Friedrich von Hayek’s classical liberalism argued that free markets allow individuals the greatest opportunity to achieve their ends. This paper develops an internal critique of this claim. It argues that once externalities are introduced, the forms of economic knowledge Hayek thought to undermine government action and orthodox utilitarianism also rule out relative welfarist assessments of more or less regulated markets. Given the pervasiveness of externalities in modern economies, Hayek will frequently be unable to make comparative welfarist claims, or he must (...) relax his epistemic assumptions and allow for greater government action than his classical liberalism would wish to accept. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge builds a critical epistemology of technocracy, rather than a democratic argument against it. For its democratic critics, technocracy is illegitimate because it amounts to the rule of cognitive elites, violating principles of mutual respect and collective self-determination. For its proponents, technocracy’s legitimacy depends on its ability to use reliable knowledge to solve social and economic problems. But Friedman demonstrates that to meet the proponents' “internal,” epistemic standard of legitimacy, technocrats would have to reckon with (...) the heterogeneity of people’s ideas, which he presents as one of two aspects of a political anthropology of ideational beings. The other aspect is ideational determinism: the shaping of our conscious actions by our interpretations, and of our interpretations by “ideational exposures”. For the most part, our symposiasts agree with this anthropology or leave it uncontested, but they fall back on democratic theory to point toward alternatives to technocracy. This raises the question, which Friedman does not ask, of whether his political anthropology undermines a certain brand of democratic theory: the liberal brand that attaches respect to people’s opinions as products of “free reflection,” i.e., as underdetermined. (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)