Recent developments in artificial intelligence, political and social changes around the pandemic, and the new more fragile international atmosphere, together with the emergence of challenges in finance, in trade, and in the relative power of global operators, all point to new developments and demands in the way management is done. Some of these developments contain strange contradictions: many of them highlight changes, even weaknesses in the ability of political and social institutions to cope. Older questions, like justice, the role of social identities, mobility between social groups and geographical migration have all been raised. The philosophical aspect of this investigation can be seen in the emergence of the discourses around “world history”, “the end of metaphysics”, and how to understand technology, that bring together four thinkers in particular – Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and Heidegger, and those who draw on some or all of them.
One of the most significant and important of the domains of modern life has come to be the managerial itself, and yet it is one of the newest. Managerialism’s other name, historically, has been technique, even technics, both older words for the matter of how “technology” is put to work. Technique has wider reach than “technology”, since technique encompasses not only the apparatus of technological means, but also the presumption of organisational practice and harmony it brings with it: technics suggests this technique as a domain of study in itself. Technique, and the practice of governance that follows in its wake as Technocracy, in every case proffers and promises harmony, in the name of heightened effectiveness and productivity, and yet its real meaning and its highest possibilities of application and development have most often been revealed in the crucible of war. If Ernst Jünger’s The Worker demonstrated to an extraordinary level the way in which, in a technological age, everyday and ordinary life will continue to be organised with the impulse toward totality of mobilisation that manifested itself on the battlefields of the First World War, theorists like James Burnham (1941) and Nicholas Spykman (1942) correctly surmised even while the Second World War was being fought, that what presented itself both as a possibility and a necessity was a future that would manifest itself as a “management” of the planet as a whole. More recent crises – of “cold” war, pandemic, finance, climate and the occurrence of “local” wars as the contained expression of the struggle for the balance of forces in a “closed” political world, have all shown the powers and the dangers, all immense, that managerialism harbours within its folds.
Project Leads: Bogdan Costea & Laurence Hemming