In Search of the Public: Economic Reason and the Crisis of Representation in British Government

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

First Advisor

Moyn, Samuel

Abstract

This dissertation reconstructs the emergence and spread of contemporary forms of economic reason in British government. Across six chapters, it tells the story of how it became normal for agents of the British state to perform cost-benefit analysis as a routine practice of governing, and to quantify the value of life, limb, leisure and nature as amounts of money. The dissertation makes three core arguments. The first is that cost-benefit analysis in the British state first coalesced between 1947-1954 in the nationalized transport industry, before spreading across all departments by 1971. The practice was carried into new places in this period by a variety of civil servants and reformers, turning the technique to their own local problems. Second, the dissertation argues that British officials arrived at cost-benefit analysis because the somewhat social democratic form and aspirations of mid-century statecraft pressed them to do so. When the transport industry was nationalized, the new mixed regime of economic life pushed civil servants to develop novel practices to guide the allocation of the community’s resources and to justify their choices. Finally, the dissertation argues that cost-benefit analysis issued from a multifaceted crisis of representation in British government. Reformers spread and generalized the practice because they understood several nineteenth century mechanisms for representing the public to be failing: including the popularly-elected Parliament, the invisible hand of the market, and the ‘judgement’ of the civil service mandarin. Nonetheless, I conclude, the rise of cost-benefit governing has not ended the crisis of representation in modern Britain, but only changed its form. The dissertation’s Introduction sets cost-benefit analysis within the longer history of calculative reason in government, going back to the “political arithmetick” of the late seventeenth century. Nonetheless, Chapter One establishes that cost-benefit analysis as we recognize it today only emerged in the postwar nationalized transport industry. The chapter focuses on three institutions — the Ministry of Transport, the Road Research Laboratory, and its Committee on Economics — to demonstrate that British civil servants fashioned the cost-benefit method of public decision-making as they grappled with how to make investment decisions on behalf of ‘the public’ in conditions of intense contestation. Chapter Two follows the Ministry’s new “social accounting” techniques as they were adopted by imitators in new domains of the state between 1959-1966. I show how public officials took up the quantification of ‘social value’ in the governance of underground subways, flood defenses, urban planning, and rural land use, as they struggled to ‘see like a welfare state’. Chapter Three reconstructs how a cross-partisan group of administrative reformers arrived at the project of generalizing cost-benefit analysis across Whitehall. Figures in the Treasury, Labour and Conservative parties came to dream of scaling up and routinizing the technique, albeit to solve different perceived defects in the British system of government in the age of the ‘social state’. Chapter Four recreates the institutionalization of cost-benefit appraisal across the departments of government between 1961-1973, focusing both on the transformation of the budget-making procedure and the civil service training regime. This process marginalized the older cultures of collective decision-making within the British state — anchored in the idea of ‘judgement’ — whilst cementing an economic style of reasoning across the civil service. The Epilogue explores the opposition to cost-benefit analysis that had formed by the early 1970s, focusing particularly on the response to the Roskill Commission’s recommendations for the site of a London Third Airport. I show how conservationists and statisticians combined to contest the analyst’s claim to represent the public. Despite the searching critiques of these opponents, the Epilogue also demonstrates that cost-benefit appraisal has retained a prominent place in the ‘mixed regime of representation’ which characterizes British government from 1971 down to the present day. In fact, the kind of ‘technocratic democracy’ that cost-benefit analysis exemplifies has only proliferated further since the 1970s, including in institutions of supranational governance such as the United Nations, World Bank, and European Commission.

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