Get to Know Yourself, or Better Not

The International

Journal INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES

Volume 2, Number 5

Get to Know Yourself or Better Not: The Multidimensionality of Power and the Pseudoradicalism of Intellectuals and Teachers Mariano Fernรกndez Enguita

www.socialsciences-journal.com

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES http://www.SocialSciences-Journal.com First published in 2008 in Melbourne, Australia by Common Ground Publishing Pty Ltd www.CommonGroundPublishing.com. © 2008 (individual papers), the author(s) © 2008 (selection and editorial matter) Common Ground Authors are responsible for the accuracy of citations, quotations, diagrams, tables and maps.

All rights reserved. Apart from fair use for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act (Australia), no part of this work may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. For permissions and other inquiries, please contact <cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com>.

ISSN: 1833-1882 Publisher Site: http://www.SocialSciences-Journal.com THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES is a peer refereed journal. Full papers submitted for publication are refereed by Associate Editors through anonymous referee processes.

Typeset in Common Ground Markup Language using CGCreator multichannel typesetting system http://www.CommonGroundSoftware.com.

Get to Know Yourself or Better Not: The Multidimensionality of Power and the Pseudoradi-calism of Intellectuals and Teachers Mariano Fernández Enguita, University of Salamanca, Spain Abstract: Power is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Even restricting our considerations to the economic public sphere, i.e. markets and organizations, we should recognize at least three main sources of power: property, authority and qualification, that is, power on (or through, or on the basis of) means of production (the matter of the economic system), work (its energy) and knowledge (information); or let us say economic, social and cultural capital. No matter the justification (or not) of any critique of economic and social power (of property and authority, of capital and state), intellectuals’ and teachers’ radicalism, as far as it is not matched by a parallel or even harsher critique of cultural power (qualification, division of labor), should be considered more as a reflection of (not so much on) status incongruence than as a critical stand.

This must be specially emphasized as we enter in an informational economy and a knowledge society in which the long waited Platonic utopia, an aris-tocracy of knowledge, could come into effect but also reveal itself as more anti-egalitarian than any past of stratification in the open society.

Keywords: Power, Professions, Radicalism, Knowledge Society

E FIND IT natural that not only intellectuals, but also teachers as a whole, are notably more critical of society, in particular as regards the economy, than other citizens. Wherever there is a meeting of teachers, no matter at what level, and especially if they meet as such (for example, at a staff meeting, in a professional association, at a work meeting or in a union), we are more than likely to hear opposing opinions, if not heated discussions, against globalization, neoliberalism, bureaucracy and hierarchical structuring, to mention but a few of the more hackneyed topics.

These evils of our times are not only criticized as the cause of different social problems, particularly economic ones, but also and above all as major threats hovering over the education system as a public service, over the right to education as an egalitarian and democratic conquest, over autochthonous cultures and over the teaching profession as the bastion of all these.

At first glance, one might think that being critical, even hypercritical, is inseparable from knowledge; hence, intellectuals, whether in the most limited or broadest sense, and in the latter case particularly teachers, are only doing what they can do better than anyone else, what they should do and what they are expected to do. Nevertheless, this hypercriticism seems to combine badly with the inertia of the school system and the conservatism of the teaching profession, which are evident from a simple visit to a classroom or in the omnipresent and insistent longing for a lost golden age. But it only seems so, since, as I shall try to argue in the following pages, this radic-

W

alism is limited to criticizing the unfair distribution of what the teacherintellectual does not have (ownership), as well as the consequences of such distribution in terms of power; an ambiguous posture is maintained concerning what they have and at the same time do not have, what they benefit from and what they suffer from (authority), and they maintain an absolute silence about and feel comfortable with that which forms the basis of their social standing and the advantages associated with it (skill).

The Paradoxes of Criticism Globalization is frequently seen in the titles of books, articles, conferences, etc., especially in those related to education, and it appears as one of the evils of our era, in part as the cause of great injustice and economic problems which, supposedly, would not exist without it and have arisen through it, and in part as a castrating wave that makes things uniform and puts an end to singularity, genuineness and cultural originality. Neoliberalism is usually presented as the bête noire, the villain in the story, ready to subordinate everything to private interest, to walk over the dead body of general interest, more specifically besetting the state school in order to achieve its privatization, and the right to education in order to subordinate it to the market, etc. At the same time it is contemplated with a mixture of admiration and terror (the so-called unique thought, the Washington Consensus, the Saint-Severin Club…) and with scorn

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES, VOLUME 2, NUMBER 5, 2008 http://www.SocialSciences-Journal.com, ISSN 1833-1882 © Common Ground, Mariano Fernández Enguita, All Rights Reserved, Permissions: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com

84

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES, VOLUME 2

(only the foolish co n fuse value and price, etc.).1 Bureaucracy and authority are identified or compared and insulted time and time again as the epitome of ignorance, blindness, arbitrariness (one might think that authority may have behind it the support of democratic legitimacy, but this is easily remedied by cancelling it out with the discredit of politics, even more if it is party politics … which is what there is). In all this criticism there is some or perhaps more than some truth: economic and cultural globalization not accompanied by moral and political globalization, neoliberal doctrinarism and its function of staunch supporter of the market and private ownership, bureaucratic inertia and behaviour that puts the interests of the party before general interests. It is a part of the truth, and just like all half truths, also a half lie, but neither this, nor the correctness or unsuitability of these summary rejections, is what I want to speak of here, but rather of its partial and biased nature, that is, of its purely ideological function.2 To start with, it is striking that rejection of globalization should take root so extensively and intensely in an institution, the school, which is, itself, one of its oldest, most extreme, and in some aspects, most damaging examples. Several studies and authors, especially those forming part of the neo-institutionalist trend in the field of sociology of organizations, have underlined the isomorphism of the school over and above political, geographical and cultural boundaries.3 Obviously, school institutions and systems vary from one continent to another, from one region to another, from one country to another, but much less so than the societies that house them. Each educational system, through its authorities, and each teaching body, through its representatives, looks to those in other countries as a reference, deliberately or unconcernedly above the differences in culture and wealth, rather than to the social needs, other public services or other occupational groups in its environment. Paradoxically, the school and the teaching profession, which are the major instruments for building the nation, form part of purely global realities. Indeed, in few spheres have statistics and other comparative studies and international cooperation bodies developed so rapidly and so early, or the governments and institutions in the sector come to an agreement so easily to provide them with information and follow their recommendations. The school can be said to be the most global and transcultural institution we have ever known; more, for example, 1

than the armies, hospitals and, indeed, than the churches. It is only an apparent inconsistency that such different contents are instilled in one same way, since they have in common their arbitrariness, and, above all, their imposition.

The second major target of the intellectual troop’s criticism, both of the cavalry (the essayists) and of the infantry (the teachers), is neoliberalism, which is presented as a Hydra with numerous heads: private education, school choice, parents’ rights, accountability, specialization of schools, educational vouchers, cooperation with firms, institutional evaluation, comparison of results, individual incentives, etc.

However, opposition to the market and all that goes with it is far from being so radical. In many countries, apart from those that work in private schools, a considerable proportion of teachers combine their work in the public function with other salaried private activities, or send their children to private schools. In Spain, where state employees can choose, through their benefit society, to have public or private health care, over ninety percent of public school teachers choose the latter, thus opting to combine the best of both worlds: produce in the public sector and consume in the private one. But perhaps what is most surprising is the paradox of an organizational profession, moreover one that is bureucratic, which, as a model of its aspirations and a reference point for arguing its comparative grievances, always looks to medicine, that is, the liberal profession par excellence –not so much for its alleged liberality, but rather because of its original and usual practice in the market and its determined defence of the cash nexus.4 Finally, the ambiguity of the teachers’ attitude to authority is no less surprising. That intellectuals who are more or less freelance (although often subsidized with public funds), such as writers, musicians, artists, etc., should cultivate antiauthoritarian ethics and what is more aesthetics, forms part of their role and of the display of their image; that teachers should do so, when they themselves are part of state authority (whether they work in state or private schools), and are exercising it all the time over the students and aim to do so to a certain extent over the families, is much more striking. But that is how it is: on the one hand they exercise authority, demand it should be strengthened or re-established with students, and, before the parents, even claim the condition of public authority. On the other hand, however, they recoil from the action of the administrative authorities too

The most complete and sophisticated expression of this unvaried thought can be found in the popular work by C. Laval, L’École n’est pas une entreprise.

2 In the meaning that Marx and Engels gave to this term, but which neither applied to intellectuals themselves, since both of them thought that they were ready to ally with any class, but could never be a class. Undoubtedly the fact that they themselves were of the same condition helped.

3 See, especially the works by Meyer, Ramírez, Rubinson and Boli (1977) and Ramírez and Boli (1987).

4 For the difference and contraposition between bureaucratic and liberal professions, see Abbott, 1988.

MARIANO FERNÁNDEZ ENGUITA

easily, they insult those who leave the classroom for other administrative responsibilities (classroom deserters), and an attempt is made to hold in low esteem and even look down on school heads (at least in the Iberian peninsula, which is undoubtedly somewhat peculiar in this aspect) and any reform under suspicion of introducing a hie r archical stru c turing of the teaching body is resisted tooth and nail.

The Multidimensionality of Power Contemplated merely in itself, apart from the flesh and blood of those who sustain it, this critical discourse could be considered as fully consistent and nothing new. It is the old anti-capitalist discourse on power, with its old scale of values (or anti-values); pandemonium is private ownership, the source of all evil directly and through the market; authority (i.e., direct power over people, since ownership is merely an indirect power) is also bad, but less so, as indicated by the fact that it can be tolerated when it is opposed to ownership, for example, in the case of leftist authoritarian regimes (and, if it were the case, also in totalitarian regimes). On the other hand, differences based on knowledge are no problem at all, provided that neither ownership nor authority interfere, i.e., provided that they depend only on personal effort or ability, that they are meritocratic. Really, they are not only seen as not being a problem but are the essence of Utopia: since Plato’s Republic, crowned by the government of philosophers, selected for their wisdom, and all its ancient and medieval sequels – from the enlightened and liberal revision, then the proletarian revolution and the revolutionary regime, headed by the most illustrious vanguard, to the emerging knowledge society, which bows to scientists and those cre a tives.

However, and even without any need to complicate our analysis with the vicissitudes of history, we can see ownership, authority and skill as three forms of power based on the differential control of three types of resource: means of production, work and knowledge. Or, if you will, as three forms of capital: economic, social (organizational, relational) and cultural (human).5 Some neo-Marxists would prefer to speak means of production, organizational and skill assets.6 Indeed, what marks the difference in the comparative value of these forms of power is not so much their effectiveness in providing advantages for those who hold them (human and social capital can be much more profitable, attractive and satisfying than economic capital) as their different degree of security and transmittability (in the family sphere, for instance, transmitting cultural capital is encour5

aged and considered a sacred duty, among other things because educational discourse declares this, although to do so may entail great practical difficulties; economic capital is allowed to be transmitted and should be transmitted, but not without a certain reluctance on the part of society, which demands a price in the shape of inheritance tax, but here there is no practical difficulty at all, except if one wishes to avoid taxes and not always; on the other hand, the transmission of social capital is forbidden and condemned, at least in its strongest sense –inheriting posts, nepotism- although it is often attempted, ranging from family political sagas to the mere pulling of strings for jobs).

In more general terms we could consider these three forms of power as being merely those peculiar to the differential control of the resources or elements of any system, the economic one being just a variant.

Every system is composed of three elements: matter, energy and information. In the economic system, matter is the means of production, including energy in the physical sense of the term (combustibles, work animals, etc.), non-human; energy here is another thing, it is what moves that matter or sets it in motion (non-human energy included), that is, work; and information is simply information (i.e., the part of information that comes to form part of the productive system, of the process and mechanisms of production and distribution in the broadest sense).

In general, in all societies these three forms of inequality have coexisted, but in very different proportions. Ownership, as a differential form of access to resources, is spreading, coming to control more and more social spheres (by privatization, commercialization, deregulation, etc.), but it has also become more open, i.e., less conditioned (the possibility of access to it) by birth or social standing. Authority, as personal, diffuse and undifferentiated authority in the territorial community (the lord’s country estate, servitude) has long since been proscribed, and is now being eroded, in a second stage, in the family community; but, at the same time, it has reappeared and is spreading, as functional, limited and specific authority, but authority all the same, within organizations.

Finally, skill has been strengthening its role, more or less steadily, throughout history, but it is doing so and will do so much more intensely with access to the society of information and knowledge.

This is the economic and social revolution we are living today. We will understand its scope and meaning better if we compare it with the previous industrial revolutions of modernity. But history takes in more than just modern times, and although it had before bequeathed us great works that were the

We have not forgotten that the concepts of social capital, e.g., from sources as different as those of R. Inglehart or the World Bank, and cultural capital, according to P. Bourdieu, can have a different, and to begin with more lax meaning.

6 This is the case of Eric O. Wright (1985).

85

86

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES, VOLUME 2

product of great enterprises (in the original sense of the word, unde r taking, but also in the modern meaning of organization and, hence, of artificial social system), really these were exceptional in both the diachronic linearity of history itself and in the synchronic horizontality of the life experience of our ancestors. Only with the first Industrial Revolution did we pass from the exceptional nature of the pyramids, the cathedrals, etc. to the systematic accumulation of great means of production for the mass production of goods or consumer services and services of everyday use (textile in Europe, plantations in America, the railway, etc.). Suddenly in the perspective of history, there was a radical leap in the scale on which the means of production were used, which stopped being the scale of the individual, as was the case of small-scale country workers, artisans, tradersâ&#x20AC;Ś, to reach large scale concentrations of which the other facet is the relative devaluation of typical or average individual ownership, the dispossession of the means of production, as Marx would explain. Although on paper other formulas were imagined, and some even attained an anecdotic or episodic existence, history really only brought forth two possible ways of handling these new large concentrations of the means of production: by a few individuals (capitalism, or, to be more precise, the capitalist way of production) or by the state (communism, or what we could more broadly call the state way of production). On the other hand, of course, there are always the dispossessed; in the first case the huge majority and in the second case almost the whole. This systemic revolution in distribution, organization and means of production allowed an overwhelming display of a new form of power, ownership (new in its dimensions, its liberation, with respect to other social relations and many of its other characteristics) and generated a major social dividing line, between capital and labour, the consequences of which would strongly mark the second half of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th.

The second Industrial Revolution in modernity (by now it must be obvious that here I am not going to deal with other typologies based, for example, on the successive technological waves: coal, steel, electricity, petroleum, etc., but rather I will confine myself to social relations and, particularly, to the control of productive resources) arrived at the beginning of the 20th century with Taylorism, Fordism and Stakhanovism, organizational technologies whose target was not to gather and manage greater concentrations of the means of production (materials, machines, driving force) but greater concentrations of labour (parallel to these, the corporation arrived, i.e., the firm with social capital, a legal technology that makes it possible to gather and manage greater concentrations of capital). This new systemic revolu-

tion, now focused on the energy of the productive process, entailed, in turn, the display of another form of power until then of very limited scope, authority (organizational, not personal) and generated another new social dividing line, between managers and subordinates. Indeed, although the inertia of the discourse that had arisen from the previous revolution has often made it difficult for us to understand it (in particular because of its insistence on reducing the organizational categories to the old dichotomy of capital and labour), the distribution of (access to) positions in the organizational hierarchy became the core of social stratification for the rest of the 20th century.

Today we are experiencing a third industrial revolution, this time focused on the scale in the use of the third element of the economic system, information and knowledge. We are no longer exploiting natural processes secondarily modified by human intervention, such as traditional agricultural and mining activities, neither do we transform the products of the latter in large scale processes indebted to old artisan procedures, but rather we consciously and deeply alter natural processes (genetic engineering), we create materials that nature never produced (new materials), we replace human labour with machinery (robotics and artificial intelligence) and handle huge amounts of information with a high degree of sophistication and effectiveness (computer science and communications). At the centre of all this is a new capability and, hence, a new scale in the use of information and knowledge, when they are applied directly to the means and processes of production and when this is done indirectly, acting recursively on themselves. The consequence is the triumphant deployment of a new source of power: differential control of knowledge itself or, to give it another name, skill, and the development of a new social dividing line, now between the skilled and the unskilled, professionals and laymen, manipulators of symbols and manual workers, self-programmable labour and generic labour, info-rich and info-poor.

The fact that theoretically and conceptually this is not exactly clear to us should not prevent us from grasping the novelty, the strength and the specificity of this new major transformation (as happened with the previous one), which is what will occur if we remain prisoners of the old schemes.

The Limitations of Theory and Social Criticism No social power in modernity, that is consubstantially and increasingly reflexive, has failed to arouse more or less comprehensive or radical criticism, but not all critiques have been equally incisive, accurate or effective, and sometimes they have cancelled each

MARIANO FERNÁNDEZ ENGUITA

other out or counteracted each other. Liberalism bequeathed us criticism of authority; Marxism, of ownership; skill, however, is still awaiting an author, a school, a sociological trend that will be capable of subjecting it to extensive, in-depth deconstruction, analysis and criticism. Perhaps this is because no one shoots themselves in the foot.

First it was liberalism, with its criticism of the relations of subjugation belonging to the ancien regime and its declaration of individual autonomy, which armed us against authority. But it did so by identifying authority with the old relations of personal dependence, which made it easy to extend it to other relations of dependence not contemplated at first (beginning with the servitude of the colonial peoples, on which the enlightened were divided, and continuing, of course, with male domination, to culminate in parental authority) but hard to extend to relations of subjugation freely contracted, in particular, relations of authority and subjugation in the firm, arising from an act of free will but also from the need dictated by the dispossession of the means of production.

Then came Marxism, with its critique of ownership relations. It knew how to reveal their nature of power relations, behind the innocuous appearance of free agreement of wills in the contract and equality of status of the contracting parties in the market. It laid bare the dark side of ownership, specifically of capitalist ownership of the means of production, but it lumped it together with small ownership, minimized or trivialized freedom (despised as the veil of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in society, of the despotism of capital in the firm, etc.) and in its quest for antidotes, ended up devoted to praising authority (the revolution itself, the dictatorship of the proleta r iat). Indeed, its scorn for the value of freedom and the problem of authority was such that it left us as a legacy the most systematic and lasting form of totalitarianism, and as brutal as could be, despite claiming universalist values.

What is interesting, however, is that neither of these two trends tackled the critique of skill, of the differential possession of knowledge. Both the French philosophes and the British econ o mists proclaimed the liberating nature of knowledge, but were more often hostile to than in favour of popular education, no matter how much the pedagogical hagiography in fashion would like to think the contrary.

Marxism, for its part, carried its disdain and confidence in them simultaneously and schizophrenically to the limit: the former, expressed in the rejection of petit bourgeois intellectuals (of their weakness by Marx, their errors by Lenin, and their vices by Stalin and Mao); the latter, in the Marxian statement of the revolutionary nature of philosophy (the Theses on 7

Mannheim, 1929.

Feuerbach and similar) or Lenin’s self-proclamation of his party as revolutionary vanguard, taken to the grotesque by his imitators. This self-celebration of intellectuals would continue unstoppable, through epicycles such as the Gramscian organic intellectual or Althusser’s conquest of State ideological apparatus, up until the new wor k ing class or the forces of culture, etc., of Euro-communism. Common to all of them is that intellectuals, at the service of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, and more so in the vanguard of the latter, do not have their own class interests. Remember, by the way, that not even Mannheim, who was able to apply Marxist analysis to Marxism and proclaim it as an ideology, knew how to escape the seduction of the freischwebende Intelligenz, i.e., the intellectual with no class constrictions.7 Only marginally and occasionally did Marxism recognize a certain specificity in the interests of a specific stratum, singled out by skill: skilled manual labour. Marx did so in the figure of the master artisan, whose archaic interests he saw behind Proudhon’s ph i losophie des manufactures, and to which he afforded very little future, condemned to disappear in the proletariat as the effect of the general deskilling of labour through the logic of capital. Lenin did so in the labour aristocracy, which he saw as unworthy and also transitorily delighted to eat the crumbs of imperialism; Mao, in the call of the Cultural Revolution to the uprising against the intellectuals, combined, however, with the proclamation of his own banalities as the ultimate truth (Mao Zedong thought). More recently, in the age of Neo-Marxism, we must mention the somewhat bizarre concept of skill goods or assets of Eric O. Wright, perhaps the last Marxist sociologist worthy of being read. For him, under a hypothetically democratized communism to which history gave no option at all, these assets could have become the basis of the ultimate form of economic exploitation in the long course of humanity.

The object of this brief hagiographic review is merely to point out that Marxism, and its critique of capitalism, on which both the political left wing and social theory still largely feed today (although they no longer subscribe to the supposed solutions), did not leave us any basis for a critique of social inequalities based on skill. Naturally, it did not declare itself in favour of them, neither did liberalism proclaim itself the upholder of inequalities based on ownership. The latter simply supposes that a more competitive market would give everyone sufficient opportunities and would recompense their contribution in its fair value; the former is content to await the day when the educational system, after a few reforms and free at last from the interference of ownership

87

88

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES, VOLUME 2

and authority (the true social inequalities), will reward all in accordance with their merits (or will give everyone what they deserve).

Get to Know Yourself or Better Not Intellectual and teaching pseudoradicalism is inconsistent in strictly logical or moral terms, but perfectly consistent in practical terms, since it legitimates particular interests by presenting them as general, universalist interests or even outside, altruistic interests, watching over their nature as such not only in the face of society, whose support it claims, but also in the conscience of its leading figures, whom it reconciles with themselves by allowing them to be universalist, egalitarian and moral in what does not affect them while being egoistic, anti-egalitarian and immoral in what does affect them - with a little bit of luck, without even realizing it. It is like the old joke in which a communist asks a peasant in succession whether he would be in agreement with sharing the money from the banks, the businessmen’s factories, the churches’ jewels, the landowners’ estates, etc. among everyone, to which he repeatedly answers yes, to the joy of his questioner, who adds each time: “You see? You too are a communist!” until in the end he asks him about sharing the cattle, when the peasant angrily interrupts him: “No, not that, definitely not!” “But, why? It’s the same”, his mentor asks in surprise. “Because I’ve got two cows!”, the other answers.

A good part of the radical rhetoric of intellectuality and the teaching staff can and should be explained as a phenomenon of inconsistency of status. They become more radical because they sincerely believe that society places too high a value on what they do not have (ownership, which they lack, or authority, of which they have little) and too little value on what they do have or think they have (knowledge, skills).

Hence the eternal complaints about lack of recognition, the need to dignify the profession, society’s lack of i n terest in culture or education and other similar tales, which apart from being euphemisms to avoid expressly asking for increases in salary and a reduction in working hours (which the unions take care of) are expressions which suit the nature of what is adduced, the possession of knowledge.

Radicalism in the criticism of the advantages of other groups, or of the material bases of their advantages, can be easily combined with the demand for advantages for oneself by the obvious, although not simple, procedure of identifying one’s own interests with general interests. I think it was actually Marx who pointed out, when referring to the (bourgeois) French Revolution, that in the conflict of classes the class that wins is the one that succeeds in presenting its particular interests as universal interests. Nothing is easier, certainly, than passing off the needs of the

educational system as those of society in general and the interests of the teachers as those of the educational system (or the interests of artists and intellectuals as the needs of culture and these as social needs), although to do so it may be necessary to openly violate the counsel of the Seven Wise Men of the façade of Apollo’s temple in Delphos.

Perhaps what has been most useful in this distortion is the adoption of union rhetoric in a context that was not proper to it. Another apparent paradox of our times, at least in Mediterranean countries, is that the unions, which arose in private industry, survive today above all in public services. At the same time, the idea that everything that is done to improve the situation of manual labourers is justified has not been of much use to the latter, who have been pushed around by the market, but has been of use to state employees, who, by adopting union rhetoric (the worker, despite their advantageous conditions, versus the employer, despite his remoteness and impotence), have seen themselves exempt from having to justify the timeliness or the justice of their claims.

So far, this is only a particular realization of a much more general phenomenon: we all tend to believe that the virtues we have are appreciated little and those we do not have are valued too highly.

Moreover, the scale of values, or at least the official scale, is usually determined by the intellectuals, which explains, for example, why intelligence without beauty can be proclaimed as great and beauty without intelligence as a misfortune, despite the fact that the common mortal seems to seek the opposite every day. But the problem does not lie in yet another social group seeing society from its own point of view, but rather in the fact that this distorted view seems to reign precisely when we are entering the age, economy and society of information and knowledge, and the group most inclined to let itself be led by it is its main beneficiary and, in turn, the one with most influence in the view of the others.

The problem of power best solved in history until now is, undoubtedly, that of authority, and the solution found, with all its faults, is democracy or, to be more exact, the combination of individual freedom and collective democracy (of civil rights and political rights). The problem of ownership has been less satisfactorily solved, since the market, while opening formal opportunities for all, deploys in a highly unequal distribution of the real results. Hence, it has been democracy that has had to come and correct its effects by ensuring minimum means of living for all (social rights). Indeed, a large part of the 20th century could be seen as a permanent tension between capitalism and democracy, not just as mutually exclusive options (capitalism and communism) but also or rather as alternative but coexisting and often complementary scenarios (market and state, or private sector

MARIANO FERNÁNDEZ ENGUITA

and public sector, in the western nations). What is not so clear, as opposed to inherited knowledge, is that the main problem of democracy is ownership and not skill, economic capital and not cultural capital, the bourgeoisie and not the professions, capitalism and not the division of labour. Think, for example, of the United States of America, the country where democracy has developed most and where economic capital and the main professional groups have gained most strength. We may be impressed above all by the great fortunes, but, looking at things without preconceived ideas, could we affirm that the ordinary life of ordinary people is more affected by these than by the immense power of the medical and legal professions, both of which have made the likelihood of conserving life and health or freedom and property, in the face of any setback, vary not in an arithmetical but in a geometrical or logarithmic ratio to their capability of paying the bill?

Far from being its salvation, the professions are becoming one of the main problems of democracy.

Not, of course, because of their capacity for developing and applying more or less complex knowledge, but rather because of their understandable inclination to make it result in privileges. Among all the professions, the intellectuals and the teachers are certainly not the most dangerous, but their ability to mystify their own situation can be especially costly to society, since it is based on the broadest mystification of the emerging form of power peculiar to the age of knowledge. In any case, the intellectuals, whether the most high-flying, the creator of knowledge, or the most modest, those in charge of reproducing it on a universal scale, should be more aware that they are also made of flesh and blood and that they not only have values, but also interests, and above all should not confuse the former with the latter. They should, as the Seven Wise Men advised, know themselves individually and collectively.

References ABBOTT, A.D. (1988): The system of professions: an essay on the division of expert labor, Chicago, UChP. MANNHEIM, K. (1929): Ideología y utopía, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987.

MEYER, J.W., F.O. RAMIREZ, R. RUBINSON and J. BOLI-BENNETT (1977): “The World Educational Revolution, 1950-1970.” Sociology of Education L: 242-258.

RAMIREZ, F.O. and BOLI, J. (1987): “The political construction of mass schooling: European origins and worldwide institutionalization”, Sociology of Education LX, 2-17, 1.987.

WRIGHT, E.O (1985): Classes, London, Spanish Version 1994.

About the Author Prof. Mariano Fernández Enguita University of Salamanca, Spain. http://www.enguita.info

89

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES

EDITORS Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Patrick Baert, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK. Norma Burgess, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY, USA. Vangelis Intzidis, University of the Aegean, Rhodes.

Paul James, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

José Luis Ortega Martín, University of Granada, Spain.

Francisco Fernandez Palomares, University of Granada, Spain.

Miguel A. Pereyra, University of Granada, Spain.

Chryssi Vitsilakis-Soroniatis, University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece.

Please visit the Journal website at http://www.SocialSciences-Journal.com for further information: - ABOUT the Journal including Scope and Concerns, Editors, Advisory Board, Associate Editors and Journal Profile - FOR AUTHORS including Publishing Policy, Submission Guidelines, Peer Review Process and Publishing Agreement

SUBSCRIPTIONS The Journal offers individual and institutional subscriptions. For further information please visit http://iji.cgpublisher.com/subscriptions.html Inquiries can be directed to subscriptions@commongroundpublishing.com

INQUIRIES Email: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com