The Limitations of the Expert
- PDF / 211,389 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 14 Downloads / 180 Views
FEATURE ARTICLE
The Limitations of the Expert Harold J. Laski 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Introduction by Leslie Lenkowsky “Trust the experts!” That may be the catch phrase of the coronavirus pandemic. At one time or another, it’s been used by Donald J. Trump and Nancy Pelosi, Governors and Mayors regardless of political party, university presidents and business leaders, journalists and bloggers, and many others to urge the public to follow the guidance of public health specialists in order to prevent Covid 19 from becoming more harmful than it already was. Was that good advice? Leave aside the questions of who is an expert and what is to be done when they disagree (as happens more than occasionally). Is expert knowledge really sufficient to guide a country – indeed, the world – through a crisis with profound economic, social, and political ramifications, as well as health consequences? To British political theorist Harold J. Laski (1893–1950), the answer would surely have been “No.” All but forgotten today, Laski was one of the most influential intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century. (To the extent Laski is remembered at all, it may be principally because he is one of two people singled out by George Orwell, in an often-cited essay “Politics and the English Language,” for their convoluted writing.) He was a faculty member at Harvard, Yale and the London School of Economics, prolific author of books and articles, friend to the likes of Felix Frankfurter, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Walter Lippmann, and not least of all active in Labour Party politics, eventually becoming its chairman after it regained power at the end of the Second
* Harold J. Laski [email protected] 1
Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA
World War. Despite his own accomplishments, he believed that good government required more than the expertise of scholars to succeed. Laski expressed this view most fully in “The Limitations of the Expert,” a pamphlet published by the Fabian Society in 1931 and brought back into print here. In the modern world, he believed, expertise is essential and inescapable. Public problems, Laski wrote, have grown much too technical and complex to be grasped by those without special training, and certainly not by the “plain man.” However, experts bring what we might call today occupational disabilities: They can rarely see beyond their particular subject. They are intolerant of “novel views,” particularly coming from experts in other fields. Convinced their conclusions are right, they lack humility and may “fail to see the obvious which is before their very noses.” Not least importantly, experts often confuse the facts they know with proposals for what to do about them, which are often rooted in unexamined premises, not shared by those likely to be most affected. “The expert tends,” Laski concludes, “to make his subject the measure of life, instead of making life the measure of his
Data Loading...
