I am probably not alone in welcoming the return of Liam Kofi Bright to blogging after a longish hiatus. Writing as The Sooty Empiric, he takes on the ‘fact vs opinion’ distinction, which is peddled by educators and misinformation scholars Stateside. As he notes the distinction is increasingly “a marker of civic political competence.” What makes Liam’s piece so excellent is that he both diagnoses the earnest impulses that might give rise to promoting such a distinction, and that he uses lovely examples to illustrate the many reasons why professional philosophers uniformly reject reliance on this distinction.
To avoid confusion, I do not think Liam is appealing to this philosophical professional consensus as a consideration or higher-order evidence in rejecting the distinction. If he had done so that would, in fact, be self-undermining in his account because part of the point of his piece is also to be alert to the risks of creating mechanisms that empower a technocratic elite. This is nicely summed up in the final paragraphs:
Now I just think this is a bad picture of ourselves and our reasoning. The world may not be so knowable, facts are not so neatly independent of our will, the "emotions are biasing" thing is overplayed. But even all these philosophical disagreements aside, I think that outside of some moments of high minded epistemic idealism all this is in the end just a technocrat's delusion….What they most want is a clear realm wherein their expertise is recognised and deferred to and taken as the common basis of political action. This is why they are less worried about false impositions of opinion than they are about relativising the things which ought to be taken as facts. Sometimes the political nature of the distinction is laid bare (witness this from the Misinformation Review paper: "Objective evidence is often quantifiable... and comes from verifiable sources and methods such as official government records" -- the American state as arbiter of what the facts are!) but more usually it is presented as simply a philosophical given, an obvious part of the conceptual landscape. And it is this underhandedness which bothers me. Here we have a grab for status crudely disguised by a toy philosophical distinction. Ultimately my objection to this distinction and the will to power it barely masks is that it is tawdry.
So far so good. As regular readers of Bright and myself know Bright’s (recall) anti-liberalism (see also here) is treated by me (recall) as contributing to the cause of liberalism. And so what follows should not wholly surprise. For those who are impatient, my bottom line will be this: Liam’s beef is not with liberalism but with civic republican, common good technocracy.
Okay, notice first that while the official part of Liam’s argument rests on non-trivial wisdom on the nature of non-ideal (social) epistemology, in his examples he often relies on the existence in society of what we may call ‘pluralism’ (in the political theorist’s sense). Such pluralism presupposes that the diversity of views, tastes, religions, metaphysical commitments, lifestyles, and socio-economic classes are ineliminable from social life. Responding to, and embracing such pluralism, is constitutive of liberalism. Go check out any right-leaning liberal on the nature of the ‘open society’ or any left-egalitarian-leaning liberal on the need for an ‘overlapping consensus.’ (I return to this below because Liam and his supporters may well think that the demand for a reasonable overlapping consensus presupposes metaphysical secularism and neutrality.)
Second, liberalism does not require civic competence. In fact, as I have noted before, the genius of liberalism is its civic undemanding-ness. This is especially so when we compare it to deliberative democrats, Marxists, and civic republicans. All of these alternative ideologies require a competent citizenry willing to devote its energies to political life. Liberals recognize that many citizens find politics and civic life tedious and unimportant. In addition, during the civil rights movement, liberals recognized that literacy tests which were defended as a means to track competence were a racist tool to exclude African-Americans (and some immigrant groups) from the franchise.
It’s true, of course, that some contemporary epistemocratic libertarians use civic incompetence to urge more reliance on markets and dis-enfrachisement of the ignorant, but even they would not promote the American state as arbiter of what the facts are. If anything, that crowd (e.g., Richard Epstein) was radicalized against the American state during the covid pandemic.*
That is, third, the American elite fondness for civic competence (and civility) is a product of its echt-republican legacy. This is a republicanism that recoils from Machiavellian, bottom up ‘creative social turbulence’ (which is characteristic of Rome in its growth), but emphasizes civic unity and social harmony in the service of the common good. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the intellectual godfather of this stance, but there is also a distinctly ‘neoclassical’' American version that is characteristic of the Founding era (as Pocock and others have shown). The growth of liberalism with its simultaneous distrust of concentrated power and its embrace of social diversity is itself a reaction to the excessive emphasis on social unity and conformism in this tradition.
The political significance of this can be illustrated. It is no surprise that Adrian Vermeule, who vehemently rejects liberalism, is capable of showing that common good constitutionalism is a feature of the history of American jurisprudence. This common good constitutionalism is the way American ‘neoclassical’ republicanism historically manifests itself. While interest in Vermeule is driven by his integralism (and its potential rise in the American judiciary), Vermeule is also the leading legal theorist (and friend) of the American administrative state. To put this as a serious joke, his view is if it follows proper procedure, the American state can, in fact, be the arbiter of what the facts are in many domains. This is what administrative agencies do all the time!
That is to say, ‘civic republican, common good technocracy’ is not a species of liberalism. It has deep roots in any place where republican ideals shaped the growth of the national state. In fact, in the twentieth century its main theorist is an anti-liberal (and former Trostky-ite), James Burnham. See especially, The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (1943)). Both books are really excellent, despite the tension between Burnham’s fondness for technocracy and his insistence on the significance of political conflict.
Now, Liam may well grant that ‘civic republican, common good technocracy’ is a real thing, and simultaneously suggest that this is not really all that different from Rawlsian public reason liberalism with its fondness for a neutral overlapping consensus. (Liam does not mention Rawls or public reason liberalism in his post so he need not affirm this objection in his name.) There is a kernel of truth in this. But before I respond to it, I reject the rhetorical strategy to treat Rawlsian social contract theory as the only liberalism left standing, so that a refutation of Rawls becomes a refutation of liberalism.
That there is a kernel of truth in this is not wholly surprising. I myself have argued that Rawls’ Theory of Justice lends itself to a kind of technocratic conception of politics. If Maurice Cowling (a conservative) is right this has deep roots in J.S. Mill’s thought.
In addition Rawls was deeply influenced by Rousseau and Hegel. Undoubtedly, Rawls is sincere in claiming in Political Liberalism that his views can be made to fit important features of the American historical experience (which is, as I noted, at least partially civic republican in character). Of course, Rawls did argue that a certain kind of neutrality in public justification was desirable. And the development of Rawlsian secularism may well be taken to have an affinity with a “kind of creeping metaphysical secularism” wherein “liberal neutrality becomes a metaphysical certitude.” Rawls himself, of course, would reject metaphysical secularism!
There was a strain of post WWII liberalism that certainly is invested in a species of public neutrality (while rejecting earlier liberal perfectionism) and a healthy respect for the technocratic skill of various social planners. Conservatives and so-called neoclassical liberals have bemoaned this (and treated it as ‘collectivism’) for generations from the right. Not unlike my emphasize on the effects of civic republicanism here, they often diagnose the embrace of ‘collectivism’ as the effect of Marxism and Keynesianism on liberalism. So, it is somewhat of a historical irony that a self-proclaimed Marxist like Kofi Bright now also treats excessive Statism or the epistemic monopoly of the state with mistrust. (I am not accusing him of inconsistency; anti-Statist Marxism is a noble tradition.) In this fashion he — not unlike Alisdair MacIntyre in an earlier age — indirectly promotes the cause of the revival of liberalism again!
Outside of philosophy, disentangling pure versions of republicanism and liberalism from each other is a fool’s errand. As political and institutional traditions they shape each other in innumerable ways and they co-habit in essential tension. But sometimes its useful to track their differences and remind ourselves where one stands; liberals have never defended the fact/opinion distinction nor need we apologize for the sins of the petty improvers of civic life that peddle it.
*To be sure, there were some Victorian liberals who proposed to reward civic competence with more votes.
I haven't followed all of the argument. But if there is no fact/opinion distinction, there can be no facts. If so, whoever is more powerful gets to determine what is taken to be true. That was the path that took social constructionism into the defense of creationism (Fuller), climate science denialism and so forth. Latour saw the problems with this back in 2004, IIRC.