Social Science and Scholarly Communication in the New Century

Irving Louis Horowitz

Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt distinguished professor emeritus at Rutgers University. These remarks were given in Stockholm Sweden as part of the Zetterberg Lectures by the author.

I am greatly honored to be here this evening. Rather than view this occasion as a personal tribute, I prefer to view this prelude to the Zetterberg Lectures as a reflection of the special role that Hans and a select group of social scientists have played in bringing about a closer relationship between the social science and professional publishing communities. There is still ample room for pioneering spirit, even within an old industry such as publishing. My thoughts turn to all that I have learned and gained from having known Jeremiah Kaplan, founder of The Free Press, Irving Kristol and Martin Kessler, major figures in the start up of Basic Books, and the too often neglected Frederick Praeger who pioneered two start-ups, one that still goes by his name, the other being Westview Publishers. In this select group, Hans Zetterberg also figures prominently. For in the decade of the 1960s, through the firm of Bedminster, he issued a series of classic and contemporary studies that remain part of the social science bedrock. Hans understood early on that social science is a business, and business is not a bad word subject only to mindless ridicule.

So here I stand on the shoulders of these giants, and untold others, in demonstrating the possibilities of, and the need for, a social scientific mission in the world of professional and academic publishing. It is no simple task to have one foot in the world of university press-type books and journals, and the other in the still riskier world of commercial publishing. Add to that mix a continuing effort to contribute my own scholarship independent of publishing, and the mix can easily become quite a smorgasbord. Next year marks the fortieth anniversary of Transaction Publishers, an organization that I have been with since its start, so my impulse to reflection and rumination is, I hope, understandable. It has been my great good fortune that the world has conspired to bring scholarly communication and social science closer to each other than ever before.

This is the case not simply because niche publishing in the area of social research has been virtually abandoned by the commercial houses. Nor is it because a new cluster of specialist publishers has come into existence to address such concerns. It is rather that policy issues have arisen that require urgent attention. Just think of the plethora of issues we are now faced with that were virtually unknown even a half-century ago, when at least some of us embarked on careers in social science. There is the relationship between physical property and intellectual property; private ownership of information and the public's right to know; national boundaries and international space; the emergence of English as the lingua franca in global communications; and huge shifts in how information is transmitted to the public, from hard copy, to broadcasting, to the Internet. Thus it is that those of us involved in publishing, far from being odd ducks or adventurers, are in fact at the cutting edge of social research questions. What started as the accidental choice of a few has now been transformed into the necessary agenda of many.

I would like to take this time with you to briefly outline what I have learned in a lifetime of criss-crossing social science and scholarly publishing. My remarks are not intended as mandates or even as recommendations for how to behave. I offer them as lighthouses for those who would navigate a new course of understanding the world, and make it a slightly better place than the one that we inherited.

Both social science and scholarly publishing must break the barriers of parochial boundaries. From the unified nature of international development to the integrative capacities of the Internet, internationalism is the order of the day. This does not signify a loss of sovereignty, of family, or even of individuality. It most assuredly is not a call for imposition of ludicrous notions of world government and world order, or other such dangerous forms of control. It is recognition that knowledge and communication as such break down every barrier. Social science in this admittedly highly confined realm is part of the democratizing process. In focusing on stratification and inequalities, on different paths to pursue universal aims of health, education and security, the social sciences have been transformed. It is not so much placing limits on the range of theorizing as seeking avenues of performance that actually assist the common good. For example, the International Social Security Association located in Switzerland is the center of worldwide efforts to reconfigure social security in every nation in the democratic West. The European experiences become the source of intelligence in establishing new directions in the United States.

We are all the beneficiaries of global experience on concerns that are paramount for each of us as individuals. We live in a world where at the click of a mouse we can access the news and ideas of literally thousands of publications worldwide. In such a communication environment, of what use or meaning are publications such as The American Sociologist, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, or The Indian Economic Review? If the social sciences are to make credible claims of universality, they cannot simply be reduced to locality. There is sociology of America and an economy of India, and anthropology of Australia. But these are aspects of the universal claims for the scientific parameters of sociology, economy and anthropology not the special properties of individual nations. The attachment of the names of specific nations to intellectual pursuits has become gratuitous at the least, and insulting at worst.

Open communication channels and well-developed social science paradigms are part of the world of knowledge. They are not intended to be means to political ends and whims. One might make a case that communications and social science extend the boundaries of democracy, but they do so precisely to the extent that they are not subject to political and bureaucratic pressures. A great failing in much current social science and communication thinking is the idea of putting such knowledge at the service of elites, of political or economic agencies who have little interest in the general will or the general good. That is why social science knowledge is an end in itself, not a means to securing the interests of others. The perfume of power emits a strong but transitory odor. The tasks of the present are to make our respective professional associations responsive to the citizens we serve and the membership we aim to enhance. When such organizations become footnotes to political special interests, the very claims to science become suspect and corrupted. There are indeed risks in converting our areas of expertise into a "new class." And the goals of serving a constituency beyond us are not easy to establish. But such risks are at least manageable and controllable by us. To tailor the findings and theories that we have in the service of unknown ends is, in my view, the more risky alternative.

In discussions of this sort, the emphasis is too often on the social and not the scientific. In point of fact, it is precisely at the level of the sciences that scholarly publishing and academic social research link up. For the very act of reading, like that of research, involves forms of rationality and reflection that helped maintain, if not bring about, the very existence of civilization. In the present epoch, the nature of this struggle has been clear by the coming to power of regimes that first burn and then ban books. It is also a struggle to ensure a multiplicity and not a monopoly of publishing. Without competition in the marketplace of ideas the need to burn books becomes superfluous. The fascist approach is more obviously brutal. The Communist approach is both more sophisticated and more effective. The rise to academic respectability of doctrines that emphasize irrationality, subjectivity and ideology as substitutes for research and experimentation must also be understood as a frontal assault against the social sciences no less than the cultural heritage. At the start of the twentieth century, Charles Sanders Peirce in his essay on The Fixation of Belief somewhat whimsically declared that 99 percent of the educated public had their views "fixed" by tradition and authority, and about 1 percent by the methods of science. Whatever those number are in actuality, it is our shared task to stand with science as a method and exact information as a universal goal. This struggle is in effect the core of our politics. We must make a constant decision to oppose those who seek the triumph of the Will against the pursuit of learning. Doing so is also a tacit decision on behalf of living in a world in which truth is steadily pursued, and shortcomings necessarily tolerated, not gleefully punished.

Scholarly publishing and social science research fuse in another important respect. We are constantly involved in refining and redefining the tradition, the canon if you will, of intellectual life. The publishing community is compelled to do so by keeping a close ear to the ground listening to the demand curve of the marketplace, to learn what people want to read, and what will they buy for themselves or their libraries. What is transient and what is permanent is less a series of guesses than a statistical series of tables of buying habits. The social science community for its part is largely responsible for the supply curve-what is it that scholars are working on, what is exciting in the combining and recombining of the universe. And here scholarship is at the cutting edge, and good publishing follows closely behind. Publishing carves up the world among commercial, text and scholarly modalities. But that approach is probably as archaic and outmoded as those who still think of social research as being encapsulated by the five fields of anthropology, political science, psychology, sociology, and economics-or those fields which saw themselves organized in departmental terms between 1896-1912. The real world ultimately gets what it wants and discards the rest. This is a harsh reality, but one that is disregarded at the peril of science and society alike. A wide range of fields, from criminology, demography, urbanology, communication studies, cognitive studies, social statistics policy research, decision theory-these are but some of the areas that have increased the size and potency of social science in the new century. These are also the fields that have prevented hardening of the arteries in scholarly communication.

These brief remarks hardly exhaust an examination of Social Science and Scholarly Communication in the New Millennium. Each has power requirements that have precious little to do with each other. The marketplace of supply and demand and the marketplace of ideas are hardly isomorphic or symmetrical. That said, I believe it is of utmost importance to see the forces at work that have brought us to this point, a point of synthesis unforeseen in past ages. Researchers and publishers are united by the act of creation. Gangsters and terrorists are united by the act of destruction. If this strikes a somewhat melodramatic, indeed avuncular, note on which to end, I have done so with a purpose-to emphasize as strongly as possible that ours is a world of hard struggles. These are our struggles. They take place in the very bowels of our lives as social scientists and academic publishers. It would be a forlorn task to go hunting for the perfect political party to represent our interests. We need to define and defend our interests in terms of our quotidian lives, and in so doing make certain that the political process responds to our needs or risk our wrath. To resort to an old cliche, we live in times of enormous upheaval and uncertainty-but so did all those who came before us engaged in the struggle for a decent world filled with decent people. Interests are collective, but impulses are individual. Ultimately, it is as individuals that we need to develop the resolute skills to defend an honest social science within the context of a free communications system. In The Plague, Albert Camus put these sentiments best for me:

There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that two plus two equals four is punished with death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is whether or not two plus two equals four.