Michael Esfeld & Cristian Lopez: Restoring Science and the Rule of Law. Cham: Palgrave-macmillan/Springer. Palgrave Studies in Austrian Economics. 216 Seiten; CHF 142,00, eBook 114,00 CHF; ISBN 978-3-031-71185-5
Michael Esfeld is professor of science studies and the history of science with Lausanne University and the Swiss Technical University (EPFL) at Lausanne in Switzerland. He gained some fame, when he criticized the president of the time-honored academy Leopoldina, after it had produced a consensus statement backing the German government’s corona regime. He thought this was scientific bogus, and said so publicly.
I have met him at various occasions, interviewed him and had some very fruitful discussions with him. Otherwise, I have no conflict of interest. His postdoc Cristian Lopez works with him in Lausanne. Together they have authored this thought-provoking book, which sends the reader on a roller-coaster ride.
On roller coasters, you suddenly plunge into the depths and think you are going to hit the ground before a sharp curve takes you back up. Then you feel the sharp wind, look down anxiously, until you finally end up through several curves, mountains and valleys where you knew you had to end up from the beginning. Only now you are richer by your experience. Reading this book is a bit like that. Its message can be summarized briefly, and the rollercoaster ride is ultimately its argumentative development over several stages.
The message is this:
Since the Enlightenment, science, especially natural science, has become a motor of liberation. At the same time, it has contributed to the replacement of absolutist political structures by republican-democratic ones, and thus the rule of law has been established. This is not to be confused with the political rule of a state. But now this very success of science has turned to the fact that, on the one hand, the state has become more and more powerful and now demands a mediator, regulator and guide. Science must now serve this purpose. On the other hand, science, especially in the public perception, has become so entrenched that it has degenerated into scientism, into a belief in science. This threatens both concerns of the Enlightenment, namely, the liberation of man from the constraints of nature through good science and a liberal political structure. For the political structures have crippled themselves into a welfare state that exercises more and more domination and restricts more and more freedom. To justify this, it calls a warped science into the arena of political struggles to fight for it. Scientific scientism and political dirigisme thus go hand in hand. For reason and freedom fall by the wayside in both domains. And where reason is no longer the measure of research and action, ideologies take hold. Then a pseudoscience is used to justify a political agenda. Both support each other, and the whole thing ends in the forced beneficence of the modern welfare state. What is needed, therefore, is a new, proper Enlightenment that breaks open the narrowing of the first Enlightenment, removes the crippling of political structures, and thus liberates both science and society and, with it, economic forces.
This can be achieved by limiting science to its core competence. This is exclusively committed to the objective description of reality through perpetual critical discourse and critique of positive findings. It cannot and must not be used to justify political narratives because that contradicts its essence. After all, science never has a final answer, but only provisionally valid ones. Science by consensus, as it is increasingly being claimed in various subject areas, is always a self-contradiction. If science is left free from political paternalism, then science provides very useful insights, the utilization of which is then determined in a free society by free citizens who know how to use their own minds and are engaged in free discourse and exchange of goods. Furthermore, it is important to limit the community again to what it was intended for by the Enlightenment: as an institution that, through the rule of law, defines above all defensive rights. These are negative rights, in the face of an intrusive state and greedy neighbors. In such a view, positive rights, on the other hand, have little or nothing to do with it. Positive rights are those that the state takes upon itself to regulate coexistence beyond what is necessary, e.g. the right to collect taxes to finance state tasks and to redistribute wealth. Ultimately, the model proposed by Esfeld and Lopez amounts to an anarchistic solution to the Hobbesian dilemma.
