Tribune of the Technostructure: The Popular Economics of Stuart Chase

Abstract

ideological conflict in the United States in the period between the World Wars. The possibilities and dangers of planning concerned businessmen, politicians, bureaucrats, labor leaders, and intellectuals. The historical literature on this passion for a plan, as Max Eastman termed it, has focused on planning as a solution to the economic problems that beset the nation or as an effort to redefine the relationship between the state and private enterprise. This essay centers, however, on the neglected social dimension to the controversies surrounding planning in this period. The planning debate crystallized a larger set of concerns about the role of the experts or technical intelligentsia in American society that dated from the rapid growth of the new middle class in the late nineteenth century and the political battles of pre-World War I progressive reform. Widespread discussion of planning was, to be sure, a response to the economic difficulties of the interwar decades, but it was also a continuation and intensification of the struggle to establish the terms for the integration of the knowledge elite into American culture.'

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