Stephen Turner

Conventional accounts of liberal democracy tend to obscure a basic fact: the phenomenon of administration. The American reception of the administrative state was self-consciously imitative of Continental models of state bureaucracy, as a remedy for the ills of democratic politics, but construed as a means of saving democracy from itself, from populism, and from lawyers and legalism, in the name of efficiency. This produced its own ideology, which pervades the present discussion of populism. This ideology holds that decision-making needs the trust of the people in the wisdom of administrators, rather than their actual participation. The mythic elements of this ideology are discussed.

The problem of objectivity has deep roots in the history of sociology, reaching back to the pre-sociological era of social and labor statistics. The admissibility of the section on statistics to the British Association for the Advancement of Science had already raised this issue in the 1840s, and it continued with the labor statistics movement of the later 19th century. The repeated conflicts involved what can be seen as two competing concepts: objectivity as fairness and objectivity as pure factuality. Each was guaranteed by something: fairness by institutional arrangements and purity by methods. The greatest successes of sociology in the face of social conflict occurred when the two coincided, as they did in the study of the 1919 Race Riots in Chicago. More often they did not, leading to the dueling perspectives represented by Robert Lynd in Knowledge for What? and George Lundberg’s Can Science Save Us?, followed by Howard Becker’s “Whose Side Are We On?.” These conflicts continue to the present, and can be illuminated by the work of Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice and Ted Porter on Trust in Numbers. The conflict, however, is unequal in one respect: what counts as fairness shifts as moral saliences shift, and although concepts of purity and method also shift, they have more continuity and stability. Today, the productive interaction between the two forms has broken down, in multiple settings, notably that of race, threatening the enterprise of sociology as a whole with collapse into ideology.

The idea that the technologies one uses and the work experiences one has influence cognition is old, but somewhat vague, focused on how technology induced generalisable habits of mind. Technology creates a familiar world, which changes in large and small shocks, rather than in rational steps. This kind of change, at the tacit level, has characteristics of liminality. Cognitive science provides a vocabulary for discussing this problem that connects with several different strands of social theory, and points to various ways of conceptualising the effects of digitalisation. If we focus on the tacitisation of skilled performance, we can see how the familiar is created and recreated, and identify processes by which this occurs, specifically pattern recognition in a liminal or liminoid state. In the past, and in the classic anthropology of the liminal, the familiar consisted of a world of common or shared objects, and the liminal states involved sacred ones. In the digital world, the choice of experience is voluntary, and the worlds are diverse, but the effects of object-induced involuntary pattern recognition are the same: they organise and reorganise cognition at a tacit, non-discursive, level.

Publishing is changing rapidly, though these changes are concealed from academics, who are presented the appearances of the old world of print. The economic incentives and consequently the strategies of publishers have, however, changed. Where quality was once the road to profit, content now is, and novel digital delivery systems are the key to sales. Academic libraries have become storefronts for digital sales. Editors have become content collectors. At the same time publishing has attempted to mimic the accessibility of the web, shrinking the gap between “publication” and posting. This raises the question of what value is added by journal publication, and whether there is a justification for the huge cost. Some shorter and longer term perspectives suggest that the current value-added is linked to policies of evaluation, but that these may change.

Michael Oakeshott employed a device of argument and analysis that appears in a number of other thinkers, where it is given the name “antinomies.” These differ from binary oppositions or contradictories in that the two poles are bound together. In this discussion, the nature of this binding is explored in detail, in large part in relation to Oakeshott’s own usages, such as his discussion of the relation of faith and skepticism, between collective goal-oriented associations and those based on contract, and between a legal regime based on neutral rules and one oriented to policy goals. Other examples might include Weber’s distinction between the politics of intention and the politics of responsibility. Moreover, such ambiguous concepts as “rights,” have antinomic interpretations. In each of these cases, the full realization of one ideal led, in practice, to consequences associated with the other: in political practice, neither polar ideal was realizable without concessions to the other. But these features are rooted in the deep history of institutions. They are contingent, not philosophical. They nevertheless preclude conventional approaches to political theory.

The author analyses the concept of practices which has only recently come to prominence in social theory. The ‘rules’ or ‘norms’ model of society is a misleading abstraction and ‘practices’ better captures the fact that living in society is not simply a matter of rules but of the practical mastery of the cues and expectations of others. The locus of explanation shifts from culture as a determinant in the social system to a more pragmatic understanding of the ongoing effects of practices. Practices are becoming distinctive units of social grouping in the knowledge society.

The creation of think tanks has in part been motivated by the desire for an apolitical politics, a politics of facts and standards rather than a politics of interests and public ignorance, and opposed to political machines. This chapter brings out some of the features of this kind of politics in the USA through the historical example of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, which illustrates the place of the construction of a factual world by think tanks as part of policy processes. The history of this bureau also shows how think tanks become surrogates for party intellectuals—a non-category in the USA. Think tanks then proliferated elsewhere as surrogates for politics by normal means.

One of Ian C. Jarvie’s most interesting contributions is his discussion of the thinking of Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi on the nature and workings of the scientific community and their relation to politics : 545–564, 2001). The self-image these thinkers contributed to still lingers, but their accounts capture a historical moment that has passed and was idealized even when they were written. In this chapter, I examine this tradition and identify the central themes which dominated this literature and ask the question of how this history is relevant today. The answer will perhaps be surprising: despite the fact that the Left of the past held positions that are the opposites of the positions of the present participatory Left, the considerations that motivated the older Left remain.

The dispute between simulation theorists and theory theorists follows a basic pattern in philosophical discussions of cognitive science. This chapter brings some of the topics of social theory into the discussion. The discussion of the problem of understanding in social theory has developed in two traditions: Verstehen, or empathy, the German tradition of Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber, and in taking the role of the other originating in the thought of G. H. Mead. Each regards understanding as both an activity of theorists and of human beings themselves in the course of their dealings with one another. The topic of imitation became important in American psychology for reasons quite separate from its role in social theory. The psychological explanation holds that at least some emotions, and perhaps all real emotions, are universal and are explicable by features of human psychology, biology, and development that are themselves universal.

The history of Communism in the twentieth century, if the current orthodoxy is to be believed, was no more than a detour in a process in which history ends in a world of civil societies organized as liberal democracies that increasingly relate to each other following the model of liberal democracy itself, through the rule of law, collective discussion, the general recognition of human and civil rights, and so forth. In this image of world history, the worldwide dominance of liberal democracy is the culmination of a process that appears as a first draft in the Westphalian peace, which gradually spread through time, for example, through the internationalist ideology of Woodrow Wilson. In this teleological image of history, Communism appears as a developmental error, an error produced by an accidental combination of erroneous ideology and special circumstances of delayed development in certain countries that made them particularly susceptible to it.

The Pittsburgh Survey was part of the survey movement. The movement was characterized in three key documents of self-interpretation: the fi rst, an article by Paul U. Kellogg, Shelby Harrison, and George Palmer in the Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in 1912; the second, a paper by Kellogg and Neva Deardorff presented to an international social work convention in 1928; and the third, Shelby Harrison’s introductory essay to the catalogue of surveys constructed by Allen Eaton in 1930. Ordinarily, such documents provide the beginning of historical analysis and are critically revised by later historians. However, there has been relatively little written about the surveys and the survey movement since it expired. So these texts give shape to a kind of dim memory of a movement to promote social reform through sociological research, which, for mysterious reasons, disappeared.

The puzzle of the political significance of expert knowledge has many dimensions, and in this chapter I plan to explore a simple Oakeshottian question in relation to it. To what extent is the present role of expert knowledge similar to that envisioned by the “planners” of the 1940s who were the inspiration for Oakeshott’s essay, “Rationalism in Politics”? This role, as Oakeshott and many of its enthusiasts portrayed it, was to replace politics as hitherto practiced with something different. Rationalism thus depended on a theory of the “politics” it sought to supplant, though it rarely attempted to articulate this theory. In the context of the time, there was no need. In the 1930s, economic depression and the inability of party politicians in the British parliament to agree on measures to deal with the economic situation provided endless negative examples of “politics” standing in the way of action, and a sharp contrast with the state activism of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. In the postwar period, the planners had their chance, and the modern British welfare state was born. Much of what this state did applied ideas of Fabian Socialism, which had presented itself as objective, rational, and expert. But as an administrative fact, the welfare state had no need of the ideology of planning, and the discussion faded. The question I wish to address here is this: expertise forms a much larger part of governance than it did in the time of the “rationalism” of the planning movement; does this mean that rationalism has arrived by stealth, that is to say in practice, without appealing to the overt ideology of rationalistic planning? This is a question of the place of expertise in our politics, and thus a political question.