Introduction: Scientific Authority and the Politics of Science and History in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe**

Abstract

What sounds like a laborious set up for a shallow joke actually hits the core of the problem this issue covers: What do the leading archaeologist of the former German Democratic Republic in re-unifying Germany, Bulgarian scientists in the late 1960s and some recent discussions about representations of Polish ancient history have in common? They all operate along fractures in the crust of scientific authority, they mark moments in time when classical figures of knowledge reach or breach authoritative status. They serve to study how authoritative speech bridged and manifested these relations and help identify areas where scientific authority is contested. This volume transcends this topological rhetoric with a praxeological take on scientific authority. Concentrating on authority figures, it brings specific margins and contestations into sight. The papers in this volume study cases from former socialist countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, and thus examples that present us with the complexity of agonal relations within state socialism and post-socialist transformations that complicate matters of scientific authority in many ways, yet also offer illustrative examples of shifting constellations of (scientific) authority.

This issue is dedicated to historical challenges to scholarship as the paramount producer of facts and their discursive reprocessing. Focusing on historical sciences, sociology, as well as natural sciences and technology and their non-academic counterparts, it maps changes in the political configuration of knowledge production in modern societies. The historical reconstruction and analysis of scientific self-conceptions are aligned with the question of convergence or fragmentation of epistemologies, increase or decline of universalistic claims, and exploitations from particularistic groups’ perspectives. We thus approach the rationalities that divide science and the humanities and politics as well as the “boundary work”¹ at the intersections. When and how did the boundaries shift, were they strengthened, weakened or removed, and how did this affect the epistemic figures in different scientific disciplines? We want to know if and to which extent these dynamics, which we recently observe in the fragmentation of epistemic authority and tribalization of truth, can be regarded as an effect of political and socio-economic transformations: of processes of re-nationalization, conservative and religious turns, or the popularization of postmodernity. Where and how can we trace the consequences of the shifts in media technologies that unsettle classic information media, and what impact do social fragmentation and the subsequent emergence of specific groups have on all this?

Following these questions, this issue investigates the relations of scientific practices, reflexive scholarship and changing epistemological frames since the 1960s. Within the broader methodological framework of the history of science and knowledge, it follows the parameters of a “political epistemology” as a mode of observing the settings and developments of epistemology and rationality,² a mode informed by recent approaches to the history of cold war science,³ and works on politics of knowledge.⁴ We trace historical interrelations of changes in rhetoric and evolutions of scientific practices of truth and emphasize the local, temporal, institutional, and subjective conditions of epistemological conflicts in regard to the specific role of the scholar as a “truth figure” and her or his contested credibility.⁵ In this respect, we can rely on studies on historical scientific personae,⁶ on scholarly practices in natural sciences and the humanities,⁷ and on epistemic virtues.⁸

When discussing these phenomena, we understand “scientific authority” as a subcase of “epistemic authority”⁹ that refers to knowledge in general, including pragmatic (and practical, tacit) and everyday (quotidian) knowledge, as knowledge related to different fields and cultures (religious knowledge, political knowledge, etc.). Scientific authority refers to trust in as well as the social power of scientific knowledge, here including the natural sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences. If, in some of the contributions, academic authority is used synonymously with scientific authority, it is not to deny the long history of the struggle between the epistemic authority of academies and universities but to highlight the aspect of the habitualization and institutionalization of epistemic authority, the apparatus or dispositif of scientific knowledge and its representative – the homo academicus.¹⁰ Scientific or academic authority in this sense is thus based on education and sometimes current affiliation to academia, i. e., to universities or research institutions, bestowing professional authority at least in modern knowledge societies.

The 20^th and 21^st centuries are characterized by a large range of epistemologies, from positivist to postmodernist and more explicitly politicized nationalist, socialist, neoliberal, or evangelical epistemologies. The respective relations between knowledge and power are closely tied to the emergence or disappearance of different epistemic authorities and, amongst these, scientific authority is but one. Various other figures of epistemic authorities can be found in different cultural settings throughout history, trusted, feared, and questioned: the elders, the sage, or the oracle, the church and the priest, common sense and the eye-witness, the press and the journalist. Authority that comes with an asymmetric distribution of knowledge might be regarded as something natural by the addressee when the situation corresponds to a (habitual) cultural practice and authority is carried by an established authority figure.

Obviously, as an expression of asymmetric social relations, authority is inherently ambiguous – an ambiguity displayed in Thomas Hobbes’ notorious Leviathan, who just as much rules on the basis of the formula pax et protectio as he spreads fear on its behalf. Richard Sennett has pointed to the ambiguity of authority in modern societies – “the emotional expression of power,” “a bond between people who are unequal”¹¹ – as one of the basic emotional bonds. Protection being a telos of modern governance, this means that the state has a specific responsibility for its subjects which consists not only in protection but also in safeguarding or improving living conditions and taking the right means to achieve these goals. In the so-called “knowledge society,” it is up to scientifically educated experts to decide what these means are.

The ambiguity between trust or belief in authority, and fear of its power explains the constant shifting of authority and why some figures might lose while others gain authority. Furthermore, social figures that habitually embody epistemic authority can be – and often are – politically shaped: by granting or denying authority to individual subjects; by concretely replacing individuals and institutions (as in authoritarian states); by questioning the cultural architecture of epistemic authority or the social roles that embody it as such (the scholar, the journalist). The political shaping of figures of authority can be a deliberate act of some social groups but it may as well be the result of contingent and uncontrolled processes, structural and systemic changes, etc. Thus, it relates to what we have called “political epistemologies” elsewhere.¹² Since epistemic authority figures have authority regarding what has to be considered knowledge (and what does not), they resemble truth figures although their authority does not necessarily relate to truth, but to decisions.¹³ Accordingly, scientific authority figures can appear as truth figures and as experts although in the latter case with a smaller range as, for instance, advisors or consultants.

While modern knowledge societies before the Second World War produced an academically grounded type of expertise that often came along with the exclusion of non-scientific knowledge, the division of the world into two main political camps after 1945 resulted in the emergence of experts that first and foremost were loyal to their respective blocs. These experts did not – at least not essentially – depend on their academic background, but were validated by the political systems they represented in the global struggle.¹⁴ In the 1980s, the AIDS pandemic and growing environmental consciousness, Chernobyl and the collapse of scientific socialism further weakened trust in science prompting the question how unbiased and aloof from politics it really was.¹⁵ This process, one could argue, supported the multiplication of authorities. Here, we can follow Naomi Oreskes, who in Why Trust Science? recently connected epistemic authority with trust:

The idea that science should be our dominant authority about empirical matters – about matters of fact – is one that has prevailed in Western societies since the Enlightenment, but it can no longer be sustained without an argument. Should we trust science?¹⁶

To Oreskes, trust in science as a collective endeavor, as an institution, has replaced the “authority of the ‘man of science,’” chosen by academic societies in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Alluding to a familiar problem of STS, she points out that reflection on science had shown that scientists were just people doing their work, so that trust does not come naturally, but has to be earned, which it can because of science's “sustained engagement with the world” and its social character:¹⁷ “The key point is that the basis for our trust is not in scientists – as wise or upright individuals – but in science as a social process that rigorously vets claims.”¹⁸ And scientists, who are trained to study the natural world and thus are the experts, have “to explain not just what they know, but how they know it” – Oreskes speaks of “informed trust.”¹⁹

The changing relations between science and politics can be well shown regarding examples from Central and Eastern Europe featured in this issue. Miglena Nikolchina observes a differentiation between the epistemic authority of an officially acknowledged and supported science, and that of a dissident one – even if they have been intrinsically entangled and partially depended on each other. This case demonstrates that scientific authority is not only determined by structures of power and social arrangements within the scientific field²⁰ but also by logics of other social fields that penetrate its realm. Along the lines of Pierre Bourdieu, we could describe this as the intrusion of political logic into the scientific field – the political epistemology of scientific authority.²¹ However, intrusion works in two directions and on several levels. Not only can we highlight general changes in the relation between science and politics but also in the individual tactics of scholars who have used (and still do) their institutional scientific capital to achieve personal goals or tried to strengthen their position by relying on social prestige. As Ella Rossman demonstrates in respect to Russian Gender History or Michał Pawleta for recent Polish archaeology, the political dimension can become more important and create conflicts between pure and institutional scientific authority.²² Thus, authority is always relational and depends on social interaction: it has to be represented by someone and it has to be acknowledged by someone else.

In respect to institutional scientific authority, a modern key figure is the expert. Sociologist Felix Wassermann has pointed out that in democracies, “experts have authority when their advice cannot be easily ignored in the decision-making process,” when their advice demands consideration and actually is being heard in politics, society and the public.²³ Still, this definition only refers to situations where authority is displayed and can be observed but does not address the question of how it is constituted: Is it sufficient to be asked for one's knowledge in a specific field to become an expert? Is pure or institutional scientific capital needed or perhaps only social capital? As he discusses the social figure of the expert, Wassermann gives a relational explanation: “[A]n expert is someone who, compared to a layperson, is considered to have more or different knowledge in an area that a (political) decision-maker considers relevant for decision-making.”²⁴ In this issue, however, we attempt to leave aside the grand figure of the expert in order to identify various derivations and their situational contexts. This, of course, opens a plethora of crucially important questions. How is authority constituted in societies, in which information and the access to academia is controlled in a certain restrictive manner; which pure scientific capital might either not be acknowledged or achievable; in which the accumulation of institutional scientific capital depends on political positions; in which the institutions of the scientific field themselves are a creation of elites that try to change the political order, as Andrea Pető discusses for the case of Hungary? Does being part of academia suffice to build up scientific authority in systems that misuse the scientific field to generate trust and respect for their political positions? Can and do epistemic virtues like modesty, trustworthiness, or diligence play a role in these contexts at all? Are even the same areas and kinds of expertise considered relevant for decision-making and, if they are, as in the case of science studies Friedrich Cain examines, why does the scientific authority of the respective experts differ so considerably? How does the transition from non-democratic to democratic regimes (or the other way around) affect these issues? Which strategies do experts apply in cases of regime change in order to transfer their scientific authority from one regime to another? How do they maintain it if their scientific tools and arguments are not enough to keep up their pure scientific capital, as discussed by Michał Pawleta, or if they are able to keep up their scientific standing but not their institutional scientific authority, as Anne Kluger examines?

The wide array of examples in this issue covers a long period from the 1960s until the present; it spans across general historiographic thresholds preventing a too closed geographical denomination. One might assume that the interpenetration of science and politics – and all complications this brings with it for the question of authority of science – is a post-1945 phenomenon. Yet, scholars had already been prominently present as figures of political authority when new states were popping up after the First World War. Philosopher Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk became president of Czechoslovakia, Gabriel Narutowicz, professor for hydraulic engineering at ETH Zürich, was elected president of Poland, historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky presided over the Ukrainian parliament – not to mention the philosopher Lenin who led the Soviet Union and was succeeded by Stalin, a self-proclaimed pantomath.²⁵

In the Soviet Union, not only Sputnik but physicists as a scientific group became symbols of progress and the expected socialist victory over the bourgeois society. But this happened at the cost of “lyricists” – poets or scholars from the humanities – who in the 1960s were deemed to be slowing down the progress-oriented techno-scientists.²⁶ It is hard to estimate how important this discussion was for the diverging social attribution of authority, but while “lyricists” gained epistemic authority as dissidents contesting the regime, natural scientists gained authority as symbols of Soviet power. Yet, as criticizing Soviet Sputnik meant criticizing the Party, increase in authority for these scientists meant that there were new possibilities to claim or to maintain independence from politicians, as Cain reminds us in this issue. Nikolchina analyzes moments in the 1960s, when scientific authority of theory and history of literature emancipated itself from the intrusion of political power in Bulgaria. At the same time, especially historians were the usual go-to-scholars when it came to the big anniversaries, as it was the case for the millennial celebrations of Polish statehood in the 1960s.²⁷

Scientists in socialist states had to face special tensions. They were either acknowledged by politicians and thus able to amass resources, yet often at the cost of losing trust in the eye of the public – or they faced the invert situation as dissidents. While many politicians (not only) from socialist states regarded science as a universal problem-solving tool, it was by no means considered as an elysian hail bringer nor unconditionally accepted by its protagonists. During the 1980s and 1990s, intellectuals in many countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe frequently pointed to the extension of scientific knowledge to cover more and more areas of knowing, eventually leading to the dilution of the very idea of science – an issue that was more acutely perceived during the growth of the academic landscape after 1989.²⁸ The crisis of authorities that was detected by sociologists in Poland or Russia during the 1990s then added a new dimension to the relation between science and authority.²⁹ The transformation meant the fall of what had been praised as eternal truth for decades while, at the same time, none of the authorities were able to fill the gap and find broader social acceptance (perhaps except for John Paul II in Poland, who was, until recently, acknowledged by the whole spectrum from post-socialists to new conservatives). In many cases authority was (re)arranged with the support of international foundations which helped create trusted institutions or produce authoritative book series.³⁰ However, as strongly opposing groups often gained considerable local importance, an uncritical narrative of westernization does not help here.³¹ Rather, we can speak of the post-Soviet academia becoming divided into two competing groups, one following the Soviet paradigm and one following the Western ones.³² The failure of the allegedly science-based socialist system added to a fragmentation of science's genuine epistemic authority in many ways. The question that people posed during socialist times, whether one can trust science if everything can be regarded as scientific, and the question of post-socialism, how one can trust science if a science-based ideology has failed, was joined by the phenomenon of multiplying authorities typical of the Western Bloc.

Authority can be both at once – scientific in a narrow sense and based on administrative power –, but it may also lean in one of the two directions. Hence, trust in science comes in very different shapes, and several of those will be presented in this issue. Our examples from Poland, pre- and postunification Germany, from Bulgaria, Hungary, and Russia show that trust is often linked to the specific reconfigurations of scientific authorities during and after state socialism. One should also be aware that the collapse of state socialism did damage the authority of social sciences in general. Their claim to be able to predict was shattered when the unpredicted occurred.³³ The equation of power and truth that has contributed to the recent rise of illiberal democracies has become normal and plausible.³⁴ Today, scientists in Hungary, Poland, or Russia – both in the natural sciences and the humanities – are again judged by state representatives according to their party affiliation and their political orientation respectively. While on a personal and institutional level this has far-reaching consequences – expulsion or internal and external emigration of non-conformist scholars, closure of disfavored institutes and creation of conformist “polypore” institutions – on a more abstract level, the scientific authority in general becomes increasingly relativized.

Interestingly, however, this return of “partiinost” (see Nicholchina in this issue) also changed the scope of who is considered an expert: if scientists are consulted by the state party they are presented not only as experts in their discipline but can be engaged in other domains as well, or they can even present themselves as general experts in societal and political issues.³⁵ This can be observed not only with regard to populist and right-wing parties that have traditionally been supported only by a limited number of scholars but increasingly also regarding other parts of the political spectrum. While in Putin's Russia the emergence of the expert general can be explained by a lack of alternatives, which means that the few experts present have to be able to reach beyond their discipline, this is not (yet) the case in Hungary or Poland where media logics are important. Here, the degree of trust is linked to familiarity. Who frequently appears in the media is likely to be trusted more rather than people with actual expertise but less coverage.³⁶ Thus, illiberal democracies are repeating the conflation of good vs. bad science with good vs. bad politics, but now the dividing line is not bourgeois vs. Marxist but runs between the one we can trust and the one we cannot.³⁷ But, as Pető argues in this issue (and elsewhere),³⁸ the academic systems in former socialist countries are far from stable, and clearly the 1989/1991 belief in a path of progress and modernization of science seems to have been (somewhat) naïve.

The following texts make up three parts that are arranged in, more or less, chronological order from State socialism through transformation/post-socialism up to the 21^st century. The first part includes contributions focusing on how scientific institutions and actors (sometimes unintentionally) came into positions that allowed them to perform criticism or dissidence against the political regime. In the first paper of the issue, Friedrich Cain argues that socialist Science Studies in the GDR placed themselves at an external insider position to science and to industry. Based on the socialist understanding that the sciences were important and could not be left to themselves but needed directions, Science Studies were empowered to take up a speaker position which made it possible to criticize science, production, and even party and state organizations as well as their interactions. Thus, the authority of Science Studies was established in a poly-vectoral process of communication, rather than being assigned solely by the party or only based on a scientific habitus. Miglena Nikolchina's contribution about political control and the Humanities in 1960s Bulgaria investigates the “emancipation of scientific authority from the intrusion of communist political power” referring to the opposition between the dogmatic Stalinist theory of aesthetics and the intellectual power of non-conformist philosophers of art. Challenging the official party doctrine of art as a reflection of reality by discussing art as the production of freedom, the “true intellectuals” (re)gained scientific authority over the politically institutionalized authority of the “apparatchicks.”

The second part assembles papers which focus on the transformations and recent re-transformations of post 1989/91 science systems in reunified Germany and in Russia. Analyzing the debates about GDR archaeologist Joachim Herrmann as “‘Honecker's Vassal’ or a Prehistorian in the Service of Science?,” Anne Kluger shows differing and contested perspectives on academic merit and on the credibility of Herrmann's self-legitimation. Her paper suggests that especially times of transition, insecurity, and contention reveal how much “the granting or denying of academic authority and the status of the professional scholar are highly context-dependent and hence situationally determined and historically dynamic.” Another example of a struggle for recognition among peers is presented by Ella Rossman, who examines how women's and gender history scholars faced changing political difficulties in Russia from the 1990s until today and how they used various strategies to build up scientific and, more specifically, disciplinary authority within post-Soviet academia. The first generation of those scholars predominantly worked in the field of academia. They organized large conferences and published volumes – including very diverse contributions – and also emphasized the relevance of gender studies/gender history as well as its applicability in state policy and governmental decision-making. Yet from the 2010s onward, a new movement of feminist political activism brought a new generation of gender historians to the fore who directed their research to wider audiences and gained recognition within and outside academia. While the first generation's strategies, based on the inclusivity of contributors and topics, effectively eroded the concept and aim of gender studies and gender history, the long-term success of the new movement is not yet clearly determinable.

The two final contributions discuss contemporary challenges from (beyond) the borders of science. Focusing on reconstructions of archaeological sites in open-air reserves and theme parks in present-day Poland, Michał Pawleta observes a renegotiation of scientific authority within a complex clash of conflicting claims on the past made by different stakeholders. After the profound change in management and funding after 1989, former state museums and archaeological reconstruction sites now face the need to fulfill requirements of the tourism and histotainment industry and to compete with more and more new local initiatives. Pawleta describes attacks on the scientific authority of archaeologists and their attempts to maintain their epistemic authority – for example through critique of popular reconstruction sites – to illustrate conflicts that arise when the “aim of reconstructions is not congruent with scientific or conservational goals,” and when notions of authenticity differ considerably. He analyzes conflicting modes and motivations of constructing the past, and studies attitudes to scientific knowledge and legitimizing strategies, as well as the making of alternative authorities, and how these practices may destabilize scientific authority today. Andrea Pető discusses academic authority and Hungarian illiberal democracy. Using the idea of the illiberal “polypore state” as an explanatory framework, she shows how the science policy of the Fidesz government perverts the idea of science, turning it into a means of political control. Restructuring the institutional landscape of science, more and more “polypore” institutions are being installed that, like the polypore fungus on a tree, feed on the former academic system by transferring resources to build up their own base, produce their own elite and thus authority. Following Pető’s analysis, the illiberal state's distinctive science policy operates with classic rhetoric modes of scientific authority that are, in fact, neither scientific nor do they share in an authority relying on scientific merit or expertise.