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The Tyranny of Experts
A review of The Great Disruption by Zaki Laïdi
“Expert consensus, rather than public consensus, underpins today’s political outlook”
"... A political drama in which the tension is between the expert and the decision-maker has little room for ordinary people. Instead, the public is expected simply to accept and live with the wisdom of decisions taken by experts and government regulators. Expert consensus, rather than public consensus, is the driving force of new forms of governance.
The main strength of The Great Disruption is that it shows how the outsourcing of authority to the expert and to international bodies leads to today’s peculiarly risk-averse and regulation-obsessed policymaking. Laїdi argues that the new, post-national governing bodies are drawn, almost spontaneously, towards talking up environmentalism as the principal political issue of the twenty-first century. He believes there are three reasons why the issue of the environment is being relentlessly politicised in Europe. ‘First, it is one of the fields that best lends itself to the production of new norms and standards’, he says. Second, it is a field where the ‘political construction of Europe can acquire greater legitimacy’. And third, ‘the environment is the pre-eminent area of shared sovereignty’. Thus, it is in this domain, in the area of the natural environment, that the outsourcing of authority to the scientist, expert and international organisations brings its greatest rewards.
Unfortunately, Laїdi’s valuable insights into political sociology are undermined by his tendency to place faith in enlightened experts. He seems to be imprisoned in the contemporary technocratic imagination, which views the expert as the solution and the people as a problem. As a result, you will find little sympathy for populism or public debate in The Great Disruption. Instead, the argument seems to be that, because our world is so complex, we must place our allegiance in international civil society rather than in the people. Populist movements are dismissed out of hand. Laїdi believes that they arise ‘out of the desire to reduce the complexity of the world to simple issues’. Apparently, the simpletons in these populist movements must not be trusted in our ever-more complex globalised world.
There is another way of making sense of the trends discussed by Laїdi. The voluntary relinquishing of sovereignty by European elites does not show that they are high-minded, forward-looking, enlightened internationalists. Rather, it is an attempt by an insecure oligarchy, which senses that its authority is feeble and falling apart, to disavow full responsibility for its actions. That is why governments today feel so much more at home hanging out in international civil society than they do engaging with their own ‘populist’ public."
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“Expert consensus, rather than public consensus, underpins today’s political outlook”
"... A political drama in which the tension is between the expert and the decision-maker has little room for ordinary people. Instead, the public is expected simply to accept and live with the wisdom of decisions taken by experts and government regulators. Expert consensus, rather than public consensus, is the driving force of new forms of governance.
The main strength of The Great Disruption is that it shows how the outsourcing of authority to the expert and to international bodies leads to today’s peculiarly risk-averse and regulation-obsessed policymaking. Laїdi argues that the new, post-national governing bodies are drawn, almost spontaneously, towards talking up environmentalism as the principal political issue of the twenty-first century. He believes there are three reasons why the issue of the environment is being relentlessly politicised in Europe. ‘First, it is one of the fields that best lends itself to the production of new norms and standards’, he says. Second, it is a field where the ‘political construction of Europe can acquire greater legitimacy’. And third, ‘the environment is the pre-eminent area of shared sovereignty’. Thus, it is in this domain, in the area of the natural environment, that the outsourcing of authority to the scientist, expert and international organisations brings its greatest rewards.
Unfortunately, Laїdi’s valuable insights into political sociology are undermined by his tendency to place faith in enlightened experts. He seems to be imprisoned in the contemporary technocratic imagination, which views the expert as the solution and the people as a problem. As a result, you will find little sympathy for populism or public debate in The Great Disruption. Instead, the argument seems to be that, because our world is so complex, we must place our allegiance in international civil society rather than in the people. Populist movements are dismissed out of hand. Laїdi believes that they arise ‘out of the desire to reduce the complexity of the world to simple issues’. Apparently, the simpletons in these populist movements must not be trusted in our ever-more complex globalised world.
There is another way of making sense of the trends discussed by Laїdi. The voluntary relinquishing of sovereignty by European elites does not show that they are high-minded, forward-looking, enlightened internationalists. Rather, it is an attempt by an insecure oligarchy, which senses that its authority is feeble and falling apart, to disavow full responsibility for its actions. That is why governments today feel so much more at home hanging out in international civil society than they do engaging with their own ‘populist’ public."
Read full article
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