The religious belief in rationality, science and democracy

Abstract

In this chapter, I will argue that academic practice or disciplines understood as part of the Enlightenment ideals — here represented by Jurgen Habermas’s communicative philosophy — must be contrasted with an understanding of ideals as normative regimes or imaginaries and how, then, academic practice must be reformulated as a historically and discursively based activity and set in the context of the late modern capitalistic society. I will focus attention on how the university as an institution is given a privileged position in society as a neutral provider of knowledge, expressed in the belief that technology and science will solve our fundamental problems, and as a democratic-moral corrective to the world outside — supposed to guarantee that political action is guided by knowledge, and that deeper and more encompassing scientific insights will provide a richer and truer picture of reality. The Enlightenment ideal, or understanding of modernity as a rationalizing process, has become one with Western, institutionalized science. I will discuss this problem complex by counterposing the image of modern academic institutions as a process of liberation through disciplinization and seen in light of our time's dogmas and fundamental beliefs: a free and open democratic polity, the free and just market economy and the autonomous pursuit of the truth called science (Wagner 1994). Common to these beliefs is a discourse of liberation which is tightly intertwined with a specific understanding of modernity.