Education, Control and the Judicial Community

Polanyi argues that the analysis he has made of the scientific community can be applied to other communities which have established a body of systematic ideas. He attempts to apply a similar analysis to the judicial community in The Logic of Liberty 1 and to the community of historians in The Study of Man. 2 Both these are intellectual communities which are concerned with developing systematic ideas about the nature of justice and about the nature of the past. However, he has a further claim that his analysis can be applied to non-intellectual communities that have developed coherent ideas, for instance, the moral community and the political community, and that these coherent ideas will be used to assess and control innovations.