This extract about partial loyalty from Chapter 6 ‘Social Relations of Trust‘ in my 2012 book ‘The Politics of Knowledge in Education’.
The objective knowledge developed in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences is important to liberal democracies for political as well as for educational reasons. This chapter is about the link between the objectivity of epistemic knowledge and the rational thinking required for democracy. It draws on Alan Macfarlane’s (2002) ideas about ‘partial loyalty’ (p. 271), a concept developed in the literature about the role of contractual associations in making the modern world (the title of Macfarlane’s book). According to this approach, the partial loyalty of social relations of trust enables the simultaneous attachment and separation towards knowledge that is required for objectivity and criticism. Macfarlane (2002) refers to the development of a world of trust and openness as ‘the basis not only for capitalism but also for modern science’ (p. 106), a view of science’s role in modern society shared by Sharplin and discussed in chapter 3. Along with their importance in establishing and maintaining relations of trust between people in societies based on contract not status, objectivity, criticism, and judgement are also features of democratic citizenship.
The student who ‘knows only what has been told him, (whose) judgements are only those which he has received from his teachers (and) has formed his mind on another’s. His knowledge has not been drawn from reason. He is merely the plaster-cast of a man’ (Kant, 1781/1993, p. 535). Such imbibed understanding is the doxic or embodied knowledge of subjective experience, where ‘we accept many things without knowing them’ (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 1992, p. 113). It is the commonsense reality of experience that is the source of ideology and the reason for ideology’s power. But it is a reality in which our “senses may fail us”. Only the provisional truth claims of objective knowledge can reveal the ideological or cultural nature of experience.
This means that the reasoning required for disciplinary knowledge is that which is critical both of itself and of the society which that knowledge serves. It employs the sociological imagination which makes the familiar unfamiliar and enables us to conceptualise that which is unknown to us. Forms of social organisation that have been developed in the academic disciplines over time, forms that arise from the ‘cognitive interests’ (Young, 2008, p. 31) of intellectualised individuals and that are produced in disciplinary institutions, are intimately connected to the partial loyalty of contractual social organisation. That partial loyalty enables agency—whether the agency of the intellectual individual in knowledge creation or the rational citizen in democratic politics.
Social knowledge and academic knowledge have much in common. Both types of knowledge are produced by people within a social context and in the service of the society. Both have their origin in the sacred of the traditional world where ‘in general no distinction is drawn between the natural, the supernatural, and the human; the gods do not transcend the universe but are rooted in it and subject to its principles’ (Lindberg, 1992, p. 8). But as David Lindberg (1992) observes, the early ‘conceptions of space and time are not (like those of modern physics) abstract and mathematical, but are invested with meaning and value drawn from the experience of the community’ (p. 8). With reference to the origin myths of several early societies, Lindberg points to the ‘strong tendency in oral traditions to identify causes with beginnings, so that to explain something is to identify its historical origins’ (p. 8).
This is a significant observation and helps with the task of delineating one of the major differences between social realism and social constructivism—that of abstract conceptual knowledge. Whereas scientific knowledge is characterised by advanced theoretical and conceptual understanding, social knowledge too conceptualises the world in the beliefs found in religious and cultural explanations for the unknown. However with social knowledge, the meaning and value of knowledge remain tied to the experience of the social group. The beliefs do not become abstract concepts capable of being applied to other times and other situations. They remain experience-based beliefs even if the experience referred to occurred in mythological times. In this way, commonsense knowledge, although located in the reality of experience, is ideological. It is not a “false consciousness”, because it is deeply embedded in the reality of everyday life and is a “way of knowing” that arises from that experience. For this reason the cultural beliefs that make up ideology are extremely difficult to change (Shalem and Bensusan, 1999). But although such social knowledge is the “truth” of our lives it is one limited in what and how it can explain the world given that it is always tied to the the world of the “knower”.
Like Durkheim, Lindberg (1992) traces the emergence of science from the early understandings of the sacred, describing how the contemplation of natural phenomena led to new sets of questions and new sets of answers with ‘personification of nature gradually becoming a less-prominent feature of their (the early philosophers) discourse, and the gods disappearing from their explanations of natural phenomena’ (p. 26) as a ‘distinction between the natural and the supernatural was emerging’ (p. 27). The distinction between the natural and the supernatural, which has enabled the growth of science as objective knowledge, was developed within the canons of the various disciplines. These were communities of scholars across time and space that produced the ‘coalitions of minds’ described by Collins (2000, p. 7)—a claim accepted by social realists to support the argument that knowledge is produced within social and historical circumstances but not limited to those circumstances. It is in the sociality of the canon that the collective representations of the discipline are generated. According to Durkheim (1995):
Collective representations are the product of immense cooperation that extends not only in space but also through time; to make them, a multitude of different minds have associated, intermixed, and combined their ideas and feelings; long generations have accumulated their experience and knowledge. A very special intellectuality that is infinitely richer and more complex than that of the individual is distilled in them. (p. 15)
Despite the sociality of the production of knowledge, the “product” is able to be separated from those conditions of production—for reasons that I described in the previous chapter. That is one of the crucial differences between social realist and constructivist arguments. Another distinction concerns the role of the individual in generating knowledge and contributing to the disciplinary canon. Not only must the knowledge be separated from the knower, but that “knower” must have a degree of agency within the social relations of symbolic production. In order to be a critic within disciplinary systems and procedures researchers must be capable of objectifying their own conditions of existence, including the symbolic relations of production within which they are located. In doing so researchers are intellectual agents contributing to producing the collective canon, not to merely reproducing it.
Social knowledge is characterised by its role as the means to reproduce a socio-cultural group. It preserves the “culture” in order to maintain continuity and cohesion. In contrast, modern societies are characterised by internal mechanisms of change, what Alan Macfarlane (2002) describes as ‘the unusual properties of the new kind of grouping’ to emerge in societies based on contract not status (p. 259). This is the partial loyalty made possible by the fact that individuals can enter and leave social groups according to the person’s volition—something not possible with groups organised according to kin and ethnicity. The idea of partial loyalty can also be usefully applied to academic communities. They, like members of socio-political organisations, have an “entry and escape clause”. Neither the researchers nor their ideas are required to be totally loyal to the wider group, as is the case with religio-cultural groups. The latter require such total loyalty to maintain social and political cohesion. But it is a condition of the academic system that its members are not “loyal”, that they remain critical and judgmental.
For this reason, although ideas are created within the social relations of symbolic production of any particular discipline, those relations are not necessarily determining of the intellectual thinker who produced them. They do determine the systems, methods, and codes that are used, that is true, but the scientist is not restricted to reproducing the theories and concepts of the discipline. He or she is able to change them. While the disciplinary systems and procedures allow for the development of innovative theories, it is the individual scientist either alone or with colleagues whose creativity is “distilled” in the complex intellectuality of the canon.
Michael Young (2008) refers to one of the two goals he identifies for social realism as ‘to explore how the forms of social organization that arise from “cognitive” interests may themselves shape the organization of society itself’ (p. 31). That exploration is my purpose here to link the type of institutions made possible in contractual societies to those institutions and procedures of science. The link is to be found in the partial loyalty that characterise the social relations of trust required for criticism and judgement. The rise of objective knowledge that contains criticism as a key part of its logic is intimately associated with the shift from status-based to contractual societies and the resulting individualisation of personal identity that followed from the breakdown of the kinship structuring principle. Trust emerged as the unifying device for this new social order.
My interest in this chapter is in examining the relationship between contractual society and objective knowledge to explore the nature of the link. I find it in a politics of knowledge that contains two features; one is the processes of objectivity, criticism, and judgement that allows for the partial loyalty of attachment and distance exercised in the disciplinary canons and in democratic politics. The second feature is the social relations of trust that provide the context for that partial loyalty to operate. The organising principle of liberal democratic societies in the modern world is that of contract, and it is in the making of the contractual relationships and the public sphere as the site for those relationships that objective knowledge plays a major role. It is for this reason that I devote the first section of the chapter to explaining the shift from status to contract—what Henry Maine describe as the ‘the greatest of all changes’ (Maine, cited in Macfarlane, 2002, p. 16)—before turning to examining how objectivity creates the partial loyalty that is a necessary condition for the exercise of critical reasoning in contractual societies.
How do societies with populations that do not share a common past cohere and hold themselves together? The status to contract issue is an old question for modernity—one asked by thinkers from Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Tocqueville to Marx, J. S. Mill, and Durkheim. According to Alan Macfarlane a question at the heart of sociology is: What is the ‘way in which the individual is embedded in wider groupings’? (p. 5). In The Making of the Modern World (2002), Macfarlane traces what it was about the change in the individual-group relationship that enabled the shift to modern liberal democratic societies. Convinced by the nineteenth-century historian, F. W. Maitland’s argument that the answer is found in the non-kinship corporations and trusts that characterise English common law and equity from the Anglo-Saxon period, Macfarlane asks the rhetorical question: ‘How could civilisations avoid the Scylla of status and also the Charybdis of contract?’ His answer is that ‘the way lay through some combination of the best of both; the affective, emotional ties of status, the flexibility and efficiency of contract’ (p. 259).
In tracing the development of contractual associations as ‘a new kind of grouping’, Macfarlane brings back into the literature Maitland’s ideas about how a new form of cooperation emerging from the early English ‘proto-trusts’ ‘could balance the allegiances of group and individual’ and replace societies based on status bonds’ (p. 259). According to Macfarlane (2002), Maitland ‘finally solved the problem of combining individualism and associations in a new way’ (p. 3) in explaining the ‘origins and nature of the modern world’ (p. 4). This is indeed a powerful statement. If it is the case, then Maitland’s insights will also assist those like myself who wrestle with how to explain the relationship between a determinism in the relations of symbolic production and the agency of individuals in creating Durkheim’s ‘collective representations’ (1995, p. 15).
While the canon ‘enables a particular type of activity and its principles are generative’ given that it is the ‘knowledge not the knower that counts’ (Moore, 2007b, p. 68), the individual is consciously involved in the creation of knowledge. In this way, I would argue, the knower does count (although not tied forever to the knowledge as the constructivists would argue). Along with creating ideas that become distilled in the canon’s complex intellectuality, the scientist issimultaneously a member of the disciplinary community and its critic. It is this “knower” who enacts the systems and procedures of objectification and criticism authorised by the discipline as well as doing the actual thinking. As Durkheim (cited in Culliver, 1983) maintained, ‘truth is only ever achieved by individuals’ (p. xx). However, Durkheim traced the condition for individualism in the social division of labour.
My argument that the form individuality takes with its “partial loyalty” under certain political conditions—conditions enabled by the objectivity of knowledge—does not deny the location of individualism in economic relations. However I do argue that the contractual nature of liberal democratic political relations acts as a counterbalance to the determinism of capitalist relations of production. This is the case because the partial loyalty of contractual social relations encourages objectification, and with it, criticism and judgement. It is for this reason that the uneasy but workable settlement between liberalism and capitalism of the expansive industrial period was the condition for the extension of epistemic knowledge to the wider population. The stronger the forces of liberal democracy, the greater the spread of epistemic knowledge with its objectivity and criticism.
However, since the 1970s, the democracy-capitalism settlement of the industrial era has weakened. Reactionary and conservative political forces with their accompanying strategies of localisation have found that accumulation in the era of financial capitalism appears to operate effectively alongside non-democratic polities. The success of capitalist accumulation in countries governed by oligarchies and autocracies as well as the emergence of localised forms of capitalism, such as neotribal capitalism in New Zealand (Rata, 2000; 2011b) would support this view. It would appear that democracy is no longer the price that capitalist elites need to pay by placating the working class in return for expanding profits. This realisation that democracy may not be the only polity suited to capitalist accumulation supports the rise of conservative elites, increasing inequalities, and liberal-democratic nations that govern increasingly on behalf of global capitalism rather than on behalf of the people.
It is a pyrrhic victory for capitalism however. As democracy declines, so too does epistemic knowledge, given one is a condition for the other. Capitalism, by weakening the conditions for objective knowledge through various localisation strategies, weakens its own foundations. The source of creativity required for capitalist expansion is located in epistemic knowledge. The “long twentieth century” settlement between capitalism and democracy was not only a settlement with the working class, it was a settlement with science. While financial capitalism may believe it can dismiss the claims of working people for greater equality, it cannot do without objective knowledge. However, such knowledge also serves democratic aspirations. This means that contemporary capitalism is mistaken to think that its rejection of the settlement with democracy is in its best interests. Creative capitalism still needs the “turbulent individual” who can think objectively. Democracy is the price to be paid for science.
But before continuing with the idea that the objectivity and critical reasoning developed in the disciplines is made possible by the social relations of trust in liberal democracies—I indulge in an intriguing tangent—one that also fascinated Macfarlane. Given the importance of Maitland’s contribution to explaining the modern world, what accounts for the amnesia surrounding his work? Macfarlane attributes that amnesia to ‘the way in which earlier knowledge of a high quality is quietly forgotten’ (p. 7). I include these comments here as a further reason for the importance of the structuration of disciplinary knowledge with its procedures of building on the work of earlier thinkers through processes of scrutiny and criticism. The collective representations developed over time that become the disciplinary canon are undermined by the constructivist conflation of knowledge and the knower. It means if one does not approve of the politics of the philosopher or the politics of the age in which the philosopher worked, then one also rejects his or her ideas. This has enabled the dismissal of earlier thinkers as “dead, white men” and of their ideas as well. It means the generation of students raised within postmodernism miss out on the philosophical heritage that underpins today’s social sciences.
I recall one of my postgraduate students justifying her refusal to read anything from the “dead white male camp” by saying that not only did those writers contribute to Western patriarchy but so did their writings. For her, the knower and the knowledge were inseparable. Because she refused to read the work of Enlightenment thinkers, she missed out not only on understanding the historical context of today’s sociological theories but also on those works with which she would have a degree of sympathy. These would, I have no doubt, include Kant’s essay On Enlightenment (1784/1990) and Mills’s The Subjugation of Women (1869/1999). She also missed out on acquiring the historical way of thinking required for the sociological imagination. Most unfortunate of all is that she will never know what she has missed. Although that student was at the extreme end of the postmodern generation of graduates, her dismissal of the knowledge of the last three hundred years on the grounds of the sex of its producers captures the intransigence and irrationality of the postmodern fundamentalist that I referred to in chapter 4. It is also a real problem for emerging researchers in indigenous studies, where a hostility to “Western” ideas can mean that the young researcher is confined to an ahistorical intellectual context.
To return to the amnesia surrounding Maitland—a silence that cannot be blamed on postmodernism since Macfarlane identified it in the 1960s. The silence suggests a larger problem; how to maintain disciplinary knowledge down through the generations without important ideas becoming lost, or alternately, other ideas taking over as an authoritative “creed” in the manner of moribund degenerative science. When the latter happens, disciplinary knowledge is reduced to stultified and stultifying “truths”. Indeed that is a charge levelled at the traditional school curriculum by social constructivists—one not without some foundation—although the answer lies in re-vitalising the knowledge that is taught and in teaching it well, not in rejecting it. In the case of the former, when ideas are simply lost, as exemplified by the amnesia concerning F. W. Maitland, it was not that Maitland’s ideas were abandoned because they had been tried and found wanting. That would suggest a vibrant discipline doing what it should do—testing and discarding as warranted. In this case it appears that the ideas had simply been overlooked and then forgotten. Yet, like Macfarlane, I also consider Maitland’s ideas insightful, finding in his explanation of a new form of social organisation based on trust and its institutional expression in legal trusts a powerful explanation for the emergence and resilience of contractual societies. This includes the “contractual” society of the scientific community. Their “discovery” by Macfarlane and my own use of the ideas may well exemplify the cooperation over time that may be seen not only as a continual process, but as one that has its stops, starts, and disjunctures.
Maitland drew on earlier ideas about the role of trusts in the modern world and contributed to taking the ideas further. Voltaire (1647/1994) had, as early in the modern period as the seventeenth century, identified the emerging new forms of association based on trust (in his case a trust engendered by common business interests) that overrode race and religion. Accordingly, ‘the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all profess the same religion and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts’ (p. 30). Over three centuries later the two great unanswered questions that Macfarlane returned to remain central to sociological inquiry.
The first concerns the exceptional case of modernity, where civilisation favours the individual rather than the group as the political subject. The second is ‘what could possibly hold such a system together? If kinship is restrained, God was kept out of the market, the state inhibited, how and why should people work effectively together?’ (2002, p. 257). Given social realism’s preoccupation with the sociality of knowledge, these are questions as relevant for that discipline as for political science. For society generally, the institutions of the political sphere—the state—and the institutions of the broader public sphere—civil society—provide the sites and systems for the individual to exercise partial loyalty to the group and, in doing so, enable individualisation and, at the same time, group commitment. For academia more specifically, the institutions of each discipline offer the site and systems for that partially loyal engagement.
The intellectual conversations across time by those in the same or inter-related disciplines are part of the procedures of academic knowledge that guarantee its truthfulness. It is a point made by the social realists in their use of Collins’s metaphor “coalitions of the mind” as the sub-title in the edited volume by Karl Maton and Rob Moore (2010) that brings together some of the major articles in the emerging social realist canon. The idea emphasises the importance of scholarship that builds disciplinary knowledge over the centuries. As a relative newcomer to this coalition, my interest in applying the ideas of Maitland and Macfarlane to social realism is because both writers provide insights into the socialising character of contractual associations and it is the very sociality of knowledge that is the central issue for social realists. Such associations, which include academic communities, must remain connected to their social contexts if they are to survive, and yet they must also be able to exercise critical judgement within that very context; a criticism that has the potential to destabilise the discipline’s existence. What accounts for the stability of that vulnerable state? It is a contradiction that exists in contractual societies as in disciplinary institutions. According to Maitland and Macfarlane, it is the social relations of trust that stabilise the society while at the same time allowing the contradiction to serve as the vehicle for innovation and change. Contractual forms of social cohesion have something very human at the core—trust—a trust that becomes institutionalised as legal trusts, associations, incorporations, institutions, and in the case of knowledge, in disciplinary institutions, systems, and procedures.
Disciplinary knowledge remains connected to its social context yet able to transcend that context in a number of ways: by the sociality of the academic community—that is its “coalition of minds” I previously referred to, and by the partial loyalty of those working in that coalition. The third way in which knowledge both maintains and transcends its social character is in the materiality of the knowledge “product”. Moore (2007a, p. 38) draws a distinction between ‘constructivism’ and ‘emergence’ to explain the materiality of scientific knowledge. He describes constructivism as reductionist in that ‘knowledge relations are reduced to power relations between social groups and their specific standpoints and interests and any autonomy of knowledge is denied’. In contrast, the disciplines are ‘concerned with the emergent properties of knowledge producing practices and their capacities to transcend their immediate contexts of production (allowing for autonomy)’. Accordingly, ‘whereas one is concerned with the social construction of knowledge (and is a form of idealism) the other is concerned with the social production of knowledge (and is a form of materialism)’ (p. 38). I understand that ‘autonomy’ to be the partial loyalty of social relations of trust found in institutions that have mechanisms enabling change (in contrast to the stasis that characterises the institutions of traditional societies). In the knowledge disciplines, the mechanisms of change are the thinker’s objective reasoning and critical judgement. These are faculties enabled, rather than determined, by the procedures of the disciplines.
It is the structuring relations of trust that enable the otherwise de-stabilising forces of change to operate in disciplinary institutions and in the wider contractual society itself without destroying institutions from within. Scientific knowledge serves that society through processes of objectification that enable change to occur within institutions that guarantee continuity. Social knowledge also serves society. It is important primarily for its role in providing the cement that holds the society together and maintaining stability and continuity. This role of disciplinary knowledge, on the other hand, is as the agent of change. But to understand the changes made possible by science in Heideggerian terms as ‘a machine-like “total mobilization” of technological enframing’ (Irwin, 2008, p. 73) is to confuse knowledge with how it is used. That application is to be found in the motives and interests of real people.
Knowledge is, as Moore (2007a) suggests, a symbolic production that is ‘organized through distinctive modes of production parallel to those of material production in the economic sphere’ (p. 30). If its use is corrupted, then it is to those who control knowledge to whom we look, not to the knowledge itself. In chapter 10, I take up Moore’s identification of the issue for the sociology of education—‘to investigate the historical and sociological conditions under which the possibilities (of modes of symbolic production) are realised and distributed’ in an account of the production of indigenous knowledge. It is in the specificity of those conditions that one finds the ideological strategies of knowledge production and application.
Where the science “product” is controlled by a political group acting in its own interests, knowledge production and reproduction, like any economic resource, serves that elite. In such cases, erudite knowledge loses its partial loyalty character and becomes social knowledge—a total loyalty. This is the case because the authority over the knowledge has passed from the disinterested systems and procedures of the discipline reliant on trust to maintain their stability to the interested strategies of an economic elite or an ideological driven group. We see this with religious and cultural “knowledges”, where the criteria for who can produce the knowledge is based on the knower’s status as a group member rather than developed through procedures integral to the discipline. These are the procedures that scrutinise and test the knowledge.
Objective knowledge contains moral and aesthetic as well as economic dimensions. The arts and humanities are as important in their potential application to society as are the sciences from which technologies are developed. Objective knowledge with its inherent reasoning and critical features has the potential to ensure that science is directed towards sustaining the natural world and improving the lives of human beings. This is in marked contrast to societies that value knowledge for its economic worth only. With only an instrumental rationality as the guiding principle for existence, a society becomes lost in the reactionary modernism that Jeffrey Herf (1984) identified as Germany’s fate in the 1930s. It is the other side of modernity; soulless, sterile, and ultimately self-destructing. It is the price to be paid for rejecting the Enlightenment ideal of knowledge as capable of containing the moral and aesthetic means by which we become fully human, means that are intrinsic to the judgement function of criticism.
Contract societies need all three dimensions of knowledge to provide the material for “trust” that integrates individuals into the social contract. The individual is the social and political subject of the modern world, and it is for the individual that the concept of human rights was developed. It is the individual who holds those rights in liberal democratic nations. This fact makes nonsense of the belief that the modern individual is ‘a fiction’ (Irwin, 2008, p. 73). The social contract between individuals that arises from the individual’s political subjectivity is the condition for social and political agency. Whether the explanation for individualisation is a Marxist or liberal one, the process of becoming individualised means separating from the status-based social group in order to re-connect through contract (the liberal explanation) or class social relations (the Marxist understanding). Ulrich Beck (1994, p. 13) uses the terms ‘disembedding and re-embedding’ to describe that process of individualisation. It contains the same idea of attaching, separating, and re-attaching—the process by which partial loyalty is created.
The struggle to be free from cultural tyranny, to cast off the prescriptive template laid out for people in status-based societies is not only about what is to be rejected. It also involves ways of re-connecting. For Marxists the individual is re-connected through capitalist social relations of production that are considered to be alienating in their exploitative character. For liberals, the re-connection is the partial loyalty enabled by the contractual social relations of trust. It is when the re-connections fail and the individual is left isolated and atomised that we see the rise of traditionalist ideologies, of re-racialisation movements, and of romantic dreams of Arcadia. Although these are all part of modernity—in the logic of its negation—they are understood as a return to the more humanised world of an idealised tradition. Yet it is a world that lacks the means of progressive change. That is found in the partial loyalty of individuals within institutions, including disciplinary institutions, and operating according to social relations of trust.
Individualisation enables people who are not from the same racial and religio-cultural heritage to unite within the modern imaginary of the liberal democratic nation. How this happens is, as Macfarlane (2002) points out, the task of sociology—to understand ‘what it is that unites people in the modern, industrial, world’ (p. 109). While Marx argued that the new form of social relations are to be found in the exploitative relations of production, Macfarlane, drawing on Maitland’s insights, looks to trust-based forms of association for the explanation of reconnection. The key feature of the associations that sustain individualisation while simultaneously relating the individual to others within a social entity is the partial loyalty of the individual. That person, while belonging to the group through relations based upon trust—a relationship institutionalised in various ways and all with their codes, systems, and practices as with the institutions of academic practice—is also free to join and leave.
The processes involved in developing objective knowledge provide the mechanisms that connect people into the non-status associations of the disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences. The same procedures also provide the wider society with the mechanism for the unifying trust that enables the simultaneous stabilising continuity and the destabilising but transformative change of contractual social organisations. That mechanism is objective critical reasoning. It is a process developed within the scientific disciplines but of huge importance to modern societies based on the delicately balanced social contract. The trust between individuals that creates the society, a trust institutionalised within the systems, procedures, and practices of social organisations, ensures the existence of the society as well as the existence of the individual. It is a trust that is only as sound as the institutions that provide its structures and systems. The processes of objectification, scrutiny, and criticism, processes developed as mechanisms in disciplinary knowledge production, are as important for all forms of contractual social organisations as they are for the disciplinary communities. They play a crucial part in maintaining trust because they are procedures that enable the connection to—yet, at the same time, the separation from—the social context.
It is in these ways that scientific knowledge contributes to uniting people so that non kin-based associations are possible. Epistemic knowledge, while located in the social context, is directed to its criticism and transformation. The type of knowledge that can unite the non-kin, non-ethnic associations of the modern world must be knowledge that enables ‘communities not based on blood and place, but communities of sentiment as well as purely instrumental and practical goals’ (Macfarlane, 2002, p. 269) to cohere. Any society with groups placed on the margins and not fully integrated into the national imaginary struggles with that unity. And yet what is the ‘trick’ of unity? Macfarlane speaks of the concept of ‘trusts’ as ‘islands of fellowship in a sea of atomistic, contractual, market society’ providing the possibility and the resolution of the logical contradiction of self-love and social’—a ‘trick’ he calls the ‘mysterious essence of modernity’ (p. 272). These ‘new flexible institutions’, whose ‘prototype is the trust’, enable a ‘civilisation to emerge which “has separated off different parts of life”—power, economics, religion, and kinship’ (p. 272). I would add that the ‘trick’ he identifies is one made up of objectification, doubt, and criticism—strategies first developed within and protected by the institutions of science.
The new ways of uniting people that don’t come from one’s status in the kin group, in the religious order, or in other traditional hierarchies of power and wealth brings people together in the sports clubs, the music and arts fraternities, the political groups, the endless number and type of community organisations based on anything from gardening to sexuality to child care, and central to all—the school. The public school in the national education system—one with a common curriculum that teaches academic knowledge—is at the heart of the “trick” of unity. Public schools have the potential to create the social links that are vital to unifying each new generation in the act (and art) of association—one that ultimately depends on trust. Trust only develops where there are shared values, behaviours, and aspirations, but it is a sharing that is not mandated by kinship and the need for total loyalty to ensure the group’s survival.
To have a “heart”, these associations must have internal links but be able to link to the wider contractual society in ways that command both loyalty and criticism—in other words “partial loyalty”. Public schooling and public universities are not only institutions where the contract is developed and strengthened, their importance lies in their role as contractual institutions based on the “raw material” of association—the methods of producing and reproducing abstract objective knowledge. That knowledge is, or should be, produced and reproduced in public education, thereby providing the instrumental means for social coherence but also providing the affective and moral ties that make the civilisation worth having. In a world where people without a shared heritage form new bonds, those bonds must have ongoing value from a source other than tradition. It is not enough that epistemic knowledge be instrumental. It must also provide the raw material for social integration, but for an integration that is constantly fluid as new individuals and groups join the society. To do this, knowledge must draw on disciplines from the three dimensions of human life—the instrumental or economic, the moral or spiritual, and the aesthetic. These are found in the symbolic codes of the arts, humanities, and sciences. They form the basis of education in modern democratic nations—all directed towards the universal humanity captured in Kant’s (1781/1993) dictum referred to in chapter 1 of this volume.
What can I know?
What ought I to do?
What may I hope? (p. 518)
‘What can I know’ is the promise offered by objective knowledge. It frees us from the way of thinking that is tied to experience; to a world where “I know because I was there”, “I know because I feel”, “I know because I am a member of a gender, a race, a religion”, a membership that provides certain experiences to be understood only by those in the group. ‘What can I know’ is the implicit acknowledgement of the key idea of the Enlightenment, the idea of the universal human being who is the author of his or her own destiny, whose self-authority comes from the ability to reason and to criticise—but who exercises the authority within the collective representations of “coalitions of minds”. ‘What can I know’ also evokes an instrumental use of knowledge. It suggests what can I know for what purpose. It is the utility of knowledge; the way knowledge can make our lives better. We don’t need to live the brutish and short lives lived by all our ancestors. The science that brings economic benefits is to be welcomed. As David Landes (1998) points out in describing the great technical advances of the nineteenth century, the bringing together of ‘instruction in abstract and theoretical matters’ with technical application ‘opened the way to new branches of knowledge of great economic potential’ (p. 283).
But that instrumental use of knowledge is only one dimension. It needs the humanising control of the moral and aesthetic dimensions if we are to be more than alienated, mindless machines. It is these dimensions that are expressed in the everyday lives of people as they associate with those to whom they are not bound by ties other than their universal humanity. The contractual society cannot do away with the human need for emotional warmth and for a life with meaning and value. Indeed it needs these values more than status-based societies do because they cannot be assumed but must be constantly created.
‘What ought I to do’ is the promise of that meaningful future. Disciplinary knowledge is by its nature future oriented. It is about what is not yet known. The very idea of a future is the source of hope. We can think about what is to be valued and why and what we should do to maintain that value and carry it forward into the future. It is for this reason that a national curriculum should be the ‘knowledge that each country agrees is important for all students to have access to’ (Young, 2011). The universality and future orientation of epistemic knowledge means that all individuals are seen as contributors to this future. It has a moral message: That we have an obligation to contribute to making a better world, and that what we do, however small, does matter. Indeed, it is the idea behind the growing contemporary commitment to a sustainable world, a commitment to redress the excesses of industrial capitalism and the narcissistic greed of financial capitalism. The final line of Kant’s dictum, coming after the first two suggesting that knowledge is behind action, is a political message. Hope implies a purpose; hope for a better society. Politics is about making that society. In this way, Kant’s dictum links knowledge and politics.
The mechanisms for the link between knowledge and politics are the partial loyalty based on trust and produced by objectivity and critical reasoning. The objectivity and critical reasoning needed for scientific inquiry is also needed for democracy. Young people are prepared for citizenship, not merely by learning about being a citizen and what democracy is, but by being trained in the practices of objectivity and critical reasoning. Their understanding of the world cannot be tested against experience because “experience fails us”. It requires “testing” using the abstract concepts of political and civic engagement. In this way, the objectification required for scientific knowledge is a source for the institutions and systems of political citizenship. It is also a source for the systems and institutions of social citizenship. It provides the material for the partial loyalty that links people across the enormous range of interests and activities in modern societies.
Although loyalty to the contractual group is only partial, this does not mean that societies are simply collections of individuals. The structures of the institutions and systems of association exist independent of the individuals who belong to them. Liberal societies are constituted by social relations of trust. This is not an idealised mechanism but has its own materiality in those social relations of trust. Like knowledge, “trust” is a “product”. There is a difference, though, in terms of the type of “product”. Unlike academic knowledge, which has a specific product in terms of ideas, the component of the trust product is affective and social—it is the emotional ties and the belief in the efficacy of those ties. It is also the practices of social interaction that occur in contractual organisations. Where abstract knowledge and trust have a similar materiality is that both are produced in systems that operate according to the mechanisms of objectification, doubt, and criticism.
By producing the intellectual means for the individual to be at once separated from yet partially loyal to the group, disciplinary knowledge is intimately tied to democratic politics. This means that the attack on objective knowledge by relativists and constructivists has implications for society far wider than the “dumbing down” of the curriculum. The dominance of constructivism in educational circles contributes to what Durkheim described as ‘one of the great obstacles which constrict the development of sociology’ (1983, p. 91). Durkheim’s insight that ‘for a long time to come, there will be two tendencies in any society: a tendency towards objective scientific truth and a tendency towards subjectively perceived truth, towards mythological truth’, captures the impasse that the sociology of education found itself in at the end of the century. By denying the objectivity of knowledge, the discipline lost its own object of study.
