Little Platoons v Big Data: agonistic pluralism, law and conservatism in Hildebrandt’s Smart Technologies and Oakeshott’s On Human Conduct

Abstract

Mireille Hildebrandt’s Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law (2015) is an extraordinary piece of work, looking back to the co-evolution of law, the state and the technology of the printing press, and forward to the contribution that smart technologies of machine learning, big data, artificial agents and pre-emptive environments will make to our society and the threats they make to us individuals (the onlife world). Smart Technologies presents history at an inflection point, where technology has the capacity to introduce a step-change in our relations with our selves, our fellows and our society. Hildebrandt defends our plural society with an agonistic reading, resisting the Rawlsian project of developing consensus, and instead suggesting a Mouffe-like position of accepting, even welcoming conflict. Yet the focus on forthcoming change implies that a more interesting philosophical lens would be conservatism, the ideology that problematizes and examines social change. And indeed, reading Smart Technologies through conservative spectacles results in many insights into the politics of technology, conservatism and Hildebrandt’s work as well. In its scope, scale and ambition, Smart Technologies brings Michael Oakeshott’s masterwork On Human Conduct (1975) to mind, and in many ways updates that statement of liberal conservatism for the 21st century. Both books focus on human decision-making and action at the individual level, the use and purpose of law for constraining action, and the role of the law and the state for creating the circumstances for autonomous, authentic, free individuals to flourish. Oakeshott’s themes of human behaviour and civil association, and modernity’s challenges to individuality, are replicated and extended in Hildebrandt’s work.

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ORCID for Kieron O'Hara: orcid.org/0000-0002-9051-4456

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