Planning, knowledge and technocracy in historical perspective

Fifty years ago William Armytage opened his history of the rise of technocracy with the Homeric image of Laocoön, the priest of Apollo who tried to convince his fellow-citizens to reject the wooden horse left by the Greeks outside the walls of Troy. Just as he was making his case two serpents suddenly emerged from the sea and crushed him to death (fig 2.1) Armytage comments: 'similarly latent, but aggressive, social forces emerge from below the "social horizon" to confound historians' (1965 vii).