Abstract
In this chapter, I will try to discuss what specific practices, intrinsic value bases, and spheres of competence should ideally characterize three of the most important and interrelated, but yet separate collective arenas or systems of authority that, in my view, still constitute the “necessities permanents” in modern liberal-democratic society: politics, systematic research or science, and public administration. I will further argue that precisely by strictly upholding and respecting their respective and specific normative systems and institutional practices, their separate and joint contributions to society will become optimal. I will also, at least, briefly touch upon the role played by modern media as a fundamentally new type of arena of authority in western democratic society and particularly what I consider to be its distorting impact on the existing, traditionally, democratically based systems of authority and power.
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Notes
- 1.
In my deliberations, I am leaving out the important arenas of economy/market and art.
- 2.
Politik als Beruf, the second lecture he was invited to give by the left-liberal students in Munich, was delivered in 1919. The first lecture, Wissenschaft als Beruf, he delivered already in 1917, below p. 25.
- 3.
When using the concepts “science” and “scientific,” I am referring to the German concept of “Wissenschaft,” which includes all fields of scientific and scholarly knowledge.
- 4.
The “Carema scandal” in Sweden (geriatric care), disclosed in November 2011, is a particularly instructive case.
- 5.
To better understand what this is all about, I recommended the passionate ideological defense of these “new entrepreneurial measures,” by one of its chief instigators (and incidentally also big profiteers) (Bergström 2011), when the total lack of substance and efficiency of these measures were exposed by one of “their own” (Hartman et al. 2011).
- 6.
Forum för levande historia (Forum for living history) was established in 2003 as a formal and normal central state agency, which “on behalf of the government” has the explicit and official task of “informing” the Swedish population of the history of genocide, discrimination, etc. in general, and of the Holocaust in particular.
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Nybom, T. (2013). Power, Knowledge, Morals: Society in the Age of Hybrid Research. In: Rider, S., Hasselberg, Y., Waluszewski, A. (eds) Transformations in Research, Higher Education and the Academic Market. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5249-8_2
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