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Social engineering is a term which has been used to refer to efforts in influencing particularattitudes andsocial behaviors on a large scale. This is often undertaken bygovernments, but may be also carried out bymass media, academia or private groups in order to produce desired characteristics in a target population.[1][2]
The Dutch industrialist J.C. Van Marken (nl) used the termsociale ingenieurs ("social engineers") in an essay in 1894. The idea was that modern employers needed the assistance of specialists in handling thehuman 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 theSocial Gospel sociologist Edwin L. Earp'sThe 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",[3] to be dealt with in the manner of the technical engineer.[3]
In the 1920s, the government of theSoviet Union embarked on a campaign to fundamentally alter the behavior and ideals of Soviet citizens, to replace the old social frameworks of theRussian Empire with a newSoviet culture, and to develop theNew Soviet man.Commissars became agents of social engineering.[4]
InIndia, social engineering was said to have been done by the state of Bihar, on a grand scale, to unify differentcastes after 2005.[5][6][7][8]
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" andUtopian social engineering.[9]
[...] class war [...] was a fundamental part of Bolshevik social engineering and the party's mission to build a new socialist world. [...] along with victory in the civil war came the rise to prominence of a new type of party cadre: the tough, utterly ruthless functionary [...] these cadres fit the popular image of the gruff, leather-jacketed commissar rushing from emergency to emergency on his motorcycle.
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