Technocracy and Posttechnocracy

Technocracy has a rather bad reputation. A large part of radical political critique (particularly of the European Union) amounts to criticism of technocratic decision-making. At the same time, political campaigners have a good chance to make themselves popular with the electorate by suggesting filling the government with “experts.” And prominent economists deplore the lack of expertise manifest, they think, in austerity policies that have been prescribed by supposedly technocratic authorities. Some of them explicitly doubt that we suffer from too much technocracy. In order to dissolve the apparent contradiction between technocracy critique and technocracy denial (or the desire for more expertise in policy making) I propose the concept of posttechnocracy. Much of today’s criticism of technocracy, I claim, actually applies better to posttechnocracy. In this paper I roughly distinguish technocracy and posttechnocracy by taking a closer look at their respective relations to bureaucracy, hierarchy, participation, and ideological plurality.