| Popis: |
American experts of many stripes have long worked to manage public mistrust. At the heart of this mistrust are culturally saturated anxieties about the external direction of and authority over ostensibly autonomous, self-governing subjects. Although these anxieties have haunted and shaped the project of American democratic governance writ large, they are heightened when small-d democrats and experts take human subjectivity and behavior to be their areas of expertise. This chapter tracks how proponents of an American behavioral therapy—which has enjoyed broad institutional uptake in the United States and beyond—take on and manage the question of expert direction of American automatons, in part by training professionals to perform (in)expertise. In their pronounced and unusually explicit formulations of (in)expertise, we can decipher a prominent and telling way that American expertise and American democratic ideals have been ideologically and practically reconciled. |
