Trying to make race science the 'civil' science

Charisma in the Race and Intelligence Debates

Bibliographic Data

ID2059909
AuthorsK Dasgupta (0000-0003-1077-0183, University of California, Los Angeles), Aaron Panofsky (0000-0001-7666-2359, University of California, Los Angeles), Nicole Iturriaga (0000-0001-9534-6239, University of California, Irvine)
Year2022
Volume51
Issue4
Pages595-627
Publication date2022-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheory and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0304-2421 • E-ISSN: 1573-7853
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/s11186-022-09481-5
PMID36743837
OpenAlexW4224936709
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited55

When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvement in the scientific process as a story of suppression and persecution, in which only a few remarkable figures can withstand scrutiny and take on challengers with dignity. Description and elaboration of these figures and the folklore surrounding them sets in motion the interpretive processes by which some actors become charismatic leaders and others charismatic followers within science, ultimately providing alternative symbolic resources for an embattled research agenda to accrue legitimacy. To illustrate, we use the case of Arthur Jensen - a deceased intelligence researcher and the intellectual father to contemporary texts like The Bell Curve - and the circles of hero worship that admirers inside and outside academia have created to praise him. Using this perspective to study Jensen and his admirers demonstrates how the perennial race and intelligence debates gain a kind of symbolic power, unrelated to their scientific merit or racist appeal, which enables such debates to thrive and persist in the public sphere. More generally, our approach identifies contemporary processes by which scientific ideas can gain public authority even when their intellectual merit has been deemed dubious

Charisma · Political science · Sociology · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Race, Genetics, and Society