Science Quote by Michael Polanyi

Polanyi is doing something quietly subversive: smuggling hierarchy back into a conversation that science often prefers to narrate as pure merit and impersonal method. The line opens with “Admittedly,” a small throat-clear that signals he knows he’s touching a liberal nerve. We like to imagine the lab as a republic of equals where data rules and personalities don’t. Polanyi insists that, in practice, authority clumps. Some voices carry farther, not because truth is aristocratic, but because communities are.

The phrasing matters. “Scientific authority” isn’t just expertise; it’s legitimacy, the power to set agendas, to declare what counts as a real problem, to anoint methods as “rigorous,” to decide which results feel plausible before replication even begins. When he says it’s “not distributed evenly,” he’s rejecting the comforting fiction that peer review and citation counts are neutral sorting machines. They’re social instruments, tuned by reputation, networks, and a profession’s hunger for reliable guides.

“Distinguished members… predominate” is deliberately mild, almost bureaucratic. Predominate how? In hiring, in gatekeeping journals, in shaping funding priorities, in defining what “serious” work looks like. “Junior standing” is the euphemism that reveals the subtext: deference isn’t a bug, it’s the default setting. Polanyi’s broader context (his defense of “tacit knowledge” and the “Republic of Science”) helps decode the intent. He’s not merely critiquing elitism; he’s arguing that science’s freedom and coordination depend on informal authority, the kind you can’t codify without breaking it. The provocation is that objectivity, at scale, is partly a social achievement built on unequal voices.