On amateur and academic researchers

On amateur and academic researchers

Schumpeter wrote, “modern mathematico-experimental science developed, in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ... outside of the fortress of scholastic thought and in the face of its contemptuous hostility.”

The whole passage, from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy 

It is highly significant that modern mathematico-experimental science developed, in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not only along with the social process referred to as the Rise of Capitalism, but also outside of the fortress of scholastic thought and in the face of its contemptuous hostility. In the fifteenth century mathematics was mainly concerned with questions of commercial arithmetics and the problems of the architect. The utilitarian mechanical device, invented by men of the craftsman type, stood at the source of modern physics. The rugged individualism of Galileo was the individualism of the rising capitalist class. The surgeon began to rise above the midwife and the barber. The artist who at the same time was an engineer and an entrepreneur— the type immortalized by such men as Vinci ... By cursing it all, scholastic professors in the Italian universities showed more sense than we give them credit for. The trouble was not with individual unorthodox propositions. Any decent schoolman could be trusted to twist his texts so as to fit the Copernican system.  But those professors quite rightly sensed the spirit behind such exploits — the spirit of rational individualism, the spirit generated by rising capitalism. (P 124)

Comments: Ideas from the outsiders are suppressed not because they are hard to understand. Rather they are viewed as challenges to the dominant institutions by individuals from periphery or outside. 

For more, check out a short video by James Galbraith.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1yOdicriZ4k