What do you think?
Rate this book
Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World
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.
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.
351 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 12, 2026
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 9, 2026
A fascinating history through a range of eras and characters, ranging from sugar plantation slavers, John Locke and the Benthams, Charles Koch, Frederick Taylor, Jeff Bezos and Alfred Sloan. And Herbert Spencer.
The book focuses on the science of control, how management practitioners and economists worked to.exert control over the workplace and particularly how they conspired to keep down the working class.
The book is well researched and led me to add at least four works into my reading queue. The writing, particularly in the second half, is insightful and occasionally humorous in a trenchant way.
The book focuses on the science of control, how management practitioners and economists worked to.exert control over the workplace and particularly how they conspired to keep down the working class.
The book is well researched and led me to add at least four works into my reading queue. The writing, particularly in the second half, is insightful and occasionally humorous in a trenchant way.
Read
May 5, 2026'A powerful if one-sided case that wealthy elites have over centuries conspired with their managers to suggest that “there is no alternative” to market fundamentalism.' My FT review (free to read) https://as.ft.com/r/8c299730-5200-42a...
July 30, 2026
The book does a great job explaining the deeply rooted false pretenses that underly economics. (sometimes) well-intended philosophers push their invariably vague theories about human nature onto the world. These theories are straight-up bad, but serve a powerful use for the capitalists that appropriate them. The capitalists take the philosophies mentioned above and contort the vagueness inherit to those programs in order to shape to their (already-made) agenda. The given philosophy then underlies the language used to justify what they do -often-times through faux-empiricist, faux-rationalist, and faux-scientific language. These theories are then disseminated throughout public culture. The public internalizes these theories and often finds itself bewildered trying to think beyond it’s so-called “implications”: If Capitalist theory is scientific law, then why fight against something that has been taught as an inevitability? <-- There is so much wrong with this. For example, post New-Deal capitalists funded neoliberal ideology throughout universities. Neoliberalism is seen, felt, and taught everywhere now. Today, many see markets as an inevitability that rises out of human nature, among other things. This inevitability can not be explained without Spencerist Social Darwinism, Bentham's utilitarianism, Austrian School Economic Rationalism, Boulwarian anti-institutionalism, anti-keynesiasm, and anti-labor practice. That is to say - there is a genealogy of highly coercive economic presuppositions that can be traced to today's state of affairs. Good book do reccomend
September 6, 2026
Pretty good, tore right through it. Only complaint is that it felt to episodic and less systemic than it could be. Wanted a bit more on central planning and cybernetics, but we'll wait for the sequel.
May 18, 2026
Very good, if a bit one sided
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews