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The idea that knowledge confers power is an ancient one. It is commonly associated with Francis Bacon, the lawyer-philosopher-prophet of the so-called Scientific Revolution, at the beginning of the seventeenth century in England. One of my teachers, Thomas Kuhn, was particularly emphatic about the social relations associated with what he called the Baconian sciences, the new experimental sciences of nature, like chemistry and the study of electricity, in which Bacon sought the foundation of his new utopia in which philosopher-kings would dominate nature and rule the Commonwealth wisely. The metaphors central to Bacon's vision were ones of legitimate mastery and cruelty: twisting the lion's tail, putting Nature on the rack, extorting Nature's secrets from her. We could almost see this experimental natural philosophy as a confirmation of one of Foucault's early theses: ‘It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty’ (Foucault, 1976, p. 73).
Habermas gave the name ‘the transcendental viewpoint of possible technical control’ to this feature of the natural sciences. Writing in 1968, he gave voice to a historiographic commonplace of the time:
Science and technology were not interdependent until late in the nineteenth century. Until then modern science did not contribute to the acceleration of technical development nor, consequently, to the pressure toward rationalization from below. Rather, its contribution to the modernization process was indirect.
This is the final text of a lecture delivered at the conference ‘Knowledge, Method and the Public Good’, organized by the Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, South Africa, 18-22 July 1994. It later appeared under the same title as a Chapter in J. Mouton, & J. Muller (eds), Knowledge, Method and the Public Good. Vol. 39 of HSRC Series in Methodology, Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1997. This text has been prepared with the assistan
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This is the final text of a lecture delivered at the conference ‘Knowledge, Method and the Public Good’, organized by the Human Sciences Research Council, Pretoria, South Africa, 18-22 July 1994. It later appeared under the same title as a Chapter in J. Mouton, & J. Muller (eds), Knowledge, Method and the Public Good. Vol. 39 of HSRC Series in Methodology, Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1997. This text has been prepared with the assistan