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Paper short abstract

Debates about technocracy and populism as competing forms of truth in liberal democracies constrains productive understanding and debates. A virtue epistemology can help us frame these competing political-epistemic regimes as vice-laden modes of knowledge production from which to learn from.

Paper long abstract

Scientific expertise – treated as representative epistemic authority of technocratic elites – exists in contrast to populism in political epistemology. Technocracy and populism compete as the two wellsprings of political truth in modern democracies. These contrasting political-epistemic regimes maintain their authority self-referentially, each justifying its legitimacy through opposition to the other. The result is a persistent tension within liberal pluralistic democratic societies, where we require a modus vivendi–a minimal degree of consensual agreement on basic truths necessary for collective decision-making. The challenge becomes how to mediate and coordinate a middle ground between these oppositional forces. In their opposition to each other's perceived threat of hegemony, this pair of conflicting positions establish a conceptual hegemony over political epistemology, constraining the ways which knowledge in democratic politics can be understood solely in reference to one of these political-epistemic regimes.

This contribution argues that accommodating both technocratic and populist perspectives, while neither privileging nor legitimising either, requires a political epistemology in which expert knowledge gains precedence only through democratic mediation. I suggest a virtue epistemological framework provides such grounding and dissolves populist-technocratic dichotomous oppositionalism. This framework understands these competing political-epistemic regimes as distinct practices of knowledge production laden with different virtues and vices–their virtues are features from which they derive their legitimation, and their vices are justified as preferable to the competing regime’s vices. Rather than positions to be mediated between, they are modes of practice from which we can identify which epistemic and social virtues should be cultivated and which vices avoided.