ArticlePDF Available

The Political and the Epistemic in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives

Authors:

Abstract

Historical studies on the relationship between knowledge and politics have mostly focused on the narrower interplay between scientific knowledge and political institutions: the role of experts and advisors in policy making or the impact of the modern state on scientific institutions, theories, practices, and projects. Borrowing from Foucauldian discourse analysis, others have departed from the constitutive interrelationship between knowledge and power in order to reconstruct the epistemic regimes of governmentality. Taking up recent accounts in political theory, such as those by Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, we argue for an antifoundationalist understanding of both the political and the epistemic beyond institutionalized frameworks. The distinction between science, knowledge, and the realm of the political is thus not imbued with a clear-cut dividing line; instead, the relationship is characterized by ongoing and contested boundary work performed by various actors with different resources, strategies, intentions, and interests. The historically shifting scope of the political relies on contested fields and foundations of knowledge, and vice versa. For a more thorough understanding of the political aspects of knowledge production and circulation we therefore suggest considering the nonfoundational and agonistic conditions in which knowledge emerges in an ever-changing power play of forms and social contexts.
The Political and the Epistemic in the
Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives
kijan espahangizi, university of zurich, switzerland
monikawulz,ethzurich,switzerland
In 1934, the french philosopher and historian of science
Gaston Bachelard argued that objectivity cannot be separated
from the social aspects of proof.
1
With his socialized perspective
on scientic knowledge, Bachelard, along with many others during
this period, questioned the idea of a linear progression toward uni-
versal truths and highlighted the conventional nature of objectivity.
By shifting the focus to the intersubjectivity and social practice of
knowledge production, epistemology converged with social theories.
Moreover, epistemological considerations gained a new, specically
political, dimension that did not conate with the notorious rela-
tionship between knowledge and power or the long-standing histor-
ical entanglements between science and politics. When, in the rst
half of the twentieth century, modern epistemology began to con-
sider scientic knowledge as an outcome of social interactions, ne-
gotiations, controversies, critique, agreements, values, norms, rup-
tures, and even revolutions, it forced a reevaluation of that knowledge
through the lens of the political. This new perspective was not lim-
ited to a mere understanding of the exchange between scientic
©2020 the university of chicago. all rights reserved. know v4n2, fall 2020
research and its societal environment or of the mundane external
interests that entered into scientic research;
2
it was aimed at a
deeper levelhow science itself works as a contested social practice.
The new epistemologies thus hinted not only at different political
conceptions of the social condition of knowledge but also at political
theories aimed at specifying the role of knowledge in society.
3
Recent works in political theory emphasize the distinction be-
tween a narrower understanding of politics as a set of institutional-
ized procedures and conventionsincluding political parties, govern-
mental institutions, and electionsthat organize and pacify the contest
of power within a polity and a wider notion of the political,which
highlights a broader eld of agonisticsocial interactions, which means
the conicting interests that constitute the public in the rst place
and provide the shifting ground on which naturalized conventional
politics are able to take hold.
4
From that point of view, the social the-
ories of knowledge that emerged in the rst half of the twentieth cen-
tury reveal the intrinsically political dimensions of scienticreason-
ing.
5
Especially with the development of relativity theory and quantum
physics, science as such could no longer depend on the philosophical
underpinnings of universal naturalism as it had before: the notion of
a self-contained natural world lost its appeal, as well as its power to
stand as the ultimate nonpartisan judge in scientic disputes. Even
experimentation, the stronghold of modern scientic inquiry into the
natural, turned out to be based on reied theory, materialized human
perception, and expectations conditioned on and by social interac-
tions.
6
By jostling its own ontological foundations, scientic reason-
ing increasingly revealed itself as a rather mundane heterogenous land-
scape of conicting styles of thought,
7
socially rooted paradigms
(and other forms of intellectual hegemony), and situated struggles
over the theories, models, experiments, instruments, and materials to
be used in scientic practice. In those struggles, the boundaries of
science were demarcated to the nonscientic, culture, politics, and
know: a journal on the formation of knowledge
162
pseudoscience.
8
This politicized understanding of scientic inquiry
shaped a new social epistemology that emerged at the beginning of
the twentieth century, in response to an era of political revolutions,
industrialized warfare mobilizing techno-scientic knowledge, and
deep societal transformation. Conversely, social epistemology also
provided a valuable point of reference for political theorists as they
struggled with the intellectual consequences of World War I, in par-
ticular. The heated disputes over the political and economic founda-
tions of society and the role of knowledge in society and the economy
thus were interrelated.
Since the interwar period, French social epistemologists such as
Bachelard, early neoliberals and related thinkers such as Karl Popper
and Michael Polanyi, pragmatists such as John Dewey, and sociologists
such as Robert K. Merton (and his normativist approaches to scientic
values) continued to radically rearrange the relationship between the
epistemicand the politicalon an antifoundationalist basis. In all
of these variations, notions of the political informed perceptions of
the epistemic and vice versa in an attempt to mutually restabilize
not only these spheres but also the shaken foundations of modern so-
ciety. The ways in which the relationship between the epistemic and
the political were interpreted, however, varied widely, giving birth
especially after World War IIto a vast interdisciplinary eld of re-
search on the relationships between science, knowledge, politics, and
policy.
More recent historical studies on the relationship between the ep-
istemic and the political have mostly focused on the narrower inter-
play between scientic knowledge and the modern state as a con-
densed locus of political power, including the role of experts and
advisors in policy making and governance within broader structures
of the scientization of the socialthat emerged in the nineteenth
century.
9
On the ip side, historians have also analyzed the impact
of the modern state on scientic institutions, theories, practices,
fall 2020
163
and projects from early biopolitics to planned economies, from dem-
ocratic to totalitarian regimes, from big science to big data.
10
Borrow-
ing from Foucauldian discourse analysis, others depart from the con-
stitutive interrelationship between knowledge and power in order to
reconstruct the historical genealogies of epistemic regimes that shape
the conditions of possibility for scientic inquiry as well as public dis-
course, political life, state agency, and, ultimately, governmentality.
11
Since the 1970s and 1980s, feminist, postcolonial, and environmen-
talist approaches, including within science and technology studies,
have decentered hegemonic knowledge regimes by focusing on the
role of marginalized forms of knowledge beyond established scientic
and political institutions and by emphasizing the sociopolitical situated-
ness of all knowledge claims.
12
These approaches have heightened
awareness for the difference between the plural, heterotopic, and con-
tested eld of the epistemic and those privileged institutions and en-
terprises of knowledge production such as the sciences that become
hegemonic in certain historical contexts. Moreover, recent historical
studies address the variety of nongovernmental epistemic actors,
including think tanks and individual initiatives, engaged in power
plays with state institutions and the media since the 1970s.
13
It comes
as no surprise that, in that same period of the 1970s and 1980s, polit-
ical theorists also grappled with a more decentered line of thinking:
thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau,
and Chantal Mouffe argued for an antifoundationalist understand-
ing of the political beyond institutionalized frameworks.
14
The dis-
tinction they make between politics and the political parallels the
distinction between institutionalized forms of knowledge such as sci-
ence and what we propose to call the epistemic: the both nonfounda-
tional and agonistic conditions in which knowledge emerges in an
ever-changing multitude of forms and social contexts.
By bringing together the theoretical debates on social epistemol-
ogy and the political, the scope of historical research simultaneously
know: a journal on the formation of knowledge
164
broadens and deepens, by going beyond a mere analysis of the entan-
glements of seemingly preexisting separate spheres such as science
and politics or science and the state. In a Latourian move, it instead
departs from the underlying question of how these spheres were con-
strued and demarcated as separate entities. Other than Latour, how-
ever, an interest in the emergence of the epistemic within the political
goes beyond determining the participants in a parliament of things.
15
Instead, it implies a focus on the epistemic not as a merely deliber-
ative space but as an arena of contesting and conicting knowledge
claims. What social practices, institutions, values, and representations
form part of the realm of the political respective to the epistemic,and
which do not in certain historical contexts? How does the epistemic
constitution of the political as well as the political constitution of the
epistemic change over time and across different geographical areas?
The political can thus be traced in the interactions and debates be-
tween different actors and claims of knowledge involved in dening
the realm of the political, such as social scientists, economists, politi-
cians, citizens, and civil rights movements.
16
The historically shift-
ing scope of the political relies on contested elds and foundations
of knowledge. Jacques Rancière coined the term disagreementfor
the entanglement of understanding and nonunderstanding in what
makes social interactions a political sphere.
17
Whereas Rancière re-
peatedly pointed to the aesthetic dimensions of disagreement, a focus
on its epistemic dimensionsthe both antifoundational and antago-
nistic status of knowledge as part of the emergence of the political
is equally important.
Inasmuch as the political is understood as a space of (dis)agree-
ment, shifting not only in concert with the different actors that engage
in it but also with the different epistemic practices, concepts, methods,
and theories in which it is shaped, the epistemic cannot be separated
from the political sphere since it is, in ways of both practice and the-
ory, involved in creating the space of the political, and vice versa.
18
A
fall 2020
165
perspective on instances of knowledge in the political (as a realm of
controversies) thus teaches us to consider the coproduction of knowl-
edge and the political within its competing, antagonistic, and discrim-
inatory relationships. The distinctions between science, knowledge,
and the realm of the political are thus not imbued with a clear-cut di-
viding line; instead, the relationship is characterized by ongoing and
contested boundary work performed by various actors with different
resources, strategies, intentions, and interests. Which strategies and
practices allow for the presentation of a certain kind of knowledge
as neutral, objective, and unpolitical? And, conversely, why is dis-
senting knowledge often understood as politically biased? Knowl-
edge involves a political dimension insofar as it can be situated in
the controversial interactions and struggles surrounding the episte-
mic foundations within which it emerges.
Examining the political dimension of knowledge thus implies an
empirical engagement with the controversies and frictions involved
in the emergence and implementation of knowledge regimes and an
analysis of the conditions under which different epistemologies and
knowledge claims compete: What are the resources, networks, and in-
stitutional afliations that competing epistemologies rely on? What
are the practices and strategies of gaining relevance, attention, or in-
uence in the scientic realm, in the political world, or on a broader
social level? Which discriminatory effects are caused by specicepi-
stemic agendas? A history-of-knowledge perspective can add to our
understanding of the changing and contested history of the distinc-
tion between knowledge and the political. It can make us aware that
this demarcation is part of a history of epistemic practices and strat-
egies in which both the realms of knowledge and of the political take
shape. By analyzing histories of antagonistic and competitive forms
of knowledge, it becomes possible to paint a more detailed picture
of not only the relations between the epistemic and the political but
know: a journal on the formation of knowledge
166
also of the inherently political strategies involved in the boundary
work of knowledge regimes.
In this special issue we are interested in the reconguration of the
political and the epistemic since the interwar period and especially
after World War II.
19
In a series of case studies, we look at different
sites and actors in which this broader process is situated, from early
think tanksand public debates to expert commissions and interna-
tional organizations. The articles focus in particular on knowledge
from the social sciences in the political sphere, including sociologi-
cal and epistemological knowledge, economic knowledge, and polit-
ical science.
20
The case studies reect two main axes across which
the relationship between the epistemic and the political was shaped
during this period: rst, the denition of both what ought to be the
object of political deliberation within institutionalized politics or civil
societyand what ought to be the object of technocratic governance
decisions based on scientic knowledge and expert commissions (and
was therefore withdrawn from the political); second, the debate be-
tween the two models of economic life in modern societynamely,
the ideal type of a centrally planned state-centered society based on
aggregated technocratic knowledge and the ideal type of liberal soci-
ety in which knowledge is produced and distributed according to a de-
centralized market-based model. According to Martin Beddeleem, early
neoliberalthought emerged out of the controversies surrounding
precisely this latter dichotomy in the 1930s. In his article, he argues
that intellectuals active in private institutions—“think tanksavant la
lettresuch as the Mont-Pèlerin Society were inspired by the sociolog-
ical understanding of scientic practice developed by Michael Polanyi
and others. Since the 1930s, scholars were no longer able to build on
the naturalist certainties of nineteenth-century liberalism, and thus
this new way of thinking provided an authoritative model with which
to rethink the design of a free societyas an antidote to centralized
fall 2020
167
state-planned economies. Ultimately, the crisis of liberalism after
World War I was a crisis not only of political legitimacy but also
of liberalisms underlying philosophical assumptions about the na-
ture of man, state, commerce, science, common sense, and society.
Instead of departing from God-given rules or an axiomatic natural phi-
losophy, social epistemology understood the production of knowledge
as an open-ended, contested practice based on social interactions, ne-
gotiations, man-made conventions, and historically established forms
of dispute resolution, of settling (dis)agreements. This approach also
seemed to allow for an antifoundationalist view on the epistemic as
well as on the political, providing a strategy for arguing for the free-
domof science in the framework of deliberative politics.
Benno Nietzels study on propaganda strategy expertise moves the
focus toward a consideration of the role of political knowledge in arm-
ing nation-states during World War II. His article demonstrates how
knowledge on popular opinion deployed by state intelligence agen-
cies traveled between peacetime civil politics and the antagonistic
eld of the political in the context of a military conict. By highlight-
ing not only the embeddedness of civil politics in the political but
also the efforts of civilian experts to stand out and distinguish them-
selves in military contexts, Nietzel points to the rising relevance of so-
cial science expertise in the politics of the Cold War.
Zoé Kergomards article on debates surrounding voter abstention
in Switzerland in the second half of the twentieth century illustrates
how expert knowledge produced by political scientists played a crucial
role in demarcating the political within the eld of legitimate politics.
After World War II, decreasing voter turnout was interpreted as popular
fatigue and a retreat from politics. The new social movements emerging
in the 1960s and 1970s, however, strengthened a consciousness for the
political outside of politics.By shifting the epistemic constitution of
the political through activist knowledge, voter abstention could subse-
quently be interpreted as the exact opposite of depoliticization and
know: a journal on the formation of knowledge
168
postdemocracy”—namely, a repoliticization of what had been de-
politicized in the name of institutionalized politics.
In their article, Eric Hounshell and Verena Halsmayer reconstruct
the public debate between leading economists of the 1960s and 1970s
on questions of economic growth policies, state intervention, and con-
sumerism. Their article illustrates that the basic methodological ques-
tion of how to practice economics determines whether the economy is
perceived either as a realm governed by quantiable laws from which
state policies can be developed or as an object of the political and thus
a social space open to interpretation, controversy, negotiation, objec-
tion, and conict. The public debate between John K. Galbraith, Robert
M. Solow, and Robin Marris shows how expertise and counterexper-
tise competed for inuence in a deliberative mode of the political and
how their debate on economic methodologies participated in reden-
ing and reconguring the sphere of the political itself.
In his article, Pascal Germann analyzes the history of quality of life
research and policy since the 1970s. The shift from economic growth
to quality of life as the primary goal of politics, promoted by interna-
tional organizations such as the Organization for Economic Coopera-
tion and Development, also required an epistemic reconguration of
the political. In the aftermath of the social movements of the 1960s
and 1970s, the focus on objectivemacroeconomic indicators such as
gross domestic product growth was challenged by the demand for
social indicators that also acknowledged the subjectivedimension
of well-being in economic development. From this angle, the knowl-
edge and perception of individual citizens and social collectives be-
came an asset for political negotiations among different institutional
players.
Picking up on the question of good government, Felix Römer an-
alyzes the changing knowledge regimes on economic inequality in the
United Kingdom, from the postwar welfare state to Thatcherism. He
focuses on statistics as a site of the coproduction of knowledge and
fall 2020
169
politics, triggering debates among diverse actors from governmental
and party-political players to nongovernmental associations, academ-
ics, and the public. The actual interactions between those players re-
veal that a space for the political opens up precisely within the pro-
cesses of making and using inequality knowledge as part of creating
or withdrawing welfare policies.
The empirical case studies in this special issue highlight the emer-
gence of the political as part of epistemic processes in the twentieth cen-
tury: they demonstrate not only that knowledge plays a role in twentieth-
century political regimes but that, alongside the political debates, the
foundations of knowledgeits methodological, institutional, and con-
ceptional frameworkswere also at stake. Embracing an antifounda-
tionalist understanding of knowledge, the emergence of the political is
thus connected to controversies, negotiations, and recongurations
regarding the epistemic, and vice versa. The history of the twentieth
and twenty-rst centuries provides a multiplicity of stories that invite
us to take a closer look at the shifts, frictions, and resonances of the
political and the epistemic and which also lead us to the epistemic as
much as political challenges of the present, including issues such as
dealing with fake news,digitalization, or the contested role of ex-
pertise in debates on climate change or pandemics.
know: a journal on the formation of knowledge
170
Notes
1. Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientic Spirit (1934; repr., Boston: Beacon,
1984), 12.
2. See, e.g., the notion of political epistemology,the subject of a work-
shop series at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin in
2016/17: The term political epistemologyhighlights the role that social and
normative conditionspolitical, economic, culturalplay in knowledge produc-
tion and exchange.”“Political Epistemologies,workshop description, Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science, http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
/page/political-epistemology.
3. Gary Werskey, The Visible College: The Collective Biography of British Scientic
Socialists of the 1930s (New York: Holt, Rinehardt & Winston, 1978); Hans-Jörg
Rheinberger, On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2010); Mary Jo Nye, Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the
Social Construction of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Johannes
Fehr, “‘...The art of shaping a democratic reality and being directed by it ...’—
Philosophy of Science in Turbulent Times,Studies in East European Thought
64 (2012): 8189; Michael Hagner, Perception, Knowledge and Freedom in
the Age of Extremes: On the Historical Epistemology of Ludwig Fleck and
Michael Polanyi,Studies in East European Thought 64 (2012): 10720; Martin
Beddeleem, Recoding Liberalism: Philosophy and Sociology of Science against
Planning,in Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, ed. Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian,
and Philip Mirowski (London: Verso, 2020).
4. Agonisticis a term used in recent political theory that underscores the
importance of conict as the driving force of political processes in general and
especially in pluralist democracies. This approach differs from liberal models
of deliberation that depart from a teleology of conict resolution as well as from
171
antagonistic models of politics based on irreconcilable friend-foe distinctions
in the tradition of Carl Schmitt. Because of this agonist perspective, conicts
are ongoing and not necessarily solvable. They are, however, based on a certain
mutual recognition of the actors and interests involved as legitimate partici-
pants in the arena of the political. See, e.g., Chantal Mouffe, On the Political
(London: Routledge, 2005); Oliver Marchart, Post-foundational Political Thought:
Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2007). See also the review of Marcharts book by James
Martin in Contemporary Political Theory 8 (2009): 11315.
5. Bruno Latour, Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,
Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986):
140, at 13.
6. Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientic Mind: A Contribution to a Psy-
choanalysis of Objective Knowledge, trans. Mary McAllester (orig. 1938; Manchester:
Clinamen, 2002), 239.
7. Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientic Fact (1935; Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1979).
8. Thomas F. Gieryn, Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from
Non-science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,Amer-
ican Sociological Review 48, no. 6 (1983): 78195. See also, e.g., Michael D. Gordin,
The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
9. Lutz Raphael, Die Verwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen als methodische
und konzeptionelle Herausforderung für eine Sozialgeschichte des 20.
Jahrhunderts,Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (1996): 16593. See, e.g., Mark
Solovey, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War
America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013).
10. The literature on these topics is vast; see, e.g., Peter Galison, Big Science:
The Growth of Large-Scale Research (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992);
Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Mark Solovey and Hamilton
Cravens, eds., Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy,
and Human Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Loren R. Graham,
Lysenkos Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2016); Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard F. Wetzell, eds., Beyond the
Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017).
know: a journal on the formation of knowledge
172
11. Foucaults work on the order of things as well as on the history of sexual-
ity, the clinic, and architectures of punishment has been inuential in this re-
gard, as are his lectures at the Collège de France on governmentality.
12. See, e.g., Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in
Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,Feminist Studies 14, no. 3
(1988): 57599; Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction
of Scientic Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 16501900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007); Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Re-
gime (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). See also Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power
and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
13. See, e.g., Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a
Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global
Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010); Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). For perspectives on counter-
knowledgein the 1970s and 1980s, see Max Stadler, Nils Güttler, Niki Rhyner,
et al., GegenFWissen (5cache 01) (Zurich: intercom, 2020).
14. Mouffe, On the Political; Marchart, Post-foundational Political Thought.
15. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
16. See, e.g., Kijan Espahangizi, Migration Research and Epistemic Partici-
pation: A Case Study on the Sociology of Foreign Workersin Zurich in the
1970s,in Urban Citizenship: Democratizing Democracy, ed. Katharina Morawek
and Martin Krenn (Vienna: VfmK, 2017), 11231, and The Sociologicof
Postmigration: A Study in the Early History of Social Research on Migration and
Integration in Switzerland, 196073,in Switzerland and Migration: Historical and
Current Perspectives on a Changing Landscape, ed. Barbara Lüthi and Damir
Skenderovic (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 3359.
17. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1999).
18. Studies such as Audra Wolfe, Freedoms Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle
for the Soul of Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); George
Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Nye, Michael Polanyi and His
Generation present remarkable examples of the mutual reconguration of the
political and the epistemic in the twentieth century. For epistemology in relation
to politics in the 1970s and 1980s, see also Max Stadler and Monika Wulz,
Neben Feyerabend: Wissenschaftsforschung neokonservativ,in Nach
fall 2020
173
Feierabend: Zürcher Jahrbuch für Wissensgeschichte 15 (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2020);
and for accounts regarding more recent debates, see Gil Eyal, The Crisis of Exper-
tise (Cambridge: Polity, 2019); Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science? (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2019).
19. The idea for this special issue began at a conference, Political Culture
and the History of Knowledge: Actors, Institutions, Practices,in June 2019 in
Washington, DC, co-organized by Simone Lässig and Kerstin von der Krone
(German Historical Institute, Washington, DC), Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer
(Stefanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of
Chicago), and Monika Wulz, Nils Güttler, and Kijan Espahangizi (Center History
of Knowledgeat the ETH Zurich and University of Zurich). For the conference
report, see http://www.ghi-dc.org/events/event/date/political-culture-and-the
-history-of-knowledge-actors-institutions-practices-06-06-2019. We would like to
thank Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer and Jodi Haraldson, lead editor and managing edi-
tor of KNOW, respectively, for their support with this special issue in the chal-
lenging times sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Julia Sittmann for
her support in copyediting the texts.
20. Of course, other elds are also very relevant for studying the relation-
ship between the political and the epistemicsuch as legal studies (Monika
Dommann, Kijan Espahangizi, and Svenja Goltermann, eds., Wissen was Recht
ist,in Nach Feierabend: Zürcher Jahrbuch für Wissensgeschichte 11 [Zurich:
Diaphanes, 2015]), technology studies, and aesthetics, as one can see in the pre-
viously mentioned work of Jacques Rancière, for example.
know: a journal on the formation of knowledge
174
... To that end, it seems prudent to understand how one develops epistemic regimes-patterns and/or systems of ideologies, philosophies, and other thought patterns and knowledge traditions, by which people know or believe they know. Put another way, epistemic regimes are the arrangements and the practices of knowledge production combined with the social structures in which these practices are carried out-the collective marketplace of ideas where individuals and groups hammer out what is real or is not real and/or factual (Brooks, 2020;Espahangizi & Wulz, 2020;Gläser et al., 2018). ...
Article
Full-text available
Students in teacher education programs are often faced with perceived threats to their epistemological heritages. According to System Justification Theory, when faced with these perceived threats, individuals may become more defensive, epistemically resistant, and cognitively rigid. More specifically, due to a palliative psychological need, students may become motivated to justify what they conceive of as the status quo, or system justifications, to defend their episte-mological heritage and socializations. Students may face perceived threats to their social and epistemological heritages in courses which are critically focused, such as foundations of education courses, and courses where there are requirements for both dialogical and dialec-tical engagement. System Justification Theory offers the potential to be utilized as a way of understanding student teachers' epistemologi-cal resistance and epistemic vices while informing teacher educators' pedagogy.
... Wie das Beispiel der Ausstellung zeigt, gilt dies auch für die veränderte Wahrnehmung der Menschheitsgeschichte als eine Geschichte von Wanderungen. Der popularisierte Befund, dass Migration einen universalhistorischen »Normalfall« (Bade und Oltmer 2004) darstellt, kann jedoch selbst als Gegenstand einer Zeitgeschichte verstanden werden, die zunehmend in den Horizont geschichtswissenschaftlicher Forschung rückt (Espahangizi 2018 (Espahangizi und Wulz 2020), in dem sich der neue Migrationsdiskurs in der Schweiz ab den 1980er Jahren maßgeblich formierte ------------6 Der vorliegende Aufsatz steht im Kontext eines größeren Forschungsprojekts zu dieser Frage. ...
Article
Der Artikel setzt sich mit dem Aufkommen des Begriffs Migration in der Schweiz zwischen Ende der 1980er und Mitte der 1990er Jahre auseinander. Durch eine dichte Beschreibung epistemischer und sozialer Zusammenhänge wird das Entstehen eines neuen Migrationsdiskurses rekonstruiert, der die Wahrnehmung von und Umgang mit grenzüberschreitender Mobilität in der Schweiz nachhaltig geprägt hat. In den politischen Debatten und Aushandlungsprozessen zwischen staatlichen Behörden, Sozialwissenschaften, Hilfswerken, Kirchen, politischen Parteien, zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationen und ›Betroffenen‹ im Untersuchungszeitraum wurden verschiedene Aspekte und Wissensbereiche im Namen der ›Migration‹ neu zusammengebracht und reorganisiert, allen voran die Bereiche Asyl und Arbeit, aber auch Demografie, Entwicklung, Integration und Kultur. Bis Mitte der 1990er Jahre entwickelte der neue Migrationsdiskurs eine Eigendynamik, aus der heraus zeitgenössische Akteure anfingen, die Schweiz als ›Migrationsgesellschaft‹ wahrzunehmen. Mit der Fallstudie zur Schweiz leistet der Artikel einen Beitrag zur allgemeineren Debatte, wie die Geschichte von Migrationsregimen geschrieben werden kann.
... Wie das Beispiel der Ausstellung zeigt, gilt dies auch für die veränderte Wahrnehmung der Menschheitsgeschichte als eine Geschichte von Wanderungen. Der popularisierte Befund, dass Migration einen universalhistorischen »Normalfall« (Bade und Oltmer 2004) darstellt, kann jedoch selbst als Gegenstand einer Zeitgeschichte verstanden werden, die zunehmend in den Horizont geschichtswissenschaftlicher Forschung rückt (Espahangizi 2018 (Espahangizi und Wulz 2020), in dem sich der neue Migrationsdiskurs in der Schweiz ab den 1980er Jahren maßgeblich formierte ------------6 Der vorliegende Aufsatz steht im Kontext eines größeren Forschungsprojekts zu dieser Frage. ...
Article
Full-text available
Zusammenfassung Der Artikel setzt sich mit dem Aufkommen des Begriffs Migration in der Schweiz zwischen Ende der 1980er und Mitte der 1990er Jahre auseinander. Durch eine dichte Beschreibung epistemischer und sozialer Zusammenhänge wird das Entstehen eines neuen Migrationsdiskurses rekonstruiert, der die Wahrnehmung von und Umgang mit grenzüberschreitender Mobilität in der Schweiz nachhaltig geprägt hat. In den politischen Debatten und Aushand-lungsprozessen zwischen staatlichen Behörden, Sozialwissenschaften, Hilfs-werken, Kirchen, politischen Parteien, zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationen und ›Betroffenen‹ im Untersuchungszeitraum wurden verschiedene Aspekte und Wissensbereiche im Namen der ›Migration‹ neu zusammengebracht und reorganisiert, allen voran die Bereiche Asyl und Arbeit, aber auch Demogra-fie, Entwicklung, Integration und Kultur. Bis Mitte der 1990er Jahre entwi-ckelte der neue Migrationsdiskurs eine Eigendynamik, aus der heraus zeit-genössische Akteure anfingen, die Schweiz als ›Migrationsgesellschaft‹ wahrzunehmen. Mit der Fallstudie zur Schweiz leistet der Artikel einen Bei-trag zur allgemeineren Debatte, wie die Geschichte von Migrationsregimen geschrieben werden kann. Abstract The article deals with the emergence of the concept of migration in Switzer-land between the late 1980s and mid-1990s. By providing a thick description of epistemic and social contexts, the author reconstructs the emergence of a new discourse on migration which shaped the perception and regulation of cross-border mobility in Switzerland. In the debates and political negotiation processes between state authorities, social sciences, aid agencies, churches, political parties, civil society organizations and ›affected persons‹, various aspects and areas of knowledge were brought together and reorganized in the name of ›migration‹, above all asylum and labor, but also demography, development, integration and culture. By the mid-1990s, the new discourse on ›migration‹ had developed such a momentum that contemporary actors began to perceive Switzerland as a ›migration society‹. With this case study on Switzerland, the article contributes to the more general debate of how to write the history of migration regimes.
Chapter
The article traces the formation of local actor networks in Switzerland that engaged for the integration of foreign workers and their families between the mid-1960s and 1970s, and thus have shaped Switzerland’s integration policy until today. The example of Zurich is used to show how these networks were able to develop in the context of polarised public debates about foreign workers, immigration and ‘Überfremdung’, both on the basis of new forms of social interaction between ‘Swiss and foreigners’ and shared ideas of social inclusion as well. Sociological knowledge, Christian values, social liberal approaches and left-wing solidarity culture converged and reinforced each other. The article also shows that the emergence and work of Zurich’s local networks of integration were constitutively linked to international debates and organisations and were increasingly reflected at the national level.
Book
Full-text available
Am Beispiel des Frankfurter Flughafens untersucht »Nach der Natur« die Rolle von Wissenschaft in den ökologischen Krisen des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. Das Rhein-Main-Gebiet ist heute eine der ökologisch besterforschten Regionen der Welt. Maßgeblichen Anteil hat daran eines der größten Umweltprobleme vor Ort: der Frankfurter Flughafen. Die historischen Wechselwirkungen von Umwelt, Wissen und Politik stehen im Zentrum von »Nach der Natur«. Am Beispiel des größten deutschen Flughafens beschreibt es soziale Konflikte und gesellschaftliche Räume, in denen Wissen über Umwelt seit dem frühen 20. Jahrhundert verhandelt und wirksam wurde. Viele Wissensbestände wurden zuerst im Flughafen produziert, bevor die Umweltbewegung sie sich aneignete und gegen den Flughafen in Stellung brachte. Der Flughafen hat somit im Laufe der Geschichte die Möglichkeit seiner eigenen Kritik geschaffen. "Nach der Natur" ist mehr als eine Fallstudie. Das Buch liefert weitreichende Erkenntnisse über den gesellschaftspolitischen Ort von Umweltwissen als Infrastrukturwissen und versteht sich als historischer Beitrag zur aktuellen Debatte um die Klimakrise und das Anthropozän.
Article
Full-text available
Zusammenfassung Im März 1986 veranstalteten verschiedene ‚ökologiebewegte‘ Institutionen in Heidelberg ein öffentliches Fachsymposion mit dem Titel „Die ungeklärten Gefahrenpotentiale der Gentechnologie“, auf dem internationale Wissenschaftler*innen unterschiedlichster Disziplinen referierten. Anhand dieses Fachsymposions zeigt der Artikel, wie sich das öffentliche Auftreten von Wissenschaftler*innen als eine Form von politischem Aktivismus lesen lässt. Anhand dieser Perspektive wird herausgearbeitet, wie Biolog*innen, Chemiker*innen, Mediziner*innen, Rechts- und Politikwissenschaftler*innen politische Botschaften zu platzieren suchten, indem sie sich gerade als unabhängige Wissenschaftler*innen in Szene setzten. Das Heidelberger Fachsymposion, so die vertretene These, war darum beides: ein Ort der Wissenschaftsvermittlung und der politischen Agitation, und das in einer Zeit, da die schwarz-gelbe Bundesregierung an einer Gentechnikgesetzgebung arbeitete und auf unabhängige Expertisen angewiesen war. Der Beitrag macht deutlich, wie der Rekurs auf wissenschaftliche Unabhängigkeit zu einer Strategie in der kontroversen Debatte um den Einsatz von Gentechnik wurde. Er nimmt dabei eine Dimension politisch-wissenschaftlicher Aktivität in den Blick, die das in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte etablierte Expert*innen-Konzept nicht berücksichtigt.
Article
Full-text available
Zusammenfassung Mit der Nachfrage nach „Gegenwissen“ in den sozialen Bewegungen der 1970er und 1980er Jahre wurden „Gegenexpert*innen“ zu einem integralen Bestandteil der Umwelt- und Gesundheitspolitik. Im Umweltbereich waren sie besonders in den ökologisch stark belasteten Industrieregionen und Ballungsgebieten aktiv. Das regionalistische Problembewusstsein der Gegenexpert*innen korrelierte, so die These des Aufsatzes, mit einem Modus von Wissenschaft, der für die Umweltwissenschaften im 20. Jahrhundert insgesamt typisch war. Die Geschichte der Umweltwissenschaften war über das gesamte 20. Jahrhundert hinweg eine Geschichte regionaler Epistemologien. Die Gegenexpert*innen waren aus dem nahräumig formatierten und infrastrukturnahen Feld des Umweltwissens bald nicht mehr wegzudenken. Der Aufsatz rekonstruiert, ausgehend von jeweils einer Publikation, drei umweltpolitische Projekte von Gegenexpert*innen im Rhein-Main-Gebiet um 1980: das Engagement des Umweltpfarrers Kurt Oeser; der epistemische Aktivismus der Gründungsgrünen Jutta Ditfurth; sowie das Programm einer „sozialen Naturwissenschaft“ im Umfeld des Darmstädter Wissenschaftsphilosophen Gernot Böhme.
Book
Full-text available
Relocating Modern Science challenges the belief that modern science was created uniquely in the West and was subsequently diffused elsewhere. Through a detailed analysis of key moments in the history of science, it demonstrates the crucial roles of circulation and intercultural encounter for their emergence.
Origins of the 11. Foucault's work on the order of things as well as on the history of sexuality, the clinic, and architectures of punishment has been
  • Mary Jo Nye
  • Michael Polanyi
  • His Generation
Mary Jo Nye, Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the 11. Foucault's work on the order of things as well as on the history of sexuality, the clinic, and architectures of punishment has been influential in this regard, as are his lectures at the Collège de France on governmentality. 12. See, e.g., Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in
Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-99;
See also Miranda Fricker
  • Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). See also Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
For perspectives on "counterknowledge" in the 1970s and 1980s, see Max Stadler, Nils Güttler
  • Thomas Medvetz
Thomas Medvetz, Think Tanks in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). For perspectives on "counterknowledge" in the 1970s and 1980s, see Max Stadler, Nils Güttler, Niki Rhyner, et al., GegenFWissen (5 cache 01) (Zurich: intercom, 2020).
On the Political; Marchart, Post-foundational Political Thought
  • Mouffe
Mouffe, On the Political; Marchart, Post-foundational Political Thought.