Abstract
Populism is commonly associated with a kind of skepticism about expertise, on which the opinions of non-experts are to be preferred to any expert consensus. In light of all this, populist expertise skepticism appears to be a kind of pathology of excessive intellectual autonomy. Here I argue that this connection between populism and intellectual autonomy is mere appearance: populist expertise skepticism does not involve excessive intellectual autonomy, because it does not involve a disposition for non-deferential belief, but rather a disposition for deference to “alternative” sources of information.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Müller here imagines the pluralist rejecting the second conjunct of the claim that there is only one common good and only one way to represent it faithfully. We can also imagine a pluralism that rejects the first conjunct, in favor of a kind of subjectivism about the good.
- 3.
June 3, 2016, interview with Faisal Islam, Sky News.
- 4.
Malone (2016).
- 5.
See also Nichols (2019, p. 219).
- 6.
- 7.
“An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” at p. 17 in Kant (1784/1996) (trans. M.J. Gregor).
- 8.
Essay concerning Human Understanding, I.iii.23.
- 9.
- 10.
Cf. Hazlett (2016).
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- 12.
- 13.
Cf. Ballantyne (2019).
- 14.
Note that the non-establishment opinion leaders to which populist expertise skeptics defer need not themselves be populists, and they may even be critics of populism.
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It goes without saying that this leaves open whether Lynch is right about this alleged difference between science inquiry and religious methods. One can at least imagine, I think, an intersubjective and transparent version of scriptural interpretation that would be no less open than actual scientific investigation.
- 17.
Likewise, we cannot plausibly argue that populism is distinguished by the virtue of intellectual autonomy, since it is not distinguished by patterns of deference or non-deference.
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Hazlett, A. (2022). Populism, Expertise, and Intellectual Autonomy. In: Peterson, G.R., Berhow, M.C., Tsakiridis, G. (eds) Engaging Populism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05785-4_5
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