Post-Industrialism and Normative Technocracy

In this section, my objective is to provide a general overview of the concept of a post-industrial society. I am painfully aware of the fact that this involves not taking into account the oftentimes extreme difference among individual theories, in particular those which relate to the manner in which a specific characteristic of post-industrial society develops. However, at this point it is necessary that one get a feeling for what is common to the literature as a whole. I hope to ultimately demonstrate that post-industrialism in fact appears as the modern representative of a distant tradition of political thought. Specifically, I will argue that theories of post-industrial society implicitly entail what I refer to as a technocratic conception of the bases of legitimate political authority. But in order to do this one needs to have at least a general understanding of the nature of post-industrial society as envisioned by its theorists