The Symbolic Surrogate of Reason： Evidence-Based Policymaking and the Epistemological Crisis of Liberal Democratic Governance
Wanhong HUANG
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Abstract
Evidence-Based Policymaking (EBPM) has become the dominant epistemic framework for governance across liberal democratic states in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This paper argues that the rise of EBPM is not simply a methodological advancement in public administration, but a historically conditioned response to a structural crisis of legitimation in capitalist democracies — specifically, the double impossibility of governing by either collective emergent wisdom or by the authority of a particularized rational agent. Drawing on materialist historiography, Lacanian political theory, and the author’s framework of Generative Relational Being (GRB), the paper diagnoses EBPM as a displacement of decision-making rationality onto a symbolic Other — science as a stand-in for transcendent authority — and identifies two foundational epistemological limitations: the Humean impossibility of deriving normative conclusions from empirical data, and the structural alienation of human interiority from quantified governance. The paper then proposes that contemporary political philosophy is navigating a transition from symbolic divinity to what the author terms relational divinity — a mode of legitimacy grounded not in external epistemic authority but in the generative quality of the relational process itself.
Keywords: Evidence-Based Policymaking, legitimation crisis, symbolic Other, Generative Relational Being, relational divinity, Hume’s guillotine, epistemic alienation