The Limits of Professionalism

Abstract

Some of you may have noticed a full-page ad in last week's New York Times Book Review, which announced that 1981 is the year you will discover the freedom of 'limits'. The ad was promoting a new book by Maxine Schnall, entitled Limits — A Search for New Values, and although I haven't had the chance to read it yet, I have no doubt that Ms Schnall has hit upon an issue that will occupy us increasingly in the years to come. Events and processes with which we are all at least superficially familiar have, in the past few years, compelled Western industrial and capitalist societies to reconsider the status of their own limits, and to revise the previously prevailing view of them as borders to be extended, or as externa] boundaries serving merely to establish the integrity of the areas they demarcate. The Limits of Growth', stands as just the most conspicuous symptom of this revision in our thinking about limits, in which we have come to conceive of them not as neutral and stable entities, but rather as-active, volatile and constraining factors that can no longer be taken for granted, factors which menace as much as they protect, or contain. This recent resurgence of the question of limits — entailing as it does a fundamental restructuring of power-relations on a world-wide scale — has, I think, been most conspicuous in North America, and above all in the United States, where for as long as most people care to remember limits have been conceived as provisional states in a process of continuous expansion, much like record performances in sports, which are there only to be exceeded at the next best occasion. If the motto of twentieth century America has been 'the sky's the limit', more and more Americans have come to discover that their sky is as close and as