ance against contestable knowledge claims. More broadly, Friedman attacks assumptions about rational agents responding to incentives on the grounds that we, the analysts, cannot know that the agent perceived any… Click to show full abstract
ance against contestable knowledge claims. More broadly, Friedman attacks assumptions about rational agents responding to incentives on the grounds that we, the analysts, cannot know that the agent perceived any particular incentive nor how that agent would respond to it. Worse still, economists theorizing in this way “will be radically ignorant of their epistemic blind spot” (p. 193), unaware that they lack what they would need to know to make behavioral predictions. Add to this both an internal disciplinary context of conviction emerging inadvertently as a result of biased search and filtering and an institutional context that selects for those who project certainty, and we have reasons to doubt the reliability of much economic expertise as it is deployed in deliberations on public policy. This book is stimulating, ambitious, and wide-ranging. It is at its best in its detailed critiques of various research programs in political science, public opinion, and economics. Furthermore, Friedman makes a provocative inversion of who we identify as a technocrat—Donald Trump is the “citizen-technocrat in chief” (p. 291), claiming on the basis of business experience to be able to solve complex problems—and what we mean by technocratic politics. Far from being a bloodless “solutionism,” technocracy pushes politics into a distinctively conflictual formation: because so many people believe the solutions to social problems are simple and obvious, it seems that opposition must be motivated by malice or corruption and that the key point in selecting representatives is their commitment to enact what seems an obvious policy. This could make an interesting contribution to the emerging literature on the relationship between populism and technocracy. However, Friedman’s positive proposals are narrow in scope compared with the previous chapters. His response to technocratic politics, outlined in a relatively brief final section of the book, is what he calls “exitocracy.” Rather than engage in a politics of communication and cooperative problem solving, we ought, where possible, to create a framework to support “indirect maneuvering in the private sphere, primarily but not solely by means of the exit mechanism” (p. 322). This raises important questions, which Friedman does not really address, about the scope and limits of democratic politics: How are we to decide which sort of problems we are dealing with and which sort of mechanism is appropriate to it? These are the sorts of decisions Jack Knight and James Johnson, for instance, take to be the central work of democratic politics (The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism, 2011). Yet it is not clear whether, for Friedman, these questions should be addressed through public deliberation and decision or whether, given his account of the tendency of ordinary citizens to adopt the stance of “citizen technocrats,” they should be taken out of the hands of the people altogether. What Is Christian Democracy? Politics, Religion and Ideology. By Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 396p. $120.00 cloth. doi:10.1017/S1537592720001875
               
Click one of the above tabs to view related content.