Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy

ISBN-13: 9780190877170 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 376 str.

Jeffrey Friedman

Opis

Do leading social-scientific experts, or technocrats, know what they are doing? In Power without Knowledge, Jeffrey Friedman maintains that they do not. Friedman shows that people are too heterogeneous to act as predictably as technocracy requires of them. Technocratic reason, then, entails a drastically oversimplified understanding of human decision making in modern society.

Recenzje

In this deeply learned, passionately argued book, Jeffrey Friedman offers a trenchant critique of technocracy that indicts both the epistocratic 'rule of experts' and the opinion-based policy produced by democratic collectives. Rejecting the idea that either experts or ordinary citizens are capable of attaining the knowledge necessary to solve the social problems of modernity, he urges that the choice of individual exit is epistemically superior to voice and offers 'exitocracy' as a radical alternative to existing forms of government. His bold, carefully reasoned argument challenges social theorists to rethink our most cherished assumptions about the potential of public policy to foster ameliorative change.

O autorze

Jeffrey Friedman, a Visiting Scholar in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, is the editor of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, the editor of The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered (Yale University Press), and coauthor of Engineering the Perfect Storm: The Financial Crisis and the Failure of Regulation. He has taught political and social theory at Barnard College, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and Yale University.