Control Science

Today, the ideas of modern economics seem as natural as the laws of gravity. That we are all private and self-interested individuals competing in the marketplace have become common sense. Yet this obscures the centuries long, contested history of the struggle between workers and capitalists for control of their work and of their lives. The ideas that rule our lives are not scientific truths that experts have discovered but political visions created by ideologues.
In this sweeping work of history, Henry Snow traces the long arc of the "science of control" over the past four hundred. Moving from colonial America and the enclosure of common land in early modern England, via Josiah Wedgwood's Etruria and Jeremy and Samuel Bentham’s attempts to transform labor and governance in Russia and Britain, to the vast Amazon warehouses of today, Snow demonstrates how bosses have thought about control in the workplace and how those ideas have been both implemented and contested. Blending intellectual and economic history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history that will in denaturalising the economic ideas, show how they developed and who developed them, helping us to see the world anew.

Henry Snow is a labor historian and visiting assistant professor at Colby College