Lisa Herzog is Professor of Political Philosophy and Dean at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Netherlands. She has written on the philosophical dimensions of markets, liberalism and social justice, ethics in organizations, and the future of work. Her most recent book, Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy, explores the political dimensions of knowledge in democratic and capitalist societies and defends a “democratic institutionalist” approach to preserving democratic institutions and coordinating knowledge. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Herzog discusses the politics of knowledge, her motivation for writing this book, and her advice for other philosophers writing on interdisciplinary topics. Citizen Knowledge is available open-access.
What is your work about?
Citizen Knowledge is about the way in which societies that combine democratic political systems with capitalist economies deal with knowledge. In recent years, there have been many discussions about disinformation, distrust of experts, and the question of whether citizens know enough about politics. I make both a systematic and a historical claim. The systematic claim is that complex societies need different mechanisms for dealing with different forms of knowledge—and if they want to be democracies, democratic deliberation needs to set the frame for markets and expert communities, the two other key mechanisms that I discuss. The historical claim is that in the last decades, we have seen an overreach of the logic of markets, with markets being defended precisely for their capacity to deal with decentralized knowledge. To bring the different logics of knowledge back into balance, we need to strengthen democracy, by improving what I call its “epistemic infrastructures”: schools, the media system, the regulation of online content, etc. I also argue for a partnership model of joint responsibility between expert communities—of which academic researchers are a prime example, but not the only one—and the democratic public. The arguments draw on insights from a broad range of disciplines, and by bringing them together, I try to sketch a “big picture” of the current distortions in the relation between knowledge and democracy.
How does it fit in with your larger research project?
My work has always been at the intersection between economics and philosophy, asking how philosophical values and principles such as justice or democracy can be embodied in economic institutions and practices, or fail to do so. This task is made more complicated by the fact that many economic theories paint a rather one-sided (some would say, ideological) picture of the economic reality, so I realized early on that one also needs to take into account sociological and psychological approaches to get a fuller picture. And the history of ideas is a great tool for understanding how economic and philosophical ways of thinking have developed over time and where current conceptions come from. In my previous book, I had explored the inner life of complex organizations from a normative perspective. I did interviews with practitioners to get a better sense of what their everyday moral challenges are (a method I have explored in more detail here, with Bernardo Zacka). In these interviews, a recurring theme was how many moral questions were tied to the use of knowledge, and I wrote one chapter about these “knowledge politics” within organizations. This led me, quite naturally, to the question of how we deal with different forms of knowledge in society. As democratic citizens, we are moral equals, but as bearers of knowledge, we are different—on issues of climate change, we should listen to scientists and to indigenous experts, not to someone who has done 10 minutes of googling. How to deal with this tension, and how to understand the relation between markets and democracies as mechanisms of knowledge aggregation, those were the questions that fascinated me.
Could you say more about “knowledge politics”? How do markets fit into this process, if at all?
A simple view of politics would hold that everyone agrees on the facts first, and then conflicts are either about different values or about different interests. But knowledge itself is often affected by either values or interests, in ways that may or not be blameworthy, but that make the generation and presentation of “facts” themselves a political issue. I am not a relativist who would accept that one party might say “2+2=5” and we should accept this. But different parties can emphasize different aspects of phenomena, or they might frame established facts in a different light, for example by comparing them to different kinds of outcomes. This can make it difficult to see where the common ground is and where the disagreements are, and it can derail decision-making processes, to the benefit of those who want to preserve the status quo.
Markets might be understood as an alternative in the face of political disagreement, in which everyone can just buy and sell what they like. But markets are not a-political, politics (including knowledge politics) comes back at the setting of the rules of markets. Think about the “tobacco strategy” of throwing doubt on medical research about the harms of smoking—market actors used knowledge politics to distort democratic decision-making, cutting millions of lives short. Another way in which market thinking relates to this issue is the idea of a “free marketplace of ideas.” Let everyone say what they want to say, and truth will somehow come out of it—this is one of the most misguided, and harmful, metaphors of political life one can imagine because it has been used to argue against many reasonable and justifiable forms of speech regulation. In one chapter of the book, I discuss the many ways in which the metaphor, and the arguments behind it, fail.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
Apart from my purely intellectual interest, there were also real-life events that made clear that there are urgent questions about the role of knowledge in democracies. The Trump and Brexit votes and the misinformation around them raised many questions about the level of information that citizens actually have (and also about the role of new communication technologies such as social media, but I felt that these needed to be understood within a broader context). At the same time, I had experienced the differences in political values between the academic communities of economists and philosophers, and there were also some discussions about the role of private money in philosophy, especially in the field of “Philosophy, Politics, and Economics” (PPE) in which I also work (e.g. here). I had an intuition that this was problematic, but why exactly?
And I guess I was also, to some extent, searching for a better understanding of my own role and that of my colleagues in society: the role of an academic cannot just consist of maximizing the number of papers or citations or grants, even though that seemed to be the incentive structure that early career researchers faced. And science is never value-free, as Heather Douglas and others have argued—but what are the values behind it? In parallel to my work on Citizen Knowledge, I was part of a working group in the Global Young Academy on trust in science. We developed a project that reflected on topics of scientific integrity, values in sciences, and science communication, in a series of videos that are available for young researchers worldwide (you can check them out here, they also include practical tips and inspiring examples of science communication practices).
Why is private money in academic philosophy problematic? Isn’t it essential for supporting many important research initiatives and institutes?
It can play a beneficial role, sure, but it can also distort the relation between different strands of theorizing if some of them receive such funding and others don’t. This can also be a problem with public money, which, like some forms of private money, is often available for applied and interdisciplinary projects, not so much for fundamental research.
The real problem is if funders have ulterior motives that are not made transparent. Researchers may not even know what the motives really are, and third parties, e.g. journalists who ask for a “scientific” opinion, may not know that a researcher receives money from certain sources.
All of this would not be such a problem if we lived in egalitarian societies in which different social groups had the same opportunities to fund research that they find interesting. But in the highly unequal societies we live in, it is clear that some groups can fund research while others cannot. And insofar as these lines of research then have an impact on societal discourse or political agenda setting (if only because it is research that can be reported upon, while research that never got funded cannot influence public discourse), this is undemocratic.
How do you hope readers will respond to your book?
One hope is that it will contribute to a fundamental rethinking of the role of markets in our societies. In that respect, I hope that it will also be read by economists; it offers not an external criticism, but really engages with the economic arguments for markets. For philosophers, this is, hopefully, of interest for understanding how free-market thinking could become so powerful.
Another hope is that the book adds to the—many existing—arguments against the extreme socio-economic inequality that we currently see in many countries and that I see as a real threat to democracy. In one chapter, I argue that we cannot expect societies that are highly unequal to develop the kinds of relations between citizens that are needed to deal with knowledge in a democratic way and to hold the powerful to account. I draw on a lot of empirical research for undergirding this argument, both on the microlevel of the psychology of inequality and on the macrolevel, concerning the relations between trust and inequality in different societies. If we want our democracies to be “epistemically well-functioning,” as I call it, then we cannot let inequality grow to the extremes that we currently see, because honesty and civic trust cannot flourish in such an environment.
What advice do you have for others seeking to produce such a work?
It is an interdisciplinary work of what one might describe as “synthetic” philosophy (which Catarina Dutilh Novaes has recently defended in a great post). As such, it took me a lot of time to read around in various fields, within philosophy but also beyond. I was very lucky to have had some fellowships that allowed me to do this. Academic research has become incredibly fragmented, and one task of philosophy is, I think, to try to bring the different arguments and insights together, to translate them into a coherent language, to test their plausibility, and to develop an overall account. It took me a while to find a framework for trying to integrate the various arguments and empirical findings. Readers will have to judge whether I managed and whether the overall picture is plausible. My advice for people doing such work is to talk to many people, from different academic fields and different subfields of philosophy, in order to test the plausibility of your ideas, but also in order learn about strands of literature you might not have known about. And while I’ve written this book on my own, I would also recommend co-authorship across disciplinary lines, which I’ve done for various papers—one learns an incredible amount in the process, and it can be great fun!
Is there anything you didn’t include that you wanted to? Why did you leave it out?
Climate change is a key example in the book, but other than that, I have not discussed the role of nature, and of our existence as part of the material world, any further. I did so purely for reasons of scope. But I am sure that much more could be said about how the fact that we exist in material bodies conditions and shapes all forms of knowledge that we can ever acquire, and how we can and should relate to nature in different ways than by seeing it just as a resource for financial gain—another form of market thinking that has often been criticized. In future work, I want to try to integrate this perspective even more into my thinking. We are finite creatures on a finite planet, and my sense is that we still do not fully grasp all the epistemic and normative implications that this basic fact has.
Lisa Herzog
Lisa Herzog teaches political philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Netherlands. She published on the philosophical dimensions of markets, liberalism and social justice, ethics in organizations and the future of work. The current focus of her work are economic democracy, the future of work, and the role of knowledge in democracies.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
