Science & Tech Quote by Max Gluckman

Gluckman’s line flatters science by insulting nearly everyone in it. The jab at “the fool of this generation” isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s a celebration of a system designed to make individual brilliance less decisive over time. In science, progress is supposed to be cumulative, procedural, and replicable enough that even the merely competent can extend it. That’s the point: knowledge becomes infrastructure. Once a genius turns a wild idea into a method, the next cohort inherits a ladder.

The stingy brilliance of the quote is how it reframes what we usually romanticize. We like stories where the lone visionary drags humanity forward; Gluckman reminds us that mature sciences are basically anti-heroic. Their greatest achievement is building routines, instruments, and shared standards so sturdy they can carry people who aren’t exceptional. “Discipline” matters here: science isn’t just curiosity, it’s training, norms, and community enforcement. The fool can “go beyond” because the field has learned how to store insight outside any single mind: textbooks, lab protocols, peer review, standardized measurement, statistical tools.

Coming from a mid-20th-century scholar steeped in institutional thinking, the quote also reads as a boundary marker. It distinguishes science from domains where progress depends on singular taste or genius and can’t be reliably handed down. The subtext is a critique of prestige cultures: if a discipline requires perpetual geniuses to move an inch, it may be art, philosophy, or ideology - but it isn’t science in Gluckman’s hard-nosed, modernization-minded sense.