Over the past 25 years, Jürgen Habermas has presented what is arguably the most coherent and wide-ranging defence of the project of European unification and of parallel developments towards a politically integrated world society. In developing his key concepts of the transnationalisation of democracy and the constitutionalisation of international law, Habermas offers the main players in the struggles over the fate of the European Union a way out of the current economic and political crisis, should they choose to follow it. (...) In the title essay Habermas addresses the challenges and threats posed by the current banking and public debt crisis in the Eurozone for European unification. He is harshly critical of the incrementalist, technocratic policies advocated by the German government in particular, which are being imposed at the expense of the populations of the economically weaker, crisis-stricken countries and are undermining solidarity between the member states. He argues that only if the technocratic approach is replaced by a deeper democratization of the European institutions can the European Union fulfil its promise as a model for how rampant market capitalism can once again be brought under political control at the supranational level. This volume reflects the impressive scope of Habermas?s recent writings on European themes, including theoretical treatments of the complex legal and political issues at stake, interventions on current affairs, and reflections on the lives and works of major European philosophers and intellectuals. Together the essays provide eloquent testimony to the enduring relevance of the work of one of the most influential and far-sighted public intellectuals in the world today, and are essential reading for all philosophers, legal scholars and social scientists interested in European and global issues. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck and other theorists of reflexive modernization are allies in the general project to reduce technocracy and elitism by rendering decision making more democratic and robust. However, this study of U.S. climate politics reveals complexities and obstacles to the sort of democratized decision making envisioned by such theorists. Since the early 1990s, the U.S. public has been subjected to numerous media-driven campaigns to shape understandings of this widely perceived threat. Political interests have instigated an important part of these (...) campaigns, frequently resorting to ethically problematic tactics to undermineattemptsat policy action designed to avert or reducethe threat. The disproportionate in fluence of such interests suggests the need for a more level political playing field characterized by more equalized access to power and influence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The technocratic dimension of government—its reliance upon knowledge claims, usually in scientific guise—is of great importance if we wish to understand modern power and governance. In Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy, Jeffrey Friedman investigates the often-overlooked question of the relationship between technocratic knowledge/power and ideas. Friedman’s contribution to our understanding of technocracy can therefore be read as a contribution to governmentality studies, one that introduces the possibility of adding normative solutions to this critical tradition.

In this article I explore the underlying political philosophy of public bioethics by comparing it to technocratic authority, particularly the technocratic authority claimed by economists in Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s. I find that public bioethics - at least in the dominant forms - is implicitly designed for and tries to use technocratic authority. I examine how this type of bioethics emerged and has continued. I finish by arguing that, as claims to technocratic authority go, bioethics is in an (...) incredibly weak position, which partly explains why it has never gained the degree of public legitimacy that other technocracies have gained. I conclude by arguing for a "technocracy-lite" orientation for public bioethics. (shrink)

Development in all of its stages, from organizing the vision and strategy to implementing plans, requires policy-making. We show that the division of labor and specialization of sciences and some philosophical doctrines cause the emergence of technocracy in policies. Technocracy makes development not happen in the direction of public welfare. For this reason, for sustainable development, we need institutions, strategies, and philosophical contexts that provide a democratic ground for the possibility of criticizing and reforming policies.

Communism, in Marx' mind, did not mean simple liberation, but the economics of liberation. The realm of necessity (technē) was to become the primary field for emancipation (praxis), the latter taking form in new institutions, responsive to real socio-economic needs. In this sense, the problem of technocracy and the corporatist ethos in Marx are part of a broader discursive structure, which links the experiences of workers through the industrial revolution with the philosophies ofpraxis as they reach from Hegel through (...) Marković. (shrink)

Communism, in Marx' mind, did not mean simple liberation, but the economics of liberation. The realm of necessity was to become the primary field for emancipation, the latter taking form in new institutions, responsive to real socio-economic needs. In this sense, the problem of technocracy and the corporatist ethos in Marx are part of a broader discursive structure, which links the experiences of workers through the industrial revolution with the philosophies of praxis as they reach from Hegel through Marković.

This article explores the social frameworks guiding expert and nonexpert perspectives on medicines safety in the U.K. Scientific experts from the Committee on the Safety of Medicines and the Medicines Commission were interviewed, and three nonexpertgroups, including patients and health professionals, were studied by the administration of questionnaires and focused group discussions. The research examined to what extent these groups subscribed to technocratic or democratic approaches to medicines regula tion and how this might be related to values toward technological risk. (...) The results reveal that there is substantial divergence between expert and nonexpert perspectives on medicines regulation, and that this derives as much from value differences as from any informational deficits. However, there seems to be some scope for shared values between some experts and some nonexperts, especially as regards state secrecy. The article concludes by discussing how those values could be used to foster a new "social contract of expertise" in which scientists are more democratically accountable and patients take more responsibility in governing medical risks. (shrink)

A political epistemology that enables us to determine if political actors are likely to know what they need to know must be rooted in an ontology of the actors and of the human objects of their knowledge; that is, a political anthropology. The political anthropology developed in Power Without Knowledge envisions human beings as creatures whose conscious actions are determined by their interpretations of what seem to them to be relevant circumstances; and whose interpretations are, in turn, determined by webs (...) of belief built from somewhat heterogeneous streams of incoming ideas. This anthropology, then, has two components. Ideational heterogeneity undermines the aspiration of technocracy to predict human behavior and the aspiration of social science to arrive at lawlike generalizations about it. Ideational determinism, however, which is less important than ideational heterogeneity to the critique of technocracy, may be more important to generating epistemological approaches to other forms of politics, all of which involve the actions of human beings who, as such, are largely at the mercy of the fallible ideas to which they have been exposed. (shrink)

Any consideration of relationships between technology and ethics is likely at some point to encounter the concept of technocracy, as a proposal to incorporate scientific and engineering expertise into the political process.

In this paper, we argue that the future of development in Africa lies in the shift from democracy in the conventional sense to technocracy, where the role of the expert is recognized and appreciated. We set out by presenting conceptualizations ofdemocracy and technocracy. Thereafter, we highlight the challenge posed by the demands of the information society to traditional concepts of democracy.

This article aims to shed light on the so-called post-truth moment and the responses of Walter Lippmann, Carl Schmitt, and John Dewey to the unstable basis and implications of truth—empirical or scientific, moral and axiological—in politics. At stake historically and today is an attempt to find political authority grounded in truth so as to preserve an autonomous sphere of freedom for the individual against the potentially irrational subjectivism backed by coercive force. Lippmann and Schmitt mirror the contemporary distrust (or insistence (...) as inescapable fact) of subjectivism and the rejection of pluralism as offering truth as an ordering principle for politics. I argue that Dewey’s turn to inquiry and his conception of truth and politics provides a timely defense of participatory democracy and a democratic ethos necessary to commit to acting on verifiable truth claims. I conclude by applying Dewey’s insights to current scholarship on truth, inquiry, and polarization today. (shrink)

This article aims to shed light on the so-called post-truth moment and the responses of Walter Lippmann, Carl Schmitt, and John Dewey to the unstable basis and implications of truth—empirical or scientific, moral and axiological—in politics. At stake historically and today is an attempt to find political authority grounded in truth so as to preserve an autonomous sphere of freedom for the individual against the potentially irrational subjectivism backed by coercive force. Lippmann and Schmitt mirror the contemporary distrust (or insistence (...) as inescapable fact) of subjectivism and the rejection of pluralism as offering truth as an ordering principle for politics. I argue that Dewey’s turn to inquiry and his conception of truth and politics provides a timely defense of participatory democracy and a democratic ethos necessary to commit to acting on verifiable truth claims. I conclude by applying Dewey’s insights to current scholarship on truth, inquiry, and polarization today. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis special issue of Social Epistemology has its origin in two symposia organised by the Contemporary Philosophy of Technology Research Group at the University of Birmingham. These we...

ABSTRACT In Power Without Knowledge, Jeffrey Friedman develops a critique of technocracy and in doing so makes an epistemic case for exit over voice. He argues that a technocracy that fails to take people’s ideational heterogeneity into account is unlikely to possess the knowledge required to solve social problems, and that the alternative of “exitocracy” may, in some cases, overcome these limits. By creating the conditions under which individuals can exit from undesirable social situations, an exitocracy may allow (...) people to escape their social ills without knowing their society-wide causes or solutions. As Friedman recognizes, however, an exitocracy still requires technocratic knowledge, and this paper explores these requirements in further detail. First, it investigates the limits of exit as a solution to social problems, and the extent to which technocratic policies can be substituted for exit. Second, it considers the need for technocratic knowledge in the promotion of exit opportunities, and how this undermines Friedman’s defense of exitocracy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The mainstreaming of environmental concerns paradoxically obscures their political dimension: as the goals of environmentalism become accepted, they are reduced to administrative problems to be solved in a purely technocratic way. This technocratic environmentalism has fueled a populist backlash that challenges the scientific basis of environmentalism. As a result, contemporary environmentalism appears to be stuck in a depoliticizing opposition between technocracy and populism. A possible way out of this depoliticizing trap consists in recognizing the intrinsic contestability of the (...) core premises on which environmentalism is based, since it is not merely the result of a straightforward application of scientifically provable facts, but also depends on normative principles and value choices. This opens the possibility for an internal pluralization of environmentalism, which shifts emphasis from the depoliticizing struggle between technocratic environmentalism and populist anti-environmentalism to the inherently political rivalry between different types of environmentalism. (shrink)

The victory of realism over idealism at the start of the twentieth century, and of scientific realism over logical empiricism and pragmatism in the mid twentieth century, is a striking phenomenon that calls for historical explanation. In this paper I propose an externalist account, looking at the social and political reasons why realism became attractive, rather than considering the internal factors–the merits of the arguments in favour of realism. I look at the agenda of Roy Wood Sellars’ critical realism which (...) was not narrowly theoretical, but very much related to his concerns for the development of American society post WW1, as expressed in The Next Step in Democracy (1916b) and The Next Step in Religion (1918). I discuss the significance of technocracy in America – not only the increasing influence of scientists and engineers in government, but also the diffusion of the view that social issues are best addressed by scientific, technical means. Counter-cultural critics of technocracy, such as Roszak (1969) claimed that a “scientific world-view” provided an “ideology” for this system of governance. We will see that RW Sellars was explicitly involved in the task of building a scientific world-view, but with political goals that were probably not realised by the post-war establishment. (shrink)

The place of scientific expertise in democracy has become increasingly disputed, raising question who ought to have a say in decision-making about science and technology, with what authority, and for what reasons. Public engagement has become a common refrain in technoscientific discussions to address tensions in the rightful roles of experts and the public in democratic decision-making. However, precisely what public engagement entails, who it involves, how it is performed, and to what extent it is desirable for democratic societies remain (...) contested matters. Nevertheless, strong commitments to greater public engagement in the governance of science and technology persist. This essay examines expert discussions about heritable human genome editing beginning from the 2015 International Summit on Human Genome Editing through the controversies surrounding of the first CRISPR-edited humans in late 2018 and the subsequent renewed calls for a moratorium on heritable human genome editing. I examine these discussions as example cases in which the right relations among experts, the public, and technoscientific decision-making are actively reconfigured. I argue that rather than expanding the range of included stakeholders, public engagement serves as an enabling handservant of technocracy that reinforces the position of scientific experts in decision-making as both epistemic and normative authorities. (shrink)

Low reason is about coping in the world in the world's terms; but our freedom, morality, and enlightenment require the higher, more speculative faculty. Dr. Hanhijarvi (Humboldt Univ.) invites us to explore the great thinkers and re-activate the profound abilities of the human mind that so importantly out-shine today's mechanistic thinking.

In this article, the author explores some possible applications of Wittgenstein’s humanistic psychology, epistemology and philosophy of culture for the philosophy of technology, and more particularly, for the question of valuing a possible future technocracy over contemporary democratic systems. Major aspects of the article involve a discussion of some of Wittgenstein’s key views on certainty, cultural relativism, the problem of other minds, and gradual socio-cultural change. In order to examine these problems, the author draws from both a wide range (...) of Wittgenstein’s works, as well as secondary sources in Wittgenstein studies. An analogy is made between socio-cultural change over time and gradual visual loss. The author has incorporated important elements of Wittgenstein’s biography, both as a philosopher and as an engineer and architect, underlining the profound link between his life and thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge provides not only a critique of technocracy but a compelling story about the intimate relationship between three of today’s most important political phenomena: populism, technocracy, and democracy. In contrast to many recent accounts that treat populism as a backlash against technocracy, Friedman’s theory suggests that populism is a lineal descendent of technocracy, with which it shares substantial intellectual DNA. Friedman’s implicit theory of populism helps to explain many of its core (...) features, including its political stances, emotionality, and hostility to mediating institutions, in interpretively charitable ways. Central to Friedman’s analysis is the importance of political epistemology, which supplies key connective tissue between the three phenomena. The relations between technocracy, democracy, and populism revealed by Friedman’s theory generate both enlightening and disturbing implications for democratic theory. (shrink)

In this article, we look at the contested role of in-house lawyers in regulated organisations in the financial sector. A recent Financial Conduct Authority consultation on whether to designate the head of legal of banks, insurance companies and other financial firms as ‘Senior Managers’ and the decision which flowed from it, reflected a flawed view of lawyers as a neutral technocracy of mere legal technicians; we show how the FCA’s decision is potentially damaging to the public interest and failed (...) to take into account that in-house lawyers are often important decision-makers and influencers within their organisations. We put the case for an alternative view; that in-house lawyers are professionals, with agency that requires them to act in accordance with ethical norms and means they should be made more accountable for their conduct. (shrink)

Engineers have generally been viewed either as members of a ‘middle class’ attracted to a distinctive technocratic politics that rejects the leadership of both labour and capital or as passive servants of capital. Using published and archival data, this article shows that American mechanical engineers during the 1930s were not attracted to technocratic ideas. Instead some supported pro-business ideas, while many others showed an interest in organizing themselves as employees with interests different from business. This example suggests that engineers do (...) not constitute a distinctive, homogeneous middle class, but are, in fact, internally divided by class. (shrink)

This article examines why Günther Anders, one of the 20th century’s most formidable critics of technology, deemed a critique of technology necessary at all. I argue that the radical philosophy of industrialism in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Human Beings) and related texts is a response to what Anders’s work presents as inadequacies of traditional Marxism, with its focus on class struggle and property relations. In effect, his critique of technology, which is more attentive to forms of domination (...) emergent with mechanization, would come to supplant classical Marxist thought. The piece concludes with some thoughts about how Anders’s ‘post-Marxist’ perspective provides insights for contemporary Marxism and, in turn, how the latter can throw light on problems in Anders’s philosophy of the machine. (shrink)

This paper traces the role of American technocrats in popularizing the notion later dubbed the “technological fix”. Channeled by their long-term “chief”, Howard Scott, their claim was that technology always provides the most effective solution to modern social, cultural and political problems. The account focuses on the expression of this technological faith, and how it was proselytized, from the era of high industrialism between the World Wars through, and beyond, the nuclear age. I argue that the packaging and promotion of (...) these ideas relied on allegorical technological tales and readily-absorbed graphic imagery. Combined with what Scott called “symbolization”, this seductive discourse preached beliefs about technology to broad audiences. The style and conviction of the messages were echoed by establishment figures such as National Lab director Alvin Weinberg, who employed the techniques to convert mainstream and elite audiences through the end of the twentieth century. (shrink)

‘You can’t stop progress’, we are endlessly told. But what is meant by “progress”? What is “progress” toward? We are rarely told. Human flourishing? And a culture? That would be a good start – but rarely seems a criterion for ‘progress’. Rather, ‘progress’ is simply a process, that we are not allowed, apparently, to stop. Or rather: it would be futile to seek to stop it. So that we are seemingly-deliberately demoralised into giving up even trying.Questioning the myth of ‘progress’, (...) and seeking to substitute for it the idea of real progress – progress which is actually assessed according to some independent not-purely-procedural criteria – is a vital thing to do, at this point in history. Literally: life, or at least civilisation, and thus culture, may depend on it.Once we overcome the myth of ‘progress’, we can clear the ground for a real politics that would jettison the absurd hubris of liberalism and of most ‘Leftism’. And would jettison the extreme Prometheanism and lack of precaution endemic to our current pseudo-democratic technocracy. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not fall into complete pessimism or into an endorsement of the untenable and unsavoury features of conservatism. The challenge, in other words, is to generate an ideology or philosophy for our time, that might yet save us, and ensure that we are worth saving.This paper is then a kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s crucial aphorism on this topic: ‘Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.’. (shrink)

Technological innovations are commonplace today and usually provide great social benefits. The case of medical technology is of prime interest, for though it seems to provide primarily advantages, it may unwittingly turn over to technocrats the governance of modem society. This essay warns against the pitfalls of the age of technocracy, and calls for the maintenance of democratic controls over the development and implementation of modem technology.

Mainstream neoclassical economics, as well as heterodox schools, should be regarded as different kinds of 'political economics'. There is no value-free economics. We therefore need to bring democracy into economics. The present challenge of sustainable development suggests that a new conceptual framework in economics is needed. In this essay, a political and democratic view of individuals, organisations, decision-making, markets, assessment of investment projects and policy options is proposed. The imperative of democracy also implies that the close-to-monopoly position of neoclassical theory (...) and method at university departments of economics has to be replaced by pluralism. There is a continued role for neoclassical theory and method, considering the fact that millions of professionals globally have been indoctrinated in this particular way of understanding efficiency and governance, but the idea that neoclassical theory is best for all purposes has to be abandoned. (shrink)