Culture, Power, Politics » Podcast
Sep 22, 2026 · 1 hr 26 min · 13 segments
What makes us, a couple of professors at modern British universities, ‘experts’ on anything? What makes anyone an acknowledged expert on anything, and why does it matter? Why does the political right…
Alan FinlaysonHostwe're continuing our discussion of the concept of the expert, the intellectual.
We've been a sort of back and forth history of the idea of the intellectual, the expert.
We got up to the late 20th century period and the beginning of the epoch that we're now in.
Actually, we actually, you know, what we just removed from our notes, a bunch of references, cause we thought we wouldn't have time to talk about, but I think, I think I can just refer to those here in literally like two minutes.
There is, there's a set of philosophical theoretical texts that starts to be published really from the forties onward.
in which people who are themselves very much traditional intellectuals, they're philosophers, they're in university departments, are saying something has gone wrong with the way in which we think about ideas of expertise and knowledge.
So Adorno and Horkheimer in their book published, I think, in the 40s or the 50s, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, they say a lot of things, but one of the things they say is, look, The enlightenment idea that you can measure the world through science has led to the horrors of the gas chambers, the Auschwitz.
And what they call instrumental reason, the idea that our minds, our reason can treat the rest of the world as objects which we measure and which we don't see as having value in themselves can lead to a society in which we don't even see people as having or some people as having value in themselves.
In the 1970s, the great German philosopher and social commentator Jürgen Habermas is already saying that he thinks contemporary societies are living through what's called a legitimation crisis, a crisis in the capacity of government, states, institutions like universities to convince everyone that they are legitimate, that they really know what they're doing and they really should be deferred to.
And classically, as I've taught, there's a three hour episode from a few years ago, you can listen to if you want to, about the concept of the postmodern.
But it's not like a lot of people think, he doesn't actually say people don't believe in science at all.
What he really says is people are starting to think about every aspect of life in the way that scientists think about things.
It doesn't really matter if the medicine you take, you know, makes sense according to some overarching scientific paradigm that you and your doctor believe in.
we're continuing our discussion of the concept of the expert, the intellectual.
We've been a sort of back and forth history of the idea of the intellectual, the expert.
We got up to the late 20th century period and the beginning of the epoch that we're now in.
Actually, we actually, you know, what we just removed from our notes, a bunch of references, cause we thought we wouldn't have time to talk about, but I think, I think I can just refer to those here in literally like two minutes.
There is, there's a set of philosophical theoretical texts that starts to be published really from the forties onward.
in which people who are themselves very much traditional intellectuals, they're philosophers, they're in university departments, are saying something has gone wrong with the way in which we think about ideas of expertise and knowledge.
So Adorno and Horkheimer in their book published, I think, in the 40s or the 50s, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, they say a lot of things, but one of the things they say is, look, The enlightenment idea that you can measure the world through science has led to the horrors of the gas chambers, the Auschwitz.
And what they call instrumental reason, the idea that our minds, our reason can treat the rest of the world as objects which we measure and which we don't see as having value in themselves can lead to a society in which we don't even see people as having or some people as having value in themselves.
In the 1970s, the great German philosopher and social commentator Jürgen Habermas is already saying that he thinks contemporary societies are living through what's called a legitimation crisis, a crisis in the capacity of government, states, institutions like universities to convince everyone that they are legitimate, that they really know what they're doing and they really should be deferred to.
And classically, as I've taught, there's a three hour episode from a few years ago, you can listen to if you want to, about the concept of the postmodern.
But it's not like a lot of people think, he doesn't actually say people don't believe in science at all.
What he really says is people are starting to think about every aspect of life in the way that scientists think about things.
It doesn't really matter if the medicine you take, you know, makes sense according to some overarching scientific paradigm that you and your doctor believe in.
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