What are the rules that govern our workday? Who made them? And how do these rules dominate the rest of our lives?
Whether on Caribbean plantations in the seventeenth century or in Amazon warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers—and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control perfected on the factory floor have expanded to dictate our personal lives, political rights, national policy, and the global economy.
Seventeenth-century intellectuals such as William Petty and John Locke argued that human beings were selfish machines who had to be controlled for their own good. A century later, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham tried to do exactly that with their infamous Panopticon prison. When nineteenth-century Japanese elites imported European factory technologies, they came up with new theories of political control to justify this development. After the Second World War, the General Electric Corporation created an internal propaganda department to fight unions, then pitched that propaganda to the country with the help of an actor, the future President Ronald Reagan. Extending these practices, billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives.
Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history. Henry Snow reveals how common sense about work, the economy, and human nature was fabricated and must now be challenged.
What People Are Saying
"Sweeps across centuries of history to show the entanglement of knowledge production and exploitation. With great breadth, it reveals how the capitalist workplace has always been a laboratory." Gabe Winant, author of The Next Shift
"A brilliant intellectual history that lays bare that the ideology of the free market in reality relies on control and domination. Snow shows us how the chains were forged and perhaps helps us imagine how to break them." John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke
"It’s hard to think of a book more painfully relevant than this...Henry Snow traces the history of management, from William Petty’s 'political arithmetic' to Amazon’s exploitation machine. A lucid, expansive intellectual history which will leave you both better informed and angrier." Lit Hub
"An expansive intellectual history that demonstrates the authoritarian core of management. Plotting a course that spans continents and centuries, Snow shows how experiments in calculation and coercion have produced an ideology that turns exploitation into a science. If you want to understand the deep roots of the claims to authority made by bosses, politicians, and cops, read this." Callum Cant, author of Riding for Deliveroo
"A compelling and richly detailed history of how systems of workplace control have shaped so much of our everyday lives, from early capitalism to today’s tech giants. It's also yet another well-researched reminder that our current status quo is a construct - one which can be reconfigured along thoroughly different lines." Will Stronge, author of Overtime
"A panoramic and engrossing intellectual history of liberalism's guilty secret: that capitalism is only possible if workers can be brought to heel." William Davies, author of This is Not Normal
"Powerful ... Snow contrasts capitalism’s villains with heroic figures from the labour movement, on whom he pins the hope of replacing control science and pure market competition with democracy and equality at work." Andrew Hill, Financial Times
About the Author
Henry Snow is a labor historian who has taught at Colby College and the University of Connecticut. They publish the newsletter Another Way.