Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today's Talking Politics

Guide is with Chris Bickerton, an expert on European politics and on populism, and he's

telling us about technocracy.

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Let's start by trying to make sense of what the word means. Where does technocracy as a term

come from?

The term technocracy means different things to different people, I think it's better

to say today. The conventional understanding of it is that it's some way it's about

rule by experts, and that's a common sense understanding of it. The term itself is a bit

more complex in terms of its evolution. The earlier idea of technocracy, which is why

people always tend to go back to Plato, is that it's a certain idea about the nature of

politics, and the radical thing which Plato did, which was why I think people sort of

heart back to Plato when they try and define technocracy or pin it down, is that Plato rejected

a distinction, which was quite a classical distinction in Greek political thought, between

politics, the police, this realm of freedom and self-realisation for people who were allowed

to be a part of it, and what the Greeks called the Eukos, the household. This was a very

clear distinction, and Plato said, well, actually we can think about politics in the same way

that we think about how we govern the household. And governing the household, which was the domain

of also the way people thought about economics, is that it's a kind of craft, it's a kind

...