Technocracy and Political Truth. An Investigation into the Singularity of Political Judgment

The thesis departs from the diagnosis that a major component of the contemporary crises of democracy is the growing inability to envisage political alternatives and, in Arendt’s jargon, to even think new beginnings. The thesis’ main claim is that this situation is rooted in an increasing technocratization not only of institutional structures but also of the democratic public sphere itself. Such technocratization increasingly inhibits the ability of the public to form new political judgments. Therefore, the thesis pursues a double aim. On the one hand, it diagnostically reconstructs a concept of technocracy as administrative, non-political rule; on the other hand, it investigates the constitution of political judgments (in their delimitation from epistemic judgments). Accordingly, the thesis is divided into two parts aimed at understanding the technocratic phenomenon and at formulating its critique by conceptualizing political judgment. Part I elaborates a concept of technocracy as non-political rule by administration with a diagnostic aim. In order to do so, it will analyze modern rationalized bureaucracy and mass democracy as the two conditions of possibility of technocracy. The first one – bureaucracy – establishes the possibility to substitute what were traditionally discretional political decisions with automatic administrative processes. The second condition of possibility – mass democracy – allows the scope of administrative decision-making to be enlarged indefinitely, due to the lack of a clearly locatable political sovereignty (as opposed to non-democratic regimes) and the strength of ‘arguments by expertise’ within a complex public sphere. Part II will discuss how political judgment should be understood, on the basis of the diagnostic inquiry conducted in Part I. In this way, it will first discuss how we refer to knowledge and scientific truth claims, as opposed to opinions, from a political point of view. This discussion’s main result will be the insight that even if knowledge isn’t considered absolute from an epistemological point of view, the ‘inevitability of conclusions’ drawn from knowledge remain as strong as if it were absolute within the political realm. By recognizing the need for political judgments to not only be independent from knowledge claims, but also to be able to refer to the world independently – to avoid ‘inevitable conclusions’ and to recognize new things in the world – it will finally argue that the unity between the two moments of the Arendtian conception of judgment can be found by referring back to the Humanist conception of ingenium and sensus communis found in Vico. Such an understanding will allow us to simultaneously maintain the moment of cognitive immediateness in political judgment and its Kantian reflective moment.