Lisa Herzog: The Limits of Transparency

Lecture by Lisa Herzog (TUM, München), organized by the Centre for Philosophy, Politics and Economics

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the relation between specialized knowledge and meaningful accountability, drawing on the example of the European Central Bank. We first describe the challenge of expert knowledge for meaningful accountability in some more detail, first in general terms and then applied to supranational institutions. We emphasize in particular the role of „epistemic communities“ and the tension between expertise and independence. Then we turn to considerations from the literature about deliberative systems about how expert knowledge can be communicated to lay people. We illustrate these issues by drawing on the European Central Bank (ECB) and discuss what it would mean to hold technocratic institutions such as this one accountable in a meaningful way. We conclude by proposing that rather than giving up the idea of meaningful accountability, an independent community of experts – especially in the sense of “interactive” expertise (Collins and Evans 2007) – should be nurtured in order to help citizens hold these institutions accountable.

Lisa Herzog

Lisa Herzog works at the intersection of political philosophy and economics. She focuses on the history of political and economic ideas, normative questions around markets (especially financial markets), ethics in organizations, economic democracy and political epistemology. Professor Herzog studied philosophy, economics, political science and modern history at the universities of Munich (LMU) and Oxford. Between 2008 and 2011 she wrote her doctoral thesis entitled “Inventing the Market. Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory” as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. Since then, she has worked at the universities of Munich (TUM), St. Gallen, Leuven, Frankfurt and Stanford. In summer 2016 she took up the position of professor of political philosophy and theory at the Bavarian School of Public Policy and the Technical University Munich. In 2017/18 she was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.