Technocracy, Knowledge Regime and the Anti-free Market Attitude of French Economists

2.1 An Observation of the Failure of Parliamentary Democracy

Technocracy as a political regime is built on the cognitive failures of parliamentary democracy. These failures are the instability of government, the incompetence of voters and the demagogy of elected officials.

1. Government instability is the consequence of elections. Giving the administration power compensates for this instability. It counters instability with the continuity of administrative management of public affairs.

2. The incompetence of voters is all the more damaging because democracy is the government of the people. An incompetent people imposes bad choices on governments. The incompetence of voters is very real. It has been documented by numerous surveys (Facchini 2017). The solution is to replace the voter as the principal with the scholar. The scholar is the only one who can give content to the concept of general interest. He is the only one who can place himself above the particular interests that animate parliamentary debates. The scholar must allow politics to avoid ideological quarrels (Meynaud 1960, p. 63) and to serve the general interest. Technocracy is democratic if it is the expression of a demand from voters who admit their incompetence and agree to delegate their power to scholars, to the administration. Technocracy replaces sterile ideological divisions (left/right or social change versus conservative) with a political process that seeks consensus. It substitutes a consensual society for democratic society (Barets 1963; Birnbaum 1975).

3. The demagogy of elected officials is another weakness of parliamentary democracy. Ignorant voters could elect learned elected officials. Democracy could be an elective aristocracy (Roederer 1853–1859). Voters would delegate political choices to scholars and not to the rich (economic aristocracy) or to nobles (aristocracy of birth). The electoral process does not guarantee such a result, however, because voters favor ideological affinity. They do not reward competence. They choose sophists. They turn away from scholars. However, sophists manipulate the masses through their rhetoric. They are also disinterested in the true nature of things. They turn deliberation between elected officials into a “verbocracy”. Their only goal is to persuade others. They want to seduce and turn away from all searches for the truth.

Democracy becomes the government of sophists, of opinion rather than the government of knowledge. This would explain the weak cognitive qualities of democracy. It would explain the demagogy of parliamentary liberal democracies. The demagogue agreed on the basis of stereotypes (Plato, The Republic, section 493a). He does not seek to thwart him. He is fundamentally conformist (Plato The Republic Book VI). He can even use the distribution of privileges to win. The demagogue is not only a rhetorician. It is not only a sophist. He is also a corrupter (Plato Gorgias). He promises benefits to some financed by taxes. He is the figure of Aristophanes. Not being a conformist and a corrupter is taking the risk of losing elections. It is necessary to flatter the masses and buy them. The modern technocratic model is the heir to these critiques of democracy and the defense of government by scholars .^[2] It “orders the ignorant to obey and the wise to guide and command” (Plato, The Law [690c]).

2.2 Technocracy as a Solution

To compensate for the misdeeds of the “peaceful ignorance” of voters and the demagogy of elected officials, the technocratic ideal proposes to enforce a government of scholars and to extend it to all areas of life. Doctors deal with health issues, sociologists with social issues and economists with economic issues (growth, unemployment, inflation, income, purchasing power, etc.). The economist recognizes “the responsibility to advise the statesman”, because “the proper functioning of the economy cannot be brought about either by the free mechanism of prices and incomes, or by the free choice of ballot papers” (Boudeville 1954, p. 280). The government of scholars is transformed here into the government of a certain form of economists. It substitutes science for prices and voting.

Initially, the technocratic ideal is a philosophical ideal, a government of philosophers and not a government of scientists. The difference is important, because modern science stands against metaphysics. It develops with the Vienna Circle and the neo-positive philosophy of science a critique of philosophy and more generally of all knowledge that does not mobilize statistics or mathematical language. This conception of science was born in the 17th century with the mathematization of nature (Husserl 1949, p. 249). It is built against religions and metaphysics. It considers that it is the only legitimate one when it comes to telling the true and the false. It has a claim ,^[3] to make useful and not only speculative knowledge available to men. Science, to be useful, must design technical solutions. Technocracy becomes a technical government, of engineers (Hayek 1952b, p. 152).

The figure of the engineer embodies the positivist ideal of the Saint-Simonians and Auguste Comte. Technocracy substitutes the engineer for the owner of liberal democracy. This ideal has already been by the utopias of Campanella ([1602]) and Bacon ([1627] [1995]). In Campanella’s City of the Sun, science and mathematics have a metaphysical dimension, because science accesses the knowledge of God. It breaks with chance (Servier 1967, p. 148). It makes man a prophet capable of warding off chance through his knowledge of the future. Science thus stands against divine paternalism. It announces the possibility of an order in which man has the means to direct the course of his history. In technocratic voluntarism there is a promise of the redemption of man by man. The engineer promises technical efficiency. He bases his choices on knowledge of the scientific law. This knowledge allows him to manipulate reality. If I know that A causes B, I can modify A to act on B. Modern science thus gives hope of transforming nature (Schuhl 1938) and the social order. The social order, the economic order must no longer be left to itself. It must be governed. The techniques of government produced by modern economic sciences are the knowledge necessary for the realization of this ideal.

Social engineers produce this knowledge. They adopt the method of natural sciences (Hayek 1952a, p. 12) to be able to manipulate it. The government no longer decides on the basis of general and woolly deliberations. They decide on the basis of numerical models, scientifically established facts interpreted by specialists (Harding 1947). Scientists provide the government with a science that allows them to “treat the problems of government with the methodical rigor of research undertaken in physics or biology” (Dubois 1930). Science is the antidote to chance. Its watchword is “gain knowledge, become prophets” (Charpak and Omnes 2004). The application of this watchword to economic science corresponds to the definition that Pierre Massé (1965, 2007) gives of planning. Planning is an antihazard, an antidote to hazard. Campanella in The City of the Sun defended this same ideal. Knowledge of the law of God was sacred and led to God. It led to excluding any form of luck or chance (Servier 1967, p. 148). No longer relying on the chatter of the “verbocracy” of parliamentary democracies is therefore giving oneself the means to limit political economic errors. It is protecting oneself against the disasters of the 1929 crisis.

Government by science is not in this sense government by philosophy, but government by numbers. True science is mathematical and statistical. It has forecasting models and robust planning techniques. It is neutral. It is capable of substituting rationing by monetary prices with rationing by quantities, because it has statistical information collected by administrations dedicated to this task. These statistics allow governments to predict the future and to do better than the market.

From the 1930s, many intellectuals, engineers and scientists would share this ideal. The engineers of the X-Crise group, in particular, believed in this ideal. They would be one of the linchpins of its implementation (Dard 1995; Fischman and Lendjel 2006). This group was created in 1931 (Guitton 1982). It was initially pluralist, but very quickly transformed into a group in favor of the managed economy. Just as Thomas More in 1516 had contempt for scholasticism and admiration for mathematics, the members of the X-Crise group have contempt for the economists, historians and literary scholars of law schools. They only respect scientists trained in mathematics and statistics. The government of numbers is their only ideal. These members of the X-Crise group occupy many commissions that will prepare the transformation of democracy into technocracy. Ernest Mercier (X-1897) was a member of the X-crisis group. In 1925, he founded the French recovery (Redressement) movement, whose missions were to bring together the elites and educate the masses. The members of this group also participated in Pierre Laval’s axe commission (decree of Paul Raynaud) and inspired the creation of a Ministry of National Economy. Charles Spinasse was in charge of it from June 1936 to June 1937. He was surrounded by Alfred Sauvy (X-1920) (Dumont 2020) and Jean Coutrot (X-1913) (Dard 1999 p. 57).

Jean Milhaud (X) anticipated the school of public management by creating a Committee for the rationalization of the administration (Siwek-Pouydesseau 2006). Jules Corréard (X-1894) created the national association for the organization of democracy (Thuillier 1982). The engineer economist Jean Fourastié (1949, p. 215) places all his hopes in scientific progress to achieve social progress. The macroeconomist Edmond Malinvaud also shares this ideal. Good economic science can allow the government to correct market failures and protect the masses against economic ills, i.e. crises and fluctuations.^[4]

The technocratic ideal is therefore based on a critique of both parliamentary democracy and economic liberalism. The prerequisite for its implementation is the production of this science of government which must replace price and voting.

3.1 The Production of an Operational Science

Technocracy began to replace party democracy from 1934. It was built around administrations, producers of techno-sciences (Rouban 1989), operational sciences (Rouban 1988, p. 327), and financed by taxes.

The first steps of governments based on renewed economic knowledge and freed from the incompetence of literary economists can be dated to 1934, the date of the creation of a Council equivalent to the general staff of an army. This Council’s mission was to implement an economic policy informed by the technical expertise of polytechnic economists.

The Vichy regime reinforced this taste for dirigisme by investing in the development of the first planning instruments and by creating most of the organizations that would become the backbone of the government through technology. These administrative elites of the Vichy regime would, for the most part, remain in place after the German defeat and take advantage of the reconstruction to develop a policy of forced modernization. They would even inspire European construction (Thoenig 2000).

The Fourth Republic did not break with this ideal. Its leaders would continue to invest taxes in the production of figures and planning models. The Fifth Republic would only have to implement a regime in which the president was elected by universal suffrage and where ministers could not be elected, but appointed for their skills to consolidate this model of government. The difference between Vichy and the Fourth Republic is doctrinal. Vichy has a corporatist ideal (Pollak 1976, p. 106). The Fourth Republic has an interventionist ideal.

The most important period was in the 1940s. Most of the administrations dedicated to the new science were created in the 1940s. We can cite (1) the National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA) (Cornu, Valceschini, and Maeght-Bournay 2018), (2) the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), (3) the National Institute of Hygiene (1942) which after the war took the name INSERM, (4) the Alexis Carrel Foundation which is the ancestor of the INED, (5) the office for colonial scientific research also created by the Vichy regime which will become the ORSTOM, (6) the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE ^[5]) which replaced the general statistics of France in 1946, (7) the Atomic Energy Commission (1945) (Roche 2015), (8) the Planning Commission (1946–2006) (Djelic 1996; Sauvy 1970, p. 29), (9) the services of national accounting, (10) the Forecasting Directorate at the Ministry of Finance and (11) the Central Committee for Investigations into the Cost and Performance of Public Services (1946) (Séguin et al. 2007 ^[6]).

All these administrations dedicated to the new science are publicly funded and give France the state knowledge regime discussed by sociologists and economists of economic sciences (state ideas) (Campbell and Pedersen 2014; Fourcade 2009). The implementation of technocracy has given public administrations a quasi-monopoly on the production of economic sciences and sciences in general (Campbell and Pedersen 2014, pp. 90–93). It has marginalized public universities, which today play almost no role in the formation of public policies (Campbell and Pedersen 2014, p. 101). Only the “grandes écoles” influence economic policy choices through their training, but also their research centers.

It must be admitted that this model of state knowledge has opened up somewhat to competition through the creation of semi-public organizations (i) such as OFCE, CEPREMAP, IRES, CEPII and IFRI (Campbell and Pedersen 2014 pp. 93–95), (ii) funding by private donations from think tanks (Institut Montaigne, and IFRAP), political foundations (Gabriel Peri, Jean Jaurès, Pour l’innovation politique, Robert Schuman), and clubs such as the Institut de l’entreprise (IDEP) or the Institut Choiseul, but the majority of knowledge is produced by public administrations such as the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, the CNIS (National Council for Economic Information), the CREST (Centre for Research in Statistical Economics), the DGT (General Directorate of the Treasury, which replaced the DGTPE, General Directorate of the Treasury and Economic Policy in 2010), the DRESS (Directorate of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics), the CAE (Centre for Economic Analysis) and the CAS (Centre for Strategic Analysis, the new name for the General Planning Commission).

Several facts support this position. No private organization has the means to produce its own statistics. A simple comparison of the budgets of public and private organizations shows that the resources made available to public administrations are much greater than the budgets available to private organizations. In 1937, the staff of the General Statistics of France amounted to 137 (Touchelay 1990, p. 292). In 2023, 5,295 people worked for INSEE (Source INSEE Women and Men of INSEE), for a total budget of 458 million euros in 2023 (Finance Law, Ministry of the Economy, Statistics and Economic Studies line). In 2020, INRAE employed 8,281 permanent staff (including 1,997 researchers) and 2,749 contract staff in full-time equivalent worked. Its revenues were almost one billion euros. In 1958, its budget was around three billion old francs (Bustarret 1959). These sums can be compared with the budget of think tanks (Brookes 2021, p. 226). In 2013, IFRAP announced a budget of one million euros, the Institute of Enterprise two million (Brookes 2021, p. 228).

The dependence of all private or public organizations on INSEE statistics makes national statistics a strategic variable. By definition, government by numbers gives great power to those who produce the numbers.

The quality of the figure is a guarantee of serious public management. It is the expression of a scientific political argument. It is even the only one that can say what is objective. Because only a statistically significant coefficient says what is objective and can ultimately justify a choice of public policy. All reports to the government are built on statistics, graphs, calculations, models, predictions. One of the first reports to have taken this form was Clémentel report of 1919 (Letté 2011 ^[7]). The role of these reports is poorly understood (Caby and Chailleux 2019), but before each law, reports to the government, to Parliament and more generally to administrations are ordered. They line up figures that are supposed to help parliamentarians get an idea of what reality is.

The more the State intervenes in various fields, the more it needs figures. The more it invests in statistics (Pollak 1976, p. 107). The more the INSEE budget increases. Technocracy thus opens up an enormous public market to statisticians and to all the social sciences that agree to adopt scientism as a philosophy of knowledge. There is a real financial interest for statisticians, social engineers in technocratic consolidation.

The reverse is also true. There is a real cost for all those who do not share the technocratic ideal. Because their knowledge, their competence is disqualified in the first sense. Their competence is no longer recognized as knowledge. It is a matter of opinion because they have not succeeded in being the subject of a statistical study.

The quality of the figures also determines the quality of the forecasts of macroeconomic models and planning and forecasting models. The State in fact puts its statistics at its service by using them to anticipate the future, predict crises, calculate the amount of resources it needs to adjust its public spending to its tax revenues. Statistics are at the service of the State (Désrosières 1989). Producing macroeconomic planning and modeling tools is essential to direct the economy, to give it the right direction (Dulong 1997, p. 14). The central hypothesis is obviously that direction by technoscience can do better than direction by literary economics and direction by market prices.

Precisely predicting the economic situation to steer the national economy and vote on the finance law became the norm (decree of February 18, 1952 ^[8]). The forecast was in the hands of the Economic and Financial Studies Department (SEEF), the Planning Commission or, from 1965, the Forecasting Department of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (Armatte 2007; Terray 2002).

Initially, the Planning Commission collaborated with the national accounting departments to measure production and build forecast accounts (Sauvy 1970, p. 30). The first forecast accounts were proposed in 1948. From 1950, the work of the commission was taken over by the Ministry of Finance and the SEEF. This department was under the direction of the Treasury and MC Gruson. Gradually, however, the SEEF and the Planning Commission disagreed on what a good forecast should be. The SEEFs have a more forward-looking and macroeconomic vision, while the Planning Commission hopes to provide accurate forecasts (Kolopp 2013, p. 64). The title of the 1969 article by Aglietta and Courbis expresses this taste for accuracy, “the FIFI model, a tool of the plan”. FIFI, the two economists affirm, constitutes a reduced model of the entire economy. It simulates its interdependencies. It allows the study on a model of possible futures, and the effects of the various economic policies that can be imagined in the context of the preparation of the VIth plan. Always the same idea, to build prediction tools to protect against chance.

3.2 A Science of Government Taught “Grandes Écoles”

Once these figures have been produced and these models have been developed, they must be taught to future administrative elites. The techniques of government by numbers are taught in dedicated schools. The École Polytechnique, the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (IEPP) and the École nationale d’administration (ENA), now the Institut Supérieur du Service Public, have this role.

The École Polytechnique carries the technocratic ideal before the word technocracy was used in social science. It is, according to Friedrich Hayek’s expression (Hayek 1952, Part II, Chapter 1), the source of scientistic pride par excellence. It teaches the future engineer to give meaning only to things that have been deliberately constructed. It trains social engineers (Belhoste 2003) for the function of economic management. The École Polytechnique has, for these reasons, an essential role in the administrative management of social problems and in the management of social expertise (Shinn 1980).

Most of the administrators of the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) come from the École Polytechnique (Touchelay 1990, p. 311). C. Gruson (X 1929), Ripert (X 1929), Malinvaud (X 42), Milleron (X 58), Michel Aglietta (X-59 and member of the French Communist Party, [PCF]), Henri Sterdyniak (X 73, member of the PCF), Mairesse (X 60) are all polytechnicians. These INSEE administrators move from one organization to another. They work at INSEE, in planning, in the forecasting department, in the national accounting department and in ministries with a technical department (Touchelay 1990, p. 311). At the forecasting department of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, the management and executives are polytechnicians. The first director is Hubert Lévy-Lambert (X-53). Philippe Herzog (X-59), member of the Communist Party, future Associate Professor of Faculties and originator of the ZOGOL forecasting model, Bernard Billaudot (X-60) member of the forecasting management since its creation, Robert Boyer (X-62) specialist in anticipation models and Jacques Mazier (X-66) were all in the forecasting management. They are all close to the left-wing parties and develop the planning ideal with public funds. Bernard Walliser (X-65) obtained his first position in the forecasting management and then specialized in public economic calculation and the rationalization of budgetary choices. Roger Guesnerie (X-62) specialized in public economic calculation and began his career at CERMAP (Centre for Applied Mathematical Studies and Research in Planning).

All these engineers work with former students of the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques (ELSP, which became the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris IEPP) or the Ecole Nationale d’Administration to construct planning, forecasting and macroeconomic models.

The ELSP was created in 1872 and placed itself in the Saint-Simonian tradition. It advocated for a government based on objective skills (Leblond and Leblond 2013) and the constitution of an administrative elite that was no longer selected on the basis of birth, but on its intellectual qualities, merit and technical skills. The aim was to distance the statesman from the type of lawyer and journalist and to bring him closer to the scholar and businessman (Boutmy 1871). The entire ELSP project carried the ideal of a political life without ideological conflict. The École Nationale d’Administration was initially a means of weakening the ELSP (Prost 2017, p. 65). After the war, however, the ELSP became the institute of political studies and the main preparation for entry to the ENA.

The creation of the ENA has the same doctrinal origin. It is the consequence of the trial of liberalism and the search for a third way (Kolopp 2013, p. 56), of a directed capitalism. It is a question of giving senior civil servants a good economic culture. The pre-war elites were said to have been too liberal. The defeat of 1939 was also said to have been the consequence of the lack of economic direction of the State. The ENA must train in interventionist and its tools. It must become a school of application, specializing in the application of the tools of modeling and planning. This project is justified by the defeat of France in 1939 which would also have been the defeat of a certain ideology and by the reconstruction of the country. Law is no longer enough. The senior administration must also know economics (Prost 2017, p. 66). Teaching at the ENA has logically never been liberal. From its origins, it has transmitted faith in modern economics and modernization. From 1946 to 1965, economics teaching was provided by the senior civil service who planned the reconstruction (Simon Nora (ENA), Maurice Lauré [X-36], François Bloch Lainé [general inspection of finances], Claude Gruson [ENA], Pierre Uri, Louis Armand (X-Mines), etc.) and by professors from the law faculties who knew and adhered to the Keynesian doctrine (Jean Marchal) (Kolopp 2013, p. 58).

The ENA, like the IEP in Paris and the French Office of Economic Conjunction (OFCE), are thus “poles of diffusion of macroeconomics and Keynesianism” (Gaïti 2002, p. 17). They create the figure of the modernizing technocrat (Gaïti 2002, p. 2). These training schools generalize the technocratic attitude in senior civil service. Civil servants trained in economics and working in the finance ministries of many developed countries in the world think the same thing. They think that public policy choices must be depoliticized (Christensen and Mandelkern 2022, p.234). They think that monetary policy and fiscal policy choices (policy mix) are not political choices, but technical choices, that. Jean Tirole, for example, defends.

4.1 Direction Effects

The choices made in the context of scientific policies weigh on the production of scientific data by directing research in certain areas rather than others. The history of science is then determined by the needs of the government. Because the themes and disciplines most supported by the State are those that they consider the most useful.

Historically, the State is interested in science and technology because science can strengthen its military power (Salomon 1970, p. 109). The State finances innovations in the art of war. It also finances national accounting and precision models to better construct its budget. Economic science is put at the service of the State. An economic science that does not serve the demand of the State is not useful. It is not financed. It is also not rewarded by the government. The economist who develops a radical critique of the government thus renounces all symbolic remuneration. He should not expect to be appointed to expert committees, missions and/or be paid to produce reports to the government (Jobert 1999 Introduction Part II). Scientific policy and links to the State make the economist a State rentier^[9] (Brennan and Tollison 1980; Hillman and Long 2017). There would be less money for economics and fewer economists in a polycentric order where competition between knowledge and representations would be guaranteed. The income of economists increases with the interest that the State has in their discipline. Economists have an interest in convincing the public administration that their knowledge is useful to the State. Scientism becomes the official position of economists because it serves the interest of all economists who seek to live off taxes by selling their service. The scientist creates opportunities for gains that a purely speculative and non-utilitarian conception of science does not offer. Economists who live for economics are gradually ousted from the market. They make way for economists who live from economics. Economists who live from economics are, out of interest, the first defenders of the technocratic ideal (planning, scientistic and anti-liberal). In a knowledge regime where tax is the main source of financing for the production of economic sciences, it is logical under these conditions to note that economists are rather interventionist and hostile to the market economy. Such a regime of financing of economic sciences favors the production of statistics and macroeconomic models and neglects price theory and the study of the virtues of decentralized orders. A simple supply curve allows us to visualize this direction effect (Figure 1). On the abscissa, we place the quantity of economic sciences and on the ordinate its production price. Financing economic sciences through taxes amounts to subsidizing production. This causes a shift to the right of supply Q _m Q _sub .

Figure 1:

The effect of government subsidies on the quantity of economics.

When the State finances Keynesian models of national accounting, it increases its skills in macroeconomics, but deprives itself of the progress that knowledge could have obtained on polyarchic systems. It installs a Keynesian vision of economic sciences in the administrative elite and public opinion (Desrosières 2008). It confirms and reinforces “the evolution of economic sciences towards the institutions of the scientific field closest to economic and political power. Which corresponds to the technical function that macroeconomic research has fulfilled since the establishment of national accounting and planning” (Pollak 1976, p. 121).

In a technocratic model, the history of science, the history of economics is therefore inseparable from the history of planning of social sciences (Drouard 1982; Pollak 1976). Scientific policy determines the orientation of knowledge. The singularity of economists is the consequence of the scientific policy of French governments since 1934.

4.2 Discovery Effects

The direction effect creates the conditions for a discovery effect. It creates a path of dependency. Discovering A allows for discovery, A ₁ then A ₂, A ₃, etc. Discovering B would have taken science in another direction. It would have led to discovery B ₁, B ₂, etc. Research in molecular biology, plasma physics or nuclear fusion improves knowledge in these fields. It allows for the identification of new problems. These new problems justify new budgets.

Science policy funds A and deprives itself of the discovery chain that would have been possible with choice B. What is discovered under these science policies is not what would have been discovered under laissez-faire. No one can say what the researchers would have found, because the researchers themselves do not know (Salomon 1970, p. 153). This discovery effect creates path dependency.

A research program, like a technology, becomes dominant because of a process of self-reinforcement. The greater the number of scientists who research in a field, the more they share common problems and knowledge, the more-costly it is for those who do not work in this field to ignore them. The consequence is, for no major scientific reason, the installation of a dominant economic method and rhetoric (McCloskey 1985). This method ousts from the debates all those who do not share this rhetoric. They are no longer read, no longer listened to, and no longer the subject of controversy. They are marginalized. The risk of such dependence is a scientific locking.

The domination of one school of thought or one method blocks the development of other methods, other ways of thinking. This creates a loss of diversity, a loss that leads to a lower degree of resilience of systems, because instead of exploring all possible avenues, science and economics in particular have looked at reality from a single angle. This has increased knowledge of this reality, but has deprived society of knowledge relating to all other points of view. Modern science produced within the framework of these scientific policies is therefore a science entirely imbued with political decisions (Bachelard 1965, p. 9; Salomon 1970, p. 141).