Prophets of international technocracy

This chapter is focused on the emergence of technocratic internationalism. The first section shows how praise for rational public administration developed in philosophy. It discusses Henri de Saint-Simon’s ideas about the virtues of expert government; the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill; and how German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel idealized Prussia’s efficient bureaucracy. From these philosophical foundations, the chapter proceeds to the professionalization of public administration that in the 19th century took place in all industrialized countries and some of their colonies. The trend spilled over to the international level in the form of the ‘international public unions’, expert bodies with administrative tasks which ignited the imagination of technocratically inclined visionaries. Having sketched the historical context, the second part of the chapter presents the first programmatic proposals for bureaucratic international governance. They were tabled in the 1880s, when international lawyers moved from an analysis of these public unions to a programmatic vision of international relations managed by these bodies. The discussion zooms in on the Russian law scholar Pierre Kazansky and the American political scientist Paul S. Reinsch, whose respective works offer clear examples of how colonialism influenced early thinking about international organizations.