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ABSTRACT
This essay calls attention to two blind spots in Power Without Knowledge. First, the book has little to say about the role that political institutions can play in promoting effective democratic governance. Drawing on the “mixed government” tradition, I argue that properly designed institutions can correct for the epistemic deficits that Friedman describes by creating what I call the “pressure to conflict.” Second and more importantly, the book has nothing to say about the role of responsible leadership in a democratic technocracy. Drawing on Max Weber’s analysis of the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conviction, I argue that responsible leadership can promote judicious technocracy in a dynamic that I call the “spiral of responsibility.” The responsible leader recognizes that to recuse oneself from the exercise of technocratic power is to empower the unscrupulous and irresponsible. According to Weber, any theory of politics that fails to embrace the ethics of responsibility will therefore occupy an uneasy middle ground between quietism and enthusiasm. This, I fear, is where Power Without Knowledge may leave us.
Notes
1 Friedman borrows the terms “epistocrat” and “epistocracy” from Estlund Citation2008.
2 Friedman (237) argues that the “spiral of conviction” shouldn’t be seen as a sign of irrationality: “As one gains confidence in one’s beliefs from the accumulating mass of evidence in favor of them, one should tend to become doctrinaire about one’s conclusions, not because one is deliberately closing one’s mind, but because one’s conclusions are based on a growing sample of information that seems reliable—but that, one may fail to recognize, is biased” (original emphasis).
3 Friedman cites influential social-scientific studies in support of three of these claims: for the “spiral of conviction,” Taber and Lodge Citation2006; for “sociotropic voting,” Kinder and Kiewiet Citation1981, among others; for “technocratic voluntarism” (more indirectly) Hibbing and Theiss-Morse Citation2002. The “pressure to predict” hypothesis, by contrast, is based on a conjecture about the likely behavior of technocrats and public officials. I raise some doubts about this conjecture in section III below.
4 “That one can be both fallibilistic and anti-skeptical is perhaps the basic insight of American Pragmatism” (Putnam Citation1995, 21, original emphasis).
5 The epistemic benefits of cognitive diversity have recently attracted a great deal of attention in the form of what the economist Scott Page calls the “diversity trumps ability” theorem: see for example Page Citation2007 and Landemore Citation2013.
6 Aristotle Citation[1946] 1995, 134 (book 4, chapter 1/1288b34-5), 151 (book 4, chapter 8/1293b35), 207-8 (book 5, chapter 9/1309b20-5, 33-4; 1310a13-14, 17-23).
7 Polybius Citation1979, 312, 317-8 (book 6, chs. 11 and 18).
8 Cicero, De re publica, book 1 §§41-55, 65-9, book 2 §§57, 65; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a2ae q 95 art 4 resp and q 105 art 1 passim; Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, book 1, chs. 2-6.
9 Montesquieu Citation[1748] 1989, 155, 157 (book 11, chs. 4 and 6).
10 Mill Citation1861, 447, 477 (chs. 6 and 8). The latter aim is expressed, of course, in Mill’s notorious proposal to grant multiple votes to more highly educated voters, and to exclude those who fall below a certain epistemic threshold from the suffrage altogether: ibid., ch. 8.
11 Friedman (118-23) and I agree on this point.
12 I disagree to this extent with Friedman’s suggestion (113-14) that Dewey’s simultaneous commitment to technocracy, epistocracy, and democracy in The Public and Its Problems is inconsistent or incoherent, although I agree with him in finding the belief that they can be harmonized in the way that Dewey suggests to be naive.
13 The literature on leadership is of course vast, and mostly beyond my ken, but among many possible examples we might look to the most notorious political advisor in the history of political thought: “a prudent prince,” Machiavelli (Citation[1985] 1998, 94-5) argues, “should behave in such a mode that everyone knows that the more freely he speaks, the more he will be accepted”; “he should be a very broad questioner, and then, in regard to the things he asked about, a patient listener to the truth; indeed, he should become upset when he learns that anyone has any hesitation to speak it to him.”
14 To quote Machiavelli again (ibid., 95), “a prince who is not wise will never have united counsel,” because “each one of his counselors will think of his own interest; [and] he will not know how to correct them or understand them.” It follows that “good counsel, from wherever it comes, must arise from the prudence of the prince, and not the prudence of the prince from good counsel.”
15 Friedman’s use of the terms “exit” and “voice” is modeled after Hirschman Citation1970, although he’s critical of much of Hirschman’s analysis.
16 As Weber (Citation[1904] 1949, 72) puts it, in a passage that might have been written by Lippmann: “There is no absolutely ‘objective’ scientific analysis of culture or … of ‘social phenomena’ independent of special and ‘one-sided’ viewpoints according to which—expressly or tacitly, consciously or unconsciously—they are selected, analyzed and organized for expository purposes.” Cf. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, third essay, section 12.
17 Its companion, “Science as a Vocation,” is quoted briefly on p. 164, although the passage is misattributed to the “Politics” lecture.
18 As Weber (Citation[1919] 2004, 83, 84, original emphasis) puts it, “an absolutist ethic simply refuses to inquire about ‘consequences’. … Such a man believes that if an action performed out of pure conviction has evil consequences, then the responsibility must lie not with the agent but with the world, the stupidity of men—or the will of God who created them thus. With the ethics of responsibility, on the other hand, a man reckons with exactly those average human failings.”
19 Friedman writes, for example, that “the magnitudes on both sides of the ledger—the magnitude of the costs and benefits of judicious technocracy and the magnitude of the costs and benefits of injudicious technocracy—appear to be imponderables” (318).
20 As Weber (Citation[1919] 2004, 82, original emphasis) puts it, referring to the ethic of non-violence, “you must be a saint in all respects or at least want to be one … and then this ethic will make sense and be the expression of true dignity.” However, “the politician must abide by the opposite commandment: ‘You shall use force to resist evil, for otherwise you will be responsible for its running amok.’” It seems to me that we can replace “evil” with “ignorance” or “epistemic hubris” without loss of meaning.