Read Part 1 here.
Scientism and Scientific Technocracy
On the flip side of the progressive ideology that dismantles the universalism of reason stands positivist scientism—peculiar in that it fuses a Hegelian defense of the state with a thoroughly pre-modern attack on liberal democracy and the rule of law. These two ideological components are held together by the same progressive will to power that also links postmodern relativism with the pre-modern scientism that reifies facts in a naïve realist way and re-dogmatizes scientific knowledge.
The ongoing substitution of liberal democracy with technocratic power, and the ideological justification for this shift, form part of a broader progressive tendency to affirm authoritarian politics in the name of science. From 2021 to 2025, beginning during the pandemic, Germany’s Health Minister Karl Lauterbach was staking his political capital on climate salvation and openly advocating the abdication of democracy in favor of science. As German linguist Peter Strohschneider has put it, Lauterbach is not an enemy of the state on the professorial lectern, but an enemy of the constitution in the minister’s chair. Strohschneider’s critique of Lauterbach’s authoritarian scientism is significant not only for its blunt exposure of the anti-democratic implications of Lauterbach’s technocratic worldview—accusing him, rightly, of abusing the epistemic and social authority of science as a “political strategy for concealing politics and power” and of seeking a “scientocracy” that is “in the strict sense autocratic”, thereby helping to erect an “authoritarian regime of truth beyond the constitutional rule of law”. Strohschneider's critique is also noteworthy for spelling out the liberal self-understanding of politics and science, which sets the minimal standards of rationality that materialist critique presupposes rather than rejects outright—and which progressive scientific activism attacks in a pre-modern, unscientific, and authoritarian manner.
The ongoing substitution of liberal democracy with technocratic power, and the ideological justification for this shift, form part of a broader progressive tendency to affirm authoritarian politics in the name of science.
Without delving into Strohschneider’s detailed argument—which rests epistemologically on Karl Popper’s falsificationism and sociologically on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of functional differentiation—we can summarize and expand its core. Scientism embodies a pre-modern understanding of science and an anti-democratic, technocratic notion of politics. It is almost comical that self-styled “science followers” cling to an idea of science and politics untouched by any theory of knowledge or society—in other words, that science enthusiasts often lack a scientifically enlightened concept of either. Deployed casually as a weapon in political struggles, scientism rests on several far-reaching false assumptions: it worships a naïve-realist objectivism about facts, denying the fundamental revisability of empirical knowledge; it freezes scientific debate over the methodological constitution and interpretation of facts; it perpetuates the anti-pluralist fiction of a single unified science; it clings to the illusion that uncontroversial scientific answers exist for political questions; and it slides into an untenable naturalistic normativism that derives unconditional political imperatives from supposedly objective facts—imperatives to be enforced by a scientific elite “naturally” destined to rule. The consequence of such technocratic scientism—justified by a permanent (climate) state of emergency constructed in the “pattern of an apocalyptic discourse”—is the mutual destruction of free science and free politics, both subordinated to a monocracy that undoes the functional differentiation of modern societies.
Scientism ignores
(a) that political questions cannot, in principle, be resolved scientifically, since they are not answerable in the “true–false” schema of science and there is no consensus even within science on the facts;
(b) that politicizing science harms it by subjecting it to extraneous criteria and political arbitrariness; and
(c) that politics itself is destroyed when political decisions are made contingent on science that is, in turn, subject to political directives—as the Covid “public inquiries” vividly illustrate.
True, Strohschneider—like systems theory as a whole—abstracts from the capitalist form of modern social complexity, as well as from the function and purpose of the democratic state. Yet he nails those aspects of the science–politics relationship that are decisive for any political concept committed to critique—The very idea of an “apolitical” expertocracy is a superstition, which ignores the political-economic conditions and social functions of the capitalist science system. The very notion that scientific reasoning could yield unequivocal political decisions is fundamentally mistaken—even if science perfectly embodied its supposed ideal of objectivity and truth. Scientific knowledge yields facts, not political norms. What a society does with its knowledge—whether, in response to climate change, it expands civilian nuclear power (as in France) or abolishes it (as in Germany)—is necessarily and categorically a political question. To believe such choices can be made through “scientific objectivity” alone is to destroy politics as a human practice, which always involves alternatives. These alternatives are not arbitrary, nor is human freedom absolute; they depend on material conditions and are mediated by the specific historical and social context. Science can inform politics about these conditions, distinguishing rational practice from ideological decisionism of any political stripe. But this informative role does not entail “scientific politics”—which would grant politics a false aura of rationality while stripping it of its specific freedom. Both outcomes are authoritarian.
