The scientific field is a structured space of positions and of struggles for the monopoly of scientific authority—simultaneously technical capacity and social power. Scientific interest is always two-sided; epistemological conflicts are political conflicts. Autonomy of the field increases as the circle of those who grant recognition narrows to competitors. The purest science remains a social game whose stakes and profits take specific forms. Strategies of accumulation of scientific capital, the hierarchical ordering of institutions, and the contamination of technical judgements by positional knowledge are constitutive, not accidental. Reason progresses under determinate social conditions that the field itself produces and presupposes.
URBANISM MEETS ART