De la rectitude politique à la rectitude épistémique. Les prophètes de la « chaire » dans l’éducation supérieure
From Political Correctness to Epistemic Correctness. “Pulpit” Prophets in Higher Education

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with what seems to be the source of political or moral correctness in the academia, namely the confusion of the scholar and the prophet, one of the themes of sociologist Max Weber's 1917 and 1919 lectures on the vocation of the scholar and the politician. Far from condemning prophecy, the rationality of which he had identified in his work as a sociologist of religion, Weber believed that it had no place in the university, where the professor was exposed to three forms of corruption : acting as a prophet, a demagogue or a political leader. Despite the dangers of prophecy in academia exposed by Weber, it seems that contemporary social science and philosophy have remained deaf to a strict separation between science and prophecy. The skepticism that the social sciences have developed towards science itself, the cultural relativism, the trial of reason, the priority given henceforth to the search for the useful and the just over the truth, the prestige of critical thought, dispensing a moral law capable of social enforcement, have thus contributed to give contemporary science a moral stridency coupled with a promise of redemption or social repentance.

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