Facing Complexity: Democracy, Expertise and the Discovery Process
| Author | Dan Greenwood |
| Published date | 01 October 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00851.x |
| Date | 01 October 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Facing Complexity: Democracy, Expertise and the
Discovery Processpost_851 769..788
Dan Greenwood
University of Westminster
As politics continues to be intertwined with complex, rapidly advancing bodies of knowledge, the question arises of
how we are to understand the relationship betweendemocracy and exper tise.Recent discussions have focused on the
capacity for democratic political institutions to address complex technical and scientific issues. These discussions have
a post-positivist starting point, emphasising the contested, varied and dispersed nature of technical-scientific know-
ledge and expertise. Yet,as this article explores with particular reference to the work of Hayek,the sources of tension
between democracy, complexity and expertise involve complex economic as well as technical-scientific dimensions.
Starting from a similarly ‘post-positivist’view of economic knowledge, Hayek famously concludes that over-reliance
upon political expertise carries the danger of author itarianism.He looks to the market as the most suitable institutional
process for addressing complex economic choices, reflecting the various goals of individuals across society. As more
recent writers have shown, this radically pro-market conclusion overlooks the profound social and environmental
implications of market failure. Yet it is argued here that we can draw from the Hayekianunderstanding of complexity
and its implications to enrich our understanding of how non-market, democratic institutions might handle those
dimensions of complexity that cannot be adequately addressed through markets alone.Hence Hayekian insights can
serve as an aid to re-conceptualising the concept of expertise as performing a potentially enabling role on behalf of
political democracy.
The array of objectives and values held by individuals across society is often emphasised to
be intertwined with complex, rapidly developing bodies of knowledge that are often
understood only by a relatively small number of specialists. The implications of complexity
for political democracy have long been a matter of interest and concern. Reflecting in the
1920s on the implications of complexity,Walter Lippmann described the idea of the public
being able to ‘acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs’ as an ‘intolerable and
unworkable fiction’ (Lippmann, 1922, p. 31). His proposals for the establishment of ‘intel-
ligence bureaux’,consisting of exper ts who could counterpose certain facts to government,
causing them to question and revise their conclusions, anticipated the emergence of
modern-day ‘think tanks’ (Schudson, 2006, p. 492). More recently, the potential for
increased interaction between experts and the general public has been explored in political
theory and policy-orientated practice, particularly in relation to complex, recently emerg-
ing technical-scientific issues such as medical advancements, genetically modified crops and
energy supply (e.g. Burgess et al., 2007; Cook et al., 2004; Stirling, 2010). Yet concern
remains, as expressed by Nico Stehr,that democratic processes ‘increasingly require a certain
level of scientific literacy’,causing ‘large segments of the public [to] become disenfranchised
and disabled from effective involvement’(Stehr, 2006,p. 8).Here there are echoes of Robert
Dahl’s earlier comment that the complexity of the issues ‘threatens to cut the policy elites
loose from effective control by the demos’ (Dahl, 1989, p. 335).
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00851.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2010 VOL 58, 769–788
© 2010The Author.Political Studies © 2010 Political Studies Association
There is a need to consider how different institutional arrangements can draw from the
knowledge of experts, while ensuring that decision-making processes take into account
the values of the public. These issues are discussed here through a focus upon the
theoretical contribution of F. A. Hayek and the Austrian tradition in political economy of
which he was a part. Whereas contemporary discussions focus on technical-scientific
issues, Hayek’s work highlights the challenges involved in addressing complex economic
issues through the political sphere. His well-known thesis is that the decentralised market
mechanism is an indispensable means of enabling individuals to acquire and utilise the
knowledge required for attaining their various objectives. The essentially normative char-
acter of economic decisions, he emphasises, means that they cannot be made on the basis
of purely technical knowledge. Attempts to attain particular end states through political
intervention in the market, Hayek argues, fail to reflect the plurality of ends held by
individuals across society.
Hayek’s pro-market thesis underestimates the scale and normative significance of problems
of the market such as inequality and environmental degradation,famously refer red to by his
contemporary Karl Polanyi as the ‘ravages of the market’ (Polanyi, 1957, p. 40). This is
emphasised by some recent commentators on Hayek (Gamble, 1996; O’Neill, 1998), who
favour a more substantive role for non-market, political institutions than is envisaged by
Hayek himself, while recognising that Hayekian theory offers important insights into the
challenge of complexity facing the political sphere. Here,an analytical approach is proposed
which draws from Austr ian insights, as well as contemporary discussions of exper tise and
democracy, in assessing how different democratic, institutional designs utilise the various
forms of expertise and knowledge that exist across society.
This article begins by introducing, in the next section, the distinction in Hayek’s work
between technical and economic complexity. This distinction is the foundation for his
critique of political democracy and his case for markets as an indispensable process for
acquiring the knowledge needed to address complexity. However, as the third section
argues, Hayek’s own constitutional proposals assign a significant role to technical, legal
experts. He overlooks the subjective, contestable character of the decisions that these
experts would be required to make about the design and scope of markets. As the fourth
section discusses, this is a reflection of Hayek’s failure to apply his pluralist, epistemologically
sensitive understanding of economic knowledge to the technical-scientific sphere as far as
he might have done.Recent discussions about the relationship between science and politics
suggest that, given such a post-positivist view,there is cause for considering the values of the
public in addressing technical-scientific complexity. The fifth section explores some con-
temporary discussions about the kinds of political institution that are most suitable for
facilitating interaction between different publics and experts in the context of such a
pluralist understanding of technical-scientific knowledge. The sixth section considers the
potential to draw from Austrian theory in analysing the capacity of democratic processes to
address economic as well as technical-scientific complexity. The seventh section then
reflects on how various other kinds of expertise can also be understood as performing an
enabling role on behalf of democracy. Hayekian insights, it is argued, can serve as an aid to
re-conceptualising expertise in this way.
770 DAN GREENWOOD
© 2010The Author.Political Studies © 2010 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2010, 58(4)
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