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2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Experts, Citizens, and the Politics of Common Sense

Author : Vesa Heikkinen

Published in: Democracy and Globalization

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

From climate change to digitalisation, from pandemics to political polarization, many globally felt phenomena create unprecedented needs for scientific solutions and technical expertise in decision-making. However, despite the undeniable importance of expert knowledge in a complex world, this chapter argues that for democratic institutions to function, the plurality of particular viewpoints which arise in the concrete life of citizens must be given its due share in political activity. Taking its cue and inspiration from such political philosophers as Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Michael Oakeshott, this chapter attempts to outline a spectrum of ‘common sense’, or a sphere of practical, non-scientific knowledge as opposed to technical, scientific knowledge. Moreover, the chapter problematizes the power of expert specialization by arguing that overt reliance on experts in modern society may unduly favour the latter sort of knowledge—that is, abstract, technical knowledge—at the expense of practical, or concrete, knowledge. Finally, taking this notion a step further, the chapter suggests that technical knowledge, being based on the idea of scientific progress, may lead decision-makers to inadvertently favour reform, as opposed to preservation, as a course of political action.

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On a program on the Sky News network on 3.6.2016, Gove was interviewed by Faisal Islam concerning Brexit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGgiGtJk7MA, accessed 18.11.2020. See also Henry Mance, ‘Britain has had enough of experts, says Gove,’ Financial Times on 3.6.2016. https://www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c#axzz4G50gEbvD, accessed 30.11.2020.

In Europe and elsewhere, this ‘public mode of being’ seems to be quite missing, evoking, at best, some ideas of commonly visible media-activity. However, because of the sheer magnitude of their consequences, the various rejections facing the EU in national referenda may be seen as outcries towards this now lost public relevance. Brexit was certainly not the first instance of this tendency, and in 2005, Herman van Gunsteren argued that the rejection of the proposed constitutional treaty in France and the Netherlands marked a sort of birth of true European Citizenship—a citizenship that contrary to technocratic wishes did not want the proposed form of integration. See van Gunsteren (2005), p. 406.

It is worth remarking that both the Finnish and Swedish concepts of ‘common sense’ (maalaisjärki and bondförnuft) literally denote ‘rural reason’, aptly pointing back to earlier agrarian societies with less differentiated fields of expertise. As I will show in greater detail below, common sense, in its ancient meaning, can be traced to Aristotle, who held the view that human sense apparatus, in addition to the regular perceptive senses like seeing and hearing, also required a common sense (sensus communis / koine aisthēsis), which made it possible for the soul to understand visual and auditory stimuli intelligibly together, as otherwise they would be incompatible with each other, having nothing in common. A further interpretation, mentioned by Leo Strauss, is common sense as the sensible decorum into which people slowly grow through their upbringing, and by virtue of which one can immediately ‘sense’ an untactful remark or a rude suggestion. See Strauss (2018), p. 66.

Plato, Protagoras, 319b-e.

‘At least every sane adult possesses political knowledge to some degree. Everyone knows something of taxes, police, law, jails, war, peace, armistice. Everyone knows that the aim of war is victory, that war demands the supreme sacrifice and many other deprivations, that bravery deserves praise and cowardice deserves blame. Everyone knows that buying a shirt, as distinguished from casting a vote, is not in itself a political action.’ Strauss (1988), p. 14. Of course, we might today question whether the behaviors of consumption have not actually acquired a (fabricated) dimension of political meaning themselves, even sometimes surpassing traditional political action itself. I refer here to various manners of ethical consumption, voluntary payments for flying etc.

‘Living together with others begins with living together with oneself.’ See Arendt (2004), p. 439.

Villa (2001), p. 263.

Strauss (1988)? p. 33.

Villa (2001), p. 304.

Villa (2001), p. 15, 18; In Socrates’s account, the test failed by Athenian statesmen was whether or not their rule had contributed to the moral improvement of the citizens. What they had managed to do was flatter the people, thus making them even more ‘wild’.

Oakeshott (1991).

Oakeshott’s example is a cook book: mere technical knowledge, no matter how accurately recorded, cannot make anyone a good chef, unless he or she has had sufficient actual experience with the practice of cooking. Oakeshott (1991), pp. 12–13.

Oakeshott (1991), pp. 19–21.

Strauss (1988), p. 78.

At this juncture it may be useful to provide a short note on terminology; this essay draws from several sources, many of them eminent thinkers who have written of the issues that this article wishes to pursue. In order to avoid distorting their meaning, I have mostly held on to the terms used in original sources. This means, however, that the reader is faced with several synonymous or nearly-synonymous terms. On one hand, there are words like practical, concrete, particular, common-sensical, which represent one view of political knowledge; and on the other, words like technical, scientific, abstract, universal represent the opposing view. It is here impossible to reconcile the meanings of these words into a single, coherent system, and therefore the terms used are chosen based on the original source and the context.

See Taylor (1989), pp. 309–313.

Loughlin (1992), p. 107.

Strauss (2018), p. 27.

Strauss (2018), p. 21.

Loughlin (1992), p. 107.

Loughlin (1992), p. 105.

We cannot at this juncture analyze the further evolution of positivistic thinking after Comte. Suffice it to say that unlike later logical positivism, the positivism of Comte still retained the old notion that value propositions are indeed meaningful, and therefore did not adhere to the fact-value—distinction of later social science. (Strauss 2018, p. 18). This is in contrast to the logical positivists, who roughly held that any meaningful statement must be based on empirical observation, a requirement that value judgments lack. See Taylor (1985), pp. 58–61.

Weber (1946), p. 80.

The courts are the original form of governmental expertise. They represent a delegation of authority to specialists or expert judges. The latter’s task is operating within a set of conventionally imposed restrictions (involving the elimination of conflicts of interest, among other things) to produce technical ‘justice’, according to rules of law which the judges are better qualified than ordinary people to determine. Turner (2003), p. 11.

Weber et al. (1946), p. 84.

According to Francisco Suárez, one of the tasks of sensus communis is to compare different kinds of sensitive qualities. Vision, for instance, cannot distinguish between the color red and a loud noise. Neither can the faculty of hearing. This is the task of common sense. See Leijenhorst (2012), p. 139. See also: Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 645b10.

See Kant (1987), pp. 159–164; Par. 40: ‘On Taste as a kind of Sensus Communis.’

Snir (2015), p. 362.

Strauss, interpreting Plato’s Republic, offers the following remarks: ‘What Plato implies can be stated as follows: We are in the midst of things. We cannot begin with a clean slate, using only perfectly clear and distinct concepts. We cannot begin at the beginning, but we must try to ascend to the beginning. In other words, in dealing with human things, at any rate, we are in an entirely different situation than the mathematicians are, who do begin and may begin at the beginning. We cannot do that.’ Strauss (2018), p. 85.

Arendt (1958), pp. 57–58.

Arendt (1958), pp. 278, 290–291.

Strauss (2018), p. 25.

‘Whenever people are cut off from their fellow creatures, they are condemned to idiocy, in the etymological sense of the term (from the Greek idios: “confined to oneself”), as are people who cannot envisage that universes other than their own exist and who are therefore incapable of arriving at a consensual representation of a world where we could each have a place.’ Supiot (2017), p. viii.

Snir (2015), p. 371. Furthermore, Arendt argues that ‘no matter how far [the scientists’] theories leave common-sense experience and common-sense reasoning behind, they must finally come back to some form of it or lose all sense of realness in the object of their investigation’. Arendt (1978b), p. 56. In other words, even when science reveals mistakes in the everyday view of the world, and tries to understand the world in a different way from that in which most people usually perceive it, it must maintain some sort of affinity to common sense in order to be meaningful. See Arendt (1978b), pp. 55–57.

Snir (2015), p. 377.

Real plurality requires that individuals have a right to their particularity. In this instance, Arendt’s and Hegel’s thought run along somewhat similar lines. See Hegel (1967), Par. 152–155.

Arguably, many of the tensions in contemporary politics between ‘liberals’ and ‘populists’ arise in this manner. Such incredibly complex issues as immigration tend to slide into utter abstractions, black and white questions of one universal norm, which must then be either accepted or rejected, which in turn creates political divisions. See also, Bell (1976), p. 171.

See Hendricks and Vestergaard (2019).

Mouffe (2018), p. 42.

Quoted in Eisenstadt (1968), p. xxx.

Taylor (1989), p. 359, 446.

Pieper (1952), p. 10.

Pieper (1952), p. 9.

For one historical depiction of the failed combination of contemplative mysticism and political life, see Huxley (1942).

See e.g. Arendt (1989), p. 27.

Arendt (1978a), p. 291.

Arendt (1978a), p. 181. The indefinable character of human personality comes easily across when one attempts to use words to describe or define oneself fully—no matter how many hours one talks, a human person can scarcely give an exhaustive definition of what he or she is as a totality. Furthermore, a human society is composed of the multitude of concrete (yet largely indefinable) individuals partaking in it. If this is so, it is similarly impossible to define exhaustively the total essence of a community, or its common good. Pieper (1989), p. 65. Relatedly, for the indefinability of the Roman concept of Res Publica, see Hodgson (2017).

Legislation, while being an art (techne) in some sense, is also the highest form of practical reason—or prudence—which has as its sphere the whole human good, including the ‘common sense’ understanding of political things. Strauss (1978), pp. 22–25. See also: Aristotle, Politics, 1268b22–1269a24.

Strauss (1988), p. 10.

This is also, in Strauss’s view, the reason why political thought as such cannot be value-free, as held by modern positivistic social science. The notion of what is good or preferable is always implicit in any stance, whether towards change or preservation.

For simplicity’s sake, no distinction between merely giving expert advice and using actual political power is made here. Also, the actual motives of experts can of course be various, but this question is also left open.

See e.g. Supiot (2017), p. 6.

‘When the experience of constant correction in scientific research is generalized, it leads into the curious “better and better,” “truer and truer,” that is, into the boundlessness of progress with its inherent admission that the good and the true are unattainable.’ Arendt (1978b), pp. 54–55.

Oakeshott (1991), pp. 9–10.

Law as a prerequisite of freedom is certainly a topic which would require to be discussed at great length, but for the purposes of the present chapter it may be sufficient to posit the following: In terms of the negative liberty famously outlined by Isaiah Berlin and traced by him to Hobbes especially, the freedom provided by law consists of the ensured absence of undue constraints, while in terms of positive freedom law provides the actualization of inner human purposes. See Berlin (1969).

A political situation is one to which there is no necessary response. See Oakeshott (1991), p. 71.

Strauss (1978), p. 22. Indeed, in our modern parlance this wariness towards innovation is usually called a conservative stance. As Oakeshott defined it in his essay On being conservative, to be conservative ‘is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.’ Oakeshott (1991), pp. 408–409.

Again, this is why legislation requires prudence, which in turn is not bound to any specialized fields of expertise. Strauss (1978), pp. 22–25.

Strauss (1978), p. 22.

A policy or law is settled with a certain purpose in view. For a policy to serve this purpose, it must actually be implemented in the relevant practical choices of the individuals on whose action its actualization depends. Adopting a policy makes little sense unless it is accompanied with a reasonable expectation that the relevant future behavior of individual citizens will follow it as a standard framework for their choices. See Rentto (1992), p. 149.

Oakeshott observed that in contemporary politics, scientists as such (the chemist, the physicist, the economist or the psychologist) are commonly admitted to be heard, but he maintains that although the knowledge involved in the practice of science is always more than technical knowledge, what it has to offer to politics is never more than a technique. See Oakeshott (1991), p. 27. Cf. Socrates’s observations in Plato’s Protagoras, (319b–e) which we mentioned earlier.

Smith (1989), p. 105.

Mouffe (2018), pp. 38.

Streeck (2017), p. 5.

Agamben (2000).

Strauss (1978), p. 24. Experts are specialists who may well use their skills artfully, but their concern nevertheless remains within the field of their specialist knowledge. The citizen, in contradistinction to the expert, is not a specialist as such in any particular field or partial good, but rather, the focus of his or her activity as citizen is prudence.

Sandel (2018), pp. 357–358. On the relation of technocracy with meritocracy, see also Sandel (2020).

Leo Strauss, Seminar on Cicero, Spring 1959, lecture transcript, page 57, available at https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/cicero-spring-1959/, accessed 19.11.2020.

Oakeshott (1991), p. 38.

Strauss (1981), p. 17.

Supiot (2017), p. xiii.

Bell (1976), pp. 63–68.

Bell (1976), p. 35.

Sandel (2020), p. 145.

Streeck (2017), p. 6; See also Sandel (2018), pp. 353–359.

Strauss (1988), p. 17.

Bell (1976), pp. 16–18.

Supiot (2017), p. viii.

Oakeshott (1991), p. 71.

Hansen (1993), pp. 114–115.

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Title: Experts, Citizens, and the Politics of Common Sense
Author: Vesa Heikkinen
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Democracy and Globalization
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-69153-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-69154-7

Copyright Year: 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69154-7_12

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