The Politics of Social Knowledge

The proper task of the social sciences, this book argues, is to understand and control the impact of social and political institutions on human life—not to predict and control human behavior. Such a reorientation must start, in the author's view, with a rejection of the assumptions of traditional Western political thought. Whether or not a reader can agree in full with the argument here, he is sure to find it a stimulating challenge to his own presuppositions.

Chief among the assumptions of Western political thought is the inevitability of hierarchy, which in turn assumes the inevitability of widespread social ignorance. The latter assumption flows from a view of the human species as wanting in motivation, character, and intelligence. These assumptions, according to Dr. Spence, have attained the power of myth, in the sense that no facts known or imaginable would be permitted to falsify them or even seriously to modify them. Thus a work-loving, responsible, intelligent person is regarded as an exception to human nature, produced by hierarchical institutions; and a group of cooperating procedures without structured positions of domination is treated as a case of hidden hierarchy.

Humankind never ceases its struggle for autonomy, but is thwarted by social ignorance—from Plato's allegory of the cave to the latest research in political socialization—compound the ignorance, because such explanations force the investigator to assert his intellectual (and political) superiority. The weight of evidence from modern psychology is that learned is a self-activated seeking process rather than a passive reception and recording of data. That being so, Kuhn's theory of scientific development wrongly emphasizes dogmatism, with individual creativity as the exception; the emphasis should be reversed. Moreover, Trigant Burrow was right—as are Bateson and Laing—in challenging Freud's view that so-called normal behavior constitutes mental health. Social scientists should teach citizens to free themselves from social deception, no matter how pervasive and accepted.

Respect for our intellectual heritage, as the author writes in his preface, "demands more than the study of the so-called masters; it requires our willingness to philosophize and to create theories just as they did."