Hence, we have the most foregrounded ambition of Panofsky’s book. Heidegger’s revolt, against Kant, was the philosophical equivalent of the cultural politics of the time in particular, that of a certain generation of conservatives who reached for an understanding of authentic Germanic culture over and against both liberal politics and market economics.īourdieu proposed that it is just as wrong to explain Heidegger’s thought in strictly political terms as it would be to do so in strictly philosophical terms to instead do both and/or neither, Bourdieu reconstructed the lifeworld and meanings of the proletarianized academicians who would follow Heidegger and he also articulated how for Heidegger, as for others, “a philosophical strategy is at one and the same time a political strategy at the heart of philosophical field.” This was, as is well-known, an important starting point for field theory but, as Panofsky himself points out, field analysis has been not been well-received by scholars in the sociology of science or in science and technology studies, especially those that focus on natural science. In Political Ontology, Bourdieu endeavored to show that Heidegger’s thought constituted a “conservative revolution” in philosophy, in the strict sense of a set of inversions and interventions made on the terms of philosophy, that nonetheless, in its articulation, was homologous to the political revolution from the right that overtook Germany. Misbehaving Science is an argument about how to do a sociology of knowledge, which also answers key questions about its “case,” much as Bourdieu did in his own text from 1975 and then in the book published in 1988. Understood in its most direct or available register of writing, Panofsky’s argument is a refinement and improvement on Bourdieu’s classic argument about the politics of knowledge. I will do so by reading Aaron Panofsky’s text Misbehaving Science in the context of three other books: (1) Pierre Bourdieu’s The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger (2) Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things and (3) Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

In what follows, I will try to explicate why I think the ironic meaning of this statement is as true as its literal one. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a social theorist of our generation, possessed of rich data and much sociological insight, must be in want of Bourdieu.

Misbehaving Science by Aaron Panofsky