The state of knowledge -- The machineries of government -- "The parent of a totally different order of things" : Charles Trevelyan and the civil service as machine -- "Chaotic England" and the organized world : official statistics and expert statisticians -- "One universal register" : fantasies and realities of total knowledge -- The office machinery of government -- An information war -- The military machine? -- Treasury organization and methods and the computerization of government work -- Privacy and distrust -- Computers and experts in the hollowed-out state, 1970-2000
Summary
"In The Government Machine Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control over state action - a revolutionary move
Agar shows how mechanization followed the popular depiction of government as machine-like, with British civil servants cast as components of a general-purpose "government machine"; indeed, he argues that today's general-purpose computer is the apotheosis of the civil servant."--Jacket
Analysis
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY/History of Technology
COMPUTER SCIENCE/General
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 433-533) and index
