can be considered a scientific former of opinion, although he manifested a certain ambivalence concerning such status.49 According to Lepenies,50 not for a second would it occur to Schelsky to conceive the expert as a natural scientist. As he notes in Aufstieg und Fall der Intellektuellen in Europa, Sociology comes to assume a role previously reserved for the prophets which insisted on enlivening dead ideals, affirming itself in a productive gap between the application of the scientific method to society and the unrestrained digests of literature. It presented a third way between the melancholic contemplation, a negativity towards the present order that has lost its efficacy in the socio-economic conditions of liberal democracies, and the achievement of the utopian technocracy, presuming to hold the pathways to perfection and compulsive happiness. The fall of the homo europaeus Intellectualis and his “faith in genuine, authentic revolution, which would put an end to the ills of the west”51 leaves a void which cannot be filled by the social scientist or the technician. According to Lepenies, the engaged position of the scholars coming from the eastern bloc – we may think of intellectuals of the stature of Vaclav Havel – brought renewed enthusiasm around values and principles cemented on personal commitment and consistency, that had long given place to abstract, technocratic views, or everyday commentary. The return of the philosopher, first as the engaged melancholic that called for an open society and later as the “failed intellectual” engaged in the political arena, contrasted with the safe and lukewarm attitudes of the public intellectuals of the west. In his reading of Lepenies’ views, Kwiek52 pointed to the role of the intellectual in reviewing the conviction of a new objective order of society
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This ambivalence was well captured by Hans Gumbrecht. Luhmann refused that his theory was contaminated by personal influences and, conform to Weber’s model of the expert, already at the time of publication of Sozial Systeme in 1984, acted as if his theory was the outcome of a large network of social sciences’ laboratories and “all the world worked in systems theory, as a great swarm” (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “‘Alteuropa’ und ‘Der Soziologe’ Wie verhält sich Niklas Luhmanns Theorie zur philosophischen Tradition?,” in Luhmann Lektüren, ed. Wolfram Burckhardt [Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2010], 73). At the same time, due to his own relevance and prestige, Luhmann's personal views acquired a great potential to influence political agenda and policy-making. Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 348. Bernard-Henri Lévy, Adventures on the Freedom Road. The French Intellectuals in the 20th Century, trans. Richard Veasey (London: The Harvill Press, 1995), 43. Marek Kwiek, “Wolf Lepenies: Homo Europaeus Intellectualis Revisited,” in Philosophie an der Schwelle des 21. Jahrhunderts, ed. E. Czerwinska-Schupp (Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 2003).
98 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS523452