Public Libraries: Cultural Institutions on the Crossroads between Purposive and Humanistic Rationality1

Introduction

Since 1988 I have been engaged in studying Norwegian public cultural policy in general and library policy in particular. To a certain degree these studies have made me familiar with professions in two sectors in the field of cultural policy, namely the library sector and the museum sector. Libraries and museums have much in common as far as history and social and cultural functions are concerned. They are both institutions of the 19th century, they are legitimate children of the Enlighten ment ideas, and both institutions aspire to meet social, intellectual and cultural needs of many and complex social groups or publics. In the Scandinavian countries popular education has been a major aim for the activities in such institutions.

At the same time libraries and museums are different: While the museum sector can be characterised as heterogenous with respect to organizational structure, degree of professionalism and working techniques, the libraries are homogenous and standardised in organization, working techniques and professional behaviour (Zorich 1991).

Let aside these differences, there is one thing that has struck me many times: Many professionals and managers in the library and the museum fields do not reflect theoretically of their practical activities. They do not have meta-theories, or more precisely, very few professionals have such theories. Most librarians are practical people, in Norway education programmes for librarians are not much academic, and once librarians have started their career as professionals, they are overrun by daily duties and do not have much time left for theoretical analysis.

The lack of basic philosophical, sociological and historic thinking in practical librarianship is quite a paradox: Libraries collect, organise and distribute theoretical knowledge through books and other media to all kinds of people, but we do not have much theory on the social and cultural functions of librarianship itself. This is probably the case for libraries in general, but the need for theoretical understanding is very demanding in public libraries, which in most countries are so intimately connected with general cultural policy and even other fields of policy, i.e. education policy.

In my opinion there is an unsatisfied need in librarianship to understand professional practice in view of paramount social and cultural theories. If librarians shall keep pace with other professional groups in a society based on the transfer of information, they need scientifically elaborated theories which can strenghten their social status and enhance their self-understanding. But also we - the users of libraries - should understand the library function of our societies in a broad social context.

My presentation shall not serve a practical purpose, I do not want to "solve the problems" of libraries (a task which I have no competence for). But I hope that I can contribute to a sociological and historic understanding of public libraries in the informational society.

The Concept of Rationality in the Modern Enlightenment Tradition

Purposive rationality departs from man's basic needs for control and manipulation of nature to secure a minimum of material basis for survival and reproduction. A purposive way of thinking was necessary to meet the primary physical and biological needs at a very early stage of civilization. In the next turn this developed an instrumental attitude towards the physical environments, i.e. environments were looked upon as instruments or means that man could use according to his own mind to improve his material conditions of life. Through the history of the Western world one can observe a contiuous strife for material progress and technical improvement. This became an outstanding and distinct characteristic of Western history after the Middle Ages. The Renaissance with its focus on the autonomous human reason liberated Western man from the power and control of religion and the Church. Natural sciences and religion were separated in different intellectual spheres, a process which favoured free, experimental, reason-based research within the logics of mathematics and physics. A practical result of this basic research throughout the centuries was the technical progress of Western Europe. These technical improvements , based on the logics of mathematics and physical laws, were one of the necessary preconditions for the industrial revolution of the early 19th century. One may assert that industrialism became the material proof of the sovereignty of purposive, instrumental rationality. Purposive rationality was the core element of technical and material progress, and one consequence of this was that it also came to "conquer" human, value-based spheres of rationality. To argue for this statement and explain the relationship between purposive and humanistic rationality, I will return to the issue of the differentiation process in Western intellectual traditions after the Middle Ages.

As above mentioned natural sciences and purposive rationality were separated from the sphere of religion. Likewise the arts and the human sciences ("philosophia") were differentiated from religion and the Church and were given an autonomous, secular position. This really meant that moral values - formerly based on the concept of God and God's representative on the earth, the Catholic Church - should be anchored in the value of the self-sufficient, free, secularised individual, which - according to his natural rights - should be protected and given the opportunity to create a human based value system aiming at the happiness of universal man. This very ambitious project expresses a very central element in the Renaissance and the idea of humanism, and in the 18th and 19th centuries these traditions were furtherly developed by the Enlightenment philosophers. In the economic and political sphere these ideas were adopted by the liberalists. The supreme ideal of the epoch was the economically, socially and culturally unbound individual - free to form his own destiny in a world of prosperity and material progress. This was also the ethos of the French and American Revolutions with their focus on the individual and its natural and political rights.

And there is one very important point to this: The intellectual tradition of the human sciences was also created within the frames of reason and rationality - but more in qualitative terms and values than in quantitative categories.

Thus, the centuries after the Middle Ages created two basic forms of rationality in the Western world: 1) The purposive rationality of the the natural sciences and the technical sciences, and 2) the humanistic rationality of the arts and the humanistic and social sciences.

The two kinds of Western rationality were deeply integrated in the Enlightenment project of the 18th and 19th centuries. The two traditions of rationality were built in the institutions that were established to bring the Enlightenment to the broad masses of people. One of these institutions was the public library. In Norway the first public libraries at the turn of the 18th century were formed by wealthy bourgeois men strongly influenced by the broad Enlightenment tradition. These people were philantrophists, eager to spread practical and scientifically based knowledge that could improve the material, social and cultural welfare of the citizens. The broad Enlightenment perspective of these early pioneers can be documented by analysing the content of their book collections (Ringdal 1985): In 1780, Carl Deichman, a rich proprietor and tradesman, donated his private book collection of 6000 items to Oslo city (at that time named Christiania, after one of the Danish kings; Norway was then a Danish colony). The main subjects of the stock were geography and history (37%), theology (21%), fiction (12%), natural sciences and medicine (9%), political science and law (6%), technical subjects (3%) and a rest category of foreign languages, philosophy and biography (11%). By content such book collections reflected basic ideas of the Enlightenment tradition of that time, and in the case of Carl Deichman approximately 60% of the stock of books consisted of historic and humanistic subjects. Carl Deichman's book gift to Oslo city was one example of the time, from Norway more than 20 similar book donations may be documented (Ringdal 1985).

My point in this context is: From the very beginning the public libraries inherited and became mediators of an intellectual and cultural tradition that embraced the purposive as well as the humanistic rationality of Western Europe. This cultural heritage has ever since had an extremely strong position in the library world. One reason for this, I believe, is that the public library was deeply integrated in the economic,social, political and cultural process that the German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas has named the project of modernity (Habermas 1985).

Purposive rationality and humanistic rationality became two of the main pillars in the project of modernity. The history of modernity can be traced back to the differentiation and secularization process of the cultural tradition of Western Europe from the 14th to the 18th century, but for practical reasons I find it most reasonable to delimit my analysis to the late 18th century and onwards.
The project of modernity was an extraordinary intellectural effort from the part of the Enlightement thinkers to develop an 'objective' science, a universal morality and law and an autonomous art - and these three should be cornerstones in a universal culture of civilization that should bring progress to humanity as a whole. The idea of the Enlightenment thinkers was to accumulate the knowledge generated by many individual creators and make it available to publics that so far had been excluded from the privilege of knowledge and wisdom.

The supreme aim of these efforts was human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life. The scientific control over nature promised freedom from scarcity and natural calamities. The development of rational forms of social organization and rational thought should bring liberation from the irrationalities of myth, religion and superstition. The Enlightenment thinkers embraced the idea of eternal progress and were devoted to the demystification and the desacralization of knowledge to liberate human beings from their chains of ignorance. The doctrines of equality, liberty, faith in human intelligence and reason abounded. Writers like Condorcet expected that the arts and the natural sciences would bring about not only the control of the natural laws, they would also secure moral progress, justice and even happiness of human beings (Harvey 1989).

The modernity project and its spokesmen were utterly optimistic with respect to human and social progress within the frames of the industrial society. The bearing political ideology of this optimism was liberalism, but even socialists in the 19th and 20th centuries took over the heritage of optimism and utopian thought from the Enlightenment thinkers. Despite of antagonistic conflicts between classical liberalism and socialism, in the nature of being ideologies they both belong to the meta- narratives of modernity and the Enlightenment tradition. As such they are legitimate children of the rationalism of Western thought. The French social scientist Edgar Morin says in his book Penser l'Europe (1987) that the most original contribution of culture from the part of Europe to the rest of the world is Europe's 'historic' ability to unite opposites. The core element of European culture throughout centuries - still according to Morin - is the dialogic between opposites. This means that Western culture has developed sophisticated mechanisms for handling opposite ideas, theories and paradigms in the fields of science, politics, economics, arts and culture. Within this frame of thought - which may be named the intellectual frames of modernity - an idea is never born without its opposite. There is no truth so sacred that it cannot be desacralised by questioning and problematization. The dynamics of Western thought is constituted by the eternal dialectical struggle between opposites. One consequence of this phenomenon is the everlasting maelstrom of change and transitoriness which generations of people have witnessed in the epoch of modern industrial society. And these changes do not only affect technology, industry and material production, but social, political and cultural life as well. Social institutions, political systems and and the daily lives of ordinary people have steadily been subject to turbulent forces of change in the environments.

This means that the history of modernity is a history of contradictions and opposites. And modernity has always bred critics among intellectuals - e.g. Burke, Malthus, De Sade, Weber, Nietzsche, Adorno, Horkheimer and lately Baudrillard and Lyotard.

In our century one of the most serious critics of bureaucratic rationality of the modern state is Max Weber (Weber, Norwegian issue, 1971). Weber argues that the optimistic expectations of the Enlightenment thinkers was an illusion. The Enlightenment thinkers maintained a necessary linkage between the growth in science, rationality and universal human freedom. But if modernity is unmasked, Weber says, one can see that the Enlightenment ideals have degenerated into purposive-instrumental rationality, and this rationality is clearly visible in modern institutions and organizations, public as well as private. The growth of purposive-instrumental rationality has not led to the realization of universal freedom but has created an 'iron cage' of bureaucracy from which modern man cannot escape. And worst of all: The purposive rationality, a specific type of reasoning deriving from technical sciences, affects and infects the entire range of social and cultural life encompassing economic, structures, law, bureaucratic administration and even the arts.

Weber's critical viewpoints on modernity and and purposive rationality have been furtherly elaborated by sociologists within the school of critical theory. With Horkheimer and Adorno the the instrumental reason is regarded to be the constituting category of the capitalistic and bureaucratic modern society. In its origin the Enlightenment was an intellctual movement for emancipation, but in the advanced industrial society instrumental reason has become a means for oppression and control from the part of the power elites. The diagnosis made by Horkheimer and Adorno is not less pessimistic than the one made by Weber.

One may sum up the analyses made by Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno by this formulation: The total demystification of human life through bureaucratic, instrumental reason does not create more freedom but contrarily leads to loss of freedom and meaning of life.
The Enlightenment philosophy has gone astray and is no longer adequate to guide the modern citizen to a higher quality of life. What is left is a power struggle fought with the instruments of purposive rationality.

But despite their critical view of some aspects of the modern industrial society, neither Weber, Horkheimer nor Adorno reject reason and coherent normative systems of thinking as such . They critisise purposive rationality, but are not advocates of irrationality. After all, their position as critics is within the frames of modernity and reason. Implicitely they ask for rationality of a different nature, but they do not see how a new and more humanistic rationality can replace instru mental reason in the power structures. They end up with rather pessimistic perspectives on the modern epoch.

The most outstanding critics of modernity and the Enlightenment tradition today have walked a step further. In Europe the socalled postmodern position is heavily advocated by French philosophers like Baurdrillard, Lyotard and Foucault. They have reacted against the European Enlightenment, humanism, abstract reason and human emancipation through mobilization of the powers of technology and science (Harvey 1989). They have abandoned the moral goals and norms of the meta-narratives and ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries and assert that there is no certitude, coherence or preestablished meaning for human and social life. Lyotard (1979) talks about the death of the meta-narratives, i.e. the theories and the ideologies that have formed the framework for total interpretations of cultural and social phenomena. Within this paradigm the past and the future are not very interesting at all - there remains only the present with its actions - not reflexions; its relativism - not its absolutism; its pluralistic norms - not its truth. This is the anti-utopia of postmodernism, and this anti-utopia is about to be realized in the United States. The American is a nomad moving from one identity to another, playing out one set of norms and values against another (Baudrillard 1988).

The postmodern philosophers - according to themselves - should not seek an alternative kind of rationality, their solution should be beyond conventional reason, outside the realm of meta-narratives and their social and cultural programmes. They prefer decentralization, decon struction, individual perspectives and solutions. Postmodernists assert to be anti-ideological, but still the postmodern philosophy may be interpreted to be a cultural and philosophical answer to Western economic neoliberalism of the eighties.

In the specific sphere of art, philosophy and culture there has of course been strong countermovements to purposive, instrumental rationality. The most outstanding reaction against mere instrumental reason in social and human life came in the early 19th century with Romanticism. In many respects Romanticism was a revolt against the Enlightenment thinkers and their belief in rational growth in techniques, material production and moral, cultural and social matters. Romanticism combined with national ism also constituted an opposition to the Enlightenment idea of the universal state and universal man. As Hans Georg Gadamer has pointed to in one of his latest books (Gadamer 1989), Romanticism glorified the Christian Middle Ages and the epic pre-histories of the nations. Phantasy, intuition and myth became the counterparts to instrumental reason. But Romanticism never reversed the historic development of the 17th and 18th centuries, which, after all, came to stand in the sign of the Enlightenment thinking. What is more important: In a longer time perspective Romanti cism came to form the fundament for the critical, historic counsciousness of the 19th century. The establishment of "the historic school" (also called "the German historic school" or simply "historicism") had direct consequences for scientific studies in the humanities, e.g. for disciplines like history, arts and philosophy. From that time and onwards the developers of "die Geisteswissenschaften", "the moral sciences" or "les lettres" became cleary aware of territorial and social factors in the historic development of the nation states in Europe.

"The historic school" represented a break with the conventional universalism of the Enlightenment thinkers. The first modern historians turned their interest on the distinctive and individual character of historic phenomenons. Different historic epochs should be interpreted and understood on their own premises and their own terms. This was the principal viewpoint of the first and foremost representative of the historic school, Barthold Georg von Niebuhr (Kjeldstadli 1992).

Historicism introduced a culturally oriented approach to the study of national and regional characteristics. In the 20th century historians have been much influenced by the the critical social sciences (sociology and political science), so today we have a strong tradition of a critical, historic, humanistic and social form of rationality representing an alternative paradigm to purposive, instrumental, bureaucratic rationality. But - and this is important - they are both modern forms of rationality, developed within the frames of reason, though different of nature.

I will make a brief concluding statement on this matter: The two forms of rationality which I have described, constitute different aspects of the modernity project. The instrumental and purposive rationality is most prevailing in the systems world, the humanistic rationality orig inates from and dominates the lifeworld. In the "ideal" and harmonic modern world there should be an equilibrium between purposive rationality and humanistic rationality. This means for example that natural sciences, technical sciences and other sciences influenced by that intellectual tradition (among them positivistic social sciences) should be counterbalanced by the humanities and humanistically oriented social sciences. Likewise the citizen and the human being of the modern world should experience both kinds of rationality in a dialectical communication process with the systems world and the life world as well. There are elements of the two kinds of rationality in both worlds, modern man cannot "escape" from one world to the other. On the contrary, the characteristic condition of modern social life is that the systems world and the lifeworld are reciprocally dep endent on each other and man is the creator of both. As a matter of principle this is not problematic.

The problem is - as social scientists from Weber to Habermas have pointed to - that the purposive rationality and the systems world is "conquering" or is about to dominate both worlds. In modern industrial society instrumental reason has become the oppressor and human istic reason is playing the role of the oppressed. One explanation of this is that instrumental reason has become the key instrument to obtain power positions in the systems world. On serveral fronts - in science, in politics, in economics and even in the cultural sphere and the private sphere of the lifeworld - there is an ongoing struggle between purposive, instrumental reason and humanistic reason. But this strife with its counterparts is not a struggle between rationality and irrationality, it is a strife between different representatives of reason, within the conceptual and historic boundaries of the project of modernity.

We are still living in the midst of this struggle. Critique of the illegitimate expansion of instrumental reason at the expences of humanistic reason must - according to my opinion - take place in terms of reason, not beyond reason. A non-reasonable approach (as advocated by postmodernist philosophers influenced by Nietzsche) is pr definition very problematic in an academic debate on the subject. Probably the critique of instrumental and purposive rationality will be most impressive and effective if it is expressed in alternative categories of reason.

This is the big challenge of our time: To develop and formulate alternative categories of reason. This should be done on the terms of the late industrial society or the information based society. If we want to avoid what Durkheim named anomalie, this must be done not beyond but within the frames of reason. From a political and a historic point of view there is no alternative to reason, the question is: How can modern man create alternative rational societies and rational intellectual categories that can bring about a desirable equilibrium between purposive and humanistic rationality?

This is what Jürgen Habermas' works is dealing with. In his famous doctoral thesis from 1962, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, he describes in sociological and historic terms the genesis, growth and decline of bourgeois public opinion. In this book he describes the historic formation and change of public opinion as a complicated structural process. In the classical bourgeois epoch of the 19th century in Western Europe the dominant bourgeois publics were reasoning publics, and the public debates on politics, literature, arts etc. took place in an atmosphere of intellectal freedom, outside the realm of money and business. These publics were economically independent and they had sufficient leisure time to participate in public discussions, political decision making and cultural activities. Thus the social structure, the privileged position of the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals made it possible to keep purposive business rationality away from the public sphere of political and cultural debates. At this stage of the bourgeois history it was still possible to make a relatively sharp distinction between the systems world and the lifeworld, the public sphere and the private sphere (Habermas 1962, 1971). In idealistic terms one could say that it was a time characterised by integrity, dignity and mutual respect - which may all be named humanistic values.

This "ideal state of things" was, still according to Habermas, transformed by the imperialistic phase of capitalism at the turn of the century and the following structural change of the economies of the Western world. The class structure of the industrial states was trans formed and so were the markets. Competition became stronger and more prevailing than earlier. Political institutions and organizations became more bureaucratic and professional, social relations became more anonymous and impersonal. The alienation process went on and gradually purposive, commercial, instrumental rationality took control of the formation of the public opinion by means of advertising and "Public Relations" (in the American business-oriented meaning of that concept). At the midst of the 20th century the publics are no longer reasoning publics, they are consuming publics. They are not free and independent, but deeply integrated in a social system where there is no longer a distinct difference between economic, political and cultural interests. In this kind of society the public opinion is manipulated by people in power positions, intellectually governed by purposive, instrumental rationality.

Habermas' doctoral thesis is much influenced by the the tradition of critical theory. Emphasis was laid on description, analysis and interpretation of the bourgeois society. The political perspectives of the critical theorists were rather pessimistic with respect to future development of the Western world. But if we look at Habermas' books from 1980 and onwards, the attitude is changed. Habermas' project in the eighties has been to try to reconstruct modernity and the Enlightenment tradition on the basis of the theory of communicative action (Nørager 1993). Habermas' idea is that it will only be possible to go beyond or exceed instrumental actions and purposive rationality if the relationship between comunicating parts or humans is structurally changed. The subject-object communication model implies purposive rationality from the part of the subject and opens for power manipulations and control. The alternative of Habermas is the communicative actions model: In communicative actions there is a real dialogue, the participants (individuals or institutions) in the dialogue are mutually respecting each other, and their principal purpose is not control, but understanding. Communicative actions represent an alternative discourse of modernity (Habermas 1985), taking care of humanistic elements from the lifeworld in the Enlightenment tradition. There is an unused potential in the Enlightenment tradition which should be mobilized against the power position of instrumental rationality in social, economic and cultural matters. This potential of unrealised humanistic values is a source to make the Enlightenment idea real, which is the reason why Habermas calls modernity an "unfinished project". The humanistic rationality is inherent in the theory of communicative action, and the theory itself is part of Habermas' attempt to "rescue" the Enlightenment project.

Public Libraries: On the Crossroads between Conflicting Expectations

However, there is a double nature in people's expectations to how public libraries should behave as well: Some people say that public libraries today should first of all be information centres since social progress is so dependent on precise, targeted, purposively and rationally planned information procedures. Keywords for this strategic behaviour would be professionalim, effectiveness, profit, usefulness. Others assert that public libraries should mainly be institutions for popular education and enlightenment work in a wide perspective. Keywords for this kind of function would be citizenship, democratic choice, emancipation, personal growth, participation, culture. Or to put ut briefly: Humanism.

My theory then is that public libraries in the industrialized world of today are institutions on the crossroads between conflicting expectations that are deeply integrated in purposive and humanistic rationality forms in Western modernity. What kind of questions will this raise with respect to public library policy? This is what the remainder of this paper will deal with.

Information contra Enlightenment

Brenda Dervin (1977) also advocates the view that information needs and the use of information are dependent on concrete persons in concrete situations. A given quantity of information is "dead" or will remain unmediated if there are no receivers to interpret it. And when a certain amount of information is received by different persons, it will be of various importance, meaning and value to those various receivers. The reception context is also decisive. Information as such does not exist or is of little value if it is not received and interpreted.

In conventional language information is very often understood in terms of quantity. The dissemination of the information is considered to be a question of technology - this is one of the reasons why our society is so preoccupied with information technology. A widely- accepted viewpoint is that the introduction of appropriate technology will solve will solve information problems. People are apt to understand "the information issue" as a question of production and distribution. Within this paradigm, the premises for understanding the issue are laid by the information producers and the information distributors/disseminators. According to that same logic, the information needs of a given society will be equivalent with information production. In societies with a liberalistic economy, there will be a very strong economic pressure to sell this information once it has been produced. A market for information services is created. To the benefit of whom? That question is neither technical nor economic but rather ideological or political. Such questions are seldom asked by librarians. To be a librarian is no longer a calling as it was in the 19th century and the first half of our century. Few librarians have academic traning to handle such questions and they are forced to use all their energy to cope with their everyday problems.

An alternative approach might be to ask for more enlightenment, not more information. What enlightenment needs do we have? This is partly a philosophical, partly a political and ideological question. Instead of speaking about the information society, we might speak of the enlightenment society (Windfeld Lund 1989). Contrary to the idea or concept of information, which is closely connected with the interests of the producers, the idea of enlightenment is anchored in the interests of the citizens in the society. As already mentioned, they have som fundamental needs of intellectual and cognitive character. On a local, regional as well as on a national level, the society will - hopefully through democratic institutions - define some overall aims for people's lives. Democracy also presupposes that there must be a minimum of consent on these vital principles. But given the fact that such principles can be identified, they should have an effect, direct or indirect, on all aspects of human and social life. To understand themselves and the society and the world in which they live, people must have access to institutions and infrastructures that can bring them relevant information and knowledge to enhance their understanding of human and social life. My point is that accessible information is interesting only to the degree that it is relevant for the aims of people's lives. When people are striving to reach a deeper understanding of themselves and their society, they need information that can highlight their total life situation. What they need is "Aufklärung", an enlightenment perspective that can relate detailed information to a life totality.
Within this logic, the search for information is only one of many alternative means to enlightenment, to gain insight and understanding. It is not very interesting to talk about enlightenment in quantitative terms. Enlightenment is a question of quality - not a question of "how much" but rather a question of "what". It has very little to do with technical mediation of information - it deals with politics, culture - even with existential questions.

Technology, Market and Librarianship

Public institutions like the public library are also exposed to economical restrictions (governmental budgets are decreasing), they are expected to rationalize, to adapt to quickly changing environments, to interpret, to "ride the waves that are rolling in" (Morgan 1988). But time lines are getting shorter (Downs and Larkey 1986), and there is a risk that the perspectives of cultural politics are getting more and more narrow. From a humanistic point of view, this is very serious. If cultural aspects of life are going to be understood in economic and technical terms and categories, the total, manysided, holistic perspectives of life will disappear. This is a real problem under neoliberalism in the Western industrialized countries, and if the countries in Eastern Europe accept Western models uncritically, I am afraid they will inherit the problem in their turn. And may be even worse since they have a long and painful experience for technical-bureaucratic thinking.

It is crucial to understand that this is not a technological or an economic problem, and consequently there is no technical or economic solution to it. The issue is social, political and cultural of nature, and as such it must be understood, analyzed and solved in corresponding social, political and cultural terms and categories.

The issue of information contra enlightenment in the debate on public libraries and their social and political functions, illustrates clearly the contradiction between purposive and humanistic rationality inherent in modern cultural institutions. I do not postulate that this contradiction should be removed to "solve" the problem - on the contrary, in pluralistic societies there should be an ongoing dialogue or "dialogic" between opposites (Morin 1987). The art of democracy is how to develop institutions that can handle opposites by means of arguments og communicative actions - not guns and prisons.

Given the fact that there are such institutions in the society - it is still necessary to discern technical and economic questions from political and cultural ones. This is much a question of political and cultural consciousness of how institutions in the society function, and such questions must be understood and handled in categories and terms that are in accordance with the nature of that same questions.

Public Libraries and their Role in the Formation of Public Opinion

The forums for the expression of a free public opinion (the papers, the periodicals, the publishing agencies, the libraries, the museums, the galleries etc.) were originally established and run by private interests just to secure the freedom of expression. Before the great revolutions, the state - or the autocratic monarch, who was synonym with the power of the state - was looked upon as an agent for autocracy.

In the late 19th century the state came to play a different role. In this epoch, the dark sides and the abuses of capitalism became more and more striking, and the classical liberalism with its iron laws gradually developed into social liberalism in many Western European countries. Besides, a social security system was worked out, a forerunner of the social democratic welfare state of our century. The state and its political functions have undergone a radical change. Within the perspectives of social liberalism and social democracy , the state should be used as an instrument for equalization of social inequalities in the economic, social and cultural fields. The same principle was applied to the public agencies on the regional and local level.

In a society based on pluralism and tolerance for deviant behaviour and alternative conceptions, the confusion of government influence through public agencies and independent voluntary interests should not cause serious problems, as far as a free and democratic opinion is concerned. But if the public libraries, as agents for the formation of a free public opinion, should be compelled to adapt to a fluctuating market of information services, to adapt to restricted political groups and government demands for economic efficiency - then the library's role in the process of forming a free opinion might be questioned.

Conclusion

Samandrag

Etter renessansen og utviklinga av naturvitskapen har den menneskelige furnufta (ratio) vori grunnlaget for framveksten av den vestlige sivilisasjonen. I denne fornuftstradisjonen finst det to rasjonalitetsformer som har bakgrunn i forskjellige kultur- og vitskapstradisjonar. Formålsrasjonaliteten vart utvikla innafor naturvitskapen og dei tekniske vitskapane. Kjernetanken i formålsrasjonaliteten er at eksperiment, kontroll instrumentell nytte og kalkulasjon er legitime prinsipp for å skape materiell og sosial utvikling. Eit praktisk resultat av formålsrasjonaliteten i Vest- Europa var den raske tekniske utviklinga gjennom den industrielle revolusjonen. Den formålsrasjonelle tenkemåten spreidde seg etter kvart frå det naturvitskaplige og tekniske området til økonomi og samfunnsorganisering. Ved sida av formålsrasjonaliteten utvikla Vest-Europa etter mellomalderen ei anna rasjonalitetsform, som eg vil kalle den humanistiske rasjonaliteten. Denne rasjonalitetsforma tok utgangspunkt i verdien av det sjølvstendige, sekulariserte og moralsk frie individet som hadde ein naturlig rett til å skape si eiga lykke og det gode samfunnet. Den idehistoriske bakgrunnen var renessansen og humanismen. Dei humanistiske verdiane vart spesifikt uttrykte i kunsten. Felles for dei to rasjonalitetsformene var at dei begge representerte eit brott med den mellomalderlige førestillinga om Gud som den øvste appellinstansen for sanning og moral. Gudsomgrepet vart erstatta med ideen om det rasjonelt tenkande mennesket, som skulle vera utgangspunkt for både vitskap og moral. Religion, kunst, samfunnsetikk og vitskap vart skilde frå kvarandre som sjølvstendige intellektuelle sfærar (ofte kalla differensiering) og utvikla eigne tradisjonar. Dei utfylte kvarandra, men konkurrerte også med kvarandre. Dei to rasjonalitetstradisjonane danna basisen for det store opplysningsprosjektet frå slutten av 1700-talet. Frå omkring 1800 og framover til vår eiga tid har industrisamfunna opretta institusjonar som har fått i oppgåve å formidle den kunnskaps- og kulturarven som har rot i dei to rasjonalitetsformene. Biblioteket er ein slik institusjon, og spesielt folkebiblioteka (the public libraries) har fått som oppdrag å drive allmenn samfunnsopplysning. Dette opplysningsarbeidet har tradisjonelt omfatta kunnskap frå begge rasjonalitetstradisjonar.

I dei seinare åra har vi fått ein debatt om folkebiblioteka skal drive med informasjon eller folkeopplysning. Dette er etter mi meining ei litt merkelig problemstilling. Motsetninga handlar ikkje om informasjon eller folkeopplysning som to uavhengige og heilt forskjellige fenomen, men er ein konflikt mellom to forskjellige rasjonalitetsformer og intellektuelle tradisjonar i biblioteksektoren, men die er begge innafor det moderne opplysningsprosjektet. Det sentrale spørgsmålet er: Kor stor plass skal formålsrasjonaliteten (teknologi-, management- og økonomitanken) respektive den humanistiske rasjonaliteten (ideen om allmenn kunnskaps- og kulturformidling) ha i folkebiblioteka? I siste instans er det eit politisk og dermed ideologisk spørgsmål å avgjera kva det skal leggast mest vekt på. Forfattaren av denne artikkelen er skeptisk til at formålsrasjonaliteten skal dominere utviklinga af folkebibliotekpolitikken.

Noter

References

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