Scienza del potere e potere della scienza. Bourdieu e la declinazione delle responsabilità nella società in trasformazione

Abstract

This contribution deals with Power, in particular Symbolic Power, a category that was at the center of Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical reflection and that immediately appeared important for understanding the relationship between Politics and Science. Science is a field of power, and, like all Bourdieusian fields, it is not homogeneous but conflictual, it is relatively autonomous but its autonomy from politics is always threatened by internal and external pressures. Of course, interference with politics occurs precisely whenever scientific authority, rather than the prestige of the scientist, must be recognized and legitimized from the political power. On the other hand, in politics it happens that the strategies of legitimization of normative instruments, to obtain consensus or to face resistance, require the support of those scientific truths, or at least of some of its arguments, communicated by scientists on the public scene. In this Bourdieusian perspective, then, we have formulated hypotheses on the case of the political and scientific management of the Covid-19 pandemic, which we have represented as a public situation in which regulatory strategies have been associated with the dissemination of scientific truths. We hypothesized that the political power wanted to gather consensus on restrictive norms using the rationality of scientific discourses. Indeed, the analysis of this case leads us to suppose that the effectiveness of State actions was due as much to the collective belief in science as to the fear and solidarity that public discourse provokes in ordinary people.