“Trust the experts!” That may be the catch phrase of the coronavirus pandemic. At one time or another, it’s been used by Donald J. Trump and Nancy Pelosi, Governors and Mayors regardless of political party, university presidents and business leaders, journalists and bloggers, and many others to urge the public to follow the guidance of public health specialists in order to prevent Covid 19 from becoming more harmful than it already was. Was that good advice? Leave aside the questions of who is an expert and what is to be done when they disagree (as happens more than occasionally). Is expert knowledge really sufficient to guide a country – indeed, the world – through a crisis with profound economic, social, and political ramifications, as well as health consequences? To British political theorist Harold J. Laski (1893–1950), the answer would surely have been “No.” All but forgotten today, Laski was one of the most influential intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century. (To the extent Laski is remembered at all, it may be principally because he is one of two people singled out by George Orwell, in an often-cited essay “Politics and the English Language,” for their convoluted writing.) He was a faculty member at Harvard, Yale and the London School of Economics, prolific author of books and articles, friend to the likes of Felix Frankfurter, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Walter Lippmann, and not least of all active in Labour Party politics, eventually becoming its chairman after it regained power at the end of the Second World War. Despite his own accomplishments, he believed that good government required more than the expertise of scholars to succeed. Laski expressed this viewmost fully in “The Limitations of the Expert,” a pamphlet published by the Fabian Society in 1931 and brought back into print here. In the modern world, he believed, expertise is essential and inescapable. Public problems, Laski wrote, have grown much too technical and complex to be grasped by those without special training, and certainly not by the “plain man.”However, experts bring what we might call today occupational disabilities: They can rarely see beyond their particular subject. They are intolerant of “novel views,” particularly coming from experts in other fields. Convinced their conclusions are right, they lack humility and may “fail to see the obvious which is before their very noses.” Not least importantly, experts often confuse the facts they know with proposals for what to do about them, which are often rooted in unexamined premises, not shared by those likely to be most affected. “The expert tends,” Laski concludes, “to make his subject the measure of life, instead of making life the measure of his subject.” To avoid these problems, Laski recommended that experts should be on tap, but not on top, a phrase he had used a few years earlier in a letter to Justice Holmes. Authority over public affairs should be in the hands of “statesmen” who have wide experience in governing. They should use “supreme common sense” to determine “the limits of the possible,” mediating between what the experts desire and what the “plain man” will accept. Ironically, despite the growing importance of specialized knowledge, successful choices still had to be made by the talented “amateur,” by the person who knows a little about a lot, rather than a lot about a little. Although the examples Laski used are now dated, parallels with public efforts to deal with the coronavirus pandemic are not hard to draw. They also raise a question that Laski would assuredly have asked if he were still alive. (He died in * Harold J. Laski society@wellesley.edu

中文翻译：

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专家的局限性。

“相信专家！” 这可能是冠状病毒大流行的流行语。唐纳德·J·特朗普（Donald J. Trump）和南希·佩洛西（Nancy Pelosi）、州长和市长（不分政党）、大学校长和商界领袖、记者和博客作者以及许多其他人曾多次使用它来敦促公众遵循公共卫生的指导专家，以防止 Covid 19 变得比以前更有害。这是个好建议吗？抛开谁是专家以及当他们不同意时应该做什么的问题（这种情况经常发生）。专业知识真的足以指导一个国家——甚至是世界——度过一场具有深远经济、社会和政治影响以及健康后果的危机吗？致英国政治理论家哈罗德·J·拉斯基（Harold J. Laski，1893-1950），答案肯定是“不”。今天几乎被遗忘了，拉斯基是二十世纪上半叶最有影响力的知识分子之一。（拉斯基之所以被人们记住，可能主要是因为他是乔治奥威尔在一篇经常被引用的文章“政治与英语”中挑选出来的两个人中的一个，因为他们的文章令人费解。）哈佛大学、耶鲁大学和伦敦经济学院的教员，多产的书籍和文章作者，菲利克斯·法兰克福、奥利弗·温德尔·霍姆斯和沃尔特·李普曼等人的朋友，尤其是积极参与工党政治，在第二次世界大战结束后重新掌权后，最终成为其主席。尽管他自己取得了成就，但他认为，要想取得成功，好的政府需要的不仅仅是学者的专业知识。拉斯基在 1931 年费边社出版的小册子“专家的局限”中充分表达了这一观点，并在此重新印刷。他认为，在现代世界中，专业知识是必不可少且不可避免的。拉斯基写道，公共问题已经变得过于技术性和复杂性，以至于那些没有受过特殊训练的人无法掌握，当然“普通人”也无法掌握。然而，专家带来了我们今天所谓的职业障碍：他们很少能看到超越自己的能力的问题。特定主题。他们不能容忍“新观点”，尤其是来自其他领域的专家。他们坚信自己的结论是正确的，但缺乏谦逊，可能“看不到眼前的显而易见的事情”。尤其重要的是，专家经常将他们所知道的事实与如何处理这些事实的建议混为一谈，它们通常植根于未经审查的场所，而不是那些可能受到最严重影响的人共享的场所。“专家倾向于，”拉斯基总结道，“让他的主题成为生活的尺度，而不是让生活成为他的主题的尺度。” 为避免这些问题，拉斯基建议专家应随时待命，但不要居于首位，这是他几年前在给福尔摩斯大法官的一封信中使用的一句话。公共事务的权力应该掌握在具有丰富执政经验的“政治家”手中。他们应该使用“最高常识”来确定“可能的极限”，在专家的愿望和“普通人”会接受的东西之间进行调解。具有讽刺意味的是，尽管专业知识越来越重要，但成功的选择仍然必须由才华横溢的“业余爱好者”做出，由对很多事情知之甚少的人做出，而不是很多关于一点。尽管 Laski 使用的例子现在已经过时，但不难得出与应对冠状病毒大流行的公众努力的相似之处。他们还提出了一个问题，拉斯基肯定会问他是否还活着。（他死于 * Harold J. Laski social@wellesley.edu