A New Look at the Left Wing

In epistemology it can too often seem as if a concern with truth and rationality were wholly disconnected from any concern with power and the social identities of the participants in epistemic practices. For the most part the tradition provides us with a clinically asocial conception of the knowing subject, with the result that epistemology tends to proceed as if socio-political considerations were utterly irrelevant to it. At the other extreme, there are many ‘end-of-epistemology’ and postmodernist theories (treated as either occult tendency or as the new orthodoxy, depending on the company one keeps) who tell us to abandon reason and truth as universal norms on the grounds that they are mere functions of power as it is played out in the drama of epistemic practice. Whereas on the the traditionalist view social power is seen as irrelevant to the rational, on the postmodernist view reason tends to be reduced to social power. One might venture a diagnosis: that both the traditionalist and reductivist camps make the same mistake of thinking it is an all or nothing situation, so that if social power is involved in rational proceedings in any but the must superficial of ways, then it is all up with rationality.

…These characterizations of traditionalist and reductivist extremes are somewhat artificial, of course, although I think they are not quite caricatures. They serve to delineate two contrasting and equally mistaken conceptions of how rational authority and social power are related. I shall present a different conception of the relation, which explains, firstly, why socio-political matters are a proper concern in epistemology; and, secondly, why the very possibility of bringing a politicized critical perspective to bear requires that rational authority and social power be firmly distinguished.

It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and
not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in
order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first
flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewilder-
ing mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose
of this or that particular map.

My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis,
which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the
mapmaker’s distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose
shared by all people who need maps. The historian’s distortion is more
than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending
interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian
means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political
or racial or national or sexual.

Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in
the way a mapmaker’s technical interest is obvious (“This is a Mercator
projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you’d better use
a different projection”). No, it is presented as if all readers of history
had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability.
This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a
society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical
problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social, classes,
races, nations.