The Politics of Science
Review of Restoring Science and the Rule of Law by Michael Esfeld and Cristian Lopez
Modernity, we are told, was erected upon the twin pillars of empirical inquiry and individual sovereignty. The two now lay crushed beneath the weight of their own overgrown progeny: the scientistic priesthood and the goliath of welfare statism.
In Restoring Science and the Rule of Law, their 2024 contribution to the Palgrave Austrian Economics series, Swiss philosophers Michael Esfeld and Cristian Lopez proffer a cogent critique of this devolution, marshaling the intellectual arsenal of Austrian libertarianism—from Mises to Rothbard to Hoppe—to excoriate COVID impositions, climate catastrophism, and woke totalitarianism.
Modern science and the constitutional state, the authors contend, emerged as “liberation from a political order that was legitimated by a state religion.” It harnessed “reason as a means to limit the exercise of power.” Science attains objectivity through “evidence and arguments,” deeming “social status, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation” irrelevant and obstructionist. Analogously, the rule of law imposes “the same rights and obligations for every person,” regardless of personal convictions or traits.
Their analysis traces these developments to the Socratic-Aristotelian tradition of open deliberation, contrasting it sharply with Platonic authoritarianism, which they see as a foreboding precursor to the philosopher-kings of contemporary technocracy—a dominion where experts dictate norms under the guise of science. The two precepts of empirical observation and individual sovereignty were germane to the Enlightenment’s Christian-inflected individualism. Together, the authors contend, they eradicated slavery and proscribed racism (dubious claims), and catalyzed “an enormous scientific, technological and economic progress, creating a standard of living and quality of life for all segments of the population of which earlier ages could not even dream.”
Paradoxically, however, this triumph engendered a hubris that threatened their self-annihilation: science transgressed the demarcation between factual discernment and normative fiat. Meanwhile, constitutional safeguards have turned negative liberties—protections against interference—into positive entitlements shielding a docile population against existential perils. The result is “welfare totalitarianism,” under which the state determines what counts as public welfare and the common good. Welfare totalitarianism resurrects a pre-Enlightenment specter in which scientism functions as a “secular religion,” sanctioning state dominion over “every aspect of social and even private life.”
Exemplars abound in the “corona regime,” the “climate regime,” and wokeness. All three impose on individuals a “general suspicion of endangering others through their everyday ways of self-determining their lives.” In other words, under welfare totalitarianism, one’s rights end where others’ fears begin. The corona regime was marked by absurdities, like the isolation of the elderly from loved ones and mandates for vaccination framed as acts of “solidarity,” enforced through state coercion and based on the assertion of following “the Science.”
Similarly, under the climate regime, supposed anthropogenic risks bloom into apocalyptic mandates that justify global surveillance and economic fascism under (the World Economic Forum’s) “stakeholder capitalism.” Wokeness, meanwhile, arises from postmodernism’s abandonment of reason and becomes a cult of subjective “lived experience,” which, when backed by power, is totalitarian because it allows no appeals to evidence or reason.
In the book’s second chapter, “Science Versus Scientism,” the authors chart the trajectory from Descartes’s mechanistic ontology to the positivist encroachments of the present. It culminates in an incisive dissection of “actually existing postmodernism,” the fusion of “political scientism” (social engineering), “intellectual postmodernism,” expansive welfare states, and crony capitalism. These four pillars fill the ideological vacuum following the end of the Cold War with narratives of perpetual crisis—from viral contagion to carbon footprints to microaggressions, each demanding state-mediated intervention.
While Esfeld and Lopez trace scientism to Platonic roots, a closer historical examination shows that the seeds of scientism were latent within modern science itself, particularly in its dominant if not exclusive epistemological framework: scientific naturalism. Historically, scientific naturalism is most remarkable for the cultural work, polemical support, and philosophical defense that it performed on behalf of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Premised on the uniformity of nature, a strict adherence to empirical findings, and an evolutionary view of nature and the cosmos, scientific naturalism emerged as the dominant cosmological and epistemological framework for science by the third quarter of the 19th century and has retained this position ever since. Its most important proponents were Thomas H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer.
There is little disagreement that the contest for scientific authority in Britain during the second half of the 19th century was between an Anglican clergy and an emerging elite from outside their ranks. The clergy had dominated the intellectual terrain occupied by science and depended on a theistic-scientific worldview. The emerging elite worked to establish new criteria for conducting science, and succeeded at making the new criteria the sine qua non of scientific theory and practice. So far, this history tracks well with the broad historical sweep narrated by Esfeld and Lopez.
However, as the historian Frank M. Turner argued, scientific naturalism should not be understood strictly in terms of its epistemological challenge to “theistic science.” In Contesting Cultural Authority (1993), Turner showed that the conflict between the scientific naturalists and theists largely hinged on the issue of professionalization. The scientific naturalists promoted the idea that one had to hold to scientific naturalism to be considered a legitimate “professional” scientist. Scientific naturalism became a shibboleth used by Huxley and others to take over science and assume the cultural authority to speak in its name. Thus, scientific naturalism was and remains essentially a dogma, and here we find the roots of scientism: adhere to this creed or you are not following “the Science.”
I mention this fraught terrain to show that science relies not only on neutral empirical discoveries but also on theory-laden constructs encoding social and political beliefs. Esfeld and Lopez, in their zeal for a New Enlightenment, risk a Whiggish history of science by narrating science’s arc as the linear rise of reason, followed by an inexplicable, hubristic fall from Cartesian grace. They thereby underplay how such foundational myths themselves embed the scientistic overreach they decry—scientific naturalism imposed a dogmatic creed that curtailed empirical observation, with uniformity and evolution as an a priori assumption.
The book’s latter chapters, which focus on normative suggestions for restoring science and liberty, help to redeem its historiographical shortfalls. The third chapter, “How to Restore Science,” offers practical strategies to overcome scientism and its political weaponization, including escaping the thrall of “experts” by cultivating personal judgment through the critical evaluation of hypotheses. It grounds this project in a profound metaphysical claim: human freedom is the indispensable presupposition of science itself. The authors deduce this via a transcendental argument linking Kant’s epistemology to Mises’s praxeology and Rothbard’s ethics.
The fourth chapter, “The Rule of Law Versus Welfare Totalitarianism,” traces the fall from natural law’s presumption of liberty to the justification of coercion. The authors expose the constitutional state’s inherent contradiction: its monopoly on violence, which breeds the very power concentrations it supposedly checks. This leads to the welfare state’s inexorable slide into totalitarianism, where negative rights yield to positive claims on resource redistribution and protections from the otherwise free and legal actions of others. The “illusion of republicanism,” they argue, sustains this totalitarianism by allowing centralized coercion to masquerade as a democratic safeguard.
Finally, the fifth chapter, “How to Restore the Rule of Law,” charts the libertarian turn from Popper and Hayek’s warnings against historicism and economic planning, respectively, to Mises and Rothbard’s normative radicalism. The authors call for polycentric legal orders, Hoppean covenant communities—resistance to power concentrations through voluntary cooperation in a fully private property society. A truly free society, they hold, can only thrive without the state. The stateless society would culminate in a “New Enlightenment” that returns us to reality by reaffirming reason, freedom, and the rule of law, untethered from its current state monopoly.
Its authors’ uncritical veneration of modern science’s foundations aside, Restoring Science and the Rule of Law equips the dissident vanguard with indispensable erudition. It calls for a new post-postmodern paradigm. Will that paradigm be a New Enlightenment, as the authors hope, or one of the many post-postmodern options—like meta-modernism or trans-modernism? All suggest paths toward a renewed role for reason, a belief in objectivity, and a scientific engagement that depends on free and open inquiry as opposed to its curtailment by “experts.”