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Peter McLaughlin's avatar

It's a little odd to me that Roeber's definition of "political knowledge" is so practical, almost a kind of knowledge-how: knowing how to capture and maintain power is certainly a species of "knowledge that is instrumentally useful for capturing and maintaining power"; and while there exists knowledge useful to this end that is not direct knowledge-how to achieve the end, the knowledge-how would seem to be the matter on which the issue turns.

Yet Roeber's argument, as you describe it, is immensely intellectual: we rely on testimony for knowledge-that about areas of policy importance (immigration, criminal justice, etc.); that testimony is unreliable; so we lack the requisite knowledge-that. Whether or not this is correct, it doesn't establish the conclusion. Indeed, one sceptical and pessimistic view that I already hold is that knowledge-that about policy areas is largely irrelevant to capturing political power; and even if you don't go that far, it's not clear at all that this is the only type of knowledge relevant to achieving power.

Lots of political success comes down to capacities like cunning, good judgment, instinctual familiarity with public opinion, things that don't necessarily require a deep and reliable font of policy knowledge. But they still require discerning accuracy from bullshit: they are _cognitive_ capacities, just oriented towards different types of information. And in a lot of cases I'd want to say that they involve knowledge: a mixture of pure knowledge-how and also knowledge-that about the political realm of a kind that doesn't really rely on expert testimony. ("If X doesn't vote with me there's no chance I'll carry it, she's really influential in Y faction.")

Of course, there are also non-cognitive abilities relevant to achieving political power – charisma, say. Roeber's stated conclusion could be argued for with reference to the reliability of these different capacities in winning power. As it stands, it seems like Roeber has produced an interesting argument for the wrong conclusion? Or is this discussed in the book? (Perhaps in the background here is something like the debate about "populism" within the American Democrats, both sides of which do seem to assume that policy knowledge and knowledge of public opinion as represented in polling are the sum total of relevant knowledge?)

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