‘The most despotic of all regimes’: Covid-19 and the political anthropology of expertise

The Covid-19 pandemic exemplifies an emergent form of hegemony in late modern societies, a technocratic managerialism in which the interlocking elites who populate government and corporate bureaucracies, big tech, large media organisations, and academia define the ‘social good’ and construct a consensus for the implementation of the policies they view as necessary to achieve it. Policy measures are increasingly legitimised by ‘expert opinion’ rather than as expressions of the ‘popular will’. The chapter attempts to understand the phenomenon of ‘expertise’ using the concept of ‘trickster logic’. Central to trickster logic are processes of substitution, mediation, and translation. ‘Experts’ are typically individuals who have mastered abstract idioms into which they translate elements of social experience. In the process, they generate conceptual and normative constructs which react back on the social world, enabling experts - or more accurately, the policymakers and managerial bureaucracies which employ them - to influence conduct and behaviour. The result is an ‘inversion of reality’, in which abstract constructs take precedence over people’s concrete life-circumstances and individual judgement and legitimise a fine-grained regulation of the conduct of individuals. There is an elective affinity of expertise with three other fundamental aspects of contemporary society: the digitalisation and datafication of social life; the growth of managerialism and bureaucracy; and the expanding influence and numbers of the professional-managerial class. In combination, these influences give rise to a managed society in which an ever-expanding area of human life is subjected to surveillance, regulation, and administrative control.