Unspecialized people, not specialists, hold moral and political capacity.
Evidence
The unspecialized human being constitutes the moral norm. It is he who can lose himself in a solidary unit, and gladly accept collective responsibility. By contrast, the specialists of the towns, for whom specialization is of the essence, are politically castrated and incapable of cohesion, and hence of self-government. Consequently they are also incapable of governing others. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1978
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Defines the moral norm as the unspecialized human being — the conceptual core of Gellner’s cohesion model.
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s Luhmann/Hardin synthesis: the unspecialized person is ‘too embedded in a solidary unit’ to need trust or observability — cohesion substitutes for trust.