As Hegel observed of the emerging democracies of the1
nineteenth century, in the universe of modern political subjects
“what is to be authoritative… derives its authority, not at all
from force, only to a small extent from habit and custom, really4
from insight and argument.” Under democracies, at least,
argumentation complements pure force and arbitrary choice as
a basic source of world-shaping decisions. Rationality itself has7
become a source of power; consensual political systems require
agreement in thought as well as acquiescence in behavior.
Twisting the liberalism of Hegel’s point in light of decades of10
discussion of the politics of representation, we must ask how
any given claim comes to count as an insight and from what
source arguments derive their social force.13
This problem has been addressed most explicitly in the
sociology of knowledge. Recent social studies of science have
termed the epistemological standpoint that assumes a relation16
between power and knowledge an “equivalence postulate”.
Barry Barnes and David Bloor, for example, describe this
position as follows:19
“Our equivalence postulate is that all beliefs are on a
par with one another with respect to the causes of their
credibility. It is not that all beliefs are equally true or equally22
false, but that regardless of truth and falsity the fact of their
credibility is to be seen as equally problematic… Regardless of
whether the sociologist evaluates a belief as true or rational, or25
as false and irrational, he must search for the causes of its
credibility. Is a belief enjoined by the authorities of the society?
Is it transmitted by established institutions of socialization or28
supported by accepted agencies of social control? Is it bound
up with patterns of vested interest?” (…)
Instead of looking for fixed, universal laws of logic31
guaranteeing the connection of particular phenomena to general
concepts, sociologists of knowledge seek the learned,
contingent principles of thought actually used by human34
groups. (…) To investigate signification and justification as
social practices, we have to explain why cognitive approaches
differ without appealing to the ‘facts’ of the world.37
Paul N. Edwards. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of
Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 (adapted).