Architects and Engineers: Two Types of Technocrat and Their Relation to Democracy

ABSTRACT

Technocracy is a contested concept, but it is typically associated with the exercise of political power justified by claims to expertise, and is often contrasted with populist forms of politics. In Power Without Knowledge, Jeffrey Friedman reframes the concept of technocracy as a form of politics oriented to solving social and economic problems, and thereby extends it to cover not only epistemic elites but ordinary people. This move usefully challenges the simplistic framing of populism and technocracy as opposites, but at the expense of effacing other dimensions of democratic politics. Friedman also suggests that maximizing individuals’ exit opportunities will allow them to take advantage of their relatively reliable personal knowledge. The architecture of “exitocracy” would itself, however, be designed by experts who, as such, might be tempted to insulate the institutional architecture they design against democratic interference.

Keywords:

• democratic technocracy
• epistocracy
• exitocracy
• naïve technocratic realism
• public ignorance
• radical ignorance
• technocracy

Notes

1 Real-world epistocracy, Friedman suggests, generates a pressure to predict, which selects for positivism or naive realism; and a pressure to overstate one’s confidence, which leads to what he calls the “spiral of conviction.”

2 While Oakeshott is associated with political conservatism, a similar critique of technocracy as a sort of rationalism is well rooted on the left, and in particular among participatory democrats (see Fischer 1990).

3 Hayek, for instance, developed a theory of complex systems which purported to show the impossibility of knowledge sufficient for prediction and control of the system, but claimed the possibility of knowledge of behavioral “patterns.” Economics, he thought, can tell us “under which general conditions a pattern of this sort will form itself,” which in turn “enable[s] us to create such conditions and to observe whether a pattern of the kind predicted will appear” (Hayek [1964] 1967, 36). Thus, while Hayek powerfully rejected the aspiration to prediction and control of complex social systems that he thought underpinned any attempt at economic planning, he regarded his own approach as one grounded firmly in the science of complex systems.