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LEO
BERSANI
ful; I will say in a moment for whom.) But do we find skeptical, dis–
passionate objectivity in such investigations? Skepticism can
be
a de–
vastating disposition of mind; I recommend to our sociologists a sum–
mer devoted to the reading of
Ecclesiastes
and the
Essays
of Mon–
taigne. But how much skepticism
is
there in Lipset's description of
"a back-lash opposition" (characteristic of "a kind of left-wing in–
tellectual
Poujadisme")
"to the very conception of the utility of ef–
forts at value-free objective scholarship in policy-relevant fields"? We
are encouraged, in advance, to ignore a possible contradiction be–
tween "value-free" and "policy-relevant" by the value-charged way
of referring to opposition to sc.holars working for the government: this
opposition
is
a "back-lash," it is
aPoujadisme."
Furthermore, "utility"
is
an admirable way of begging the question: what Lipset's so-called
Poujadistes
are objecting to is, of course, not the utility of govern–
ment-sponsored research (God knows it's useful), but rather its de–
sirability
and
the possibility of its being "value-free."
The advantage of some of our sociologists' "procedural norms"
is that they allow them to present prejudice as skepticism, commit–
ment as detachment. The norms must be preserved not for the sake
of "truth," but because they constitute the defenses
of
a system of
intolerance. Lipset writes: "For those students inclined to the left–
who knew not Stalin, the Hungarian Revolution, or the Berlin Wall–
the Vietnam issue became defined in terms that placed American
actions at odds with a basic democratic belief - the right to self–
determination of politically weak peoples." How different this sen–
tence would be without "who knew not Stalin, the Hungarian Rev–
olution, or the Berlin Wall"! Are we not being asked to rephrase the
sentence in order to get its true message? - that is:
aIf
the students
had known Stalin, they might
not
have defined Vietnam as at odds
with a basic democratic belief." The awesome shrewdness of the sen–
tence consists in a structural arrangement which presents the words
designed to create an attitude as merely another piece of objective
information in a series which includes the information about the stu–
dents' attitude toward Vietnam: it is, after all, a
fact
that our students
are too young to have "known" Stalin, etc. On the other hand, the
sentence
wants
to denounce its own appearance and reveal itself as
persuasive. The only element of personal "style" in the sentence
is
"knew not" instead of "didn't know" or "did not know." And
this
