ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that despite the often-made claim about complementarity, contemporary arguments for technocracy continue to represent an important challenge to the democratic idea of collective self-rule. The Platonic argument for technocracy construes it as a utopian ideal, which can function as the ground for a partisan political project within a democratic political regime. Contemporary arguments for technocracy undermine the very space in which a public contestation of the relative merits of technocracy and democracy could take place, by defining a priori the objective boundaries of their respective spheres of legitimacy. The fact that contemporary arguments for technocracy make a formal show of deference towards democracy can be seen as an implicit endorsement of the normative value of the democratic ideal of collective self-government, if only at a symbolic level. In the classical case for technocracy, made by Plato, the goal is very clearly to replace democratic self-rule with a form of rule by experts.
