Prestige, Imitation, and the Politics of Knowledge

Contemporary debates on post-truth politics, epistemic polarization, and the legitimacy of expertise often assume that conflicts over knowledge are a distinctly modern phenomenon, driven by digital media, misinformation, or declining trust in science. This paper challenges that assumption by offering a historical–theoretical analysis of epistemic conflict in the late eighteenth century, focusing on the Scottish Enlightenment thinker John Ogilvie (1732–1813) and his critique of skeptical philosophy. I argue that Ogilvie provides a powerful conceptual framework for understanding how struggles over knowledge, authority, and expertise emerge not only from institutional arrangements or informational deficits, but from the social and affective dynamics of intellectual life itself. Ogilvie’s intervention is situated within the Aberdeen common sense tradition, which confronted the growing cultural authority of philosophical skepticism associated with David Hume. Rather than treating skepticism solely as an epistemological position, Ogilvie analyzed it as a socially embedded practice that reshaped the public circulation of knowledge. He interpreted the rise of skepticism through two interrelated epistemic passions: the desire of singularity and the desire of imitation. On this account, skepticism gained authority not primarily through superior evidence or argument, but by functioning as a marker of distinction within educated elites. Its wider diffusion depended on processes of imitation, through which skepticism became a sign of cultural belonging rather than a disciplined method of inquiry. By foregrounding these psycho-social mechanisms, Ogilvie offered an early critique of a demand-driven politics of knowledge. Long before contemporary discussions of the “marketplace of ideas,” he questioned the assumption that ideas rise or fall primarily by virtue of their intrinsic merit, emphasizing instead how prestige, emulation, and symbolic capital shape which forms of knowledge are adopted and trusted in public life. From this perspective, epistemic authority appears less as a neutral reflection of truth than as a socially mediated achievement, vulnerable to distortions that may emerge within intellectual elites. Epistemic breakdown, Ogilvie suggested, does not begin—and certainly does not end—with an ignorant public, but may arise when certain intellectual practices come to prioritize novelty and provocation as sources of social esteem, transforming knowledge claims into markers of identity rather than instruments of mutual persuasion. The paper contributes to debates within the Knowledge, Science and Expertise section by offering a genealogical perspective on conflicts over knowledge, showing that tensions surrounding expertise, authority, and public judgment long predate contemporary post-truth politics, while shifting attention away from the institutional governance of expertise toward the cultural and affective foundations of epistemic authority. Treating skepticism as a historically specific yet analytically revealing episode, the paper develops a general account of how intellectual positions acquire influence through psycho-social mechanisms of distinction, imitation, and prestige rather than through evidentiary force alone. Ogilvie’s critique is thus not mobilized to diagnose skepticism as a contemporary pathology, but to illuminate broader dynamics in the politics of knowledge, underscoring the importance of moral psychology and social conditions in shaping epistemic trust in democratic societies.