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Reviews
| The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer. By Jon Agar. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. viii+554 pp., illus., tables, diags., notes, index. $50 hb (ISBN 0-262-01202-2).
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Industrial archaeologists approaching a history of the computer may not be too interested if the history focuses on the machines themselves. The Government Machine is not such a book. It is, rather, a history of "the material culture of bureaucracy" (p. 3). Jon Agar follows avenues of analysis that should appeal to industrial archaeologists and historians of technology, even if their areas of interest are far from the age of the modern computer. Indeed, this is a significant book because the methods Agar employs demonstrate, more so than most histories of computers, the material basis of computing. Agar locates important aspects of that history in evolving ideas of government.
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Near the beginning of his introduction, Agar makes a provocative statement: "[This book] aims to convince political historians and historians of public administration that they would profit from understanding the history of technology and the material culture of bureaucracy. (Indeed, 'bureau' should be put back into studies of 'bureaucracy.')" (p. 3). He then outlines a history in which the increasing capacities of government (the British government in the main but also the American and German governments) were dependent on the development and implementation of new technologies for data gathering, storage, and analysis, and that the capacity to envision and develop those new technologies grew, in large part, out of the advent of the machine metaphor for government.
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Agar lays the groundwork for his argument in the first chapter, "The Machineries of Government," in which he describes the power of metaphors, and, in particular, the metaphors by which people conceive of governments. Organic metaphors typically represent the government as the body of an organism, with a head, trunk, and members, all with various organic functions. Clock metaphors for government were popular for a while in the 18th century but were rejected in favor of another mechanism, the balance. In any of these mechanistic metaphors for government, there were some human actors who acted upon the machinery of government and other human actors whose roles in government were considered to be part of the machinery.
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Charles Babbage's career in the early-19th century existed in the context of such a government. He was a Whig reformer, so "for Babbage it was precisely in separation, mechanization, and control of governing powers that political progress lay" (p. 39). He devised first a difference engine to automate mathematical calculations and then an analytical engine intended to store information on punched cards and process the information for the purpose of controlling the machinery of government. Agar compares this use of punched cards in controlling government to the way in which similar cards control a Jacquard loom. He calls the cards "the materialization of thought separated from labor" (p. 41).
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The perfection of office machinery for storage and analysis of statistical data important to government agencies accelerated after the turn of the 20th century. For such machines to work, great attention needed to be given to the cards themselves, as well as to the kinds of information that could be usefully stored on cards, along with the methods for acquiring such information. Agar makes a material analysis of the data card as part of the material culture of government. He shows how the needs of government shaped the punched card and, conversely, how the physical capabilities of the punched card helped shape the kinds of information government sought to gather, which in turn shaped the kinds of actions government tried to take in response to the kinds of data it could collect. The demands of war, especially the need of government to know the capacities of its population and its industrial base in mobilizing the economy for the war effort, provided an especially strong stimulus during both world wars to this co-evolution of government and machines for governing.
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As data analysis (and machines for data analysis) became more prominent in the conduct of government in Britain, experts in such matters gained influence, leading to conflicts concerning the kinds of expertise that were important in managing government bureaucracies. In Agar's analysis, the material basis for many of those conflicts becomes apparent. He is explicit in his assertion that the innovators who were developing the machinery of government did not envision the electronic computers that became prominent in the second half of the 20th century. At the same time, he asserts that the first electronic computers of the mid-20th century, like the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania, were not wholly new ideas; rather, they were pieces of equipment developed to accomplish specific computational tasks in a decades-long context of mechanizing government.
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The first half of The Government Machine carries Agar's history through World War II. The second half explores the introduction of electronic computers into the conduct of government from the Cold War to the present. Throughout the book, he attends to his two paths of analysis, following "both the articulation of government as a machine and the achievement by social movements of the mechanization of the work of government" (p. 391). This book is important not only as a political history of computers and as a technological history of government but also as a model for how material analysis may be employed in crafting the history of complex human organizations.
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