Chapter 13
The Role of Experts in the Condominium
Model as Republican (Re-) Solution of Social,
Economic, and Political Problems
Rafal Pawel Wierzchoslawski
Abstract Problems about expertise have been discussed quite intensively in
philosophy and in the social and political sciences in recent years. My contribution
aims to examine how the analysis of experts question provided by Stephen
P. Turner in Liberal Democracy 3.0. (2003) and The Politics of Expertise (2014)
apply to political theory, and, in particular, to the neo-republican theory proposed
by Philip N. Pettit in Republicanism (1997) A Political philosophy in public life
(2010), with Jose ´ Luis Martı ´, and On the People’s Terms (2012). The republican
state promotes freedom as non-domination in relations between the state and the
citizen as individual (imperium) and the citizens as collectivity (dominium).
Republican democracy consists of the mixed government, rule of law, and
contestatory citizenry. Its functioning may be presented in the condominium
model. One of the proposed conditions of achieving non-domination is referral of
certain decisions to independent bodies, auditors, solicitors and impartial experts.
However, problems arise when one takes into account the variety of expert types,
and especially the fact that not all of them fulfill the impartiality condition. This
may pose some challenges to the condominium model. In this chapter I present and
address those challenges.
13.1 Introduction
In recent years the role experts and their advising activity have called the attention
of scholars from different domains of the social sciences (sociology of knowledge,
STS). In most cases, the experts’ problem is considered in the framework of social
conditions and set-ups, pointing up privileged epistemic position of experts against
that of laics, and their specific place in social stratification of knowledge, to refer to
phenomenological sociological traditions (Schu ¨tz 1964; Sprondel 1979).
R.P. Wierzchoslawski (*)
Faculty of Philosophy, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Lublin, Poland
e-mail: rafalw@kul.pl
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
C. Martini, M. Boumans (eds.), Experts and Consensus in Social Science,
Ethical Economy 50, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08551-7_13
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