Expertise, Scientification, and the Authority of Science 2007. The definitive version of this paper has been published in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology 1 st edn., all rights reserved. Boston: Blackwell, 1541-43. http://www.sociologyencyclopedia.com/. Stephen Turner, University of South Florida The problem of the role of experts in society may seem to be a topic marginal to the main concerns of sociology, but it is in fact deeply rooted in the sociological project itself. Sociologists and social thinkers have long been concerned with the problem of the role of knowledge in society. Certain enlightenment thinkers, notably Turgot and Condorcet, believed that social progress depended on the advance of knowledge and the wider dispersion of knowledge in society. But Condorcet especially recognized that this idea had complex political implications. On the one hand, it required science, which for him included social science, to be supported by the state yet retain independence or self-governance in order to advance without political interference. On the other hand he recognized that social advance required that the most enlightened be the rulers, and that this conflicted with the ideas of democracy and equality. Condorcet’s solution to this problem was education. But he also recognized that even the educated citizen would never be the equal of the scientist. Thus his conception of the role of the expert in politics depended on the hope that a more educated citizenry would defer politically to the most enlightened, thus bringing about de facto expert rule through democratic means. Saint- Simon extended this reasoning, but it was made into a sociological system by Comte, and, in the course of doing so, Comte created the term “sociology.” Comte’s central idea was the law of three stages, which held that every science goes through the successive stages of theological, metaphysical, and positive. He argued that sociology was to be the last science to reach the positive stage, and that this law itself was the first and most fundamental positive law of sociology. Comte also believed that consensus was a central requirement for order and orderly progress in society and looked to science to provide the intellectual basis for this consensus. Comte regarded freedom of opinion as inappropriate to an age of knowledge. If the facts of a social life could be reduced to science, the principles of this science should be the basis of state action rather than the misguided views of citizens, who, if they disagreed with the principles, were merely ignorant and needed education rather than the right to voice their ignorance. Expertise thus would correct the anarchy of opinion of liberal discussion. The authority of science was to be the basis of state authority. This posed the problem of education, to which Comte had an authoritarian solution: the lessons of sociology should be inculcated in the masses through the same kind of techniques that the Catholic Church in the past had used so effectively to inculcate religious dogma. His critics, such as John Stuart Mill, saw in this a kind of authoritarianism but acknowledged the logic of his position. Later thinkers such as Karl Pearson defended similar views about the necessary role of experts. These ideas in turn influenced such movements as Fabianism in Britain, technocracy in the United States, and the social relations of science movement of the nineteen-thirties, whose ideas were a precursor to the modern sociology of science. The social relations of science movement was dominated by Communists, and Communism itself may be understood as a form of expert rule in which experts direct social life