Abstract
By the end of the 19th century the moderate progressive W. H. Tolman in New York introduced the term “social engineering” to denote the task of a new profession, which, according to him, was needed to deal with the human aspects of industrial life. Just as modern capitalists made successful use of technical engineers to deal with dead matter in order to make their businesses efficient and profitable, they needed the assistance of “social” engineers as well.
Using Tolman’s innovation in language (which is identified and analysed here, perhaps for the first time) as a point of departure, this thesis deals with the possibilities and problems which social reformers of the early 20th century could see in the prospect of encouraging modern employers to take care of the workers and their families in different ways. With pecuniary resources and daily contact with the working class, employers could play a key role in solving the “social question” which had followed the rise of modern industry. But at the same time Capital was the adversary to Labour in the conflict of interests - the “social war” - which was often seen as the core of “the social question”.
Could Capital’s measures of benevolence possibly be relieved of paternalism and charity, which challenged the workers’ autonomy and often provoked them? Could company managements thus contribute to make social peace by adjusting the living conditions under industrial capitalism to human needs (especially to the needs of women) - and by adjusting the way of life of the working class (especially of female workers) to the needs of industrial capitalism and to the wishes of the middle class?
One solution was to emphasise the businesslike character of the task (“it pays”) and to give priority to those “features of industrial betterment” which concerned workplace conditions - safety and hygiene - and only with caution applying such features as expanded into the private lives of the workers. This approach was advocated, albeit in an ambivalent and ambiguous way, by Tolman.
It was also adopted by the liberal “hosts” at the Centralförbundet för socialt arbete (CSA) in Stockholm, the much more influential sister institution of Tolman’s platform (the American Institute of Social Service). In the Swedish case, though, the appeal to crass interests in efficiency, and the urge for a spirit of “mutuality”, took on a different character. While Tolman (despite connections to more radical reformers) ignored the existence of the trade unions, implicitly regarding them as a part of the ills to be cured by private Sozialpolitik, and published his main text on social engineering (1909) under the ægis of Andrew Carnegie, the liberals in the CSA - an institution which from the start also had an immediate footing in the socialist workers’ movement - were defenders of the unions and collective bargaining. In their view autonomous counter-power among the workers was a part of the solution to the problems which “enlightened egoism” among employers could also help to solve.
In the epilogue the term “social engineering” is followed from where it left its original context - during the late Progressive Era in the USA - to the renewed efforts to create a vigorous capitalism with a human face in the social policy of the “People’s Home” in Sweden during the 1930s and 1940s.
Key words: social engineering, the social question, labour relations, paternalism, welfare capitalism, efficiency, workplace conditions, labour protection, social adjustment, mutuality, W. H. Tolman, Centralförbundet för socialt arbete (CSA), the Swedish model.
Institutionen för litteraturvetenskap och idéhistoria, Stockholm 2003
Stockholms universitet, S-106 91 Stockholm
ISBN 91-7265-597-6