Has Labour had enough of experts?
| Author | Butler, Lise |
Emily Robinson: Thanks for agreeing to speak to me, it's great to see you both. I wanted to get you together to think about Labour's relationship to expertise--and particularly social science expertise, although I know we're all interested in the humanities as well. As a journal run by academics, which is trying to speak to Labour politics, it's something that we at Renewal consider quite often, though never really in a formal way. So, as two academics, who are both also involved in Labour politics, I wanted to get your views on how this relationship could and should work. And, as two historians, I hoped you might also reflect on how this relationship has and has not worked in the past. What's changed, when, and why?
Marc Stears: Well, thank you so much for the chance to chat. It's a really important topic and I can't think of two better people to discuss it with.
The relationship between expertise and social change is a crucial but a complex one. And the Labour Party has always, right from its inception, grappled with the difficulties at its heart. You can't change a social system without knowing how to do it, without having a plan, and without being able to evaluate how it's going. So that requires expertise, training, and intellectual equipment. On the other hand, you can't change a social system without deep values and deep understanding of the lives of the people who are affected by that change. And values and experience are not within the remit of expertise, at least as it is usually understood. Indeed, questions of values and experience tend not to be dealt with particularly well by conventional social science. At all.
I think Labour has known this, right from the start. One of the first articles I read when I started my PhD back in the day was Harold Laski's Fabian Essay 'The limitations of the expert'. It is a brilliant study of exactly this quandary. Laski knew the desperate requirement for knowledge and for skill and for understanding and for analysis, on the one hand. (1) And, on the other hand, he appreciated the need for depth of experience, for practical wisdom, for morals, even for spirituality. And he knew the latter have a tendency to get crowded out in the social scientific academy. We just need to come to terms with the fact that it's always been there, and it always will be, and each generation tries to grapple with it in their own way.
Lise Butler: Different political eras often feature different analytical and intellectual frames. My own research has really emphasised the importance of the social sciences, and specifically sociology, for framing the kinds of questions that post-war policy-makers were asking in the context of the development of the welfare state. In my book, Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-70, I describe this as a reaction to overly economistic ways of thinking about policy that were common amongst left-wing policy-makers in the Attlee government and during the post-war period more generally. One of the arguments I've tried to make in my book is that Young was part of a battle in the post-war period between economistic thinking about policy, and a more humanistic approach which drew on the insights of social sciences like sociology, psychology and anthropology.
I often note the disproportionate number of historians on the Renewal editorial board, and I think that says something about the cultural role of history and the historical profession today. Indeed it might also give us some insights into why history has become such a target in the current culture wars. Whereas sociology achieved cultural prominence in left-wing circles in the 1960s and 1970s, and was subsequently attacked by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s, I think history has become prominent in progressive political circles in recent decades and has, as a result, become a target for the contemporary right. I think we need to see expertise as fundamentally tied to different frames for thinking about policy-making, which are historically contingent.
ER: That's really interesting, and raises the question of whether those intellectual frames are attached to a general cultural moment, or whether they are also ideologically driven. As you mentioned, sociology was attacked by the right, so would you see it as a particularly left way of approaching knowledge?
LB: Well, we all know Margaret Thatcher's famous statement: 'there's no such thing as society... there are individual men and women and there are families', which is commonly understood as a rejection of the idea that social problems have structural explanations. (2) I think there certainly was a sense that sociology provided a language and a framework for policy-makers to think more structurally about social processes, which challenged a more individualist political project. But the point that I've tried to make in my own work is that--and I think that Marc might be sympathetic to this--in the 1950s and the 1960s sociology provided a language for progressive policy-makers to conceive of individual action in terms of communities, in terms of families, and in terms of social groups. And I think that part of that story might not have been fully appreciated by some of the antagonists towards sociology in the 1980s. So, I don't think that any policy science or any way of thinking is intrinsically left-wing or right-wing, but these things are grasped by different actors and come to have certain meanings in different contexts.
ER: Yes. One of the things that often comes up when we're thinking about experts and expertise is the idea of technocracy. This is an accusation that has been thrown at lots of people on the left at various times, and has been particularly associated with Keir Starmer in recent years. This is usually seen as a bad thing, and in conflict with many of the calls in recent years (including from people like Marc) for politics to be more human, more relational. But then, running alongside this, we see another kind of discourse about people having had enough of experts, which is associated with a much more populist, post-truth and anti-democratic strain of thinking. Could you maybe say a bit more about that tension? Are these opposing sides of the same debate, or are they actually completely different conversations that just happened to be framed in similar language?
MS: It's a great question. I think, essentially, there are two kinds of problems with technocracy. The first is the kind of knowledge that technocratic knowledge gives you, which tends to be very abstract, hyper-scientific, economistic, in Lise's terms. So, it leaves out parts of human experience which non-technocratic ways of looking at the world include. We can think about that as an intellectual challenge to technocracy. One of my great intellectual heroes, the philosopher Bernard Williams, always said we need to take a 'humanistic' rather than a technocratic approach to the social problems that we are confronted with. So one of the problems with technocracy is its dryness, its abstraction, its over-reliance on a particularly narrow set of analytical skills.
I think the other problem with technocracy, though, comes from the question: who are the technocrats? What kind of people have that knowledge or that expertise? Where are they trained? What are their material interests? What backgrounds and what experiences of life do they have? And the criticism of technocracy on that score is that (to simplify) technocrats tend...
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