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  • Introduction:Perspectives on Knowledge and Democratic Reason
  • Ira Katznelson (bio)

each contributor to this section considers social knowledge to be an instrument of democratic reason. In these respects, their contributions implicitly stand on the shoulders of a powerful article written as war raged in 1942 on "Science and Technology in a Democratic Order." Composed by the sociologist Robert K. Merton, that essay observed that "incipient and actual attacks upon the integrity of science have led scientists to recognize their dependence on particular kinds of social structure" (Merton 1942, 115, emphasis in original). The ethos of science, extending into social science, Merton noted, includes methods by which knowledge is certified, a stock of certified knowledge, and cultural values that underpin the quest for knowledge, embracing organized skepticism and the impersonal standing of truth claims. These features, he underscored, make science both dependent on and a contributor to democratic values.

Today, faced with ruptures and newness, many of us within the academy find ourselves anxious about the status, character, and future of social knowledge; and thus about the contributions systematic knowledge makes within democratic life. Such knowledge, Arthur Lupia notes in this issue, is distinctive. The manner in which scholars pursue rigorous and transparent knowledge about politics, society, and economics differs from personal testimony, metaphysical argument, and cultural claims about meaning. This distinctive orientation, Steven Brint observes in his article, helps reveal otherwise [End Page 633] not visible or comprehensible features of social reality by producing theory and concepts, analyses and empirical tests. The conditions that make such work possible, Richard Shweder argues, depend on appropriate institutional norms and conditions, not least within our universities.

Read together, these three contributions invite creative controversy about scholarship within democratic life. Though they appraise our current condition differently, ranging from satisfaction to discontent, they demand that we pay attention to vital trends and conditions. Brint takes note of potentially fundamental shifts in condition. Compared, say, to just a generation back, scholarly knowledge is presently shaped by new relations in ideas and institutions among disciplines; widened participation across the globe and within American institutions that has brought formerly marginalized people and places into the ken of academic life; and the development of new measures of the influence of ideas.

Nonetheless, he believes that these changes and challenges have not altered the basic character of social science inquiry. Based on an informative analysis of genres, topics, themes, and audiences for the most-cited articles and books in anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology (drawn from a universe numbering in the millions), he concludes that longstanding central features of knowledge will persist. The making of scholarly knowledge will broaden, but meaningful inquiry will continue to thrive.

At a contrary pole of concern, taking note of the growing penetration of commercial interests inside the academy, pressures to restrict legitimate expression when they give offense, and an intensification of vectors of human identity in ways that can override universal norms, Shweder worries that our universities are forgetting their core values and purposes, and thus risk losing their soul. Taking the University of Chicago as a paradigmatic center of systematic creativity, he traces practical and normative shifts that have come to place the generation of robust and disinterested knowledge on shaky ground. External pressures and internal shifts to review boards and systems of evaluation, he argues, are filled with peril. [End Page 634]

Located in the space between satisfaction and anxiety, Lupia advances three desiderata that must be present together if social science is to develop well both as an intrinsic source of knowledge and as an effective instrument of democratic reason. Within the ambit of assertion and modesty, studies of society gain credence by enhancing their transparency. The credibility and legitimacy of scholarship depend on practices that allow the scientific community to probe the claims others make by apprehending their sources and analytical bases. Otherwise, systematic knowledge will not differ from the other forms that Brint identifies. Further, Lupia insists that scholars engage more fully with external stakeholders and increase their ability to communicate clearly and effectively to wider publics.

Reading these varied perspectives on where things stand and what the future of scholarly knowledge might look like, I...

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