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As Hegel observed of the emerging democracies of the nineteenth century, in the universe of modern political subjects “what is to be authoritative… derives its authority, not at all from force, only to a small extent from habit and custom, really from insight and argument.” Under democracies, at least, argumentation complements pure force and arbitrary choice as a basic source of world-shaping decisions. Rationality itself has become a source of power; consensual political systems require agreement in thought as well as acquiescence in behavior. Twisting the liberalism of Hegel’s point in light of decades of discussion of the politics of representation, we must ask how any given claim comes to count as an insight and from what source arguments derive their social force.

This problem has been addressed most explicitly in the sociology of knowledge. Recent social studies of science have termed the epistemological standpoint that assumes a relation between power and knowledge an “equivalence postulate”. Barry Barnes and David Bloor, for example, describe this position as follows:

“Our equivalence postulate is that all beliefs are on a par with one another with respect to the causes of their credibility. It is not that all beliefs are equally true or equally false, but that regardless of truth and falsity the fact of their credibility is to be seen as equally problematic… Regardless of whether the sociologist evaluates a belief as true or rational, or as false and irrational, he must search for the causes of its credibility. Is a belief enjoined by the authorities of the society? Is it transmitted by established institutions of socialization or supported by accepted agencies of social control? Is it bound up with patterns of vested interest?” (…)

Instead of looking for fixed, universal laws of logic guaranteeing the connection of particular phenomena to general concepts, sociologists of knowledge seek the learned, contingent principles of thought actually used by human groups. (…) To investigate signification and justification as social practices, we have to explain why cognitive approaches differ without appealing to the ‘facts’ of the world.

Paul N. Edwards. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 (adapted ).

Considering the grammatical and semantic aspects of text, decide whether the following items are right or wrong.

The word “enjoined” cannot be replaced by endorsed in this particular context.