The Symbolic Surrogate of Reason： Evidence-Based Policymaking and the Epistemological Crisis of Liberal Democratic Governance
Wanhong HUANG
Just Individual Consideration. Please critical reading. Any discussion may contact huang-wanhong.g.official@gmail.com
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
1. Introduction: The Puzzle of Convergence
Across liberal democratic states with markedly different political cultures, institutional histories, and administrative traditions, a striking convergence has occurred: the adoption of Evidence-Based Policymaking as the privileged framework for state decision-making. From the United Kingdom’s “What Works” initiative to Japan’s EBPM suishin agenda, from the European Commission’s Better Regulation programme to similar reforms across North America and East Asia, EBPM has acquired the status of an almost unquestioned methodological good.
This convergence invites a structural rather than merely technical explanation. If EBPM were simply a neutral improvement in administrative competence, one would expect its adoption to vary with local institutional capacity and epistemic culture. Instead, its near-universal appeal among a particular family of political systems — capitalist liberal democracies — suggests that it is responding to something shared: a common structural predicament.
This paper attempts to name that predicament and to evaluate what EBPM offers as a response — and what it cannot offer.
2. The Structural Predicament: A Double Impossibility
To understand EBPM’s appeal, one must first understand the decision-making problem it is called upon to solve. Liberal capitalist democracies face what may be described as a double impossibility in the grounding of political authority.
The first impossibility concerns collective emergent wisdom. In principle, democratic legitimacy rests on the capacity of political communities to generate shared judgments through participatory processes — what one might describe, following the materialist tradition, as the collective intelligence of organized social actors arriving at decisions through structured deliberation. Certain political systems have institutionalized this through robust mechanisms of representative participation, in which the preferences and lived knowledge of broad social constituencies are systematically incorporated into policy formation. In capitalist liberal democracies, however, the structural atomization of social life — produced by market relations, the individualization of labor, and the erosion of collective institutions — makes genuine emergent deliberation structurally difficult. Decision-making authority cannot be authentically distributed without simultaneously transforming the social relations that prevent such distribution.
The second impossibility concerns the rationalist alternative. If collective wisdom is unavailable, governance might be delegated to a class of sufficiently rational experts — individuals or bodies presumed to possess the comprehensive knowledge required for optimal decision-making. Yet the epistemological critique of bounded rationality (Simon, 1955), combined with the political illegitimacy of technocratic rule in formally democratic systems, forecloses this option as well. No particular person or administrative body can claim, in good faith or with public credibility, to possess the global rationality that legitimate governance would seem to require.
This double impossibility — unable to govern through genuine collective emergence, unable to govern through particularized rational authority — creates a structural vacancy at the center of political legitimacy.
3. The Symbolic Surrogate: Science as the Big Other
It is into this vacancy that EBPM steps. The argument here draws on the Lacanian concept of the grand Autre — the Big Other — understood as the symbolic register that guarantees meaning, confers legitimacy, and bears the weight of authority that no empirical subject can sustain.
What EBPM accomplishes, on this reading, is a displacement of decision-making rationality onto a third term — neither the collective nor the expert, but Science, understood not as a set of specific practices but as a symbolic function. The policy is legitimate not because the people made it, nor because the expert made it, but because the data demands it. Responsibility is externalized to a seemingly neutral, non-partisan, fully rational symbolic authority.
This displacement has a historical logic. It is useful to trace, in broad strokes, the sequence of symbolic authorities that modern states have invoked to ground political legitimacy. Transcendent religious or imperial authority gave way, under conditions of modernity, to the authority of national tradition and historical destiny. When those authorities were discredited — through the catastrophes of the twentieth century — the market and its rationality briefly occupied the symbolic function. When market rationality itself was destabilized by recurring crises, science and evidence stepped forward as the next candidate for the role of the Big Other.
The appeal of EBPM, from this perspective, is not primarily methodological. It is theological in a displaced sense: it relocates divinity from the person of a sovereign or the spirit of a people to the impersonal, reproducible, auditable procedures of scientific inquiry. This is why EBPM is so difficult to argue against in political practice — to question it appears to question science itself, which is to say, to question the symbolic order’s final guarantor.
4. Two Epistemological Limitations
Recognizing EBPM’s structural function does not preclude engaging its internal epistemological claims. Here, two foundational limitations deserve careful attention.
4.1 The Humean Impossibility
The most fundamental challenge to EBPM’s foundational premise is what philosophers have long called Hume’s guillotine: the logical impossibility of deriving normative conclusions — what ought to be done — from purely empirical premises — what is the case. No accumulation of evidence, however extensive or methodologically rigorous, can by itself generate a policy recommendation. Between the data and the decision lies an irreducible evaluative judgment about what matters, whose welfare counts, and what kind of future is desirable.
EBPM does not eliminate this judgment; it conceals it. Embedded within any EBPM framework is a prior normative architecture — typically organized around efficiency, measurable welfare, or cost-effectiveness — that determines what counts as evidence, what outcomes are worth measuring, and what causal relationships are worth investigating. This normative architecture is not itself subject to empirical verification. It is, in the strictest sense, a metaphysical commitment disguised as a methodological choice.
The practical consequence is significant: EBPM does not make governance more value-neutral; it makes the operative values of governance less visible and therefore less contestable. The ideological function of the scientific framing is precisely to render the normative invisible.
4.2 The Alienation of Human Interiority
The second limitation is at once more phenomenological and more political. EBPM, by structural necessity, operates on what can be measured, aggregated, and compared. This means that the objects of governance — the persons whose lives are affected by policy — must be rendered as data points: quantified, categorized, and processed.
This operation is not neutral. It involves a systematic suppression of what might be called the first-person dimension of lived experience — the interiority, relationality, and situatedness that constitute social life as it is actually experienced. Persons become, in the grammar of EBPM, not agents but variables; not speakers but data sources.
This is not merely an abstraction. Policy domains that most acutely require attentiveness to the texture of human experience — care, education, mental health, community belonging — are precisely those most poorly served by quantitative evidence frameworks. The metrics available tend to measure proxies of wellbeing rather than wellbeing itself, and the governance that results from those metrics may optimize proxies while leaving the underlying conditions of human flourishing untouched or worsened.
5. Toward Relational Divinity: An Alternative Epistemology of Governance
The foregoing diagnosis does not counsel a retreat from rigor or a rejection of empirical inquiry in governance. What it suggests, rather, is that the problem is not evidence per se but the particular epistemological role that EBPM assigns to evidence — as the bearer of legitimacy, as the substitute for the absent authority of collective reason or individual wisdom.
The author has developed, in a separate theoretical context, the framework of Generative Relational Being (GRB), which proposes that genuine value — in intimate relationships, in social institutions, in political communities — is not a property of objects or outcomes but an emergent quality of relational processes. Value, on this account, is generated through the sustained, non-extractive interaction of participants who remain responsive to one another’s interiority. It cannot be captured at a moment in time and stored; it exists only as long as the generative relation continues.
The application of this framework to the governance context suggests a reorientation of the epistemological question. Rather than asking “what does the evidence show?” as the terminal question of policy legitimation, a governance epistemology informed by relational being would ask: “what quality of relationship between governing institutions and those governed does this process sustain?” Legitimacy, on this view, is not a property conferred by correct methodology but an emergent quality of the governing relation itself.
This constitutes what the author proposes to call relational divinity — in contrast to the symbolic divinity that EBPM instantiates. Symbolic divinity locates authority in an external symbolic register (Science, the Market, the Law) that stands above and apart from the relational field. Relational divinity locates authority nowhere outside the generative quality of the relation — it cannot be delegated upward to a symbolic guarantor, because it exists only in the ongoing responsiveness of the participants.
This distinction has direct implications for governance design. A governance epistemology oriented toward relational divinity would prioritize: the cultivation of genuine two-way epistemic channels between policymakers and those affected; the protection of qualitative, non-quantifiable dimensions of social experience from reduction to metric proxies; and the honest acknowledgment that every evidence framework embeds normative commitments that are themselves subject to democratic contestation.
Importantly, this is not a return to unstructured deliberation or to the abandonment of empirical rigor. Evidence remains essential; what changes is its epistemological position. Evidence informs the relational process of governance rather than replacing that process. The shift is from science as surrogate sovereign to science as a participant in an ongoing, open-ended, generatively structured conversation about the common good.
6. Conclusion
The widespread adoption of EBPM across liberal democratic states reflects not the triumph of rational governance but the symptomatic expression of a structural crisis of political legitimacy. Caught between the unavailability of genuine collective deliberation and the indefensibility of particularized rational authority, these systems have displaced the burden of decision onto a symbolic Other — science as the stand-in for transcendent rationality.
This displacement carries two foundational epistemological costs: the concealment of irreducible normative commitments behind the appearance of empirical neutrality, and the systematic suppression of human interiority in the governance of human affairs.
The deeper movement visible in contemporary political philosophy — of which this paper is one articulation — is a transition in the very concept of political authority: from symbolic divinity, grounded in external epistemic guarantors, to relational divinity, grounded in the generative quality of the governing relation itself. This transition does not abolish the need for evidence, expertise, or methodological rigor. It relocates them: from the position of sovereign to the position of participant.
Whether the institutional forms adequate to relational divinity can be developed within existing political-economic structures is a question that exceeds the scope of this analysis. What can be said is that the question is now unavoidable — and that the limitations of EBPM are among the clearest signs that it is being asked.
References
(To be populated with: Hume 1739; Simon 1955; Lacan; Habermas 1973 Legitimation Crisis; Foucault on governmentality; Carol Bacchi “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?”; relevant EBPM policy documents; author’s GRB papers)