Science & Tech Quote by Michael Polanyi

Science likes to sell itself as the great anti-authoritarian enterprise: no priests, no kings, just evidence. Polanyi punctures that comforting myth by pointing at the social machinery underneath. “Admittedly” is doing heavy lifting here, a deliberate clearing of the throat before an inconvenient truth: the scientific community is not merely a loose network of truth-seekers; it’s an organized body that guards its jurisdiction, and it does so in part by asserting authority “over the lay public.”

The subtext isn’t anti-science so much as anti-naivete. Polanyi is warning that science functions as a profession, and professions survive by controlling entry, language, and training. The line about “young men” (period-typical phrasing that also reveals who was presumed to belong) frames scientific education as more than transmission of facts. It’s initiation. You don’t just learn methods; you learn what counts as a good question, which mistakes are forgivable, whose judgments matter, and what kinds of skepticism are respectable.

Context matters: Polanyi wrote in the shadow of totalitarian attempts to commandeer science and in an era when “planning” and technocracy promised neutral expertise while quietly consolidating power. His argument threads a needle: science needs internal authority and gatekeeping to maintain standards, yet that same structure can harden into self-protection and distance from democratic accountability. The quote works because it refuses the easy binary. Science is reliable partly because it’s social and disciplinary; it’s also vulnerable, for the same reason.