Pels D. - Property and Power in Social Theory[c] A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (1998)(en)

INTELLECTUAL CLOSURE AND THE NEW CLASS

This wide spectrum of havings and doings not only accommodates the relative ‘hardness’ or material stability of cultural appropriations, but simultaneously (and perhaps paradoxically) their essential ‘softness’ or precariousness, which results from the fact that they must ceaselessly be instantiated through the performative power of definition and recognition. While recognizing the relational, institutional, and socially constructed nature of virtually all material goods (which, for one thing, must be perpetually reconstituted as goods rather than bads), it also accommodates the distributive quality of attributes or properties which are indissolubly linked to natural persons (skills, stocks of knowledge, identities, reputations). In pressing home the twin economic and political analogies, it emphasizes both the performative magic of instituting objects and subjects, and the distributive quality of even the most ethereal and definition-sensitive forms of cultural capital. In this respect, all resources along the continuum are simultaneously external and internal, hard and soft, thinglike and credibility dependent, although they are so in different proportions. Indeed, if cultural havings and doings derive their true specificity from their being inscribed in human bodies, they exemplify the peculiar mix of hardness and softness which identifies the habitus as Bourdieu has defined it. It may be here, also, that the mixed metaphors of capital and power, of having and doing, run up against their limits and ultimately fail to grasp the thing in the middle.

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INTELLECTUAL RIVALRY

Theory-work is not done just by ‘adding another brick to the wall of science’ but often involves throwing bricks as well; it not only involves paying one’s intellectual debts but also (and rather differently) ‘settling accounts’.

Alvin Gouldner

MIXING THE METAPHORS: KARL MANNHEIM

The notion that intellectual rivalry is a basic energetic force in the development of knowledge and science is one of the few ideas which modern philosophers and sociologists of science agree upon without reserve. In this context, the economic metaphor of the ‘market-place of ideas’ is as much favoured as the political model of contained ‘parliamentary’ dialogue, and in either case descriptive purposes are intimately wedded to normative ones. Free competition is traditionally associated with liberty, tolerance, and progress, while its absence is interpreted as a definite cause of intellectual vegetation, dogmatism, and arrogance. However, such consensus as may exist is only a thin film which scarcely subdues the differences of opinion which lie underneath. These disagreements not only concern the specific balance of competition and cooperation which obtains in scientific work, and hence how far their psychological and structural impact should extend, but they also touch the question to what degree scientific developments are steered by local, position-, or group-bound interests, and what this signifies for the alleged ‘truth’ or global rationality of the scientific enterprise.

If we attempt to impose some order upon such disputes, it appears that they can be deployed along a continuum which is limited by two extreme positions. One of these says that intellectual competition is a struggle between true and false ideas, and that truth radiates with such irresistible force that it ultimately prevails against all superstition and ideology. Although this model acknowledges the presence of competition, its effect is neutralized by a primordial consensus about the rules of the scientific game, which are in

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turn derived from a privileged and peremptory logic of scientific discovery. In so far as interests play a role, they are normally reduced to the abstract ‘truth interest’ which acts as the normative backdrop of, for example, Max Weber’s principle of value-freedom. As we travel towards the opposite pole, the balance of rivalry and consensus gradually alters. The weight of the agonistic factor increases while the volume of prior agreement dwindles, and the practice of competition spells more danger to the principle of scientific rationality itself, because the production of knowledge is made to depend to a larger extent upon ‘opportunistic’ struggles between mundane, positionbound interests. It is more decisively acknowledged that, in Derek Phillips’s words, ‘it is not only theories that are in competition, but human beings as well’, and that scientists engage in a never-ending struggle to establish as legitimate the ideas of specific individuals or groups against others. One is increasingly prepared to tolerate structural dissent about how the game of science is to be played; it is recognized that the rules, and hence also the limits of the playing field itself (object boundaries, disciplinary fences, research methodologies, legitimate players), are routinely and perhaps essentially contested (Phillips 1977:161, 168; Gallie 1955–6; Bourdieu 1981).

Both political and economic metaphors lose their virginity here, and shed a good deal of their metaphoric character. They increasingly operate as alternative (although converging) expressions of a radical mutual implication of cognitive and social dimensions in knowledge and science (pouvoir/ savoir; cultural capital), and of the situated, contextual, and contingent nature of their professional production. They offer two ways of saying that science (and intellectual practices more generally) are social through-and-through, that they constitute ‘nothing special’, and do not present a privileged exception to the rule of mundanely interested social practices. The two vocabularies disenchant and deconstruct because they register something analogous to the search for profit or the will-to-power as intrinsic features of the professional quest for knowledge; they twice emphasize the inseparable duality of scientific and social interest and the resulting agonistic structure of scientific endeavour. In this fashion, the two metaphors are equally useful in hastening the desecration of what Nietzsche dubbed the ‘ascetic’ ideal of philosophical truth, and in robbing science of its conventional epistemological privileges.

The sociology of knowledge has not been slow to discover this constitutive significance of intellectual competition. It is remarkable that Mannheim’s first essays on the subject, written in the course of the 1920s, already breathe a quite radical spirit—in ascribing a decisive causal weight to the factor of rivalry itself, in unreservedly allying the production of knowledge to strategic group interests, and in adopting a sceptical attitude with regard to the utility of universally compelling, context-free standards of scientific rationality. In this regard, Mannheim is certainly identifiable as the Urheber of the agonistic model of scientific development in either of its currently popular quasieconomic or quasi-political formulations (Pels 1997). Indeed, in his early work, Mannheim liberally mixes the metaphors of ‘competition’ and ‘power

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struggle’ as more or less equivalent specifications of his grounding intuition about the existential determination of thought and the ‘essential perspectivity’ of all social and political knowledge. It is striking that subsequently influential contributions to the sociology of knowledge, such as Merton’s normativefunctionalist paradigm, to some extent back down from this radical perspective in order to present a more serene and disinterested image of the scientific struggle and its major stake: the acquisition of reputational prestige. It is only during the 1970s, in the wake of the newly emerging philosophy and historiography of science after the Kuhnian turn, that the agonistic model of science is reinvented through the largely disparate efforts of French theorists such as Foucault, Lyotard, and Bourdieu, of constructivist science studies issuing from the Strong Programme in Britain, and feminist standpoint epistemologies developing mainly in the USA. All of these currents almost ‘naturally’ revert to the disenchanting metaphors of economics and politics as critical tools for assessing the workings of interests in scientific change.

Mannheim’s early views are advanced most expressly in ‘Die Bedeutung der Konkurrenz im Gebiete des Geistigen’, a lecture first given at the Sixth German Convention of Sociologists in Zürich in 1928. Although competition is considered a universal feature of social life, Mannheim finds too little acknowledgement of its effects on processes of idea formation and the production of culture more generally. Instead of constituting only a marginal or sporadic cause of intellectual production, competition ‘enters as a constituent element into the form and content (Gestalt und Gehalt) of every cultural product or movement’ (1952:191). Phenomena traditionally diagnosed as resulting from immanent laws of spiritual life, such as the ‘dialectical’ patterning of cognitive development, may now be explained in terms of social patterns and structures, such as the impact of intellectual competition and the rise and fall of (intellectual) generations. This strong dismissal of cognitive internalism and affirmation of the constitutive role of the social, however, is immediately set off against an ‘unbridled sociologism’ which tends to view cultural creations as ‘nothing but a by-product of the social process of competition’. Social factors such as competition, Mannheim insists, are neither peripheral nor all-determinant but co-determinant of the content of intellectual products (1952:192–3).

This anti-reductionism is further articulated when Mannheim parries the criticism of ‘projecting specifically economic categories into the mental sphere’. Anticipating Bourdieu’s notion of an anti-economistic economy of practices, he points out that actually the reverse is the case. When early political economists demonstrated the important role of competition, they were only discovering a general social relationship in the particular context of the economic system. While the existence of the social, the ‘interplay of vital forces between the individuals of a group’, became first visible in the economic sphere, the ultimate aim of sociology must nevertheless be ‘to strip our categorial apparatus of anything specifically economic in order to grasp the social fact sui generis’. Theoretical conflict (‘das theoretische Gegeneinander’)

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constitutes a self-contained sphere of experience, and cannot be reduced to an immediate reflection of current social competition. It is sociology’s task not only to account for the distinction between the various planes of experience, but also to explore their interpenetration and togetherness as manifestations of the ‘general social’. The question then becomes: what is the specific nature of competition as it manifests itself in the sphere of thought?

In answering this question, Mannheim loosely interweaves the idioms of appropriation and domination. Intellectual competition is basically about ‘the possession of the correct social diagnosis (Besitz der richtigen (sozialen) Sicht)’, or at least about the prestige which it lends its proprietors, while furthermore

all historical, ideological, and sociological knowledge (even should it prove to be Absolute Truth itself) is clearly rooted in and carried by the desire for power and recognition (Machtund Geltungstrieb) of particular social groups who want to make their interpretation of the world the universal (öffentlichen) one.

(Mannheim 1952:196–7)

Sociology and the cultural sciences offer no exception to this sociological rule; the old battle for universal acceptance of a particular interpretation of reality is here carried on with modern scientific weapons. The ‘public interpretation of reality’ is a ‘stake for which men fight’; a struggle which is not directed by motives of ‘pure contemplative thirst for knowledge’ but by the interested positions which various groups occupy in their struggle for power (ibid.: 197–8).

Somewhat later in the text, Mannheim more frankly adopts this knowledgepolitical vernacular, and provides additional evidence of his anti-reductionist intentions. Politics is initially conceived in extremely broad fashion, as coincident with the activist, pragmatic, or ‘impulsive’ basis of knowledge which is also suggested by the closely related notion of a ‘style of thought’ (1952:209–10). Politics is simply the natural telos of all activity which is directed at changing the world (e.g. ibid.: 214; cf. Mannheim 1953: 84). Hence one runs far less risk of going astray, Mannheim believes,

if one proposes to explain intellectual movements in political terms than if one takes the opposite course and from a purely theoretical attitude projects a merely contemplative internal, theoretical thought pattern on to the concrete, actual life process itself. In actual life, it is always some volitional centre which sets thought going; competition, victory, and the selection based upon it, largely determine the movement of thought.

(Mannheim 1952:212)

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Once again, the languages of politics and economics appear virtually interchangeable as indicators of the interested infrastructure of thought, and as critical counterstatements against the ‘merely contemplative’ conception. In close parallel to the economics case, however, Mannheim immediately qualifies his vaguely extended conception of politics. The use of political terms must not give the impression ‘that mental life as a whole is a purely political matter, any more than earlier we wished to make of it a mere segment of economic life’. The aim is once again to direct attention to the vital and volitional (voluntaristische) element in existentially determined thought, ‘which is easiest to grasp in the political sphere’ (1952:212).

POLITICS AND AUTONOMY OF SCIENCE:

SCHMITT TO MERTON

It has been insufficiently appreciated that Mannheim’s potentially radical theorem about the existential rootedness of thought was in fact widely shared among his Weimar contemporaries, across a broad spectrum extending from Lukàcs’ left-proletarian standpoint epistemology (which long held Mannheim’s critical fascination) towards the right-wing political existentialism embraced by writers such as Freyer, Jünger, and Schmitt. If our purpose is to trace early conceptions of intellectual rivalry, we are invited to some remarkable cross-borrowings and reactive positionings among these various advocates of sociological or political existentialism, all of whom in a sense viewed science and ideology as a vehicle of ‘continuing politics by other means’. However, while the reception of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge on the left and centre of the professional and political spectrum has been given systematic attention (cf. Meja and Stehr 1982), his relationship to the Weimar ‘conservative-revolutionary’ right has been equally systematically neglected (Pels 1993c). In the present context, I can only trace a few connecting strands with the early writings of Schmitt and Freyer, in order to acknowledge the former’s anticipation of the idea of a ‘politics of theory’ in his trenchant criticism of liberal parliamentary dialogue, and to demonstrate, if only briefly, that much of Mannheim’s own retreat from the idea of the ‘existential relativity’ of thought after 1930 was triggered by anxieties about the more categorical politicization of this grounding idea by right-wing social and political theorists.

In his lecture on intellectual competition (1928) and his book Ideologie und Utopie of the following year, Mannheim sympathetically paraphrased Schmitt’s scathing attack upon the ‘intellectualism’ of liberal political ideology, which mistakenly believed that ‘rational tensions grounded in existential differences’ could be reduced to differences in thinking, and that these could in turn be ironed out by virtue of ‘the uniformity of reason’. Since liberal theory held that evaluation could be separated from theorizing as a matter of principle, it refused to recognize the phenomenon of existentially determined thought, of a thought ‘containing by definition, and inseparably,

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irrational elements woven into its very texture’. This self-deception deprived it from seeing that behind every theory stood collective forces that were expressive of group purposes, group power, and group interests (1952:216– 17; 1968: 133). Carl Schmitt’s early writings on political sovereignty and parliamentary democracy had indeed dismissed the same rationalistic ‘belief in discussion’ and ‘truth-finding’ —and in parliamentary representatives as impersonating the ‘particles of Reason’ —as fatally dependent upon the liberal dogma of free competition within a pre-established harmony of interests. The utopia of ‘government by discussion’, according to Schmitt, divorced the Kampf der Meinungen from the Kampf der Interessen, separated argumentative discussion from negotiation, and ignored the need for ‘decision’ as striking ontologically deeper than any set of communal norms. It would be perhaps advisable, he had therefore concluded, to ‘put up for discussion discussion itself’ (1926:9–11, 43–5, 89–90).

Liberalism, in seeking to eliminate the primordial quality of the political, tended to neutralize it either through economic-organizational technique or the ‘eternal conversation’ of democratic dispute. The ‘Western’ concept of truth, in translating this liberal obsession for peaceful consensus to the theoretical plane, was likewise a product of liberal neutralization. For Schmitt, by contrast, theorizing and concept-formation constituted an arena of struggle, a field of force in which concepts, propositions, and distinctions functioned as weaponry, and where one had to be on continual alert in order to ward off the tactical manoeuvres of one’s intellectual adversaries. The method of science itself was intensely polemical, and one should be constantly aware of tensions within and between theories, of objective moments of negation and ‘enmity’ between concepts (cf. Mannheim’s contemporary notion of ‘counter-concepts’ (1952:208; 1968:197, 207, 244).1 This struggle for words, names, and concepts was constitutive of the knowledge process itself, and represented an immediate extrapolation of the struggle between social groups, classes, and peoples (cf. De Wit 1992:15–16, 456–9). All political concepts, images, and terms, Schmitt proclaimed in a striking passage of his Der Begriff der Politischen,

have a polemical meaning. They are focused on a specific conflict and are bound to a concrete situation; the result (which manifests itself in war or revolution) is a friend-enemy grouping, and they turn into empty and ghost-like abstractions when this situation disappears. Words such as state, republic, society, class, as well as sovereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorship, economic planning, neutral or total state, and so on [might we not add property and power to this list?] are incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combated, refuted, or negated by such a term.

(Schmitt 1996:30–1)

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Terminological disputes consequently turned into matters of high political import; a word or expression might simultaneously be ‘reflex, signal, password, and weapon in a hostile confrontation’. This polemical character naturally also dominated the usage of the term ‘political’ itself; the struggle over the concept of the political was a political struggle like any other (ibid.: 31–2).2

Like Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer attentively read Mannheim’s Ideologie und Utopie on publication, and lost no time in marshalling its basic insights in the service of his own conception of a radically activist and politicized sociology. In Soziologie als Wirklichkeitswissenschaft (1930), Mannheim’s still hesitant criticism of liberal Weberian conceptions of value-freedom was extended into a defence of a politically committed Ethoswissenschaft, in the course of which the idea of the volitional or existential grounding of social and political knowledge acquired a strong decisionist twist (‘Wahres Wollen fundiert wahre Erkenntnis’) (Freyer 1964:307). In reverse, Mannheim’s initial sympathies for Freyer’s line of argument soon faded, especially after the latter had scored a major success with his ‘national socialist’ pamphlet Revolution von Rechts in the following year, which proclaimed that ‘true knowledge’ of history was grounded in and guaranteed by the ‘true will’ of the German nation (Freyer 1931).3 Gradually, in the years leading up to the Nazi coup and his exile in 1933, Mannheim adopted a more defensive stance, taking greater distance from the relativistic implications of his earlier formulations, and approaching a more distinctly academic conception of scientific rationality—without, however, fully endorsing a Weberian principle of value-freedom or resolving his enduring ambivalence between political involvement and scientific detachment (Kettler et al. 1984:70–6; Pels 1993c:61–2; 1996a:43). A textual comparison of the original German and subsequent English editions of Ideologie und Utopie not only evidences this ‘positivistic’ drift but also demonstrates that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge reached a broader audience primarily in this second, more academically polished, version.4

A major force in the diffusion of this deradicalized conception was Merton’s influential reading of Mannheim’s work (Merton 1941). Dominated by Merton’s Science, Technology and Society (1938), early American historiography of science developed from the start a much stronger sense about the constitutive autonomy of science, its essential detachment from the political, and the attendant need to discriminate more pertinently between ‘internal’ cognitive and ‘external’ social factors of scientific change. In major part, this emphasis upon the autonomy of the ‘community of scholars’ vis-à-vis external pressures was polemically levelled against the same particularist politics of theory which had induced Mannheim to shift his allegiances towards more positivistic and universalistic views. Both in his early account of the normative structure of science (1942) and his subsequent critique of ‘positional’ thinking (1972) —as in various other writings—Merton was explicitly concerned to rescue the dignity of the intellectual enterprise from ‘anti-intellectualist’ attempts to continue politics by scientific means, of which right-wing scholars collaborating with the Nazi regime provided an obvious first example (e.g.

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1973:136, 267–8, 278).5 Merton’s stricter delineation of scientific autonomy in normative-functional terms was accompanied by a significant readjustment of the balance between competition and cooperation in science, which neutralized the agonistic risk of the former by the overriding imperatives of the normative structure, and ensured that the shared discipline of the ‘pursuit of truth’ transcended all particularistic loyalties of a political or social kind. This model also included a view of intellectual property which emphasized ‘communism’ over private interest, distinguishing it sharply from other types of property, and limiting its scope to a mere interest in ‘recognition’ or ‘esteem’.

Science as a social institution, Merton maintained, was governed by a distinctive body of authoritative norms, which paradigmatically included those of universalism, intellectual communism, disinterestedness, and organized scepticism (1973:270ff.). Property rights in science were whittled down to a bare minimum, since the products of the ‘competitive cooperation’ between scientists became part of the public domain of science, while the individual scientist was rewarded with recognition for his contribution to the communal stock. Recognition was therefore the true ‘coin of the scientific realm’. The interest in it was generated by an institutional premium on originality, which in turn fuelled an intense concern with intellectual priority. Hence the ‘rigorous policing’ to which intellectual experts subjected their fellows, and the remarkable frequency of priority battles in which scientists pressed each other for recognition and pursued reputed violations of the property norm (1973:286ff.). Nevertheless, this social pressure for competition was ‘dampened’ and rendered institutionally innocuous by the functional ethos of communism and disinterestedness. More generally, the relevance of positionally conditioned thought, as for example reflected in the influence of polarized ideological commitments, was lessened by the unique discipline which was imposed by scientific method. The ‘margin of autonomy in the culture and institution of science’ evidently meant that

the intellectual criteria, as distinct from the social ones, for judging the validity and worth of that work transcend extraneous group allegiances. The acceptance of criteria of craftsmanship and integrity in science and learning cuts across differences in the social affiliations and loyalties of scientists and scholars. Commitment to the intellectual values dampens group-induced pressures to advance the interests of groups at the expense of these values and of the intellectual product.

(Merton 1973:136)

In science, as elsewhere, conflict easily turned into the ‘gadfly’ of truth: in social conflict, cognitive issues became warped and distorted as they were pressed into the service of ‘scoring off the other fellow’. When the conflict

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was regulated by the community of peers, however, it could have its uses for the advancement of the discipline (1973:58).

As compared with the Mannheimian paradigm, the Mertonian one thus insisted upon a much stricter demarcation of the scientific subsystem, and drew a much sharper dichotomy between internal and external generators of scientific change. In identifying the former with cognitively rational factors and the latter with socially contextual ones, it also decisively constrained the explanatory scope of the external-social dimension itself. Although Mannheim, as we saw, tended to resist explanations in terms of unmediated ‘reflection’, and did not take existential determination in a politically or economically reductionist sense, he had been none too precise on the explanatory status and scope of intellectual interests themselves. Surely, concepts such as Weltanschauung and Denkstil offered intermediary terms which grasped indirect connections between intellectual contents and social class interests (1952:184; 1953: 74–84). Mannheim also distinguished between ‘immediate’ social interest and ‘indirect committedness’ to styles of thought, precisely in order to emphasize the complex variety of forms of social determination (1982:273–6; 1952: 183–7). But on balance, he still seemed more interested in how forms of competition between extraneous classes or political groups infiltrated in the intellectual sphere, tending to neglect the internal politics of theory which were conducted by the intellectual stratum itself or competing factions within it.

In comparison, the Mertonian approach (which during the Cold War period increasingly profiled itself against left-wing ‘economic’ rather than rightwing ‘political’ externalism) not only accentuated the protective boundaries between science and ‘outside’ society, but simultaneously ‘detonated’ and depoliticized the idea of internal strife by putting a large trust in the neutralizing force of the scientific ethos. Although intellectual competition could be fierce and ugly, as was demonstrated by the endemic contests for priority of discovery, the normative structure of science guaranteed that such ugliness was institutionally contained, turning science into an essentially cooperative enterprise. Barber’s Science and the Social Order (1952), which codified the distinction between internal and external explanatory factors, was complemented by exchange models such as those of Hagström (The Scientific Community, 1965) or Storer (The Social System of Science, 1966), which described scientific interaction as gift-giving in a normatively integrated community, rather than as maximizing profit in an agonistic market (Shapin 1992:340; Knorr-Cetina 1981a:70). Analysing conflicts between various sociological currents and styles, Merton himself had suggested that often such polemics were not so much about cognitive oppositions as about contrasting evaluations of the worth of various kinds of sociological work, or ‘bids for support by the social system of sociologists’, thereby clearly separating ‘intellectual criticism’ from ‘social conflict’ and ‘status battles’ from the ‘search for truth’ (1973:54–8).

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