Stanislaw Kozyr-Kowalski

Academic democracy versus oligarchic and authoritarian tendencies in contemporary sociology

Summary

The paper contains an analysis and critique of various kinds of anomy and oligarchic and authoritarian tendencies that have become visible within the Polish institutions of academic democracy. The critique is quite keen but substantial reasons support it. Oligarchy and authoritarianism in the world of Polish sociology have their roots both in the formal socialist past and in the mechanical transferring principles of “competitive business enterprise” (Veblen) to academic and spiritual work. The existence of many different sociologies is regarded not as a necessary condition for functioning and developing one scientific sociology but as its basic weakness that should be eliminated. Attempts to construct one sociology by administrative, juridical and fiscal means, by such a type of competition that presupposes and causes various kinds of monopoly lead to the poverty and uniformity of language and thought.

The inspiration of the Founding Fathers of sociology allows us to see among the academic institutions such tendencies that could be named “laws”. The paper deals with the law of mediocrity (Weber, Veblen), the law of majority tyranny (Tocqueville), the law of bureaucratic spiritualism (Marx), the laws of microparties, microparty leaders and microoligarchy within democratic systems (Weber, Michels, Veblen.) The Master – lackey relation displaces the cooperation and mutual esteem of academic and non-academic teachers, students and parents that serve the common good. The egalitarianism of average value and the lowest marginal value dominate over the egalitarianism of the highest marginal value.

The place of censorship as a profession has been taken by censorship as an inner calling. The system of the academic results evaluation subordinates the quality of scholarly and didactic work to purely quantitative indicators. The delusive and apparently objective statistics favour the subordination of quality to quantity. Transforming the university into a competitive business enterprise accompanies phenomena already analysed by Veblen, such as piecework, spread among academic and teacher modern estates attitudes that are typical for hired employees and hirelings.

Anomic competition for a number of students, for money, power and notority generates surrendering to a rule: Omnia pro tempore, nihil pro veritate - everything for circumstances, nothing for truth. Irreconcilable competitors fight against one another by means of grey and black marketing.

The rules of anomic competition are directed not only against contemporary scholars, but also against the deceased classics of modern social sciences. Competition with the classics is co-conditioned by a search for absolute novelty but it often ends with sham newness. Occupational diseases proper to social scientists and intellectuals have spread at the universities transformed in competitive business enterprises. In praise of those who discovered the diseases we could call them: Schopenhauer’s-Weber’s disease i.e. vanity, Znaniecki’s disease i.e. envy, Sorokin’s disease i.e. intellectual kleptomania. The paper emphasizes that the present-day reforms of Polish social sciences and education have added new values to the Veblenian analysis concerning the transformation of universities into competitive business enterprises and into authoritarian and bureaucratic institutions.

The paper was published in “Ruch Prawniczy, Ekonomiczny i Socjologiczny” [The Juridical, Economic and Sociological Movement], No. 4, 2001, pp. 251-270.