Re-thinking Political Knowledge as a Practice of Procedural Debate?

This paper examines the concept of knowledge in politics, re-introducing the model indebted to the rhetorical tradition, as previously put forward by political thinkers such as Max Weber and Quentin Skinner. The aim is to re-assess the value of knowledge for politics in terms of a resource for acting politically. As the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated, ‘knowledge’ is relative, especially as the facts about the disease and the virus as well as their impact on humans remained elusive and changeable. The rhetorical model of knowledge highlights that knowledge is related to "intervening in pre-existing debates" (Skinner 2018, 11). In a debate, the model suggests, a speech act is the operative mode with which one can expect to offer a new argument to an existing debate or a move into a new direction. Whether this expectation will be realised in the specific context does not depend on the actor(s) alone but also on the responses of audience(s) in the situation. This model illustrates that knowledge is not understood in terms of a "property" of the acting person (i.e. ‘epistemic governance’) nor as the actual content of the move alone. Rather, our contention is that the condition of political knowledge lies in the recognition of procedures and practices of debating a question from opposed points of view. The structure of the paper is the following: first, we lay out the problematics of knowledge as practice with the presentation of two currently common views of knowledge, the relativistic and the scientistic. It will be followed by presenting the alternative, a rhetorical debate model of knowledge. The model is discussed from the Weberian perspective of ‘objectivity’ as a procedure of debate and with a comparison between parliamentary and academic debate. Then, we continue with the examination of its implications for officials’ knowledge and illustrate ways of its parliamentary control. Next, we analyse the different ways of using and controlling expertise in parliament, first in the committees and then in the plenum, and discuss parliamentarians as lay person scholars. With this political figure we mean an experienced parliamentarian who, during her political career, has handled a variety of questions, including as member in different committees, enabling them, even without having background in the academia, to develop specialized competences to participate in scholarly questions regarding politics. In the conclusion, we discuss an example of officials claim to monopolise the interpretation of existing situation, and thus restrict the extent of legitimate political disputes, to apply our view on the value of parliamentary debate and to argue that politicians should not accept such reduction of their responsibility.