ABSTRACT

Chapter one provides an overview of the parallel rise in the twentieth century of big government and a bureaucratic conception of society. It outlines how the nineteenth-century classical liberal ‘night-watchman’ model of the state was overshadowed in the twentieth century by the large-scale public provision of education, health and income support. Societies shifted their emphasis from the self-organizing pattern order of cities, markets and industries to the model of purposive organization typical of states and corporations. This also entailed a transition from classic industrialism to post-industrialism. Auto-industrialism represents a counter-movement of self-organization and self-management. Its protagonists prefer pattern-rationality to purposive-rationality, smaller to larger government, accumulation to allocation, and autopoietics to managerialism.