Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The elite basis of scientific knowledge is traceable to the Greeks. Plato treated knowledge as a principle of social stratification that is distributed as talents across the population. Accordingly, education is about discovering the social role or function for which one has been biologically endowed. In a highly differentiated society, all such roles are “elite” in that a select few can play them well. The distinctiveness of science for Plato is that its form of knowledge makes one, at least in principle, fit to rule society as a whole. It is worth contrasting Aristotle's somewhat different view of the situation. He shared Plato's views about genetically based individual differences but treated the capacity to rule as a general talent common to those whose families have a proven track record of estate management. For Aristotle, science was “elite” in the sense of a leisure activity that such people should undertake, much like sports, once they have attended to matters of the estate. Both Plato's and Aristotle's perspectives on the elite nature of science underwent significant change in the modern period, especially as science metamorphosed from a specialized mental discipline to the basis of technological innovation and society's infrastructure. Yet, relatively pure versions of these classical views have persisted. On the one hand, Platonism survives in the idea of an “internal ... log in or subscribe to read full text