1.1 Introduction
In the spring of 1929, on the occasion of the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University, John Dewey asked: ‘Are there in existence the ideas and the knowledge that permit experimental method to be effectively used in social interests and affairs?’ (Dewey, 1988, p. 218). By ‘experimental method’, Dewey meant systematic reasoning about effective means for achieving a specified end. This was problem‐solving reasoning par excellence for Dewey, because it was reasoning that was reflexively shaped by its consequences in a cognitive positive feedback loop characteristic of applied science and engineering. It was just this ‘experimental method’, Dewey argued, that by uniting the results of experiment‐validated scientific knowledge with the objectives of engineering practice had enabled the society‐ and culture‐transforming accomplishments of nineteenth‐century technological innovations. What Dewey was asking in the Gifford Lectures, then, was: Do we know enough, not in science and engineering, but about the methodologies employed in applied science and engineering, to apply those methodologies to ‘social interests and affairs’?
Here we are, eighty‐six years later, asking the same question: Is there, in the kind of reasoning routinely employed so successfully by engineers to solve technical problems, a model for the design of more effective social systems? Do we, today, know enough about engineering practice – specifically engineering practice rather than the practice of science – to help us formulate more effective public policies, create more effective organizational structures and develop better social systems: educational systems, health‐care systems, judicial systems, financial systems, even political systems?
A first step towards answering these questions would be clarifying the distinctiveness of engineering reasoning vis‐à‐vis scientific reasoning. This would help us to understand why it is that we ask about a model for developing better public policies and better social systems in engineering and not in science.
A second step would be to describe the centrality to engineering reasoning of the design process, and within that process, of trade‐off decision‐making, in order to assess its transposability to the design of public policies and social systems. Even if it seems transposable in principle, however, the roles of two fundamental features of engineering practice in the reasoning underlying the design process must be taken into account, namely, its experimental and its evolutionary character.
Of course, people have been designing and redesigning social systems, and implementing public policies, for all of recorded history, and for a long time before that. As nearly as we can tell, they did this without asking for help from the ‘engineers’ of the day, that is, from contemporary possessors of craft know‐how. What seems new in assessing social systems today is a perception on the one hand of manifest expertise in applied science and engineering and on the other hand of a problematic situation confronting humanity for which science and engineering clearly bear some responsibility: a technology‐enabled, globalized social, political and economic life causing a threatening reaction of the physical world to our science‐ and technology‐based action upon it. The distinctive re‐engineering of human being in the world that has taken place over the past 200 years has clearly contributed to this threatening situation, so, we ask, can engineering show us how to ameliorate, if not resolve, its most threatening features?
That question will be explored here, beginning with putting the perception that science and engineering could play a role in designing new social systems into a historical context. As a matter of fact, this perception has a history, one extending back some 400 years. That it does, implies that the turn to science and/or engineering today for guidance in formulating public policies and designing social systems is not uniquely a response to today’s technology‐caused problematic world situation. Long before that situation arose, people had proposed basing social systems on science or engineering. Exposing the history of such proposals may thus shed light on the motives, and prospects, for turning for help now to engineering practice.
1.2 The Historical Context
Claude‐Henri de Saint‐Simon and Auguste Comte were perhaps the first people to propose a wholesale reorganization of society – in truth a re‐engineering of society – in order to put scientists and engineers in leadership roles, alongside industrialists and financiers. New forms of science‐informed, technology‐driven industrialization were then just beginning to be recognized as constituting an ‘industrial revolution’ that was creating a new basis for prosperity for society. This was consistent with Adam Smith’s vision in The Wealth of Nations (1776), and with Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures (1791) to the US Congress, but it was in sharp contrast to the views of the Physiocrats, who in mid‐eighteenth‐century France had formulated the first holistic economic theory. This theory was propounded by Francois Quesnay in his Tableaux Economique (1759) and developed further by Baron Turgot, Minister of Finance to Louis XVI from 1774 to 1776. The Physiocrats argued that national wealth derived solely from agriculture, or more generally from extractive activities, including mining, fishing and arboriculture, so that the only productive class in society was made up of those citizens working in the extractive sector. Merchants, including factory owners and industrialists, artisans and even wealthy landowners, were ‘sterile’ in that they generated no net wealth themselves, but only repackaged and redistributed the wealth created by the extractors.
Adam Smith’s economic vision, by contrast, was one in which trade and industry did indeed create wealth. Within twenty‐five years of the publication of The Wealth of Nations, wealth created by technologically transformed industries in England and Western Europe was beginning to transform society. In his Letters to an Inhabitant of Geneva (1802), Saint‐Simon argued that France’s future prosperity depended on optimizing industrial production. To do that, French society needed to be reorganized so as to reap the benefits from an industry‐driven, rather than an agriculture‐driven, economy. Saint‐Simon proposed the creation of a European committee of twelve scientists and nine artists to guard ‘civilization’ as this transition was made. He also called for a Council of Newton, composed of twenty‐one scientists, the ‘Elect of Humanity’. These men and women were to be nominated by, and supported by contributions from, the public to ensure that they were apolitical. Their task was to do research and to oversee a new scientific religion that Saint‐Simon saw as central to a ‘modern’ society.
Seventeen years later, in his book Social Organization, Saint‐Simon called for the creation of a new parliament comprising three chambers: a chamber of invention, composed of scientists, artists and engineers; a chamber of examination, composed of scientists only; and a chamber of execution, composed of leaders of industry. In a society whose well‐being depended on optimizing industrial production, scientists and industrialists would be, for Saint‐Simon, the ‘natural leaders’ of the working class, and a new political system was needed that reflected that reality. It followed that industrialists should replace the feudal and military classes in government, because the business of government was ensuring a social order that allowed for an optimal industrial–entrepreneurial environment.
Like Francis Bacon, who had argued early in the seventeenth century for mass education in the technical arts informed by his version of natural philosophy, Saint‐Simon had no significant knowledge of science and even less of engineering. Both men were social reformers who had visions that science and technology could drive a nation’s wealth and security. Unlike Bacon, however, Saint‐Simon’s vision was informed by his witnessing the beginnings in his lifetime of what he correctly foresaw would become a flood‐tide of industrial development, driven by successive technological innovations that drew on scientific knowledge. If France were to manage the shift to such an industrial economy successfully, traditional politics, social organization, social systems and personal as well as social values needed to be replaced by new ones that reinforced science serving the needs of industry.
Saint‐Simon could do no more than sketch what those new systems and values would be like, but his ideas reached a wide audience, especially among students at the École Polytechnique. Some of these students did subsequently influence French industrial policies, playing roles in the creation of the Credit Mobilier bank to finance industrialization and in the promotion of grand engineering projects like the Suez Canal, but the direct impact of Saint‐Simon’s ideas was modest. Their indirect impact, however, through the writings of Auguste Comte, was considerable.
Comte was thoroughly literate in the science and engineering of his day. Before serving as Saint‐Simon’s private secretary and assimilating his ideas, Comte had been a student at the École Polytechnique. Although he was ultimately expelled for his political activities, Comte received an excellent education in science‐based engineering at a time when the Polytechnique was the leading engineering educational institution in the world, pioneering engineering education based on science, mathematics and the laboratory instead of the machine shop and field experience. Especially in his Course of Positive Politics (1851–1854), Comte presented by far the most detailed plan yet for creating a new society whose well‐being would be dri...
