Claims to expert knowledge and the subversion of democracy: the triumph of risk over uncertainty

We live increasingly in a ‘risk society’, Characterized by the multiplication and increasing unpredictability of risks, as well as by our enhanced consciousness of them. Claims on the part of expert bureaucracies to possess superior abilities to anticipate and managerisks are increasingly suspect in public perceptions. This suspicion is legitimate. The history of economics is revealing in this respect. The triumph within econmics of the notion of ‘risk’ (as defined by frank Knight), or a vision of the future as subject to probabilistic analysis, over ‘uncertainty’, or a vision of the future as so fundamentally and radically indeterminate as to preclude such an analysis, has been instrumental in the legitimation of expert bureaucracies. Anthropological literature on risk also reveals, in enlightening but rather perverse fashion, many allied modern presumptions. The enhancement of the degree of both democratic legitimacy and consequential efficacy of social decision-making procedures to confront indetermina...

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