Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Abstract
Experts and intellectuals in the social sciences have a long history of relating to the state and the public. These relations vary in
kind from those based on technical knowledge applied to policy to cults to social scientists in organic relations to social
movements to organized attempts to develop public policy guided by social science knowledge. The most successful early
attempts were cameralism and ofcial statistics, but intellectuals like John Stuart Mill also reached a wide public audience in
the nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, social reform movements claimed expert knowledge. As the social
sciences entered the university, however, the forms of inuence changed. Under the inuence of the Rockefeller philanthropies, social science became more realistic and the emphasis shifted to creating professions dependent on academic
knowledge and certication. Think tanks and other forms of knowledge intervention developed which relied on academic
social science. Public intellectuals, however, speaking not to professions or bureaucrats, remained important.
Expertise: A Typology
Experts may be categorized according to the way in which they
relate to the public and public bodies. One kind of expertise,
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 22
which other forms emulate, is modeled on technical knowledge, and specically limits the role of the expert to technical
advice based on empirical research. This kind of expertise is
normally rooted in academic training and a community of selfdened and selected experts, and is made accessible to users,
who support research related to their own aims. It gains its
legitimacy from being publicly recognized as genuine expertise.
Technical expertise of this kind is ordinarily self-limited to the
specic domains of technical knowledge. In practice, this kind
of knowledge is insufcient in itself to inform public policy or
public opinion, but it can constrain the claims of other kinds of
experts. However, the line between technical expertise and
expertise beyond the narrow connes of what is established
technically is often vague, and those who possess technical
knowledge often claim more than is justied.
Expertise could be said to differ from scientic knowledge
proper in that it represents the state of knowledge at a particular
time, and is not limited to fully developed or tested theories or
facts accepted as textbook knowledge by the academic
community. In this respect, expertise resembles meta-analysis.
Experts are normally expected to be aware of conicting
claims and the range of relevant knowledge and opinion on the
topic in question, and to be able to aggregate this knowledge
and make judgments about the methodological adequacy,
signicance, and relevance of various knowledge claims to
present policy questions. But they are not expected to fully
agree on their advice and conclusions, which may involve
nontechnical elements, of values or policy considerations that
are contested, often by other experts.
Within this very broad denition, several major variants
may be distinguished. One model of expertise involves the
direct appeal to ordinary citizens and persons on the basis of
claims of special access to relevant knowledge with some sort of
certication or sanction of the status of the expert in
a community of experts or specialists that recognizes their
expertise. The expert speaking directly to the public on the basis
of specialized knowledge is, in contrast, speaking for specialists
whose knowledge is being publicly represented by the expert,
who is speaking for this community. This kind of expert appeal
plays a role in all the social and behavioral sciences, but is far
more developed in such elds as psychology and child
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03009-9
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696
with one another, but were not concerned with persuading the
public. Instead, they represent a continuous tradition of
administrative expertise based on a theory of statecraft:
a doctrine of Polizeiwissenschaft, according to which the ruler of
a principality enhances his own power by improving the
economic and moral life of his subjects through mercantilist
regulation and the paternalistic use of state administrative
power through magistrates to improve morality. This was the
beginning of academic social science: many of the cameralists
were university professors who simultaneously held administrative positions, a pattern that persisted in the Germanspeaking world well into the nineteenth century.
These two patterns, the public and the bureaucratic, developed in different directions. In the eighteenth century, Hume
and Adam Smith were supported by wealthy patrons, though
they were not entirely dependent on them. Smith became
a professor of moral science at the University of Edinburgh.
Humes history of England was a best seller. The Encyclopediasts, in France, also derived income from literary projects.
This was the beginning of a period in which the educated
public was a paying audience. Social science at this stage was
a part of a much larger body of successful literary publishing for
this audience, and beneciary of this growing and increasingly
prosperous group.
It was not until the eighteenth century and the development
of a signicant book market that enlightenment thinkers such
as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau were able to support
themselves through literature, but they could do so only barely
and with aid. The famous Encyclopedia on which Diderot
collaborated sold 25 000 copies; the income from this and his
other writing was not enough to support him, but he was
helped by Catherine of Russia, who bought his library and paid
him a pension. Edward Gibbon and Hume were also supported
by aristocrats.
In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, who has been
described as the greatest public intellectual of the last two
centuries, worked for the East India company and derived
income from his writings as well, especially his System of Logic
(1882), which outlined his account of the methodology of
social science, including his conclusion that social science,
together with the utilitarian principle, would provide
a complete policy science. He was part of a current of liberal
thinkers, including Harriet Martineau, Walter Bagehot, and
Herbert Spencer, who wrote for the market. The latter two got
their start in nancial journalism, which has ever since been
a major conduit for communicating expertise, especially in
economics, to the public, and was the rst domain in which
experts could support themselves through writing.
These writers had a complex relation to the public and the
literary market. Their most important intellectual works were
not the source of their income. Most of them needed an
inheritance to enable them to commit time to writing social
science: Karl Marx was subsidized by Friedrich Engels, Comte
by Mill. Spencer and Henry Buckle, author of the astonishingly
successful History of Civilization in England (1864), inherited
wealth that enabled them to turn to social science. It is a small
irony that the great exponents of liberalism were unable to
survive in the market. Nevertheless, the fact that they did derive
income from the public literary market, and often through
journalism, meant that they were subject of the discipline of
697
698
Transitions to Disciplinarity
The academicization of social science was uneven between
countries and between disciplines, but for the most part rested
on the promise that the development of academic expertise
would produce practical results. Much of it built directly on
social reform movements. Movements for such things as prison
reform and the special treatment of juvenile offenders as well as
the regulation of child labor were important elements of the
American Social Science Association of the nineteenth century.
This body, which had a British analogue, was the precursor to
the disciplinary social science bodies that were founded in the
United States and elsewhere around the beginning of the
twentieth century. These associations promoted the idea that
expert knowledge was needed in the operation of state institutions as well as the creation of university social science, and
were typically supported by wealthy donors as well as
membership fees.
The London School of Economics was a project of the
Fabian society, and was needed because of the reluctance of the
traditional universities to accept the social sciences. In France,
sociology entered the university under the academic heading of
pedagogy. Psychology entered under this heading in the United
States. Aside from Staatswissenschaft, the eld with the greatest
initial success in entering academic life was German Nationalekonomie, which presented itself not as a pure science but as
providing the basis and ideology for national economic policy
and development. German economists exercised their expertise
in various ways, for example, through commissions. Max
Sering, Adolph Wagner, and others represented the dominant
Socialists of the Chair, and were organized in the Verein fr
Sozialpolitik, which produced policy advice and studies. The
problem of agricultural policy and rural life was common to all
major countries, and produced a variety of responses in the
form of commissions and research projects, as well as policy
recommendations. These provided both a basis and transitional stage to the creation of academic policy-oriented elds of
agricultural economic and rural sociology, and embedded this
form of expertise in agricultural bureaucracies.
National Differences
Much of the literature on both expertise and public intellectuals
focuses on national differences. In Raymond Arons ironic
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700
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