What is the Difference, if any, Between Epistocracy and Technocracy?
Among the projects I’m working on, I’ve recently started to reflect on the idea of epistocracy from a political economy and philosophy perspective. In particular, in light of the growing literature on the virtues and limits of “epistemic democracy” and the relevance of the epistocratic alternative, an interesting question concerns the possibility (both in the conceptual and empirical sense) of “liberal epistocracy”, i.e., the compatibility of epistocratic political institutions with liberal values and principles. This is obviously a huge question that I hope to investigate in detail with several colleagues from different disciplines in a near future. One of the issues that we will have to tackle concerns the political nature of an epistocratic regime, in comparison of course with democracy but also with what is called – most of the time in a very imprecise way – “technocracy”. The following is a preliminary short exploration of the relationship between the two concepts.
The first thing to note is that we are used to working with what Max Weber called “ideal-types”. Both concepts of democracy and epistocracy tend to be used as such. The former refers – in the narrow sense – to a political regime where collective decisions are made either directly by the people by voting or by officials elected by the people. The latter corresponds to a political regime where collective decision-making is made by epistemically competent individuals. Now, once we go beyond these very general characterizations, it is easy to see that more fine-grained concepts can partially overlap. For instance, an epistocratic regime can rely on vote mechanisms, though the set of enfranchised persons would be restricted compared to a democracy. On the other, in most contemporary democracies, a significant set of collective decisions are not made by the people or the officials that have been elected by them. Quite the contrary, they are made by “administrators” whose political legitimacy is grounded on their competence. Hence, in a democracy, many social choices are justified not because they have been made (directly or indirectly) by the people, but because they have been made by competent individuals. This was well put by Raymond Aron who, in Démocratie et totalitarisme, wrote: “Les régimes démocratiques occidentaux sont des régimes d’experts sous la direction d’amateurs”.[1]
Considering that Aron wrote these lines back in 1957, this is not a new phenomenon. Nonetheless, political scientists and philosophers have recently suggested that the current democratic crisis in Western countries might be due to the growing political power in the hands of “experts”. Yasha Mounk argues for instance that western liberal democracies are systems of “rights without democracy” and considers that the rise of populism is directly related to this lack of democracy. In a similar spirit, Jeffrey Friedman identifies the notion of “democratic technocracy” that he relates notably to Popper’s idea of “piecemeal social engineering”.
Here, we start to see that the concepts of epistocracy and technocracy may not be easy to disentangle. Is a “democratic technocracy” not a democracy with more or less widespread epistocratic components in it? The confusion is also sometimes encouraged by authors who are sympathetic to or even support the implementation of an epistocratic regime. For instance, among the epistocratic systems that he sketches, Jason Brennan (following a suggestion of Thomas Christiano) discusses the “value-only” system that instantiates a political division of labor: citizens would vote on the ends pursued by the political regime, and legislators and experts would be charged with devising and implementing the means to reach those ends. I have put the notions of “means” and “ends” in italics because I think that the difficulty in distinguishing the concepts of epistocracy and technocracy finds its roots here.
The distinction between means and ends is fairly intuitive. Everyone understands it and it has been used by influential scholars to characterize the nature of politics and society. It is central for instance in Max Weber’s account of rationality. Isaiah Berlin relies on the distinction to make his case for value pluralism and the particular importance of negative liberty in this context.[2] Jürgen Haberman also builds on this distinction to criticize technocracy as being anti-democratic. I think indeed that the constitutive feature of a technocracy is the regulative belief that means can be meaningfully and practically separated from ends in the government of a polity. This leads to two different possible political regimes. If this belief is complemented by another belief that there is one set of non-conflicting ends to be pursued that can be rationally identified, then we have a “pure technocracy”; if quite the contrary it is admitted that ends are plural and conflicting, then the definition the rational definition of means is subordinated to the selection of ends by a different political mechanism, which can be democratic or autocratic, for instance.
Both democracy and epistocracy must reject the rigid technocratic dichotomy between means and ends. From a democratic perspective, it can be argued (and it is often argued) that the rational identification of means is itself value-loaded, probably as much as the identification of ends. An extreme view is to claim that science and expertise are political from top to bottom. A more moderate view consists in noting that the identification of the best means is often not uncontroversial and that, given this uncertain knowledge may determine what is valuable for society as a whole, citizens should also have the right to make decisions on them. On the other hand, the epistocrat should also contend that the (scientific) rational appraisal of means can inform the choice of ends. Without denying that “what is” cannot logically determine “what ought”, the knowledge we have about our world must be relevant to help us assess what ends and values can be realistically pursued. Maybe even more importantly, scientific knowledge helps us to identify the current boundary of our knowledge. This is important to understand the potential if uncertain, costs of pursuing far-reaching ideals.
This leads to a second key feature that distinguishes an epistocracy from a technocracy. In the latter, there is a strict separation between the citizens, portrayed as ignorant or at least incompetent beings, and the administrators who possess the relevant specialized knowledge. It is obvious that this representation is democratically problematic. But it is also unjustifiable from the broader perspective of liberal principles and values. A liberal epistocracy, if it can exist, must aim at forming knowledgeable citizens, i.e., citizens who have the minimal competencies to rationally justify their political preferences, but also to recognize the boundaries of their knowledge. This is well-perceived by the economist Gareth Jones who, discussing Singapore’s political system, notes that “Singapore has exceptionally smart citizens… In practice, Singapore already has an element of epistocracy.“ I don’t know if Jones’s claim about the smartness of Singapore’s citizens is well-grounded. Still, it points toward the important idea that the idea of epistocracy cannot be reduced to the principle of the government by the knowledgeable. It must be complemented by what looks like a Millian ideal of what I would call “epistemic perfectionism”. An epistocratic regime would have high expectations about the epistemic competencies of its citizenry and would have therefore to provide the required institutions to live up to its ambitions.
[1] “Western democracies are expert regimes governed by amateurs.”
[2] For instance, in his essay “Does Political Theory Still Exist?”, Berlin clearly suggests that value monism opens the door to “a technocratic society dedicated to a single end of the richest realization of all human faculties”.