Lasch—The Trouble With Professionalism

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[228] Bureaucratic Dependence and Narcissism Recent studies of professionalization show that professionalism did not emerge, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to clearly defined social needs. Instead, the new professions themselves invented many of the needs they claimed to satisfy. They played on public fears of disorder and disease, adopted a deliberately mystifying jargon, ridiculed popular traditions of self-help as backward and unscientific, and in this way created or intensified (not without opposition) a demand for their own services.

footnote to above:

[228] my argument must not be misunderstood as an unqualified condemnation of professionalism. Obviously professions uphold important values. ... But it is not true...that "professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community." [P. Goodman, "The New Reformation"] The way in which professionals construe and discharge these responsibilities naturally reflects the social surroundings in which they operate. American professionalism has been corrupted by the man-
[229, footnote cont.]
agerial capitalism with which it is so closely allied...

[Thomas] Haskell writes: "Membership in a truly professional community [cannot] be based on charm, social standing, personal connection, good character, or perhaps even decency, but on demonstrated intellectual merit alone." Haskell does not appreciate how easily "intellectual merit" can be confused with the mere acquisition of professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken ideological consensus...

Great points. So professionalism is an ideal that can never quite be realized?

I wonder also if the internal technical contours of a field have at least as much to do with just how professional it can ever become as do any social and political contexts? Also whether these surrounding contexts invade a profession precisely to the degree that said profession is unable to objectively define merit?