This book is based on my forty years in higher education, and particularly my thirty years in higher business education, where I worked on integrating business and the humanities. For a long time, I conceived of my work as interdisciplinary. After more research, I realized that, in fact, the two fields had once been linked and that the rupture between them was only a few generations old. Understanding this rupture became my central focus. I took a genealogical approach (Part I), which led to the view presented in this book: for centuries, humankind has pursued knowledge for governance, including self-governance, and institutions that preserve, create, and disseminate this knowledge, for individual and collective flourishing. However, also for centuries, this idea was interwoven with ideas about and institutions associated with class, exclusivity, and continuity.
This combination fell apart in the twentieth century. Institutions organized under a new logic that valued the new per se and that linked new knowledge to new wealth and status. Reliable paths developed for individuals and organizations to exploit this synergy for themselves. In particular, science institutionalized in the research university as “basic science” in the disciplines and “applied science” in the professional schools. Together, they created far more value than either could do alone. The academy, the professions, and industry thus developed and thrived as a whole. The United States became a leader in all three domains and in the overarching idea of opportunity—what Mary Parker Follett called “dynamic society” and the chance for individuals to grow it and grow themselves in it. Both she and Chester I. Barnard envisioned a new knowledge field that would understand and master this mutually creative process.
At the same time, then, the possibility of a science of and for society emerged. But this science was not easy to distinguish from the old knowledge for governance. Also, the logic of separation and specialization . . .