Papers by Jeffrey Friedman
For those who have been reading Critical Review over the years, the journal is synonymous with Je... more For those who have been reading Critical Review over the years, the journal is synonymous with Jeffrey Friedman, who founded it in and edited it until his sudden death in December . Trained as an intellectual historian at the University of California, Berkeley, and then as a political theorist at Yale University, Friedman founded it when he was still a graduate student at Berkeley with the goal of putting various philosophical and political ideologies in conversation to scrutinize both their strongest and weakest arguments. It was, as one early ad in the New York Review of Books put it, the place where Marxists and libertarians could talk to one another. As Friedman's interests evolved over the years, so did the journal, but he always treated Critical Review as a forum for critical intellectual debate. As he saw it, no single ideology captures the full complexity of the economic, social, and political spheres. Yet while casting a critical eye on all orthodoxies, he willingly published debates between scholars with radically different perspectives. As Friedman conceived it, the broad mission of the journal was to both model and promote an open society where participants would be selfconscious enough of their own fallibility that they would eagerly question their own premises, while also paying scrupulous attention to competing claims. This broad mission led Friedman to adopt, as its corollary, a subsidiary mission: to determine the best tools for analyzing the sources, nature, and effect of human fallibility in the face of the complexity of contemporary society. It was thus, from the beginning, interdisciplinary in orientation, as Friedman sought to canvass and evaluate the tools from such fields as economics, history, sociology, philosophy, and political science. Starting in the s, when Friedman entered graduate school in political science,
Post-Truth and the Epistemological Crisis, 2023
The polarization and charges of "post-truth" that mark contemporary politics may have its source,... more The polarization and charges of "post-truth" that mark contemporary politics may have its source, ultimately, in a crisis of epistemology, which is characterized by a tension between different forms of naïve realism-the view that reality appears to us directly, unmediated by interpretation. Perhaps too schematically, those on the right tend to be first-person naïve realists in treating economic and social realities as accessible to the ordinary political participant by simple common sense, while those on the left tend to be third-person naïve realists in treating credentialed experts as forming a consensus-a new common sense. In treating reality as transparent enough to be legible either to oneself or to a group of experts, both sides tend to treat disagreement as a motivational problem-a problem of bad faith, motivated reasoning, perversity, and refusal to see the truth-rather than as an epistemic problem caused by the possibility that each side may hold a different set of interpretive frameworks that determines how and what it sees of reality. In obviating the possibility of genuine disagreement, the epistemological crisis is quite naturally transformed into a political crisis.
Political Epistemology, 2023
This is the second edition of Political Epistemology, the newsletter of the "Ideas, Knowledge, Po... more This is the second edition of Political Epistemology, the newsletter of the "Ideas, Knowledge, Politics" section of the APSA.
Critical Review, 2021
Bernard Yack's The Longing for Total Revolution exemplifies an unusual approach to the history of... more Bernard Yack's The Longing for Total Revolution exemplifies an unusual approach to the history of thought: a form of critical genealogy that, unlike the Nietzschean and Foucauldian variants, seeks intellectual charity by ascribing mistaken ideas not to non-ideational psychological or social sources, but to a web of beliefs that would have obscured from fully rational historical actors the mistakenness of the idea being genealogized. This approach to intellectual history can justify the history of thought on logical grounds that are unavailable to those who attempt to justify it on the basis of the inherent interest of the past or the usefulness of intellectual history in providing resources for present-day use.
Political Epistemology, 2021
Contains debate between me and Judith Lichtenberg about "post-truth," media bias, whether people ... more Contains debate between me and Judith Lichtenberg about "post-truth," media bias, whether people should be condemned for their false beliefs, and the difficulty of unbiased research on false beliefs.
Political Epistemology, 2021
ticism" covers several important issues relevant to both political epistemology and the epistemic... more ticism" covers several important issues relevant to both political epistemology and the epistemic crisis unfolding around the world. So I welcome the opportunity to respond to her paper, in my capacity as a political epistemologist (not as the editor of Political Epistemology). My response will attempt to answer the following three questions, which I've chosen to address so as to outline some of the research opportunities and challenges facing political epistemologists if they attend to systematic and involuntary sources of false belief-not just the individual and voluntary sources of it, such as lying, to which Lichtenberg draws our attention. Here, then, are my three questions: First, what is the relationship between moral philosophy and political epistemology? I will argue that the relationship is, or should be, minimal. Moral philosophy entails blameworthiness, but many of the epistemic problems of politics and government are involuntary and thus are not blameworthy. They are unintended consequences of Lichtenberg's starting point: that we are epistemically dependent on others for most of the information on which we base our political opinions. Epistemic dependence entails that our opinions are hostage not only to our informants' deliberate and thus (perhaps) blameworthy lying, bullshitting, gaslighting, and so on, but also their involuntary, inadvertent mistakes. I will suggest that because all of our informants, being human, may inadvertently err, political epistemologists would needlessly narrow our inquiries into false
Routledge Handbook of Political Epistemology, 2021
Critical Review, 2019
An intellectually charitable understanding of populism might begin by recognizing that, since pop... more An intellectually charitable understanding of populism might begin by recognizing that, since populist citizens tend to be politically uninformed and lacking in higher education, populist ideas are likely to be inarticulate reproductions of the tacit assumptions undergirding non-populist or "mainstream" culture rather than stemming from explicit theoretical constructs, such as an apotheosis of the unity or the will of "the people." What features of our ambient culture, then, could explain the simplistic and combative approach that populists seem to take to politics and policy, their impatience with political debate and deliberation, their willingness to set aside democratic legal forms and political norms, their nationalism, their per-sonalization of politics, their inclination toward conspiracy theorizing, their fondness for fringe sources of information, and their suspicion of political, scientific, and media elites? Using focus group and survey data, we can understand these populist traits as reflections of the culture of "democratic technocracy": a regime in which we, the people, are assumed capable of rendering sound judgments about how to solve our social and economic problems. Whether or not this assumption is warranted, its cultural dominance seems likely to generate the ideas that populist citizens apparently take for granted.
"This is just the book for social scientists still in thrall to the capacity of technocratic elit... more "This is just the book for social scientists still in thrall to the capacity of technocratic elites to bring the utopian ideas of political philosophers to the people by virtue of their instrumental skills. Friedman's critique will remove the scales from your eyes. The improvement of society may be possible but it will never emerge from the cost-benefit analyses of what he calls the Epistocrats. Densely and convincingly argued, lucidly written, Power without Knowledge is perhaps the most convincing case yet against the worship of classical economics in political life." -- James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University
"A book loaded with profoundly important arguments that I have never seen brought together so skillfully." -- Philip E. Tetlock, Annenberg University Professor, University of Pennsylvania; author of Expert Political Judgment
"Today, many embrace their own 'alternative facts,' but Jeffrey Friedman contends that we still all too often believe our preferred experts can guide human behavior to good results-when we should doubt that any know how to do so. The bold alternative he raises is to seek to provide people with the resources needed to make their own choices. While so many today claim to champion 'the people,' Friedman seeks instead to help people champion themselves." -- Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
"In this deeply learned, passionately argued book, Jeffrey Friedman offers a trenchant critique of technocracy that indicts both the epistocratic 'rule of experts' and the opinion-based policy produced by democratic collectives. Rejecting the idea that either experts or ordinary citizens are capable of attaining the knowledge necessary to solve the social problems of modernity, he urges that the choice of individual exit is epistemically superior to voice and offers 'exitocracy' as a radical alternative to existing forms of government. His bold, carefully reasoned argument challenges social theorists to rethink our most cherished assumptions about the potential of public policy to foster ameliorative change." -- Josiah Ober, Stanford University
"Friedman offers a powerful critique of technocratic politics. He marvelously pricks the hubris of social scientists with their naive epistemologies and their claims to predictive powers. And he provides an invigorating call for greater freedom and experimentation with a basis in universal welfare." -- Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley
Critical Review, 2020
A political epistemology that enables us to determine if political actors are likely to know what... more A political epistemology that enables us to determine if political actors are likely to know what they need to know must be rooted in an ontology of the actors and of the human objects of their knowledge; that is, a political anthropology. The political anthropology developed in Power Without Knowledge envisions human beings as creatures whose conscious actions are determined by their interpretations of what seem to them to be relevant circumstances; and whose interpretations are, in turn, determined by webs of belief built from somewhat heterogeneous streams of incoming ideas. This anthropology, then, has two components. Ideational heterogeneity undermines the aspiration of technocracy to predict human behavior and the aspiration of social science to arrive at lawlike generalizations about it. Ideational determinism, however, which is less important than ideational heterogeneity to the critique of technocracy, may be more important to generating epistemological approaches to other forms of politics, all of which involve the actions of human beings who, as such, are largely at the mercy of the fallible ideas to which they have been exposed.
Critical Review, 2017
How can political actors identify which putative expert is truly expert, given that any putative ... more How can political actors identify which putative expert is truly expert, given that any putative expert may be wrong about a given policy question; given that experts may therefore disagree with one another; and given that other members of the polity, being non-expert, can neither reliably adjudicate inter-expert disagreement nor detect when a consensus of experts is misguided? This would not be an important question if the problems dealt with by politics were usually simple ones, in the sense that the answer to them is self-evident. But to the extent that political problems are complex, expertise is required to answer them-although if such expertise exists, we are unlikely to know who has it. This conundrum is illustrated by the financial crisis. The consensus views of financial regulators prior to the crisis appear to have been mistaken, in that the regulators not only failed to anticipate a crisis of the type that occurred, but adopted regulations that may have encouraged the concentration of mortgage risk in financial institutions. Similarly, once the crisis broke, academic financial experts, financial regulators, and journalists-who communicate information from one branch of the division of epistemic labor to another-converged on a narrative of the crisis that, once again, may plausibly be described as inaccurate, but that nonetheless has come to shape the understanding of the crisis shared by the rest of the polity.
Deontological (as opposed to consequentialist) liberals treat freedom of action as an end in itse... more Deontological (as opposed to consequentialist) liberals treat freedom of action as an end in itself, not a means to other ends. Yet logically, when one makes a deliberate choice, one treats freedom of action as if it were not an end in itself, for one uses this freedom as a means to the ends one hopes to achieve through one's action. The tension between deontology and the logic of choice is reflected in the paradoxical nature of the ''right to do wrong''; and in Rawls's unsuccessful attempts to justify to acting agents their interest in such a right, embodied in his conception of agents as ''self-validating sources of claims.'' A self-validating source of claims is akin to God as envisioned by voluntarist theologians such as Ockham. Leibniz's critique of voluntarism, then, is applicable to the Rawlsian subject: like the voluntarist God, she would be unable to act if it were indeed the case that her action validated itself.
Taylor, Sandel, Walzer, and MacIntyre waver between granting the community authority over the ind... more Taylor, Sandel, Walzer, and MacIntyre waver between granting the community authority over the individual and limiting this authority so severely that communitarianism becomes a dead letter. The reason for this vacillation can be found in the aspiration of each theorist to base liberal valuesequality and liberty-on particularism. Communitarians compound liberal formalism by adding to the liberal goal, individual autonomy, the equally abstract aim of grounding autonomy in a communally shared identity. Far from returning political theory to substantive considerations of the good, communitarianism legitimizes really existing liberal politics-the politics of the nation-state.
The Tulis thesis becomes even more powerful when the constitutional revolution he describes is pu... more The Tulis thesis becomes even more powerful when the constitutional revolution he describes is put in its Progressive-Era context. The public had long demanded social reforms designed to curb or replace laissez-faire capitalism, which was seen as antithetical to the interests of ordinary working people. But popular demands for social reform went largely unmet until the 1910 s. Democratizing political reforms, such as the rhetorical presidency, were designed to facilitate "change" by finally giving the public the power to enact social reforms. The resulting political order has created systemic pressure for policy demagoguery in place of rational deliberation. Mass political mobilization seems to be better achieved by contests of grand principle that pit the well-meaning supporters of obviously needed reforms against "villains and conspirators," than by technical discussions of the possibly counterproductive effects of those reforms. for comments on earlier drafts.
Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied... more Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter treats several immensely important and understudied topics-public ignorance of economics, political ideology, and their connection to policy error-from an orthodox economic perspective whose applicability to these topics is overwhelmingly disproven by the available evidence. Moreover, Caplan adds to the traditional and largely irrelevant orthodox economic notion of rational public ignorance the claim that when voters favor counterproductive economic policies, they do so deliberately, i.e., knowingly. This leads him to assume (without any evidence) that "emotion or ideology" explain mass economic error. Straightforward, unchosen mass ignorance of economic principles-neither "rational" nor "irrational," but simply mistaken-is a more coherent explanation for economic error, and it is backed up by the vast body of public-opinion research.
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Papers by Jeffrey Friedman
"A book loaded with profoundly important arguments that I have never seen brought together so skillfully." -- Philip E. Tetlock, Annenberg University Professor, University of Pennsylvania; author of Expert Political Judgment
"Today, many embrace their own 'alternative facts,' but Jeffrey Friedman contends that we still all too often believe our preferred experts can guide human behavior to good results-when we should doubt that any know how to do so. The bold alternative he raises is to seek to provide people with the resources needed to make their own choices. While so many today claim to champion 'the people,' Friedman seeks instead to help people champion themselves." -- Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
"In this deeply learned, passionately argued book, Jeffrey Friedman offers a trenchant critique of technocracy that indicts both the epistocratic 'rule of experts' and the opinion-based policy produced by democratic collectives. Rejecting the idea that either experts or ordinary citizens are capable of attaining the knowledge necessary to solve the social problems of modernity, he urges that the choice of individual exit is epistemically superior to voice and offers 'exitocracy' as a radical alternative to existing forms of government. His bold, carefully reasoned argument challenges social theorists to rethink our most cherished assumptions about the potential of public policy to foster ameliorative change." -- Josiah Ober, Stanford University
"Friedman offers a powerful critique of technocratic politics. He marvelously pricks the hubris of social scientists with their naive epistemologies and their claims to predictive powers. And he provides an invigorating call for greater freedom and experimentation with a basis in universal welfare." -- Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley
"A book loaded with profoundly important arguments that I have never seen brought together so skillfully." -- Philip E. Tetlock, Annenberg University Professor, University of Pennsylvania; author of Expert Political Judgment
"Today, many embrace their own 'alternative facts,' but Jeffrey Friedman contends that we still all too often believe our preferred experts can guide human behavior to good results-when we should doubt that any know how to do so. The bold alternative he raises is to seek to provide people with the resources needed to make their own choices. While so many today claim to champion 'the people,' Friedman seeks instead to help people champion themselves." -- Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
"In this deeply learned, passionately argued book, Jeffrey Friedman offers a trenchant critique of technocracy that indicts both the epistocratic 'rule of experts' and the opinion-based policy produced by democratic collectives. Rejecting the idea that either experts or ordinary citizens are capable of attaining the knowledge necessary to solve the social problems of modernity, he urges that the choice of individual exit is epistemically superior to voice and offers 'exitocracy' as a radical alternative to existing forms of government. His bold, carefully reasoned argument challenges social theorists to rethink our most cherished assumptions about the potential of public policy to foster ameliorative change." -- Josiah Ober, Stanford University
"Friedman offers a powerful critique of technocratic politics. He marvelously pricks the hubris of social scientists with their naive epistemologies and their claims to predictive powers. And he provides an invigorating call for greater freedom and experimentation with a basis in universal welfare." -- Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley
"A book loaded with profoundly important arguments that I have never seen brought together so skillfully." -- Philip E. Tetlock, Annenberg University Professor, University of Pennsylvania; author of Expert Political Judgment
"Today, many embrace their own 'alternative facts,' but Jeffrey Friedman contends that we still all too often believe our preferred experts can guide human behavior to good results-when we should doubt that any know how to do so. The bold alternative he raises is to seek to provide people with the resources needed to make their own choices. While so many today claim to champion 'the people,' Friedman seeks instead to help people champion themselves." -- Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
"In this deeply learned, passionately argued book, Jeffrey Friedman offers a trenchant critique of technocracy that indicts both the epistocratic 'rule of experts' and the opinion-based policy produced by democratic collectives. Rejecting the idea that either experts or ordinary citizens are capable of attaining the knowledge necessary to solve the social problems of modernity, he urges that the choice of individual exit is epistemically superior to voice and offers 'exitocracy' as a radical alternative to existing forms of government. His bold, carefully reasoned argument challenges social theorists to rethink our most cherished assumptions about the potential of public policy to foster ameliorative change." -- Josiah Ober, Stanford University
"Friedman offers a powerful critique of technocratic politics. He marvelously pricks the hubris of social scientists with their naive epistemologies and their claims to predictive powers. And he provides an invigorating call for greater freedom and experimentation with a basis in universal welfare." -- Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley