Specialization

Specialization is a recurring thread running through two of Kyle’s books on knowledge and expertise. In Reinventing Knowledge — From Alexandria To The Internet, it is the engine behind the rise of “the disciplines” as an institution of knowledge: when “a mass market for education first arose after 1800, a new specialization of intellectual labor creating these fields was the natural result.” The book traces the idea to Adam Smith, who in The Wealth of Nations (1776) argued that the “subdivision of employment in philosophy, as well as in every other business, improves dexterity, and saves time” — treating knowledge as a commodity and disciplines as scholars “seeking a niche in the marketplace of ideas.” The pithy summary the wiki attaches to this is the move from “I know nothing → I know a lot about a little.”

In The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols treats specialization as both indispensable and socially abrasive: “we prosper because we specialize,” developing formal and informal mechanisms “that allow us to trust each other in those specializations.” Yet he also notes that “one reason claims of expertise grate on people in a democracy is that specialization is necessarily exclusive” — the same division of labor that makes modern knowledge possible also produces the resentment that fuels the death of expertise. Specialization thus sits at the hinge of both books’ arguments and connects to the Social Contract frame of trust between specialists and the public.

Context: The division of intellectual and economic labor is a classical economic idea — Adam Smith’s pin-factory illustration is its canonical statement — and the proliferation of academic disciplines across the nineteenth century is its expression in the history of knowledge.

Where this appears

• Reinventing Knowledge — From Alexandria To The Internet — specialization as the engine of “the disciplines” after 1800, traced to Smith’s subdivision of intellectual labor; the “I know a lot about a little” thread.
• The Death of Expertise — specialization as the basis of mutual trust (“we prosper because we specialize”) and, simultaneously, the source of democratic resentment because it is “necessarily exclusive.”