Minnich, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Minnich, a graduate faculty member at the Union Institute in Cincinnati, is the author of Transforming Knowledge (1990). This study pivots around issues of curricular transformation in particular and knowledge construction in general. Educated in the liberal arts at Sarah Lawrence College (BA) and in philosophy at the New School for Social Research (MA and PhD), now named New School University, Minnich situates herself theoretically between modernism and postmodernism. She argues, for instance, that the “heady postmodern attack on universals per se” may be misguided inasmuch as “it may not be universals that are the problem but… faulty universals and the particularities they frame” (p. 56)

Arguing that equality entails not sameness but the “right to be different,” Minnich goes on to argue that “[f]aulty generalizations by those in power create and express not dualisms, but hierarchical monism” (p. 70). By hierarchical monism she means that “supposedly parallel categories … do not name parallel groups; the categories are indeed paired, but they are not expressions of a complementary dualism, nor even an oppositional one.” Paired categories, such as women/men, refer not to anything “separate but equal” but to hierarchies that socially construct not only difference but also inequality. Worse, one category in these hierarchical pairs gets represented as the “real thing” (p. 73) with the other category being some lesser version of that thing, whether it be theologian, citizen, or assembly line worker.

On these (and other) bases, Minnich returns to faulty generalizations. She says their theoretical damage gets done through “circular reasoning in which the sources of standards, justifications, interpretations, reappear as examples of that which is best, most easily justified, most richly interpreted by those standards” (p. 84). Middle-class standards of cleanliness, child rearing, and religiosity, for example, are often used to denigrate and regulate the lives of lower-income persons and families. Middle-income experts of all sorts promulgate those standards that in turn are used to bolster and justify their own moral and political authority. Closer to home is the substantial segregation of feminist theory in textbooks and curricula, as if it is an inferior version of theory or social theory. Minnich's work shows how social realities such as feminist theory get represented as specialized versions of social theory, as if scholars get more insights into social realities from masculinist than from feminist texts.

In the end, Minnich deems it unnecessary to “undo all universals” (pp. 180–81). Instead, she urges that we “particularize accurately” so as “to demystify the functions of power and hierarchy.” In her view, that strategy enables us “to cease turning difference into deviance” and equality into sameness, while also enabling us “to live and work with more complexity and fineness of feeling and comprehension, taste and judgment” (p. 184).