Linsey McGoey- Epistocracy and Oracular Power: Applying an Ignorance Framework to the New Authoritarianism

This event is part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Winter Speaker Series.

"The resurgence of strongman leaders in many nations is raising justified concern about the threat to democratic governance. While crucial and deeply needed, criticism of ‘strong’ rule has inadvertently sidelined attention to a separate line of attack on democratic governance, the rise of libertarian political theorists who explicitly champion ‘epistocracy,’ defined as anti-democratic, elite rule by expert ‘knowers’.

In this paper, I argue that the concept of epistocracy rests on spurious epistemological assumptions which misunderstand the relationality of knowledge and ignorance, erroneously presuming that increased knowledge inevitably eradicates ignorance, when the opposite is often the case.

Through an empirical focus on growing economic inequality, I argue that epistocrats devalue the problem of ‘elite ignorance’, defined as the superior use of strategic ignorance to achieve both stated and unstated political goals. To challenge epistrocratic elitism, more attention is needed to the notion of ‘oracular power,’ which I define as the capacity to shift perceptions about where the boundaries between ignorance and knowledge lie."

Linsey McGoey is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. A social theorist and an economic sociologist, her work is focused on developing new conceptual frameworks for understanding the political value of ignorance and the unknown.

She is author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (Verso), and The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World (Bloomsbury), and has written for The New York Times and The Guardian on inequality and billionaire power today.