Abstract

I wish here to advance the still unfashionable thesis that there can be ‘political experts’ not just in the sense that some people are better than others at practical politics , nor that there are experts who can tell us the best means to achieve our ends, nor that some people are expert in reconciling political interests, making good compromises, and so forth. I mean that there are people better equipped than others to decide what is right, in the context of ends as well as means, for a society or a state: the thesis maintained but inadequately defended in Plato's Republic . The thesis does not, of course, entail that these experts are eo ipso entitled to enforce their status as experts, or their decisions, on the rest of us: at most, it would entail that the rest of us would be wise to entrust such decisions to the experts