Politics and Science as a Vocation: Can Academics Save us from Post-Truth Politics?

In an apparently post-truth era, the social science scholar, by disposition and training committed to rational argumentation and the pursuit of truth, appeals as the ideal bulwark against excessive politicization of facts and expertise. In this article, we look to the experience of four prominent social scientists who have recently left the academy to enter politics with the aim of using their academic expertise to reshape policy. We use these cases to explore fundamental dilemmas derived from a close reading of Max Weber’s seminal vocation essays of a century ago. Weber observed that politicians were driven by a will to power, whereas academics were driven by a will to truth. We argue that these two competing dispositions create four tensions for the academic turned politician: (1) between calling and commitment, (2) between means and ends, (3) between rationalization and professionalization and (4) between facts and values. Analysing memoirs written by four of the most prominent academics-turned-politicians in recent times, we explore how Weber’s tensions manifest in contemporary practice. Our account reveals that these actors face a daunting, but not impossible, task. Their success depends on wedding the relentless pursuit of ends with the prudent application of political means.

The Great Wall of Confinement: The Chinese Prison Camp Through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage. By Philip F. Williams and Yenna Wu. [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004. xi+248 pp. $21.95; $55.00. ISBN 0-520-22779-4.]

By the “Great Wall of Confinement,” the authors refer to the prison camp system established by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949. The two crucial components of this system are the laogai system (laodong gaizao, translated in the book to “remolding through labour” rather than the more often used “reform through labour”), and the laojiao system (laodong jiaoyang) or “reeducation through labour.” Let me say at once that this book is much more than an analysis of the literature surrounding the phenomenon of the prison camps. Through memoirs from former inmates and reportage literature we learn many detailed facts about the Chinese camp system, details equally valuable to the legal and the social science scholar.The book describes in detail the daily life of the camps, the prison conditions and the system's methods of arrest, detention, solitary confinement, torture for confessions, famine, degradation of prisoners, and a range of practices showing the security forces' discretionary powers and the “flexibilities” of informal sentencing. The authors emphasize both the modern ideology of remoulding and the traditional legalist (fajia) roots of a “very malleable sort of law.” Williams and Wu commendably combine a range of valuable empirical detail with a more general theoretical analysis of the historical, cultural and systemic roots and practices of the camp system.The only exceptions to generally harsh conditions in the PRC camps were the special prisons for high-ranking persons like the famous Fushun prison in Liaoning province which contained the last Manchu emperor, Puyi, high-ranking prisoners of war such as former Kuomintang top military officers, and Japanese prisoners of war.