ABSTRACT
The first three sections focus on the critiques, both radical and conservative, of the Great Society of the Johnson administration, seen to be the paradigm case of the liberal technocratic strategy.1 My purpose is to illustrate the liberal strategy’s reliance on policy experts and their technical discourses and to identify specific ways in which these discourses functioned to shape the Democratic party’s reform agenda. Focusing in particular on the uses of policy analysis, the critics argued that it represented far more than a value-neutral scientific methodology designed to supply better information to liberal policymakers. More fundamentally, critics saw policy analysis as a key element of a
technocratic strategy that served-both wittingly and unwittingly-to supplant the everyday, less sophisticated opinions of the common citizen with liberal “new class” arguments disguised and legitimated in the languages of technical discourses. According to the harshest critics, a growing emphasis on technocratic methodologies increasingly undercuts ordinary political discourse with the specialized languages of the social sciences (Banfield 1980:1).
