Social engineering (political science)

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Social engineering" political science – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (June 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article is missing information about political social engineering techniques, methods, processes, etc.. Please expand the article to include this information. Further details may exist on the talk page. (November 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Social engineering is a term which has been used to mean top-down efforts to influence particular attitudes and social behaviors on a large scale—most often undertaken by governments, but also carried out by media, academia or private groups—in order to produce desired characteristics in a target population.

This section relies largely or entirely on a single source. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources. Find sources: "Social engineering" political science – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2023)

The Dutch industrialist J.C. Van Marken (nl) used the term sociale ingenieurs ("social engineers") in an essay in 1894. The idea was that modern employers needed the assistance of specialists in handling the human challenges, just as they needed technical expertise (traditional engineers) to deal with non-human challenges (materials, machines, processes). "Social engineering" was the title of a small journal in 1899 (renamed "Social Service" from 1900), and in 1909 it was the title of a book by the journal's former editor, William H. Tolman (translated into French in 1910). With the Social Gospel sociologist Edwin L. Earp's The Social Engineer, published during the "efficiency craze" of 1911 in the U.S., a new usage of the term was launched that has since then become standard: "Social engineering" came to refer to an approach of treating social relations as "machineries",^[1] to be dealt with in the manner of the technical engineer.^[1]

In the 1920s the government of the Soviet Union embarked on a campaign to fundamentally alter the behavior and ideals of Soviet citizens, to replace the old social frameworks of the Russian Empire with a new Soviet culture, and to develop the New Soviet man. Commissars became agents of social engineering.^[2]

In India, social engineering was effectively done by ^{[by whom?]} in the state of Bihar, on a grand scale, to unify different castes after 2005.^[3][4][5][6]

In his political science book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, volume I, The Spell of Plato (1945), Karl Popper made a distinction between the principles of 'what he called "piecemeal social engineering" and Utopian social engineering.^[7]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Social engineering (political science).

• "The Best That Money Can’t Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty, and War", Jacque Fresco, 2002.
• Peter Swirski. American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York, Routledge, 2011.
• Charles Arthur Willard. Liberalism and the Social Grounds of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Noam Chomsky. 1998.
• Seeing Like a State. James C. Scott. 1999.
• Social Engineering. Adam Podgórecki. 1996.