Technician in Power The Engineer-Politician in the 20th Century

This article discusses why engineers and technical experts, a group that commonly enjoyed scant representation in the political elite of Western countries, emerged in significant numbers as high-ranking politicians in Germany and the United States between 1930 and 1970. The article discusses the rise of engineers-turned-politicians with respect to their social role and the struggles over their allegiances within the profession. It also reflects on their authoritarian style of leadership and the rapid growth of the agencies that they were chairing. While professional ideologies held only marginal importance for the engineers' rise to power, the key factor was that infrastructure programs received lavish funding in the wake of the Great Depression. This allowed ambitious engineers to build dams, road networks, and other large technological systems with unprecedented speed, overwhelming existing mechanisms of political and administrative control. This situation came to an end in the post-war years when the engineers' power base was slowly eroding. The charismatic engineer-turned-politician gave way to infrastructure projects without a public face. © 2018 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston.