Organized Hypocrisy – Disorganized Technocracy: The Assumed Retreat of Politics in Contemporary Governance in Historical Comparison

Today, it is widely assumed that a power shift has taken place over the past few decades – a shift away from politics and in favor of the market. According to this view, neo-liberalism has since the 1970s and onwards reduced the scope of “the political”, limiting the exercise of public power in general and planning in particular.

Despite this assumed retreat of politics, politics is still, at least medially and rhetorically, tasked with providing some guidance for the future, based in scientific evidence, and to generate tangible results in a logic of input and output legitimacy (Scharpf 1999). Public power is still held accountable as if it possessed the power which is by now to have been lost. Political control is still to achieve results as if it would be possible to exercise public power without the use of planning, raising the question: Why do we expect more from politics at a time when it is supposedly able to do less?

This paper proposes that this conundrum – which could be seen as an organized form of hypocrisy (openness) coexisting with an increasingly disorganized form of technocracy (transparency), to paraphrase Nils Brunsson (2002) – can be analyzed by confronting Karl Popper’s concept of “open society” with Gunnar Myrdal’s notion of “constructive social engineering” and Karl Polanyi’s concept of “double movement”, as generated in the context of pitted conflict between laissez-faire liberalism, totalitarianism, and democratic socialism of the 1930s and 1940s, a conflict which in some ways resemble the contemporary contest between neoliberalism, progressivism, and traditionalist backlash but also provide some instructive contrast.