Experts Reconsidered: Past, Present, Future — an Introduction to this Publication
Experts: you either love them or hate them. In the last year, experts have found themselves at the centre of a political storm. Brexit, the Donald Trump campaign and populist movements have lambasted the influence of non-elected experts and questioned their credibility. ‘I think the people in this country have had enough of experts’, declared Michael Gove, a leading Brexiteer and the UK’s Justice Secretary, in June 2016. Economists had got it wrong in 2008, he argued, and consequently should not be trusted with predictions about the impact of Brexit either. In the United States in March 2017, Scott Pruitt, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, brushed aside a decade of international scientific expertise in a few minutes when he announced that there was no proof that CO2 emissions were a primary contributor to global warming.
While such remarks may resonate with some audiences, public opinion polls show that most people continue to have remarkable trust in experts. An IPSOS Mori poll taken just before the Brexit referendum in June 2016 revealed that, when people were asked who they trusted most, experts came second only to family members and friends (chosen by 72%, followed by experts at 57%). The least-trusted? Politicians, at only 11%. In the United States, according to the World Values Survey, the number of citizens who approve of ‘having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country’ went up considerably from 36% to 49% between 1995 and 2011.
This polarization is taking place in a world that is shaped by experts more than ever before. Climate change, energy futures, global development and the treatment of refugees all bear the imprint of experts with their respective organizations and regimes of knowledge. This series of blogs is about how experts came to acquire power in modern times and with what consequences. Contributors follow the experts’ work in international organizations and on the ground, and reflect on support for experts — as well as the challenges to their authority. Stories in this publication will illuminate the processes and dilemmas in the formation of experts and the notion of expertise, processes that continue to leave their mark on how we think about experts, and how we employ or resist expertise today. These linkages between past, present and future extend to the very place of experts in our political discourse and action. Indeed, the accusation that experts are undemocratic and out-of-touch with the will of the people is the flipside of the experts’ own claims that their positions and influence have in modern times been “superior”, operating “above politics” in the “objective” realm of reason and science.
In discussing the present and future role of experts it is, therefore, imperative to understand the trajectories of expertise in the modern world. The blog entries in this series take us into some of the key processes through which experts have emerged, with a special emphasis on topics of international politics and organizations. Cutting across these articles is a set of unifying themes and questions:
- First, the blog posts chart the evolution of expertise across time and remind us that experts are products of history. State and non-state actors, as well as international organizations, played a critical role in carrying, diffusing and applying expertise on the ground. As the blog contributions show, this was a contested process, never smooth or easy.
- A second, connected theme is the global expansion of expertise. The posts illustrate how the form and content of expertise were mainly exported from the global North to the global South. But this was never a simple one-way street. Expert knowledge was never unquestioned and always underwent local adaptation.
- This insight raises a third theme: the rivalry among expert groups for recognition and resources. The ensuing competition inspired strategies to dominate institutions, to define policy questions and to enforce their favoured methods.
- The fourth strand of thought deals with the connection between expertise and politics. Experts often worked with an explicit sense of operating “above politics” and relying on “objective” or “scientific” knowledge. This self-justification needs to be taken seriously because it shaped the identity of experts and their public legitimation. But, of course, as the blog contributions make clear, expertise was rarely untouched by power and politics.
- The fifth overarching question is how expertise is put in practice. Together, the blog posts shed light not only on public communication of expertise in popular film and other types of media but also on the discursive and self-reflective role of experts as actors in public discourse, and on the role of deliberative reason.
- Alongside such discursive processes, there is, finally, the “stuff of expertise”. Expertise does not happen on a page, it needs to be put into practice. Knowledge and organizations matter for the exercise of expertise, but so do technologies and materials. Some posts therefore elaborate on the various objects and instruments of expertise, from dams to penicillin to digital communication and computing.
We hope the articles will be useful both to current experts and scholars, and to assist critical reflection, discussion and exchange. And we hope that they will encourage others to join this discussion by contributing their thoughts, findings and comments.
This publication is edited by Frank Trentmann, Anna Barbara Sum and Manuel Rivera. The editorial team is supported by Mathieu Denis, Lizzie Sayer and colleagues at the International Social Science Council.
