From Deideologization to Depoliticization: 20th Century Technocratic Thought and Algocracy

Annotation

The spread of digital platforms and algorithmic systems renews the question of the limits of instrumental rationality in politics. Posing it adequately requires reconstructing the tradition in which substituting technical calculation for political decision-making became a normative ideal. The article identifies the common technocratic foundation of the Western «deideologization» (the «end of ideology») and the Soviet «scientific management of society», and reconstructs the conceptual continuity between this paradigm and algorithmic governance (algocracy). Methodologically the study combines Scott’s «high modernism» with critical social theory (Marcuse, Habermas), Mouffe’s theory of the political, and the historical sociology of Soviet cybernetics (Gerovitch, Peters); the analysis of algocracy draws on Zuboff, Srnicek, Varoufakis, and Pasquale. The two emerge as functionally isomorphic configurations of high modernism, united by a drive toward the exhaustive calculability of reality and a commitment to social engineering that opens onto depoliticization. Both reduce practical, situationally adaptive knowledge (metis) to formalizable parameters of governance. It concludes that in the algorithmic age this logic undergoes a technological mutation: metis is commodified and expropriated by platforms, driving the subject’s gradual cognitive and professional deskilling, while technocracy’s asymmetry of transparency – the visibility of the governed against the opacity of the governing apparatus – intensifies. Depoliticization becomes embedded in the architecture of the digital environment, depriving the subject of space to articulate political alternatives democratically.

Keywords

• High Modernism
• End of Ideology
• Technocracy
• OGAS
• Scientific Management of Society
• Algorithmic Governance
• Instrumental Rationality
• Depoliticization
• Platform Capitalism
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Contribution of the authors

Ukhvakov A. O. – development of the research concept and methodology, substantiation of the main propositions and conclusions, writing the original text; Rukavishnikov A. I. – processing and analysis of the material, revision and scientific editing of the manuscript.

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