ABSTRACT
The great question, “Is Freedom a Daughter of Knowledge?” can profitably be examined through the lens of the school of political thought known as social democracy. This is not to suggest that that venerable tradition, still less any of the individual thinkers within it, should be treated, in Steve Fuller’s mordant phrase, as “one-stop shopping for the mind” (Fuller, 2005:67). Social democrats have been as guilty as anyone of treating knowledge as a “black box” (Stehr, 1994:92). However, the present chapter hopes to show that there is much to learn from social democracy’s responses to such topical issues as the nature and role of information and knowledge in society, the political conditions of freedom, and the technocratic/democratic tradeoff. While obviously forged in the singular matrix of mid and high industrialization, this tradition, it will be argued, contains materials of ongoing relevance to so-called postindustrial societies and to a task of increasing importance, the construction of a normative theory of the information society (Duff, 2004a). The chapter focuses on three specific social-democratic thinkers: Sidney and Beatrice Webb (taking that formidable husband-and-wife team as a unit), R.H. Tawney, and John Rawls, and seeks to demonstrate that the differences in the conceptions of knowledge and freedom in the work of these thinkers are as instructive as the similarities. It also explores some of the ways in which social-democratic thought has been or should have been affected by the information society thesis — for example, can we find a sensible way of speaking of what the anarchist thinker Brian Martin calls “information liberation” (Martin, 1998) as an overarching policy goal? — before concluding with some suggestions about the way forward for social democracy in the 21st century.
