The Limit of Cybernetic Governance in Rawls and Arendt (Wessel Reijers)

In his talk, Reijers will address the promise of “cybernetic” governance through a dialogue between John Rawls and Hannah Arendt. He will reconstruct Rawls’ liberal dictum that justice draws the limit while the good shows the point, highlighting a boundary-setting model that authorizes plural pursuits of the good only within a prior space of public right. He will then contrast Arendt’s action-centered account of politics, where judgment is modelled on aesthetic sensus communis and the unpredictable initiative of acting in concert, rather than rule-following design.

Against this backdrop, Reijers characterizes teleological, outcome-driven governance as “utilitarian biopolitics”: a recursive translation of probabilistic outcome-measures back into practice. The result is governance through the point, i.e. policy that anticipates and steers behaviour by holding desired outcomes in advance. Drawing on Heidegger’s notion of enframing, he argues that such governance risks corrupting civic virtue by dissolving limits and subordinating phronetic judgment to optimization.

The talk will ask what forms of law, judgment, and plurality can mark limits to cybernetic optimization without abandoning democratic agency.

Wessel Reijers’ talk will be followed by a response from Jamie van der Klaauw and an open discussion.