The interview with Hermínio Martins published here was originally conducted in 2011, to celebrate the 200th issue of Análise Social, the oldest Portuguese social science journal, published by the Instituto de Ciências Sociais [Institute of Social Sciences] of the University of Lisbon (ICS, Universidade de Lisboa). Even though seven years have passed, and the interview focuses mainly on the history and trajectory of the social sciences in Portugal, Martins’ replies are so wide-ranging and learned, as was characteristic of him, and contain so much valuable thinking on the theoretical and institutional state of the social sciences in general that the interview is of undeniable interest for the present volume.
The institute which publishes Análise Social is the same body which invited Martins to be a senior research fellow (the equivalent to a full professor), following his retirement from the University of Oxford. The ICS also sponsored the award of an honorary doctorate degree by the University of Lisbon and in 2006 published a Festschrift entitled Razão, Tempo e Tecnologia: Estudos em Homenagem a Hermínio Martins [Reason, Time and Technology: Studies in Honour of Hermínio Martins] edited by Manuel Villaverde Cabral, José Luís Garcia, and Helena Mateus Jerónimo (Cabral et al. 2006).
When he joined the ICS-Universidade de Lisboa and the Portuguese university for the first time in 2001, Martins found interlocutors with whom he began an intense period of joint intellectual endeavour, particularly in the field of the sociology of science and technology. In this area, to which he devoted himself vigorously in the last twenty years of his life, Martins, together with José Luís Garcia and other younger colleagues, organized seminars and jointly edited books and special issues of journals. He also supervised theses, having been a member of several master’s degrees and PhD exam boards. As part of this process, he published his magnum opus in ‘the philosophical sociology of technology’ in 2011—the book Experimentum Humanum: Civilização Tecnológica e Condição Humana [Experimentum Humanum: Technological Civilization and the Human Condition] (Martins 2011). This work was published in Brazil in the following year, with two additional chapters (Martins 2012).
The aim of the 200th issue of Análise Social was to provide a forum for significant figures in Portuguese social science, thinkers and scholars whose work was crucial for an understanding of not only the intellectual climate in which the journal had evolved but also the path taken by the social sciences in Portugal. Hermínio Martins was an obvious choice among the academics chosen, as the author of some of the earliest historical and sociological essays on Portugal for international academic audiences.
Among the various topics covered in the interview, Martins inveighs against the sociological mainstream and criticizes the lack of theoretical thinking and attention to epistemology and temporality in the social sciences. He distances himself from the marketization of the university and the ‘officialization of scientism’, from ‘the dirigisme in relation to production of knowledge’ and the ‘frenzy of “article-ism”’, referring to the fact that academics are tending to write quantities of articles which are ever shorter and limited in scope. He favours an inter-disciplinary dialogue, and is looking to horizons beyond a mere ‘theory-franchise’, defending his own contribution to a theory of social action which incorporates the notion of uncertainty.
The version of the interview published here recovers two-thirds of the original (in Análise Social 200/56: 460–483). The main lines of his argument are retained, and even if, in some sections, the focus is on Portugal, his vision is always extendable to other contexts: it is indeed the true vision of an exceptional teacher and thinker.
Appendix
Helena Mateus Jerónimo, who conducted and edited the interview, is a sociologist with a PhD from the University of Cambridge and an assistant professor at the School of Economics and Management of the University of Lisbon (ISEG, Universidade de Lisboa). Her research in the field of the sociology of science, technology, and environment led her to the writings of Hermínio Martins. She took part in various joint endeavours with Hermínio Martins and José Luís Garcia. When she did this interview she was one of the assistant editors of the Análise Social journal. She is grateful to the current editor of Análise Social, Professor José Manuel Sobral, for the grant of copyright for publication of the interview in English. She also thanks Richard Wall, who has translated the interview.
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Interview
- 1.Hermínio, you were for many years an intellectual exile, but you always followed intellectual thought and political life in Portugal closely. What are your thoughts on the consolidation of the social sciences in Portugal?
As an exile I not only followed Portugal’s situation with attention, bitterness, and anxiety, especially during the time of the colonial war, but at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s I also in fact wrote various academic articles on modern Portugal. Some of these were published in British compendia and academic journals.
Partly as a result of the circumstances in which I found myself, as a university professor of sociology in the United Kingdom, at the time possibly the only Portuguese to be titular professor in any branch of the social sciences in that country (how different is the situation today!), those essays were very well received (I was lucky—and luck, as Popper always insisted, has much more to do with academic careers than academics would like to think). They were seen as pioneering works, both by the British academic research community and by various Portuguese intellectuals in exile at the time (a fair number of them doing doctorates in French, Belgian, and Swiss universities, very few in England), as I found out years later.
The essay on the Estado Novo and its origins was […] ‘the kick-starter’ for research work on the authoritarian regime […]. The study on social stratification […] is still mentioned today, but its neo-Weberian approach, the first such by any Portuguese on any topic, if I’m not mistaken, does not seem to have garnered much of a close following in Portugal in this field, where various forms of neo-Marxist and Bourdieusian approaches prevail, quite legitimately. The article on the opposition also continues to be cited and searched for. These three essays were finally republished in Portugal—some twenty-five years later!—in the book entitled Classe, Status e Podere Outros Ensaios sobre o Portugal Contemporâneo [Class, Status and Power, and Other Essays on Modern Portugal – Martins 1998] with another unpublished study written in 1970, when it was presented at an international conference organized by Juan Linz and Al Stepan, on the collapse of the First Republic […].
In any event, these articles were the only ones in the English-language academic literature on Portugal and continued to be so for a fair length of time. Their longevity, in terms of citations and readings, is of course gratifying to me: there are not that many articles in the social sciences which have a lifespan of three or four decades, within Portugal and without. The research I had to do, which was difficult because sources were few at that time, and the obvious restrictions on my access to whatever there was, not to mention the aim of ensuring maximum objectivity on such emotive issues, I saw as a civic duty (even though my Portuguese passport had been confiscated). That was much more important to me than any contribution to a professional CV.
In connection with the first essay I mentioned, Manuel de Lucena1 said he felt in it ‘the visceral hatred’ of dictatorship: an inference drawn from outside the actual text, in my opinion. It was following publication of that first essay that American researchers like the historian Douglas Wheeler and the political scientist Philippe Schmitter, whose contributions to Portuguese studies are well known today, got in touch and talked with me when they visited the UK. It should be recalled that American researchers, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, etc., who turned their attention to the study of modern Portugal at the end of the 60s, in general started by studying Africa and Latin America (mainly, but not exclusively Brazil) before devoting themselves to studying Portugal in the final years of the dictatorship. At that time Portugal was a kind of terra incognita in international academe, a situation which nobody today can probably imagine. [...]
Nevertheless, I admit that I had a single utopian vision of [the consolidation of the social sciences in Portugal over the last thirty years] which I allowed myself to dream of for a short time after the revolution of 25 April 1974. That vision was that some of the limitations of the division of academic work in social and cultural studies that I was familiar with first-hand in the UK and North America might be overcome in Portugal. I am referring here to hyper-specialization, to the lack of communication between disciplines or even sub-disciplines, and to the linguistic, cultural, and historical provincialism of the intellectual world of the social sciences (the lack of general historical culture among sociologists seemed to me to be even more shocking in the UK than in the US, at least as far as the more prestigious American universities are concerned). My utopian hopes were dashed: the defects attending the division of intellectual labour in the English-speaking social sciences were not only mimicked but reproduced with veritable and even exaggerated enthusiasm. How zealous Portuguese researchers turned out to be in their policing of cognitive, disciplinary, doctrinal, ideological, institutional, and corporate borders! Fortunately there are still some academics who are multidisciplinary, polyglot, and possessed of a general culture in the social sciences, and indeed are exceptionally cultured in historical terms, but many of these have reached retirement age or will be retiring in the next few years (although they will continue to be active and serve as good examples to future generations). Will this generation have successors to match them, with the same willingness to take on and create links between different disciplinary perspectives?
- 2.Given your in-depth knowledge of other countries, in particular the UK, how do you see social science institutions in Portugal, in comparative terms? […]
The few with which I am reasonably familiar seem to be comparable to those in other countries […]. One of the real tests of Portuguese academic social science’s innovative ability will be precisely how well and how positively it responds to emerging proposals and projects and which will transcend disciplinary limitations and move away from preselected foreign ‘labels’.
Note university administrators’ and other established authorities’ obsession with foreign working models (especially certain supposedly North American models). That obsession not only affects the indispensable financial support required for research work today, as if those models—or rather the very limited subset of those models which they consider to be the best—enjoyed exclusive and unquestioned normative superiority. They see internationalization from a very provincial, acritical, asymmetric, and bureaucratic point of view, in the worst sense of the term. Their insistence on being placed in the rankings of worldwide academic journals, based on obscure criteria, imitating the hard sciences in a servile and mechanical way, and other standards and rules which make little sense in most of the human and social sciences, is one of the worst things to have happened in recent years. For example, the Harvard bibliographical referencing system, designed for the hard sciences alone, has become practically compulsory in the social sciences, with no intellectual justification at all for that transfer, but with undesirable effects on knowledge. The harm it does is so obvious, the practice so indefensible, the absurdity of it so clear, that it becomes impossible to understand why people persist in such practices: is their continuation due merely to inertia? Or maybe the enjoyment of administrative power is its own justification….
The primary duty of administrators is to let us work in peace, with full intellectual freedom, and not to dictate what we should do, where we should publish, the length of research articles, authorial requirements, the language in which articles are published, or the spelling of the language in which they are written. That which we might call the ‘officialization of scientism’ and the dirigisme in relation to production of knowledge in the academy is one of the most surprising developments of recent decades in states which still call themselves liberal democracies, including Portugal, of course.
Any day now, if present trends in academic policy continue, they will insist that social science articles should consist of only a few pages, as happens in the hard sciences, and that, as with the hard sciences, they be signed not by one author alone, but by many, the more the merrier, like those articles signed by 160 ‘authors’ or more, or by a similar number, as occurs in certain branches of physics! Nobody cares about the attribution of epistemic responsibility in such cases, something which was once a key criterion. We live in an age which proclaims the sovereignty of the ‘absolute individual’, in which the supremacy of economic, political, moral, and religious individualism is asserted and methodological and ontological individualism tends to prevail among social scientists. But, at the same time, academic research work is being collectivized and even formally massified as never before, subject to rigid writing protocols, to unprecedented demands for uniformity, to the monopoly of a single language for international academic communication, teamwork is valued above all, and the research author as the attributable epistemic subject is giving way to the ‘author function’.
- 3.[On being asked about the main lines of theoretical and empirical development in the social sciences over recent decades, Martins offered a critical opinion on the tendencies he called ‘the frenzy of “article-ism”’ and ‘analyticism’.]
[...] In the unceasing race to produce articles, which are ever shorter, more specific, and limited—which we might call ‘the frenzy of “article-ism”’—exacerbated by the existential conditions in which research work is carried out today, [there is another] type of work2 that is not very appealing. It takes up a lot of time, demands great dedication, and, when it is done in a non-partisan way and is not used as a weapon in academic political infighting, to ‘shaft’ one’s enemies (which does happen), is a form of research altruism which has become almost entirely discredited and is perhaps even harmful to an author’s career. No doubt there are worthy exceptions [to their general disappearance], and we should be pleased to have them, but they are just that, exceptions.
[...] As Schumpeter said in his great book on the history of ‘economic analysis’, there can be no analysis, however sophisticated, exact, and precise it may be, without a view or vision of society as a whole. Even if that view is eclectic and confused, there has to be a vision which embodies a particular image of Man, or a particular overall conception of History, or a general conception of knowledge, of its sources, criteria, and limitations, underlying that analysis, even mathematical analysis (the increasing mathematization of economics was one of the topics of the book). That underlying...