Introduction

As technocracy has spread, critical analysis of it has stagnated. In part, this is because the critics take an external perspective on technocracy, condemning it for being anti-democratic. This perspective discourages critical theorizing about whether technocrats possess the knowledge that, from an internal perspective, qualifies them to rule: knowledge of the costs and benefits of public policies designed to address people’s social and economic problems. However, once we thus recognize technocracy as an inherently epistemic enterprise, we discover that there is a democratic version of technocracy: ordinary citizens often assume that they, too, know the costs and benefits of policies aimed at solving social and economic problems. Indeed, we discover that much of modern mass politics revolves around competing claims about these costs and benefits. An internal critique of technocracy, then, will have to challenge the knowledge claims of both “technocrats” in the ordinary usage—epistocrats—and those of members of the mass public, or “citizen-technocrats.”