azov
11-18-2003, 11:28 PM
. . . Self-perpetuation of a prevailing view, especially when it seems to seve state interests and ideological needs, is in the short term fairly unproblematic within scholarly practice. Patterns of selection and self-selection of the employees-in-charge ('cadres') are minimise 'disorder', as intellectual rebels lose access to ranks, budgets, printing presses, graduate students and therefore, seemingly, to the future.
Social sciences are usually underprivileged compared with the natural sciences in so far as major correctives of unrealistic views are concerned: the test of laboratory and the immediacy of technilogical usage and nedds are absent. But creative arts, of which social sciences are one, have the peculiar ability to subvert structures of intellectual control, as well represented by Andersen's tale 'The Emporer's New Clothes.'
Kings and kings' scribes are usually naked. The more sizeable their realm themore unclad they tend to be. In every generation anew a bright child is destined to cry out regardless of the consequences: 'the king is naked.' Bright grown-ups usually know it too, but bide their time or speak in whispers. Then, all of a sudden, 'a hundred flowers bloom' and for a while society comes to terms with its own characteristics, problems, and doubts. When such blossoms subsequently freeze or are pruned, social life seldom goes back to where it all began. But a step was made, however small.
For that to happen, stubborn long-term intellectual work from those who gather 'facts as they actually are' and from analysts who persist in their unorthodoxies, form a necessary ingredient of the periods 'in between.'
-- Teodor Shanin
Social sciences are usually underprivileged compared with the natural sciences in so far as major correctives of unrealistic views are concerned: the test of laboratory and the immediacy of technilogical usage and nedds are absent. But creative arts, of which social sciences are one, have the peculiar ability to subvert structures of intellectual control, as well represented by Andersen's tale 'The Emporer's New Clothes.'
Kings and kings' scribes are usually naked. The more sizeable their realm themore unclad they tend to be. In every generation anew a bright child is destined to cry out regardless of the consequences: 'the king is naked.' Bright grown-ups usually know it too, but bide their time or speak in whispers. Then, all of a sudden, 'a hundred flowers bloom' and for a while society comes to terms with its own characteristics, problems, and doubts. When such blossoms subsequently freeze or are pruned, social life seldom goes back to where it all began. But a step was made, however small.
For that to happen, stubborn long-term intellectual work from those who gather 'facts as they actually are' and from analysts who persist in their unorthodoxies, form a necessary ingredient of the periods 'in between.'
-- Teodor Shanin