Political Epistemology, Technocracy, and Political Anthropology: Reply to a Symposium on Power Without Knowledge

ABSTRACT

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.

Keywords:

• citizen-technocrats
• democratic technocracy
• epistemological individualism
• epistocracy
• Foucault
• hermeneutics
• ignorance
• interpretivism
• methodological collectivism
• methodological individualism
• naïve realism
• philosophy of social science
• political anthropology
• political epistemology
• positivism
• social science
• social hypstasization
• technocracy

Notes

1 Separately, one might point out that technocracy itself is historically contingent upon the existence of social and economic problems that, arguably, are caused by modern capitalism. Power Without Knowledge brackets this claim (3, 337) because it is orthogonal to an internal examination of whether technocracy can solve these problems. A more challenging Marxist critique of the book would point out that mass society, and thus ideational heterogeneity, are products of, or are at least made possible, in large part, by capitalism. Because this seems undeniable, the epistemic critique of technocracy may not apply to communism (insofar as the latter could not sustain, or would abolish, mass society).

2 Brown and Williams’s reference to the fact that special interests spend a lot on lobbying might seem to indicate an empirically established “systemic” problem of bad faith, but lobbyists represent nearly every conceivable interest and, in fact, rarely bribe their targets. Anyone familiar with actual lobbying knows that lobbyists’ power stems from their ability to provide information about the effects of pending legislation. The information, of course, is very likely to be biased in favor of the interests they serve. But this does not make the information inherently unreliable, let alone false; our interpretive screens, which bias all information acquisition, are fallible but not, therefore, unreliable. In other words, one’s bias may coincide with the truth. What is really doing the work in Brown and Williams’s critique of lobbying by special interests is the naïve assumption that special interests must be wrong because they contradict what Brown and WIlliams take to be the self-evident truth about, say, global warming.

3 In introducing a conception of historically attuned positivism, I am trying to account for figures such as Foucault and Habermas. I say more about Foucault in my reply to Larsson. In Habermas’s contribution to the positivism debate in German sociology ([1963] 1976), he concedes to positivist social science the validity of the lawlike regularities it purports to discover within the compass of the capitalist order, questioning only the positivist separation of fact and value and, more to the present point, the positivist neglect of the historical totality within which the lawlike regularities operate. Because Habermas was (at least in the early years) a methodological collectivist, he accepted the existence and knowability of synchronic laws governing a given historical system; he challenged only their permanence. By contrast, because I am an epistemological individualist, I challenge the existence of such systems and thus the notion that they might supply lawlike regularity to a given era.

4 How many economists does it take to change a light bulb? Two: one to assume the existence of a ladder and the other to climb it and change the bulb.

5 Lerner may have overlooked the crucial role of interpersonal communication for epistemological individualism (150-53). In a paper titled “Theorizing Collective Trauma in International Political Economy” (Lerner 2019), he again defends a pragmatic refusal to embrace either ontological collectivism or individualism, this time in thinking about collective trauma. Therefore, he treats “collective trauma” as a valuable metaphor with uncertain philosophical status, which is how his contribution to the symposium treats “the state.” However, the reason he is unwilling to reduce collective trauma to individuals’ subjective and fallible perceptions of trauma, as an epistemological individualist would do, is not that he doubts the subjectivity or fallibility of these perceptions, or the ontological reality of the individuals who subjectively perceive them. Rather, it is because individualistic approaches to the topic in the IR literature equate individual perceptions of trauma with Freudian explanations of the source of trauma, “downplay[ing] the complexity inherent in the repeated politically mediated transmissions and reproductions necessary for individual trauma to become collective” (ibid., 554, my emphasis). In short, the “social construction” of collective trauma is ignored by the Freudian approach, but this lacuna can be filled by treating “society” as if it is a being with a “collective memory” of traumatic events (ibid., 552). It seems to me that this hypostasization of the collective is unnecessary and mystifies the process of social construction as described by Lerner, which begins when individuals’ subjective, fallible perceptions of trauma—or anything else—are “transmitted and reproduced,” presumably by means of textbooks, news reports, novels, movies, or any other cultural media. All such media reproduce and then transmit individuals’ ideas to other individuals. Methodologically collectivist critics of the Freudian approach, Lerner says, condemn it for “mak[ing] the level of culture . . . disappear” (554), but this happens only because traumatized individual psyches of the sort analyzed by the Freudians cannot communicate ideas or memories to one another unaided by conscious attempts to use communications technology. To correct this deficiency in the Freudian approach, we need not hypostasize the use of communications technology as occurring at a separate and non-individualistic ontological “level,” culture. This would repeat exactly the mistake Taylor made, and with the same result: effacing the fallibility and potential heterogeneity of the ideas being culturally communicated.

 Thus, the intersubjective communication of ideas among individual subjects by cultural media would seem to resolve the riddle that divides methodological individualists and collectivists and prompts Lerner’s prudent reluctance to endorse either side. Epistemological individualism, unlike the atomistic type of theorizing that goes under the methodologically individualist rubric, allows for intersubjective communication—which, as I see it, is the chief source of subjects’ ideational homogeneities and ideational heterogeneities alike. (I hope it is clear, then, that I do not mean, by “epistemological individualism,” what Steven Lukes [1973, 107] means by it, namely, “a philosophical doctrine about the nature of knowledge, which asserts that the source of knowledge lies within the individual.”) Communication should therefore be a central object of political science research. The fact that it is not, even more than the fact that such research tends to be positivistic, may account for the strikingly unrealistic nature of all three of the discipline’s empirical subfields.

6 Obviously the “genes/ideas” dichotomy is a bit too stark, as our genes enable our thoughts by way of our brains. However, our genes do not determine the content of our thoughts, which is historically contingent, as opposed to the cognitive architecture that processes them. There may be exceptions—ideas that are genetically encoded—but the kaleidoscopic diversity of the ideas developed during the last few centuries in the West suggests that most ideas are not genetically encoded. Positivist psychologists, however, in common with other positivist social scientists, display an appalling lack of historical awareness.

7 I do not mean, however, to deny the real issues raised by my critique of the positivist psychologist’s double standard. Among these are, first, the question of whether one’s own rationality may be an illusion; second, whether the double standard may sometimes be justified by differential or asymmetric irrationality; third, whether a psychology of intellectual charity is committed to denying the existence of irrationality or mental illness; and fourth, how to deal with cases where irrationality seems to be the only possible diagnosis. I attempt to make some progress on the fourth issue in Friedman 2021, but it is only a start.

8 When I wrote that one may disagree with some acquaintances about “nearly everything” (147), I meant, as Reamer acknowledges, only everything that one discusses—not every single belief in one’s web.

9 In answer to Reamer’s second end note, this type of variability is not random, as it is determined by non-random processes of belief formation. Therefore, we cannot treat ideational idiosyncracy as predictable noise on the tail ends of a bell curve.

10 On the difference between the later Wittgenstein and Whorf, see Kienpointer 1996.

11 MacGilvray may, however, have meant the ethic of responsibility to provide an alternative to what the book labels “the transformation of means into ends” (301-3). This is the practice of portraying technocratic policies as good in themselves rather than as means to good ends, such that one does not need to consider whether they will actually achieve those ends. In effect, the transformation of means into ends enacts a transition from the ethic of responsibility to the ethic of conviction and, thereby, a transition out of technocracy into a politics of justice or symbolism rather than a politics of consequences. The manuscript of Power Without Knowledge said just that until the last minute, when I noticed that it would be misleading to mention the parallel between the transformation of means into ends and Weber’s dichotomy—precisely because it might suggest that all we need, to avoid the transformation of means into ends and thus achieve a responsible consideration of means, is politicians imbued with the ethic of responsibility. This is untrue, as the epistemic problems facing such decision makers cannot be solved merely by intending to know the consequences of their actions, which is all that can be accomplished by the ethic in itself. Conversely, a politician who portrays a given technocratic policy stance as a matter of justice, not efficacy, may simply calculate that this will motivate greater support for the policy than couching it as a matter of cost-benefit analysis, even though cost-benefit analysis is her actual reason for supporting the policy. Such a politician would be a responsible one, in Weber’s usage, who is doing whatever it takes to achieve good consequences. Finally, Weber’s treatment of the ethic of conviction creates the impression that its adepts are aware of the fact that they are ignoring the consequences of their actions. This might be true in some cases but, as a general claim, it is intellectually uncharitable and, I think, false. For these reasons, I removed my discussion of “Politics as a Vocation” from the text of Chapter 6 but neglected to remove it from the bibliography, as MacGilvray notices.

12 There is an ambiguity about the ranking of the middle two levels. While both an injudicious exitocracy and a judicious ordinary technocracy are logically superior to an injudicious technocracy, and while both are inferior to a judicious exitocracy, I can see no way to determine a priori whether or not a judicious ordinary technocracy is superior to an injudicious exitocracy or vice versa.

13 Note that Benson misconstrues Part III as arguing that “technocratic knowledge is required to understand whether the actions of an exitocracy will actually promote or undermine exit” (my emphasis). In reality, the preface to Part III (317-19) points to a variety of reasons for thinking that theorists cannot know the magnitude of future judicious or injudicious technocrats’ successes and failures. This is not a failure of theorists’ technocratic knowledge, even though one of these reasons for their third-order ignorance is that if they were to attempt to weigh the costs and benefits of technocracy by appealing to their own estimation of technocrats’ first-order successes and failures, they would beg the question of the reliability of their own first-order technocratic understanding. This picks up on Chapter 1’s self-denying ordinance against theorists naïvely exempting their own technocratic knowledge claims from scrutiny, but in light of the intervening five chapters, it amounts to saying that political theorists are not judicious technocrats; it does not amount to saying that even judicious technocrats’ knowledge claims would be unreliable, and thus it does not impugn the reliability of judicious exitocrats’ knowledge claims. Benson also overlooks the other reasons for theorists’ ignorance—most obviously that we do not know how well technocrats will do their job (317), which does apply to judicious exitocrats, but, again, does not impugn the reliability of their knowledge, as opposed to our knowledge of these yet-unborn human beings’ trials and tribulations.

14 Again, see Friedman 1997.

15 I should qualify Bartels’s 1993 lament about the embarrassing lack of media research by quoting from a footnote from Power Without Knowledge (270n24), where I cited the same lament. Since Bartels wrote, I acknowledged, “laboratory experimentation has demonstrated the persuasive capacities of the news media (see Chong and Druckman 2011 for a brief survey). However, this literature underplays media effects because the three main categories of experimentally demonstrated effects—agenda setting, priming, and framing—each presuppose fixed voter predispositions, uninfluenced by the media. Agenda setting makes one issue rather than others appear to be important at a given moment; priming emphasizes one issue rather than another in the retrospective evaluation of a politician’s performance; and framing emphasizes one or another dimension of an issue. All three types of media effect alter ‘the weight component of an attitude through changes in [the] availability, accessibility and/or applicability’ of media consumers’ pre-existing beliefs about the issues in question (Chong and Druckman 2011, 310). None of the three takes seriously the possibility that these beliefs themselves are shaped by the media (including non-news media, such as cinema and formal education).” That is, none of the three takes seriously the possibility of closed loops of interpretation, because media scholars do not recognize the interpretive springs of human action.