Professionals

Philosopher R G Collingwood, in The New Leviathan (1942), commented upon his own profession: 'I seem to remember something that Bernard Bosanquet once said about the loss to professional thought from the fact that it is always done by cowards' [v]. There's something in this, isn't there? Not so much that professionals become over-cautious for fear of losing the comfort of their positions and salaries (although of course that may be a problem), as the fact that professionalisation itself enshrines a set or system that a braver individual may need to discard, or even to kill.