"Perhaps counterintuitively, there is an authoritarian critique of politics just as there is a libertarian one. For example, as political theory scholar David Held observes, Karl Marx looked forward to an “end of politics,” a world without political or economic classes, in which the “political supremacy” of the proletariat and the end of material scarcity would be realized. Ironically, Marx presents a vision in some ways quite similar to that of libertarians, treating politics as “the official expression of antagonism in civil society” and anticipating the dissipation of the state and the related growth of a new, different kind of governing system. Taking Marx’s stateless, anti-political reverie on its face, libertarians may be tempted to think that it doesn’t sound half bad. Who wouldn’t want a society without unjust, coercive class rule, where permanent material plenitude has replaced poverty and want? If only we could call a halt to the messy, obstructive, and—perhaps worst of all—corrupt process of politics, we might get on our way toward utopia. Inspirited by seemingly endless scientific advancements and technological developments, utopians of all kinds once confidently forecasted the day when society would be cleansed finally and fully of politics. In the United States, the authoritarian variety of this anti-political thinking reached its apogee during the Progressive Era. But while the progressives purported to be anti-political, they, like Marxists, were not anti-state; they sought not to replace or discard the state, but to purify it, to make it the instrument of the empirical method, of objective, scientific knowledge used to execute and administer a rational ordering of society from the top down. Specialization and expertise were in the ascendant, attended by a new contempt among intellectuals and elites for all things political and ideological. According to the progressive thinking, if everything is reducible to hard science—to empirical data, duly analyzed and quantified—then there is no longer a need for either politics or ideology. Trained experts in central government agencies, assigned to specific social problems and tasks, need only determine the correct, scientific solution and determine a plan for its implementation.
"The fundamental mistake of such thinking is one that Hayek identified in his Nobel Prize lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge,” in which he explains the problems with applying the methods of the physical sciences to the social sciences. Progressivism is an example of this kind of “scientism,” an attempt to coopt, in Hayek’s words, “the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences” for public policy decisions made by a burgeoning class of bureaucrats—as opposed to either state legislatures or the U.S. Congress. The twentieth century academy likewise embraced the intellectual vainglory of scientism, the economics profession, for example, coming to treat economies as “engineerable systems, i.e., machines.”2 Many free market economists espoused this “modernist genre of economic theory,” even as they battled the ideas of Keynesianism and socialist economic planning. The space of thought, inquiry, and political debate was narrowing, giving way to a monotonous climate of conformity."
Mais
