Stephen Turner

Edward Shils began as a sociologist under the close mentorship of Louis Wirth, with whom he collaborated on the translation of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia. After 1940, however, Shils’ career, which had been focused on topics in sociology, notably the class and occupational structure of cities and on German Sociological Theory, took an apparent turn, which in 1946 led him into a relationship with Michael Polanyi, a half-time appointment at the London School of Economics, and a new intellectual direction. Part of the biographical background to this was personal: his relationship with Wirth ended, and with it his expectation of a Ph.D. and his role in the Sociology Department. Yet his new direction had Chicago roots in his work on Mannheim, and his relation to Frank Knight and the planning disputes of the 1930s and 40s. Richard Moodey’s fascinating discussion (2012) needs no addition, but it might be useful to say something about Edward Shils’ personal trajectory that adds to his autobiography, and is relevant, though in obscure ways, to his motivations in relation both to Parsons and Polanyi. The story of Shils’ relation to Talcott Parsons is still unwritten, and may never be fully understood. Clearly there was a moment of intellectual excitement during the creation of the general theory of action. Shils’ own account of their work together captures some of this. But there is a biographical background to Shils’ (however brief) enthusiasm that sheds some small light on the relation of Shils and Polanyi and on Shils’ unusual and indeed frenetic efforts to connect to the larger intellectual community, represented for him by Polanyi, and on the specific form that this took.

Michael Oakeshott employed a device of argument and analysis that appears in a number of other thinkers, where it is given the name “antinomies.” These differ from binary oppositions or contradictories in that the two poles are bound together. In this discussion, the nature of this binding is explored in detail, in large part in relation to Oakeshott’s own usages, such as his discussion of the relation of faith and skepticism, between collective goal-oriented associations and those based on contract, and between a legal regime based on neutral rules and one oriented to policy goals. Other examples might include Weber’s distinction between the politics of intention and the politics of responsibility. Moreover, such ambiguous concepts as “rights,” have antinomic interpretations. In each of these cases, the full realization of one ideal led, in practice, to consequences associated with the other: in political practice, neither polar ideal was realizable without concessions to the other. But these features are rooted in the deep history of institutions. They are contingent, not philosophical. They nevertheless preclude conventional approaches to political theory.

There is a large literature on social epistemology, some of which is concerned with expert knowledge. Formal representations of the aggregation of decisions, estimates, and the like play a larger role in these discussions. Yet these discussions are neither sufficiently social nor epistemic. The assumptions minimize the role of knowledge, and often assume independence between observers. This paper presents a more naturalistic approach, which appeals to a model of epistemic gain from others, as mutual consilience—a genuinely social notion of epistemology. Using the example of Michael Polanyi’s account of science as an illustration, it introduces the notion of double heuristics: that individuals, each with their own heuristics, each with cognitive biases and limitations, are aggregated by a decision procedure, like voting, and this second order procedure produces its own heuristic, with its own cognitive biases and limitations. An example might be the limited ability of democracies to assimilate expert knowledge.

Edward Shils was a widely recognized but misunderstood thinker. The original contexts of his thought are not well understood and greatly distorted by associating him with the concerns of Parsons. Shils provides a fully comparable alternative to the thought of Habermas and Foucault, with essentially similar roots: practice theory, the dissolution of Marxism in the twenties, and Carl Schmitt. Though Shils was indebted to the American sociological tradition, with respect to these issues his sources were outside it: in Hendrik de Man, T. S. Eliot, and Michael Polanyi. It is shown how Shils responded to Schmitt's argument about the inherent conflict between democracy and liberalism in terms of an account of civility and tradition, and how this argument results in a critique of Foucault, Habermas, and collectivistic liberalism.

Normativity is what gives reasons their force, makes words meaningful, and makes rules and laws binding. It is present whenever we use such terms as ‘correct,' ‘ought,' ‘must,' and the language of obligation, responsibility, and logical compulsion. Yet normativists, the philosophers committed to this idea, admit that the idea of a non-causal normative realm and a body of normative objects is spooky. Explaining the Normative is the first systematic, historically grounded critique of normativism. It identifies the standard normativist pattern of argument, and shows how this pattern depends on circularities, assumptions about the unique correctness of preferred descriptions, problematic transcendental arguments, and regress arguments that end in mysteries. The book considers in detail a paradigm case: legal normativity as constructed by Hans Kelsen. This case exemplifies the problems with normativist arguments. But it also shows how normativism was constructed as an alternative to ordinary social science explanation. The normativist argument is that social science explanations themselves are forced to rely on normative conceptsÑminimally, on normative rationality and on a normative view of ‘concepts' themselves. Empathic understanding of the reasoning and meanings of others, however, can solve the regress problems about meaning and rationality that are central to the appeal of normativism. This account has no need for a parallel normative world, and has a surprising and revealing lineage in the history of philosophy, as well as a basis in neuroscience.

The idea of a break with tradition and its wholesale replacement with something else – most often some Enlightenment-inspired notion of the rational – is so pervasive in Western thought that it arguably constitutes a tradition in its own right. Yet recent uses of the term ‘post-traditional’ promise something novel: they radicalize the term’s meaning. Thus, ‘post-traditional’ increasingly implies not simply a break with a particular tradition, but rather a break with tradition as such. These new, more totalizing uses of ‘post-traditional’ tend to concentrate on the subjective aspects of experience and the self, rather than the demise of objective formal structures or of doctrines. Thus, in earlier iterations, tradition and traditional societies suppressed the self in a prison of duties, ascriptive demands, and restrictions, typically with religious justifications, something never fully effaced by modernization. But in its subsequent incarnations, the term ‘post-traditionalism’ denotes the end of traditional social roles and the possibility – or burden – of self-invention, a change whose full force has only recently been felt. This chapter discusses representative figures in this new account of tradition, including Robert Bellah, Alasdair MacIntyre and Anthony Giddens, and considers the relation of this new version of the break with tradition in relation to the problematic of multiculturalism, which, contrary to the Enlightenment view, acknowledges the continuing power of tradition.

Edward Shils began as a sociologist under the close mentorship of Louis Wirth, with whom he collaborated on the translation of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia. After 1940, however, Shils’ career, which had been focused on topics in sociology, notably the class and occupational structure of cities and on German Sociological Theory, took an apparent turn, which in 1946 led him into a relationship with Michael Polanyi, a half-time appointment at the London School of Economics, and a new intellectual direction. Part of the biographical background to this was personal: his relationship with Wirth ended, and with it his expectation of a Ph.D. and his role in the Sociology Department. Yet his new direction had Chicago roots in his work on Mannheim, and his relation to Frank Knight and the planning disputes of the 1930s and 40s.

Weber’s comments on democracy are puzzling, and even more puzzling when they are reinterpreted in terms of what came to be called “democratic theory” in academic circles. The list of puzzling statements is long, involving such notions as nonlegitimate domination. The distinction he made between democracy and authority—which he took to be mutually incompatible concepts in their pure forms—excludes the possibility of legitimate democratic authority. The reasoning is comparable to similar claims by Hans Kelsen, for similar theoretical reasons rooted in the philosophy of law. The result is that what we regard as democracies Weber regarded as mixed or transitional forms. What he focuses on instead is the modern state as found only in the West, and its unique features, especially the form of parliamentary representation of the play of interests, but even more important, the concept of offices, whether in the state or in organized political parties.

Democracy is not a central concept in Max Weber’s academic work. As a liberal citizen, Weber campaigned in 1918/1919 for equal suffrage and a parliamentary democracy with a plebiscitary “leader.” This contribution attempts to systematically grasp Weber’s concept of democracy on the basis of four narratives. Weber’s approach is sociological: democratization is a dynamic social process that interacts with the development of political equality for citizens. Ideal typically, “democracy” means self-government and can therefore no longer be achieved by the citizens themselves in modern mass states. Democratic legitimacy is insufficiently integrated into Weber’s typology of domination. For him, democracy is not a normative concept, but a rule-based political system legitimized by the citizens. This sober concept opens up opportunities to analyze the changeability and historical-cultural diversity of democracies today. According to Weber, political decisions belong in democratically legitimized institutions, but not on the streets.

In this reply to comments by Schliesser, Kochin, Kositna, Sassower, Miller, and Eyal and Sheremet, the underlying thesis of “Epistemic Coercion” is elaborated and explained. Epistemic Coercion is often thought to be impossible: no one can coerce belief. This is the thesis of epistemic voluntarism. But the techniques and responses the paper addressed were different: they were attempts to alter the epistemic environment. And this relates to the tacit. Voluntarism does not hold for the tacit, which is to say, that which is produced by experience and by prior cognitive predispositions. The experiences of the digital world are subject to manipulation, and the manipulators can themselves be coerced. In this way a person’s tacit sense of what is normal or acceptable can be manipulated. But the same sense can be the basis of rejection of claims made in the name of expert authority. One difference between overt coercion and tacit manipulation is that the manipulation of epistemically relevant experience, through such means as algorithms governing social media content, is hidden from recipient, and more difficult to resist. But its effects are indirect, for example, in facilitating acceptance as normal. These effects are bound up with persuasion and acceptance generally, so this kind of manipulation represents an exercise of hidden power.

Recent developments in social epistemology have applied a radically expansive notion of harm which encompasses beliefs and kinds of scientific knowledge. The implied or explicit implication of these notions is that these harms need to be suppressed. The notion of disinformation has turned this into institutional practice. The Covid pandemic saw the development and widespread use of actual means of knowledge suppression and epistemic engineering, both within science and with respect to expert claims, within nominally free societies. Paul Feyerabend’s Science in a Free Society addressed these issues by critiquing the erasure of coercion from the past history of science and the practice of ignoring the coercive elements of expertise. Here I take this seriously, and turn the problem upside down by treating coercion and resistance to coercion as inherent parts of science and the public role and place in science and in discourse generally. Regardless of one’s views on these questions it is evident that the rise of digital technologies, such as social media, has created novel opportunities for control, distinctive forms of epistemic control, and a need for rethinking the possibility of resistance to the coercive powers of the new technologies. This is a preliminary formulation of some of the issues.

Agnieszka Olechnicka et al. have nicely documented developments in the internationalization of science and collaboration which raise important broader question. The traditional view, elaborated by Michael Polanyi, was that the transmission of science at the level of discaverers required personal contact, which normally inovolve time spent in laboratories of famous scientists, and hands-on experience with experiments and close interaction with collegues, which in turn implied a few international centres. Has this changed through digitalization and the internet? One change is the increase in teamwork and the size and physical distribution of research teams, the outsourcing to the larger world of "open science", as well as novel forms of funding of collaboration, which creates the need for new arrangements for patents and credit. The huge size of the grant system and other funding for science from discovery and internal competition to "impact", which has inevitable effects on quality and the life-world orientation of scientists. Whether this has improved science is an open question: it has radically changed it.

L. J. Henderson was a central figure in Harvard discussions of the nature of science in the interwar period and served as a bridge between the sciences and the social sciences. Two key ideas were promoted by Henderson: systems and conceptual schemes, both of which spread quickly at Harvard and then beyond. In this article the focus will be on conceptual schemes, a term which had a distinctive origin in Henderson that accounts for some of the ambiguities in its adaptations. Henderson spoke as a scientist speaking to philosophers rather than doing philosophy and sharply distinguished his aims from those that followed from Immanuel Kant. Henderson’s model was the scheme of ancient Greek medicine, which had persisted for millennia and was replaced by modern medicine. This was differentiated from earlier neo-Kantian and later Kuhnian variations. Henderson’s account was distinctive in placing the origins of conceptual schemes in intuitions about patterns formed in practice by people operating on concrete phenomena. The resulting schemes, he thought, had to be accepted on faith by students, but were, as he put it, walking sticks to enable communication and understanding rather than exclusive dogmas. Henderson was an enthusiast for Vilfredo Pareto, who was vilified at Harvard during the war by Carl J. Friedrich, which led not to the disuse of his ideas but to the erasure of their origins.

Axel Hägerström is one of the fairly few, if not the only, Swedish philosophers of international significance— yet, he remains in many ways unknown. A major contribution is his theory on the nature of norms and values, which came to be known as value-nihilism, celebrated by some and vehemently rejected by others: Hägerström was the first who formulated a noncognitivist moral theory and debate still continues about the exact significance, scope and implications of this theory. Together with Adolf Phalén, he was one of the two founders of the so-called Uppsala School. He was also the inspirational source of Scandinavian legal realism. Hägerström can be said to be a significant thinker for three reasons: An extraordinary interpreter of his own time, he left his mark on his contemporaries; his thought continues to suggest interesting and contrasting readings, which is indicated by the fact that he is repeatedly re-read by new generations of scholars; finally, he developed general categories that we still use today to understand the world we now live in. This volume collects seventeen chapters of leading experts on Hägerström's philosophical legacy as well as a number of translations of published as well as unpublished manuscripts, collected on occasion of the centenary of Hägerström's prolusion, 'On the Truth of Moral Ideas'.

Edward Shils’ and Michael Young’s “The Meaning of the Coronation,” took up crucial aspects of Shils’ thinking about differentiating types of social bonds, which led to his distinction between primordial, civil, and sacred bonds, and to his focus on center and periphery and the charisma of central institutions. The relation of these concepts to colonialism and post-colonialism is complex, but the reign and death of Elizabeth II illustrate them clearly. Colonial subjects responded to the same bonds, devised alternatives to them, and accepted the revisions represented by the Commonwealth after decolonization. But they also sought liberation from the colonized mind, and in doing so reconfirmed the centrality of the institutions they were attempting to liberate themselves from. Her death evoked dual reactions consistent with this problematic relation.

Hans Kelsen’s lack of impact on political theory in the United States has been a puzzle. Kelsen arrived at a time in which several influential political ideas competed, none of which were congenial to Kelsen’s approach, and some actively opposed to it. The narrative that relativism led to Nazism; the pragmatist rejection of the fact-value distinction; the return of natural law thinking at the University of Chicago; and a very specific conflict of perspectives at Harvard, are identified as key obstacles to the acceptance of Kelsen’s view of democracy. The most important of these was associated with Carl J. Friedrich, who repeatedly attacked Kelsen, both on Kantian and Schmittian grounds.