Until fairly recently, many considered technocracy as much a part of French culture as pan au chocolat and café au lait. I had one each of the latter at the train station in Paris this morning, on my way to the Saline Royale, in the countryside between Dijon and Lausanne. I’m participating in the summer school of the Institute for Advanced Studies of Science and Technology (IHEST). A former salt mine, the Saline is classified as a World Heritage Site, and visiting families were walking the grounds this afternoon. The semi-circle of eighteenth-century stone buildings, linked by gravel walkways surrounding a large lawn in the middle, makes for a stunning conference site. There was more café throughout the day, and technocracy lingered in the background of our first exploratory discussions.
The French administrative state has long been famous for its elite corps of engineers, economists, and other experts. They go through rigorous examinations at France’s selective professional schools, and until recently their expert authority was secure enough to ensure considerable deference from politicians and the public. Experts employed by the French state enjoyed enormous discretionary power to make independent judgments on public policy. They were relatively unhindered by the detailed procedures and accounting requirements, not to mention interest group pressures, typically faced by expert advisors and administrators in the United States.
As Pierre-Benoit Joly explains in a helpful paper (published in an edited volume on science advice), the legitimacy of French technocrats did not rest on their access to objective facts, their quantification of risks, or their instrumental performance. It rested simply on their social status, established through the meritocratic system of state professional schools. Since the mid-1990s, a series of technological controversies – asbestos, mad cow disease, genetically modified food, etc. – has put the French administrative elite under increasing pressure to publicly account for their decisions. Indeed, the task of this summer school is to discuss the question: “Which place for science in public debate?”
The first talk this afternoon, by Jacques Bouveresse, a philosophy of science professor at the prestigious College de France, consisted of an extended discussion of Bertrand Russell’s views on science and democracy. Russell was not exactly a technocrat, but he believed that science deserves a special status in democratic societies. Bouveresse explained that Russell thought science and modern democracy have progressed together, because science contains less risk of dogmatism than religion, politics, and other fields of human activity. Russell recognized, of course, that not all scientists live up the scientific ideal as he saw it. Indeed, Russell worried that science was being corrupted by commercial pursuits. But this raises a question: When does an ideal stop being an inspiration, and become a source of injustice? When does an ideal image of science, like Russell’s, become an ideology?
Addressing that will require more café au lait.
About the Author: Mark Brown is a CSPO affiliate and is an associate professor in the Department of Government at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of Science in Democracy.
