Social science, professional authority, and citizenship

Sivaramakrishnan, Arvind (1988) Social science, professional authority, and citizenship. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

This is a thesis about the nature of political association, and approaches the question via an examination of questions raised by social work, psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and punishment. I have started by considering the possibility that the only response to conditions of moral and political pluralism is one based upon technical theories of human nature drawn from the social sciences. Then I have gone on to examine in detail the claims to knowledge which are entered by professionals in their fields I have listed above, and have attempted to show that their respective claims to technical expertise in the matters they cover cannot be substantiated. Further, I have argued that the issues over which the relevant professions attempt to claim authoritative judgement are inextricably moral and political in nature, and that the given professions are therefore entering untenable claims to moral and political authority. I have also attempted to repudiate the idea of the free market as the correct response to those untenable claims. The issues involved are among the central issues in western philosophy and political thought. These are questions in the philosophy of the social sciences, questions of moral and political authority, and of citizenship, the public realm, and political judgement. Among the contemporary thinkers I have drawn upon are Alasdair MacIntyre, Peter Winch, Anthony Duff, Raymond Plant, and Ronald Beiner. For the earlier philosophic background I have made reference to Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, as well as Arendt and Habermas. The thrust of my argument is that for citizens to abdicate major areas of moral and political life to those claiming technical expertise in those areas is to abdicate their own faculty of judgement and to free the professionals from the requirements of accountability. It follows that citizens must engage with moral, political, and technical issues if they are to retain anything more than abstract authority in the public realm. I conclude by arguing that this is the only way to sustain any substantial form of citizenship. (DX84038)

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