What is critical about the crisis of expertise?

Particularly in these pandemic times, appeals to the state of crisis as well as to the rethinking of expertise are omnipresent. Though published few months before COVID-19 disrupted ordinary frictions between politics and expertise, Gil Eyal’s The Crisis of Expertise (2019) helps us going directly into the vortex of this crisis, while at the same time avoiding any shortcut. In contrast to sensational disquisitions regarding the death of expertise, claims about a “science under assault” and the spread of fake news, Eyal’s book is an intellectual contribution which tries to tidy up a long debate on expertise. Stuck in the hybrid nature of its public-scholarly aporias, this debate got further complicated by the public relevance of these controversies, characterized by conflicts of value or interests, and uncertainties about the legitimate procedures to solve them. Despite these dramatic complications, Gil Eyal clearly moves away from purely normative or moralistic postures. In this essay, he gives a critical overview of key issues regarding the studies of expertise and offers important insights to interpret many of the most important experiments of technical democracy. He does it with a deep theoretical understanding, intellectual verve, and even a certain prophetic spirit characteristic of the sociology of science since Merton. The result is an agile, but densely written book that clears some of the many misunderstandings of that obscure object of desire that takes the name of expertise. While re-defining many issues, The Crisis of Expertise poses new ones and begs the question: “if expertise is in a crisis, what is critical about expertise?