Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society

by Stanley Aronowitz

Science as Power was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Science has established itself as not merely the dominant but the only legitimate form of human knowledge. By tying its truth claims to methodology, science has claimed independence from the influence of social and historical conditions. Here, Aronowitz asserts that the norms of science are by no means self-evident and that science is best seen as a socially constructed discourse that legitimates its power by presenting itself as truth. Stanley Aronowitz is professor of sociology in the graduate school of City University of New York. His books include Working Class A New Strategy for Labor and, with Henry Giroux, Education Under Siege .

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Stanley Aronowitz (1933–2021) was a professor of sociology, cultural studies, and urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was also a veteran political activist and cultural critic, an advocate for organized labor and a member of the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society.

In 2012, Aronowitz was awarded the Center for Study of Working Class Life's Lifetime Achievement Award at Stony Brook University.

Reviews

[Brett Williams · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a book of postmodernist myth-making and comrade back-scratching. Author Stanley Aronowitz spends a lot of ink quoting and congratulating “breakthroughs” by feminist theorists, proletariats, Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, and any neo-Marxist he can name. It reads like cheerleading in hopes of return accolades. Mostly, the book reads like a cataclysm for critical theorists who need to bone up on jargon. However, Aronowitz has a goal: to convince the reader that science is no more than an opinion, an ever-changing consequence of social fads. “Science is a social construct,” says Aronowitz, with no relation to reality. How Aronowitz assumed the planes he flew, the car he drove, and the TV he watched worked just as science designed them to work is not addressed. Aronowitz exercises a fertile imagination about what science is and does. He displays scientific illiteracy so epic it’s surprising he was willing to risk exposure in a book. This is not to say the book has no value as a historical marker in the transition of postmodernism to the modern form of critical theory now dominant in university humanities.

One of his more amusing myths has to do with his favorite subject: quantum mechanics. Quantum created a “crisis” in all of science for both theoreticians and experimentalists, says Aronowitz. Largely thanks to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which, boiled down, says we can’t know everything in the micro world. If we know the velocity of an atomic particle very well, we don’t know its position well at all. However, Aronowitz never considers just how poor one item is for another. If we know the velocity of, say, an electron in a hydrogen atom, we have very nearly no idea where it is within a 1 Angstrom diameter about its central proton (that’s a hundred-millionth of a centimeter). Out of an entire universe of some 93 billion light years across (each light year is 6 trillion miles), we are clueless as to just where that election is within 1 Angstrom. Is that uncertain or spot-on? Had Heisenberg called it the Precision Principle, Aronowitz and his legion of followers would have nothing to rally around, no chance to point their fingers at that “colossus of science with feet of clay,” which is the point.

The most amusing of his myths is how quantum was “fabricated” to begin with. It all started with Germany’s cataclysmic loss in WWI. Thus, the German public rejected positivism’s confidence in a future of deterministic “progress” (a favorite target of postmoderns), demanding a rejection of certainty. So, German physicists obliged. They invented quantum mechanics for the unseen realm, violating the deterministic macro world we live in. Voila! A social construct! And those fools, those “scientists,” actually “believe” their theory has something to do with “reality.” Aronowitz uses these dismissive scare quotes on almost every line. Never mind that with this “social construct,” engineers are now building quantum computers.