"We make no large claims"

"in the social world of corporations and governments private preferences are advanced under the cover of . . . the findings of experts. . . . .  The effects of eighteenth-century prophecy have been to produce not scientifically managed social control, but a skilful dramatic imitation of such control.  It is histrionic success which gives power and authority to our culture.  The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor.
     "To this many managers and many bureaucrats will reply:  you are attacking a straw man of your own construction.  We make no large claims, Weberian or otherwise.  We are as keenly aware of the limitations of social scientific generalizations as you are.  We perform a modest function with a modest and unpretentious competence.  But we do have specialized knowledge, we are entitled in our own limited fields to be called experts.
     "Nothing in my argument impugns these modest claims; but it is not claims of this kind which achieve power and authority either within or for bureaucratic corporations, whether public or private.  For claims of this modest kind could never legitimate the possession or the uses of power either within or by bureaucratic corporations in anything like the way or on anything like the scale on which that power is wielded.  So the modest and unpretentious claims embodied in this reply to my argument may themselves be highly misleading, as much to those who utter them as to anyone else.  For they seem to function not as a rebuttal of my argument that a metaphysical belief in managerial expertise has been institutionalised in our corporations, but as an excuse for continuing to participate in the charades which are consequently enacted.  The histrionic talents of the player with small walking-on parts are as necessary to the bureaucratic drama as the contributions of the great managerial character actors."

     Alasdair MacIntyre, After virtue (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 102 ("The character of generalisations in social science and their lack of predictive power").  "the alleged laws . . . all turn out to be false and . . . so unquestionably false that no one but a professional social scientist dominated by the conventional philosophy of science would ever have been tempted to believe them" (84).  "the generalisations and maxims of the best social science share certain characteristics of their predecessors — the proverbs of folk societies, the generalizations of jurists, the maxims of Machiavelli" (99).  "the notion of social control embodied in the notion of [socio-scientific] expertise is . . . a masquerade.  Our social order is in a very literal sense out of our, and indeed anyone's, control" (101).