Individual scholarly brilliance mattered less than institutional European power

Evidence

In this colossal engineering project William Jones’s intervention was not an expression of an individual effort; it represented the full force of the institutional and epistemic weight of Europe that gave it its conditions of felicity. Jones was perhaps the best talent available at that time and place, but it also was one that embodied and gave full expression to the potency of the performative power of British knowledge and its resultant colonialism. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 269

Categorization

• QUESTION: Contrast with the common celebration of individual translators/scholars like Jones as agents of knowledge — worth chasing how this recharacterizes the ‘great man’ narrative of orientalism.
• XREF: connects to: Nobel Prizes reflect disciplinary politics and local context, not pure scientific merit — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 480