Science Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Polanyi’s line lands like a rebuttal disguised as a diagnosis: it sketches a temptation within modern expertise and then quietly rejects it. The key word is “coerce.” He’s not arguing that scientists shouldn’t influence public life; he’s warning against the slide from advising to commanding, from evidence to entitlement. “Special knowledge” is framed not as a civic badge but as a dangerous solvent that can dissolve democratic humility if treated as a license to override everyone else.

The subtext is a fight over legitimacy. Scientific authority is real, hard-won, and often indispensable, but Polanyi points at the political myth that sometimes piggybacks on it: that competence in one domain grants moral jurisdiction over all domains. That’s technocracy’s seduction, and it tends to surface most aggressively during crises, when urgency makes coercion feel efficient and dissent feels irresponsible.

Contextually, Polanyi speaks from inside the institution he’s critiquing. As a Nobel-winning chemist with Cold War-era memories of science braided with state power, he’s alert to how quickly “knowledge” becomes an instrument of governance, and how easily governance recruits science for its own ends. The sentence also reads as a warning to the public: don’t outsource citizenship to experts, even when the experts are right. In a culture that oscillates between “trust the science” and reflexive anti-elitism, Polanyi threads a third needle: respect expertise without turning it into rule by credential.