Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation 0262513048, 9780262513043, 026201324X, 9780262013246

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Preface......Page 8
Acknowledgments
......Page 16
Introduction......Page 18
I Modern Politics and the Mirror of Nature......Page 38
1 Niccolò Machiavelli and the Popular
Politics of Expertise......Page 40
2 Power and Publicity in Modern Science......Page 60
3 Consent and Competence in Representative Government......Page 82
4 Liberal Rationalism and Government Advisory Committees......Page 110
II Democratizing Representation
in Science and Politics......Page 122
5 Thomas Hobbes and the Authorization of Science......Page 124
6 John Dewey and the Reconstruction of Representation
......Page 152
7 Bruno Latour and the Symmetries of Science and Politics......Page 180
8 How Science Becomes Political
......Page 202
9 Elements of Democratic Representation
......Page 218
10 Institutionalizing Democratic
Representation......Page 256
Conclusion......Page 274
Notes......Page 278
Bibliography......Page 326
Index......Page 362

Citation preview

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Science in Democracy

Science in Democracy Expertise, Institutions, and Representation

Mark B. Brown

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information about special quantity discounts, please email special_sales @mitpress.mit.edu This book was set in Sabon by Westchester Book Composition. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Mark B. Science in democracy : expertise, institutions, and representation / Mark B. Brown. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01324-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-262-51304-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Science—Political aspects. 2. Science and state. 3. Science and state—Citizen participation. 4. Representative government and representation. 5. Democracy. I. Title. Q175.5.B759 2009 320.01—dc22 2009005952 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments Introduction

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1

I Modern Politics and the Mirror of Nature 1 Niccolò Machiavelli and the Popular Politics of Expertise 2 Power and Publicity in Modern Science

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43

3 Consent and Competence in Representative Government

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4 Liberal Rationalism and Government Advisory Committees

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II Democratizing Representation in Science and Politics 5 Thomas Hobbes and the Authorization of Science

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6 John Dewey and the Reconstruction of Representation 7 Bruno Latour and the Symmetries of Science and Politics 8 How Science Becomes Political

185

9 Elements of Democratic Representation

201

10 Institutionalizing Democratic Representation Conclusion Notes 261 Bibliography Index 345

257 309

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135 163

Preface

From global warming to biotechnology, politics today is closely intertwined with the sciences. According to the dominant image of science and politics, politics provides the money, with no questions asked, and science produces knowledge, technology, and medicine. This pleasant image has become rather tarnished in recent years, as intractable public controversies have politicized science policy, expertise, and research. Many commentators respond to the politicization of science by attempting to revive an imagined Golden Age of value-free science. They call for getting the politics out of science, concerned that if science is shaped by society it will fail to accurately represent nature. They tend to believe that representation in science should strive for unmediated correspondence to reality. The most common alternative response to science politicization has been to promote lay participation in science. From grassroots movements to public hearings to randomly selected citizen advisory bodies, many scholars, activists, and public officials have argued that lay input will improve both the effectiveness and legitimacy of science policy, expertise, and research. They hope that public participation will lead to policies that more accurately represent the public. Many advocates of lay participation also tend to conceive representation as direct correspondence to reality—in this case, the reality of either expressed popular will or presumed public needs. The first response to politicized science, although based on valid concerns, has usually failed to achieve its goals. Science remains politicized, or it is continually repoliticized. The second response is more promising, but it has fallen far short of its potential. Lay participation often fails to generate significant changes in the politics of science, and citizen engagement efforts frequently become absorbed into technocratic policy making.

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Science in Democracy identifies a key reason for these shortcomings in the implicit conception of representation these approaches share. This book develops an alternative account of both political and scientific representation as practices of mediation that transform what they represent. In a democracy, the concept of representation incorporates multiple elements, including authorization, accountability, participation, deliberation, and resemblance. Democracy depends on diverse kinds of institutions— legislatures, interest groups, advisory bodies, and so on—each of which mobilizes different elements of representation. When democracy is understood in this sense, it becomes easier to see both how and why we might respond to politicized science by democratizing it. To develop these arguments I draw on the history of Western political thought, science and technology studies (STS), and democratic theory. I enlist various contemporary and canonical figures—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Madison, Dewey, and Latour, among others—to explore insights, concepts, and metaphors that seem promising for contending with current dilemmas of science and politics. The purpose of reading canonical authors in the history of political thought is not to look for ready-made answers to today’s problems. My first aim in reading such authors is to explore some of the conceptual sources of current modes of thought and practice. My second and more central purpose is to illuminate current assumptions, issues, and debates and explore alternative ways of conceiving them. This task sometimes involves showing how past modes of thought were distinctly unlike current approaches.1 To put it somewhat differently, my goal in much of this book is to ask what various canonical authors could and should mean for us today, taking into account what they meant in the past. Leaving aside the complex philosophical issues underlying this approach, it is based on the notion that the meaning of canonical texts for readers today is intertwined with the history of efforts to interpret what their authors meant to say and do, and that interpretive history extends right up to the present. The interpretation of canonical texts depends on, but need not be reduced to, understanding what their authors sought to achieve when they wrote. Given these aims and persuasions, I do not adopt the historian’s task of describing the intricate local circumstances of the texts I consider. Nor do I adopt either the sociologist’s goal of explaining their emergence, or the philosopher’s ambition of analyzing their consistency or validity. Nonetheless, I draw extensively on historical, sociological, and philosophical studies to inform my account. Similarly, I do not pre-

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sume a dichotomy between interpretation and explanation, and to the extent that the texts and concepts examined here have shaped contemporary practices and institutions, interpreting the former is key to explaining the latter. These authors’ ideas are not “mere ideas,” but contributory causal factors in both historical change and stability. Political theorists have often assumed an essential boundary between science and politics, with the effect that canonical authors become enlisted in polemical attacks on either technocratic scientism or humanistic moralism. Much of the scholarship on Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Dewey, for example, can be divided into two camps according to whether their interpreters associate them with scientific modes of thought. These interpretative debates reach beyond academic political theory, because the authors treated here often become battlegrounds in public controversies over science and technology. Debates over science and religion, for example, rarely get very far before someone invokes the legend of Galileo’s heroic resistance to the obtuse Catholic Church. I attempt to shift the lines of battle by showing how these authors, rather than being on one side or the other of a presumed boundary between science and politics, raise intriguing questions about the boundary itself. From the perspective of STS, my reliance on canonical political theory may seem rather old-fashioned. Philosophical interpretations of the “great books” have traditionally assumed an ethereal, male-dominated “conversation of mankind” that stretches across the ages.2 Much recent work in STS, in contrast, draws on actor-network theory, ethnomethodology, grounded theory, and related approaches to focus on local sites of knowledge production. Formulated in opposition to functionalist theories of society, a key aim of these approaches is to maximize the investigator’s receptivity to the empirical material by not introducing conceptual distinctions either prior to or independent of empirical research.3 STS research in this vein has revealed the importance of local material contexts comprised of instruments, bodies, and practices that traditional philosophers cannot see from their lofty perch. There is no reason to conclude, however, that the only or most relevant context is local. Localized research requires isolating local conditions from the broad historical trends and conceptual traditions within which they are embedded. These trends and traditions are themselves continually reconstructed within local contexts, but that does not prevent them from having real effects that scholars focused on local situations tend to set aside.4 In this respect, localized STS research is no less “abstract” than historically informed political theory, because both

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must isolate or abstract their research topics from other potentially relevant contexts. One can certainly argue about which contexts are most productive for one’s goals, but research contexts are not naturally given, and it is impossible to identify the context of any particular text, event, discourse, or phenomenon.5 The goals of this study are best served by locating selected conceptual and institutional features of the contemporary politics of science within the historical continuities and disjunctures of modern political thought. Unlike most work in STS, therefore, this book does not show how particular artifacts have been constructed. Rather, it takes a small step back and considers a few of the ideas and institutions that have been constructed so far, asks what it means for democracy to understand them as constructed, and explores how they might be reconstructed by both actors and analysts in the future. The interpretations offered here cannot be tested or proven in any strict sense. All the concepts I consider—science, politics, democracy, representation, and so on—are inescapably both normative and descriptive. Any way of conceiving them both provides a normative vantage point for empirical description and has implications for how we conceive the values, interests, and purposes of those whose lives they shape. Consequently, such concepts are not subject to either definitive conceptual analysis or empirical falsification.6 The merit of my interpretations, therefore, depends on their usefulness for understanding relationships among concepts, practices, and institutions, for clarifying the stakes of various theoretical and practical dilemmas, and for generating hypotheses for empirical research. In addition to interpreting canonical works in political theory, this study draws on my own empirical research on expert advisory committees and some of the key insights of constructivist research in STS.7 For the most part, I avoid philosophical debates about whether or to what extent science is constructed by society and politics. I do attempt, however, to illustrate the plausibility and fruitfulness of a particular stance in those debates. To put my philosophical cards on the table: I am persuaded that rationalist, essentialist, and determinist conceptions of science and technology are neither empirically accurate nor normatively desirable. Technological determinism may capture the ways in which many people experience the technical imperatives that shape their lives, but it does not offer a viable theory of scientific and technical change.8 Technical facts and artifacts do not become socially established merely because they are true or effective. Scientists study nature by engaging with it; nature,

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scientists, and often society at large are transformed in the process. I also take it as given, however, that scientific facts are not socially constructed, if that means natural forces and entities play no causal role in their creation. The world does not lend itself to all possible constructions. This perspective, common among STS scholars who study the “co-production” of science and society, avoids radical constructivism or relativism on the one hand, and the traditional view of scientific truth as unmediated correspondence to reality on the other.9 Put in the most general terms, scientific facts emerge from hybrid processes shaped by human ingenuity and initiative, sociotechnical structures and institutions, and nonhuman entities and phenomena. A moderately constructivist position of this sort differs from the relativist claim that all knowledge is particular to specific social contexts. Indeed, constructivism is fully compatible with the realist view that science produces accounts of preexisting material things, and that such accounts are (or may become) universally valid.10 For constructivists, the better constructed such accounts are, the more universal they become. The material world exists prior to science, but it does not come presorted into isolated packets called “facts” that scientists discover like shells on a beach. Whereas relativists focus on the particular features of local sites of knowledge production, constructivists view science in terms of broad sociotechnical networks. These networks include diverse actors, some of whom may not be certified scientists. Although this book draws more on constructivism than relativism, elements of relativism appear in my concern with the distinctive purposes of established institutions. Such institutions, I argue, create locally or nationally specific conditions that shape (without determining) the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge and expertise. Contemporary democratic theorists, nurtured on Thomas Kuhn, may be predisposed toward this moderately constructivist view of science, but they have done little to explore its implications for democracy.11 Indeed, one of the arguments of this book is that a dichotomy between science and politics underlies the longstanding debate between advocates of participatory and representative democracy. Moving beyond the dichotomy between representation and participation in democratic theory requires rethinking representation in science. In making this argument, I draw on an emerging body of work that defends representative democracy on its own terms, as an original and normatively superior form of government.12 Representative democracy is not merely an expedient for coping

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with the size and complexity of modern states. It both fosters and depends on a critical public sphere that should be understood as part of, rather than existing prior to, political representation. Just as scientific representations of nature are mediated by various social practices and laboratory instruments, political representation involves more than a simple transmission or “making present” of constituent ideas, interests, and identities. The chapters of Science in Democracy each highlight selected elements of the concept of democratic representation developed in the book. Part I sketches the historical and conceptual origins of the liberal-rationalist dichotomy between politics and science, showing how it is intertwined with a similar dichotomy between direct democracy and representative government. Chapter 1 explores Machiavelli’s distinctly modern view of the relationship between expert knowledge and common sense, showing that he also provides resources for challenging that view. Chapters 2 and 3 examine how Enlightenment thinkers legitimated both modern science and representative government by appealing to the common sense of ordinary citizens, even as they reserved the actual practice of both science and government to an elite. Chapter 4 offers a contemporary illustration of the liberal-rationalist view of representation, showing how it appears in advisory committee guidelines based on the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee Act. Despite their historical association with elitist views of government, I argue that liberal-rationalist theories of representation contain elements worth preserving. Part II of the book develops a perspective on representative democracy that avoids the modern dichotomy between science and politics and its attendant pathologies. Chapter 5 draws on Hobbes to show that a constructivist theory of both science and politics need not lead to either anarchy or totalitarianism, as critics of science studies often claim. Hobbes also offers a few hints on how to represent nonhumans and others who cannot authorize their own representatives. Chapter 6 shows how Dewey’s constructivist account of political representation reappears in his theory of scientific inquiry. Chapter 7 engages Bruno Latour’s innovative attempts to conceive scientific and political representation in tandem. Chapter 8 argues that science is neither essentially apolitical, as liberal rationalists would have it, nor essentially political, as some today suggest. Rather, like other social activities, science becomes political whenever it is enrolled in relations of conflict and power. The key distinction between scientific and political representation lies not in any essential

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properties of their respective actors or material and cultural resources. Rather, it lies in historically contingent, institutionally solidified differences of function within systems of representative democracy. Chapter 9 brings together the conceptual and historical analysis of the preceding chapters to show how democratic representation can be understood in terms of five distinct elements: authorization, accountability, participation, deliberation, and resemblance. Different institutions mediate these elements in different ways, and democratic representation depends on citizens having effective access to all of them. Chapter 10 illustrates the book’s overall argument with reference to different types of advisory bodies, including the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics and lay deliberative forums or minipublics. The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s conception of democracy as an institutionally differentiated system of collective representation. If democracy is understood in this specific sense, then the best way of responding to politicized science is to democratize it.

Acknowledgments

Political theory is a form of travel, and this project has traveled with me and my family for much longer than I care to admit. My deepest gratitude, therefore, is to Kirsti, Caitlin, and Joshua. Without them this book would have been neither possible to write nor worth writing. I also want to thank my parents Marvin and Erdmut Brown, and my sister Kirsten. Their dedication to both public goods and the good of our family has inspired and sustained my work. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge the continuing influence of my first teachers in political theory at UC Santa Cruz, especially Peter Euben and Kirstie McClure. Parts of this book began as a Rutgers University PhD thesis, written under the exemplary guidance of Benjamin Barber. At Rutgers I was also very lucky to study with Carey McWilliams. My dissertation drafts benefited from additional insightful criticism by Frank Fischer and David Guston. I am especially grateful to Dave for his spirited collegiality and repeated feedback on my work. My two years as a postdoc at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies at Bielefeld University offered a uniquely stimulating environment in which I began research on several of this book’s themes. My work then and ever since has been enriched by innumerable discussions with Bielefeld graduate students, researchers, professors, and guests. Most recently I had the good fortune to return to Bielefeld for a research group made possible by Martin Carrier and Cornelis Menke. I also want to acknowledge the ongoing camaraderie and conversation of Matthias Gross, Justus Lentsch, Niels Taubert, Torsten Wilholt, and Peter Weingart. I also owe a debt to my students and colleagues at California State University, Sacramento. The denizens of the Department of Government enjoy an exceptionally congenial work environment, due especially to the efforts of recent department chairs Buzz Fozouni and Mimi Gregg, and

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department staff Carolann Forseth and Diane Kobely. Thanks also to Shannon Fredrickson, Terry Manns, and Jim Scott for assistance with acquiring and managing a National Science Foundation grant, and to Ramshin Daneshi for excellent research assistance. And hearty thanks to Jeff Lustig, whose good humor buoyed my writing of these pages, and whose wise comments and criticism they very imperfectly reflect. The Science and Democracy Network organized by Sheila Jasanoff and colleagues has repeatedly offered a stimulating forum for discussion of some of the material presented here. I am also grateful for audience comments during presentations at Arizona State University; University of Oxford; University of British Columbia; University of Toronto; Bielefeld University; Delft University of Technology; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; as well as numerous meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science and of the Western, Midwest, and American Political Science Association. This book is also better for feedback on papers and chapter drafts from a host of friends, colleagues, and email correspondents. Special thanks go to Mark Button, Alexander Bogner, Marvin Brown, Lisa Disch, John Evans, Willem Halffman, Drew Halfmann, Darren Hall, Jennet Kirkpatrick, Werner Kogge, Frank Laird, Noortje Marres, Shobita Parthasarathy, Monicka Patterson-Tutschka, Arthur Petersen, Roger Pielke, Dan Sarewitz, Mark Warren, David Winickoff, and Ned Woodhouse. It has been a pleasure to work with the staff at the MIT Press, and I very much appreciated the skilled assistance of Clay Morgan, Kathleen Caruso, and Nancy Kotary, as well as three perceptive anonymous reviewers. Isolated passages throughout this book are taken from articles of mine cited in the notes and bibliography. In particular, chapter 4 and part of chapter 10 are adapted from “Fairly Balanced: The Politics of Representation on Government Advisory Committees,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2008): 547–560. Another part of chapter 10 is adapted from “Three Ways to Politicize Bioethics,” American Journal of Bioethics 9, no. 2 (2009): 43–54. The publishers’ permission to use excerpts from these articles is gratefully acknowledged. Parts of this project were made possible by financial support from the College of Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Studies at Sacramento State, and from the Ethics and Values Studies program of the National Science Foundation (award no. 0451289).

Introduction

Susan F. Wood resigned in protest. On August 31, 2005, she left her position as Assistant Commissioner for Women’s Health and Director of the Office of Women’s Health at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An accomplished biologist and women’s health advocate, she explained that she could not support the agency’s decision, against the recommendation of its own science advisory committee, to further delay nonprescription sale of the emergency contraceptive Plan B. When taken within seventy-two hours after unprotected sex, Plan B is highly effective in preventing pregnancy. Because it is more effective the sooner it is taken, the drugmaker applied for FDA approval to make Plan B available without a prescription. Religious conservatives lobbied aggressively against the drug, arguing that it would encourage promiscuity and unsafe sex. These claims were disproven in several studies, but conservatives also claimed, it seems correctly, that Plan B may occasionally prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. For many conservatives this amounts to abortion.1 Wood acknowledged that “there have been cases in which not accepting an advisory committee’s recommendations has resulted in good decisions.” But it is very rare, she said, for the agency to reject recommendations approved by both a science advisory committee and the agency’s scientific staff. Wood argued that the head of the FDA should “ensure that science is the driving force in the agency.”2 Senator Hillary Clinton and other Democrats supported Wood’s position, calling the FDA decision “an unfortunate triumph of politics over science.”3 In August 2006 the FDA finally approved Plan B for nonprescription sale to women eighteen and older, nearly three years after the advisory committee’s recommendation to make it available to all women. Liberals welcomed the decision, but they continued to call for allowing nonprescription access to minors. Social conservatives were outraged, and as

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Introduction

liberal critics had claimed of the agency’s earlier decision, they claimed that the FDA was ignoring the science. As Senator Tom Coburn put it, “This decision has nothing to do with science or FDA rules but has everything to do with politics.”4 The controversy surrounding Plan B is one of many such cases in recent years. The Bush administration repeatedly altered or suppressed research findings that conflict with administration policy, vetted nominees to advisory committees to ensure they supported the president, and replaced committee members with people more amenable to the administration.5 The administration’s critics usually presented such abuses as evidence of the “politicization” of science—or, as the editor of the prestigious journal Science put it, “an epidemic of politics.”6 It is clear that the Bush administration’s distortion and suppression of science advice had disastrous consequences, and the public is indebted to the courage of Susan Wood and others who have spoken out against the abuse of expertise. But if one steps back from the everyday world of policy and politics to consider how things got this way, it becomes apparent that the charge of “politicization” is misleading. It mistakenly suggests the possibility of science advice that is entirely free of politics. Numerous studies have shown how science advice often combines technical and political considerations.7 Sociotechnical problems today are complex, multifaceted, and fraught with uncertainties. Expert recommendations are often intertwined with value judgments. Different scientific disciplines and methodologies generate different assessments, often with conflicting political implications. This means that, in many cases, government advisory committees easily become political. In what precise sense they become political is a complicated matter that I address later in this book. But if even “pure science” has politics, as Daniel Greenberg documented more than forty years ago, then it should come as no surprise that government advisory committees cannot remain entirely insulated from the controversial issues they address.8 In addition to obscuring the political dimensions of science advice, those who charged the Bush administration with politicizing science rarely revealed or defended their own value commitments and political interests. They instead tended to present themselves as defenders of pure science—as though the issues of global warming, sex education, and teaching evolution in public schools have remained controversial due to a lack of independent expertise.9 Issues like these remain controversial not because science has been politicized, but because they involve ongo-

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ing conflicts over basic values and interests. Although effectively addressing such issues depends in part on science, efforts to eliminate politics from science advice inevitably lead to conflicts over what is “political.” The result is to displace the political conflict onto science. Science becomes a proxy battleground for politics.10 In this respect, those calling for science advice free of politics are as guilty of politicizing science as their adversaries—even as they simultaneously scientize politics, by implying that political questions can be resolved by science. As a result, the need for inclusive public deliberation and contestation on such issues— informed by science, of course, but not subordinated to it—becomes obscured and political conflicts become intractable. Public debate over the Bush administration’s use and abuse of expert advisory committees was unusually intense, but the themes of the controversy echo a long history of battles over issues such as nuclear power, occupational health and safety, air and water pollution, global warming, stem cell research, and genetically modified foods, to name a few. How can such controversies be resolved in a way that facilitates democracy? Addressing this question requires looking beyond everyday partisan bickering over the politics of science. It requires understanding the historical sources of current modes of relating science and politics, and it depends on rethinking the conceptual and institutional resources with which democratic societies mediate sociotechnical conflicts. I approach these tasks by exploring how political representation shapes, and is shaped by, scientific representations of nature. This book, simply put, is about the relationship between political and scientific representation in democratic theory and practice. Why focus on representation? Return once again to the case of Plan B: when the political appointees at the FDA overrode the recommendation of their science advisory committee, they did so not simply out of personal conviction but also as representatives of the social conservatives who were a key constituency of the Bush administration. And yet they portrayed their decision as representative of scientific knowledge regarding the potential behavioral effects of Plan B. They took up an argument made by advisory committee member W. David Hager, a Christian conservative and antiabortion advocate whose appointment to the committee had been vigorously protested by women’s rights groups. First Hager and then top FDA officials maintained (against established FDA practice) that data from older adolescents could not be extrapolated to younger adolescents. Therefore, they argued, the FDA required more data on the

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Introduction

use of Plan B by women under age sixteen.11 In this respect, rather than explicitly seeking to represent the concerns of social conservatives, FDA officials attempted to justify their decision scientifically. They claimed that their decision “stood for” scientific knowledge, while they surreptitiously “acted for” social conservatives. They intertwined political and scientific forms of representation. Liberal advocates of over-the-counter status for Plan B did the same thing: they spoke on behalf of young women who, they believed, would benefit from easier access to the drug; and they made statements that stood for scientific knowledge regarding the drug’s safety and efficacy. Both sides downplayed their roles as political representatives and sought to focus public attention on the science. Moreover, both sides avoided presenting themselves as explicit spokespersons for the science, presumably to avoid being accused of twisting the science to fit their partisan interests. Instead, they sought to adopt the role of ventriloquists who remain silent while allowing the facts to speak for themselves. This might seem like mere word play. Is it not just an accident of language that the same word can be used to talk about “political representation of citizens” and “scientific representations of nature”? To some extent, it is in fact a particular feature of the English language that these two kinds of representation share the same word, and in some languages, such as German, they do not.12 Nonetheless, these two basic types of representation have long shaped each other in various ways.13 The English word representation comes from the Latin repraesentare, meaning “to make present or manifest or to present again.”14 Until the late Middle Ages, the term had nothing to do with government. It concerned the depiction or embodiment of a person or thing in language, art, theater, and religion. Representation meant to “stand for” someone or something, not to “act for” another person. Understood in this basic sense, of course, representational practices predate all forms of the word representation and probably originate with human culture itself. One can hardly imagine a culture that does not produce depictions of people, things, and ideas in stories, pictures, engravings, statues, and other objects or verbal expressions.15 In science the idea of representation as “standing for” includes different versions of the notion that scientific claims refer, depict, correspond to, or “mirror” the reality of nature. Representation as “standing for” appears in the use of scientific models, as in the Ptolemaic and Copernican models of the solar system, Bohr’s model of the atom, the double-

Introduction

5

helix model of DNA, or computer models of the global atmosphere. Representation as “standing for” also appears in the use of diagrams, equations, graphs, machine inscriptions, lab reports, and other modes of recording and conveying scientific research. It also plays a role in the public communication of science through the mass media, educational curricula, and museums.16 Without getting into the many arcane debates in the philosophy of science regarding the epistemic status of such representations, and ignoring the diversity of modes of representation within and among different scientific fields, it is useful to conceive science as concerned with producing representations that “stand for” natural entities and phenomena. Although political representation existed in ancient Athens and Rome, the term representation did not appear in politics until the thirteenth century, and it initially carried the meanings associated with its earlier usages in art, theater, and religion. It meant that the ruler—and later, Parliament—embodied, symbolized, or depicted the entire realm. The King-in-Parliament was understood as the mystic equivalent of all the people; sovereignty was represented “before” the people, not “for” them or on their behalf.17 In a gradual development from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries, proceeding somewhat differently in different languages, representation slowly acquired its current association with individual representatives who “act for” their constituents. With the rise of social contract theory and the idea that legitimate government rests on consent of the governed, representation as “acting for” became the dominant meaning in politics, and it remains so today. But the notion that political representatives symbolically “stand for” their constituents has always remained influential. It has acquired increased importance in recent years, especially with regard to concerns about the race and gender composition of legislatures and other political institutions. Many citizens today want their representatives not only to act for them but to stand for them as well. These conceptual overlaps and parallels between representation in politics and in science suggest that it may be productive to consider them in tandem. Scientific representations that “stand for” nature—especially when institutionalized as expert advice—play a key role in political representation. And efforts by both elected and unelected representatives to “act for” various constituents—such as patient advocacy groups, environmental organizations, and biotech companies—frequently shape both the context and content of scientific research.

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Introduction

In addition to considering the relationships between these and related forms of representation, much of this book is devoted to elaborating a particular understanding of representation itself. In both modern science and modern democracy, representation was long understood in terms of what critics have called the “correspondence model.” According to this view, scientific representations of nature are true when they correspond to reality, that is, to universal properties of nature that exist prior to and independent of scientific research. This understanding of scientific representation focuses on its cognitive dimension; it conceives representation as a matter of statements that mirror reality. The laborious process of creating such representations, and the diverse material and social resources upon which scientists rely when creating them, remain invisible. Put simply, scientific representation has usually been conceived as a noun rather than a verb, as the result of various activities rather than an activity itself. The past thirty years of research in science and technology studies, in contrast, emphasizes the diverse practical activities and material and cultural resources involved in creating representations of nature. Emphasizing the practical dimensions of science need not impugn the truth of scientific representations, as critics of science studies often assume, but it does open up difficult questions about who should be involved in making them. Modern democracy has also been saddled with a correspondence theory of representation. Liberal theorists of democracy have generally believed that governmental decisions should correspond to the preexisting reality of either popular will (delegate model) or the objective public interest (trustee model). In either case, liberal-democratic theorists have assumed a split between the sovereign will of the people and the deliberative reason of an elected elite. As Nadia Urbinati has argued, the standard liberal view amounts to a “juridical” theory of representation, because it models representation on a private legal contract between a single principal (a unified people) and its agent (the representative). The problem is that, unlike private contracts, the laws passed by elected representatives are binding on all citizens, not only those who agree with them. The juridical view thus neglects the audience of representation. Political representation goes beyond a principal-agent relationship, because it both involves deliberation with other representatives and appeals to the citizenry as a whole. Most important, by focusing on the authorization and accountability of representatives, the juridical view obscures the need to construct shared interests and sympathies through the process of representation itself.18

Introduction

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The juridical model of representation underlies elitist, minimalist, and realist theories of democracy. They conceive political representation as the task of expert rulers who deliberate in the public interest. A uniquely rational elite, once known as the “natural aristocracy,” discerns the objective public interest, doing what the people would have done, had they been able to deliberate. Ongoing public participation and deliberation is both unnecessary and undesirable. Some formulations of this view even explicitly dissociate it from democracy, calling it “representative government” rather than “representative democracy.”19 The juridical model is also assumed by those participatory and radical democrats who see political representation as inherently suspect—a second-best alternative to direct democracy.20 They rightly charge today’s representative governments with using representation to subvert rather than fulfill democratic ideals. But they implicitly agree with democratic elitists that, ideally, political representation requires correspondence to popular will. The key difference is that where elitists seek to provide a hypothetical form of correspondence—rational deliberation about what the people would want, were they as knowledgeable as their representatives—participatory democrats reject correspondence as impossible and political representation as antidemocratic. Although elitist and participatory democrats differ on whether political representation is desirable, they agree on what it is, and they each define it in rationalist terms. Elite democrats expect deliberation among public representatives to emulate an idealized image of science, and participatory democrats conceive lay participation in opposition to this image, as a matter of common sense. By modeling representation on a narrow view of scientific rationality, democratic theorists of different stripes have unwittingly conspired to render representative democracy impossible. As Nadia Urbinati writes, “Rationalism is the subtext of an understanding of representative democracy as oxymoronic.”21 As in scientific representation, the laborious process of mediating between will and reason, citizens and their representatives, as well as the diverse institutions that potentially facilitate such mediations, have had little place in prevailing theories of political representation. Throughout this book, I develop a conception of political and scientific representation as practices of mediation that engage and transform what they represent. Neither offers unmediated access to reality. Science can help democracy become more reflective—that is, more informed, competent, deliberative—but science is not a mirror of nature, and government

8

Introduction

decisions cannot perfectly reflect a preexisting popular will. Moving beyond representation as correspondence, I argue, leads to a theory of democracy as a system of collective representation that continually mobilizes and transforms both nature and citizens. Scientists do not passively observe raw nature; they interact in various ways with the entities of which they create representations. And scientists also engage political actors of various kinds. Politicians do not parrot constituent demands; they mobilize, educate, and aggregate constituent perspectives and interests in the process of representing them. And politicians engage scientists and other experts. To be sure, different institutions represent in different ways and for different purposes: a science advisory committee does not represent in the same way as an elected legislature, and each represents differently than an environmental group. A democratic system of representation, therefore, depends on building relationships between and among different types of representative institutions and the citizens who animate them. Focusing on the concept of representation raises a series of productive questions about the Plan B controversy, as well as the politics of science more generally. Why do both sides in such debates hide their efforts as political representatives behind their representations of science? Who or what authorizes them to represent anyone, and to whom are they accountable? How do people’s basic ideas about representation in science, politics, and democracy shape such controversies? And what conceptual resources and institutional reforms might help people avoid such impasses in the future? Because representation is an internally complex concept, comprising multiple elements, it opens up more questions than other concepts one might place at the center of a study on science and democracy. Studying representation raises questions of authorization, accountability, participation, deliberation, and resemblance; focusing on any one of those concepts would not necessarily lead to the others. And by focusing on representation, this book shows that recent efforts to promote public participation in the politics of science capture only part of what it might mean to democratize science. In both politics and science, democratic representation requires but cannot be reduced to various forms of public participation. The remainder of this introduction briefly outlines the historical and conceptual context of the recent politics of science and summarizes the prevailing responses to it.

Introduction

9

Politicized Science and Scientized Politics When the Athenians accused Socrates of corrupting the youth, they set a precedent that has haunted the relationship between knowledge and power ever since. Plato’s response to his teacher’s execution set the terms for the Western model of relating science and politics: the power of knowledge in politics depends on experts first removing themselves from society, then returning as self-sufficient rulers, ready to employ their superior knowledge in wise governance of the ignorant masses. Experts are in politics but not of it. This basic model also appears in the concurrent rise of modern science and the modern state, and the story told in this book begins with the early modern period. According to the conception of science that emerged between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, science supports liberalism and democracy insofar as it remains free of politics. For scientific expertise to inform and legitimize political decisions, it must remain objective, independent, and value-free. Moreover, if science is kept value-free, it offers a cultural model of key liberaldemocratic norms, including civility, humility, consensus, disinterestedness, and instrumentally effective action. For more than four hundred years, liberal thinkers seeking to propagate such values have looked to science as a model for politics. Modern scientists have returned the favor, appealing to political regimes for both symbolic and financial support. As I explain in chapter 2, early modern scientists developed a mode of investigating nature that drew upon emerging political values of religious toleration, the rule of law, and limited government. Modern states also directly supported certain early scientific endeavors, but until the mid-nineteenth century, science was a largely private affair undertaken by gentlemen-scientists linked together in private scientific associations. State sponsorship of scientific research increased dramatically during the twentieth century, especially with regard to military research during both World War I and World War II. It reached its height during the Cold War in the United States, when a so-called social contract for science granted scientists generous public funding and wide-reaching freedom from political regulation in exchange for a steady stream of defense and consumer technologies.22 The government provided money, with no strings attached, and science produced knowledge, technology, and medicine. This social contract was always a fragile construction, and the separation between science and politics was never as complete as nostalgic critics of politicized science now claim. In

10

Introduction

particular, scientists during the Cold War were subject to political pressures associated with anticommunism and McCarthyism, and governments often restricted communication among scientists conducting military research.23 Nonetheless, until at least the early 1980s, two basic premises governed U.S. science policy: the scientific community is capable of regulating itself; and if it is allowed to regulate itself, science will produce technological benefits for society. Although the social contract for science continues to dominate popular views of science, it is being challenged by the politicization of science policy, science advice, and scientific research itself. With regard to science policy, governments have long sought to shape scientific research through such indirect means as public education, tax credits, protocols for the treatment of animal and human research subjects, environmental regulations, and patent policies, among other measures. Since about 1980, however, as David Guston has argued, the emphasis has shifted from broad attempts to shape science through macroeconomic controls on funding toward more detailed micro-level efforts to direct research.24 In the United States, the widely discussed Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 made it possible for university researchers to patent and personally profit from publicly funded research. Federal incentives for partnerships between university and industry researchers have also helped publicly funded scientists identify, patent, license, and market commercially promising research. Considerable evidence suggests that such policies have gradually transformed the culture of university research, such that commercial considerations increasingly shape research priorities.25 In this respect, the dominant mode of politicizing science policy has been closely intertwined with commercialization. The postwar expansion of government efforts to shape scientific research—“policy for science”—has been closely linked with a corresponding increase in the perceived need for science advice or “science in policy.”26 The Progressive Era fascination with “rational administration,” followed by the rise of the modern welfare state, greatly increased the government’s need for scientific advice to design, implement, evaluate, and legitimate a wide range of new policies and programs. During the 1970s, emerging environmental and health risks, and the creation or expansion of government regulatory agencies, led to an enormous growth in public demand for expertise. Science became both the leading cause of and most widely proposed solution to the various indeterminate dangers associated with life in the “risk society.”27 Today not only government

Introduction

11

agencies but also advocacy groups, businesses, and private individuals appeal to experts in every imaginable situation. Pollsters, media advisors, and consultants play ever-greater roles in election campaigns. Experts of all kinds are staple guests on television talk shows. And the burgeoning self-help movement offers anxious readers cheerful advice on friendship, love, marriage, sex, childcare, health, wealth, death, and mourning—not to mention hundreds of books on how to write books. A major shortcoming of all this expertise is that with the exception of a limited number of well-defined problems—how to make a bomb, for instance, or remove an appendix—expert knowledge today is often incomplete and uncertain. Most sociotechnical problems are “ill formed” or “wicked” problems.28 They do not lend themselves to precise measurement, prediction, and control according to a single set of disciplinary standards. In contrast to the “well-formed” problems traditionally associated with basic science, the ill-formed problems for which citizens and politicians require expertise do not have an unambiguous single best answer. Indeed, given the increasing commercialization of research, some scholars argue that today, even much basic science lacks well-formed problems.29 An ill-formed problem has multiple possible solutions, each of which may be best according to a different discipline’s standards of quality, and none of which is best in all relevant ways. Moreover, citizens’ interests with regard to such problems are often inchoate or unclear, making it difficult to say which of various expert claims best promotes their interests. Finally, the expertise created in response to ill-formed problems often varies among different types of advisory institutions and different national cultures. Quantitative measurement, for example, and procedures for public participation play a much greater role in constituting expert authority in the United States than in Europe.30 All this means that the capacity of expertise to settle political controversies is often limited by the fact that what counts as expertise is not definitively settled until after controversies have come to an end. The uncertainty of much technical expertise also means that in many cases, competing interest groups can each find high-quality science advice that supports their political views. The contingencies of emerging knowledge, combined with the different results produced by different disciplinary perspectives, make it possible for advocates on different sides of an issue to “cherry-pick” whatever scientific claims support their political goals.31 And if interest groups cannot find any established experts who support their views, they can pay “hired guns” who adopt the cultural

12

Introduction

trappings of expertise and create sufficient uncertainty to delay political action. Corporations have repeatedly used such tactics to delay government regulations on automobiles, tobacco, global warming, and other issues. The growing demand for science advice, the “scientization of politics,” has thus contributed to the “politicization of science.”32 The paradoxical result is that people need experts more, yet trust them less. The politicization of expertise increases expert prominence, yet renders expert authority more vulnerable to challenge.33 Finally, in addition to the politicization of science policy and science advice, the production of science itself has often become political in recent years; in some respects, it always has been. According to the view of politics that I adopt in this book, science becomes political whenever it involves people in ongoing relations of conflict and power. Power-laden conflicts might arise among scientific colleagues or laboratory workers, for example, or between scientists and nonscientists. Feminist philosophy of science, for example, has challenged the gender biases in certain areas of biological research. AIDS activists have shown how protocols for clinical trials of new drugs incorporate assumptions about the relative priority of scientific certainty and patient welfare.34 These and other examples of politicized science echo the politicization of race, class, and gender relations in businesses, churches, universities, and families. The internal politics of science was long obscured by the view that science should be insulated from politics because science and politics are at opposite ends of what Don K. Price called “the spectrum from truth to power.” Recent scholarship, in contrast, suggests that politics appears wherever people seek to mediate relations of conflict and power.35 Wherever there is politics, there may also be political representation. Just as state institutions are not the only sites of politics, elected officials are not the only representatives. Government bureaucracies, science advisory bodies, interest groups, corporations, civil society organizations, transnational institutions, and even individual citizens who sit on criminal juries or citizen advisory panels or who attend a public hearing or town hall meeting frequently claim to speak or act for others. Many of these representatives are not authorized as such, nor are they held accountable by their constituents, but they still make plausible claims to represent others.36 Some scientists, especially those affiliated with environmental groups, claim to represent nature in the sense of acting on behalf of nature’s interests. Such claims do not necessarily depend on science, however, and

Introduction

13

environmentalists draw on diverse forms of knowledge and experience to formulate claims on nature’s behalf. Such claims are subject to difficult questions about how to discern nature’s interests, who authorizes and is held accountable for representing nature’s interests, and whether it even makes sense to say that nature has interests in the first place. I address some of these questions briefly at the end of chapter 5 and in chapter 7, but for the most part I focus on scientists’ efforts to make representations that stand for nature, emphasizing the various cultural resources they draw upon, and the constituencies they engage, when making such representations. Innumerable case studies in STS have documented the role of social values, linguistic customs, political interests, personal idiosyncrasies, and other nontechnical factors in the production of scientific knowledge. From this perspective, much of the activity involved in making scientific representations of nature is not any more “scientific” than what occurs in political representation. As Bruno Latour remarks, “We might just as well say that a refinery produces oil in a refined manner, or that a dairy produces butter in a buttery way!”37 In many respects, there is nothing especially scientific about the creation of scientific knowledge. This does not mean, as I show later in the book, that scientific and political representation have the same goals or require the same kinds of institutions. Scientific representation, roughly speaking, seeks to explain and control empirical phenomena, and political representation aims to mediate relations of conflict and power. But science and politics use many of the same resources. In this respect, Otto von Bismarck’s famous quip— laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made—nicely captures the traditional view of science, which focuses on the results of science, not its process. Science studies scholars concerned with the activity of scientific research, in contrast, have revealed many continuities in the conceptual and cultural resources employed by scientists and political actors, even as they pursue very different goals. Whenever these resources involve scientists in relations of conflict and power—such as when people challenge the social values assumed by ostensibly neutral research methods—science becomes political. In addition to the politics that may arise within scientific institutions, science may also become political when it becomes intertwined with relations of conflict and power in the world beyond the laboratory. Bogus research claiming to demonstrate inferior intelligence among nonwhites, or women’s natural incapacity to work outside the home, has wrought much social and political damage. What critics of such claims often miss,

14

Introduction

however, is that high-quality science may also have political dimensions. Early-twentieth-century eugenics research, for example, was not first conducted by charlatans and Nazis but by leading scientists in England and the United States.38 From the eugenics movement to recent research on the genetic factors that shape human health and behavior, mainstream science has often been closely intertwined with changing social views on what counts as a “natural” or “normal” human life. Conceptions of the normal and natural, in turn, exert a powerful influence on everyday life, shaping people’s beliefs, behaviors, and self-conceptions in subtle ways. In this respect, scientific knowledge generates what Michel Foucault called “disciplinary power” and “technologies of the self” through which individuals construct their identities.39 Due in part to the social diffusion of scientific ideas and practices, people today use electric lamps to detach themselves from seasonal patterns of daylight, engage in various hygiene rituals to prevent infection, and worry as much about the nutritional content of foods as their taste. Or think of the subtle shifts in popular conceptions of human reproduction and human nature that some associate with recent research in biotechnology.40 Or consider how releasing genetically engineered organisms into the environment, with unpredictable consequences, has turned the entire world into a laboratory.41 In these and many other respects, Joseph Rouse observes, “who we are is just as much at issue in the natural sciences as in those inquiries that make us directly into an object of study.”42 The natural laws described by modern science shape the conditions of human life no less than the laws passed by elected legislatures. To paraphrase Langdon Winner, science is not only shaped by legislation, science is legislation, in the sense that its practices and artifacts legislate our lives.43 And if science is legislation, then in a representative democracy, science is potentially a site of political representation. Science is only potentially a site of political representation, because science, like other social practices, is no more essentially political than essentially nonpolitical.44 Moreover, there are good reasons to avoid calling all instances of speaking or acting for others political representation. Representation may not be very political, for example, if it involves routinized relationships of delegated authority in which power and conflict have been either eliminated or suppressed. Many contractual relationships take this form. As I argue in later chapters, political representation in a democracy requires ongoing contestation and deliberation between and among representatives and constituents. Democratic representa-

Introduction

15

tion is both spatially distributed across different types of institutions and temporally extended to allow both laypeople and experts the time required for effective deliberation and contestation. This means that studying political representation requires looking beyond government institutions and following the politicization or depoliticization of social relations wherever it leads. From this perspective, representative democracy is a way of responding to politics wherever it appears, even within the hallowed domain of science. It should be made clear at the outset, however, that politicizing science is a risky endeavor, even if it is often less risky than not doing so. Twentieth-century totalitarian regimes forced universities to employ narrow ideological criteria in faculty appointments; enforced orthodox methods and theories; promoted horrendous experiments on human subjects; and led to the emigration, imprisonment, and death of thousands of scientists.45 It remains crucial, however, to dispel the persistent myth that Nazi science and Lysenkoism represented the subordination of otherwise value-free science to political ideology. In the case of Lysenko, for example, it is certainly true that Soviet ideology and policy were instrumental in his success at promoting the Lamarckian notion that acquired traits are inherited by the next generation. During the 1930s, the agricultural crisis created by Soviet collectivization policies offered a receptive environment for Lysenko’s misguided agricultural reform proposals. But at the time there was no consensus in Western countries on the science of heredity, and the so-called genetic revolution did not occur until the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, although Lysenkoism is an extreme case of the social shaping of science, recent studies have shown how contemporary genetics also incorporates various social values and metaphors, in particular the Western view of nature as a book.46 This is not to say that it is unimportant under which type of political regime science is practiced. To the contrary: although Lamarckian genetics was initially defended by scientists living under both liberal-democratic and Communist regimes, its eventual demise was delayed in the Soviet Union because empirical findings were suppressed. Democracy allows for a diversity of political influences on science, and it helps ensure that science remains open to empirical evidence. Democracy is clearly better for science than totalitarianism. But this is not because science and democracy necessarily share a basic ethos or epistemological structure, as thinkers like Robert Merton, Bertrand Russell, and Karl Popper argued at a time when both science and democracy were threatened by totalitarianism.47 Even a

16

Introduction

science that incorporates the input of lay citizens will still employ theories, skills, and instruments that remain beyond the comprehension of most citizens. And the economic and political interests of scientists, as a group, often conflict with those of other social groups. An “essential tension” may always persist between science and democracy.48 In these respects, the specter of totalitarian science may serve as a useful reminder of the need for boundaries between science and politics, even as it becomes clear that those boundaries are not given by nature or logic, and that scientific practices often draw promiscuously on seemingly external resources. The problem with totalitarian science does not lie in the mixing of science and politics, as is commonly supposed, but in the form of politics that goes into the mix. Prevailing Responses to Politicized Science The response to politicized science that I outline in this book differs from two common approaches. Most commentators respond to politicized science by attempting to revive the postwar social contract for science. For example, reports on the Bush administration’s politicization of science advisory committees usually called for expelling politics from science. In the Plan B case and many other such cases, critics of politicized science occasionally acknowledged that politicians should also consider other factors in making decisions, but they consistently appealed to the idea of value-free science. In this respect, the Bush administration’s critics echoed the “science wars” of the 1990s, when self-appointed defenders of science accused “postmodern” and “social constructivist” science studies of threatening the prestige and authority of science.49 Polemics in major newspapers argued that constructivism implies “anything goes,” thus undermining the foundations of democracy and opening the way to irrationalism and mob rule. Despite their hyperbolic claims about protecting democracy from the postmodern hordes, the critics of science studies had a certain point: constructivist science studies does undermine the standard image of science as an objective mirror of nature (even if its actual public influence is far less than often assumed). Many constructivists at the time had not yet devoted much attention to the distinctly political question of what to do next.50 This situation has changed during the past ten years, and STS has become increasingly concerned with questions of politics.51 The critics were (and are) also correct that the politicization of science has made it

Introduction

17

increasingly difficult for science to serve its traditional cultural function of exemplifying liberal-democratic values.52 But the remedy they propose is worse than the disease. Whether their chosen culprit is postmodern constructivism or the Bush administration, critics of politicized science usually call for restoring a presumed Golden Age of “the pure virtue of the pursuit of knowledge.”53 Such efforts ignore the enormous social forces contributing to the politicization of science, which make it both impossible and irresponsible for scientists to isolate themselves from politics. They also frequently assume a deterministic conception of science and technology as developing according to their own internal logics, neither allowing nor requiring conscious political direction. Science and technology undergo constant and inherently progressive change, they argue, and societies must simply adapt as best they can. Indeed, as Winner writes, people today “are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accommodate technological innovation while at the same time resisting similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds.”54 At their worst, efforts to revive the pure science ideal underwrite technocratic attempts to stifle democracy by imposing scientific solutions to political problems. And they are often tainted by special pleading: scientists argue that the politicization of science decreases public trust in science and hence threatens public funding for their research. Their suggested remedy is to increase “public understanding of science,” which usually amounts to telling citizens why they should learn to love science.55 When advanced by scientists themselves, efforts to increase public deference to science may initially appear quite shameless. But they should be seen in light of the widespread assumption that science represents not merely scientists’ narrow group interests, but also the interests of society or even humanity as a whole. Those who defend “public interest science” thus usually insist that science can represent the public interest only if it avoids representing any particular interests, perspectives, or concerns; science must be a mirror of nature that is politically neutral and value-free. As noted previously, this correspondence view of scientific representation has long been refuted in various branches of science studies, but it continues to dominate the politics of science policy and science advice. A different and more promising response to the politicization of science comes from those who try to shift the debate from its usual focus on the degree of politicization to questions about different kinds of

18

Introduction

politicization. The reduction of science advice to partisan competition reflects a very particular view of politics: the politics of private selfinterest, typically (and unfairly) associated with liberal political thought. Introducing a more participatory, deliberative, and inclusive type of politics into science has the potential to produce very different results. In this spirit, activists and scholars around the world have long sought to “democratize” expertise by involving lay citizens in technically complex political issues.56 The women’s movement has sought to rectify patterns of bias and exclusion within the scientific and medical establishments; the antinuclear, consumer, and environmental movements have attacked elite indifference toward the “side effects” of science and technology; the movements for organic food and community-supported agriculture have challenged the dominance of technology-driven farming. Echoing these and related grassroots movements, many governments during the 1970s adopted “sunshine laws” that created avenues for public involvement in policy areas otherwise dominated by bureaucratic elites. More recently, civil society organizations and some governments have sponsored consensus conferences, citizens’ juries, deliberative polls, and other institutional experiments to involve a randomly selected group of lay citizens in deliberation on complex issues. In the United Kingdom, especially, various initiatives to promote “public engagement in science and technology” have acquired a key place on the public agenda.57 Many of these efforts focus on regulating the use of new technologies, but some also attempt to move “upstream” by introducing lay perspectives into the production of scientific knowledge itself.58 By requiring scientists to respond to lay concerns, these various efforts have the potential of transforming science and expertise into politically representative institutions. A key shortcoming of many such efforts, however, is that they rely on the same correspondence view of representation as the technocratic politics they aim to replace. Parallel to the traditional view of scientific representation as a mirror of nature, those seeking to democratize science and expertise often appeal to a conception of political representation as a mirror of either existing popular will or some hypothetical image of what popular will could be. In this respect, they share their adversaries’ view of representation as unmediated access to reality. The unmediated reality they seek is not the preexisting nature of modern science, but the unadulterated common sense of the lay citizen. This conception of representation leads to the suggestion that, ideally, deliberative citizen forums would not merely inform or supplement the judgments of elected

Introduction

19

representatives but replace them.59 Of course, proponents of public engagement generally acknowledge that such efforts must accommodate themselves to representative institutions. But they often suggest that representative democracy is a second-best derivation from direct democracy, rather than a distinct governmental form with its own integrity. This book develops a response to politicized science more promising than these prevailing approaches. It revolves around a view of representative democracy that includes a key role for public engagement in science, while making clear its potentials and limits as part of a system of diverse institutions. The first chapter takes up Machiavelli, who offers a fascinating demonstration of the modern rhetoric of expertise, while also suggesting how citizens of a republic can ensure that it serves their interests.

I Modern Politics and the Mirror of Nature

1 Niccolò Machiavelli and the Popular Politics of Expertise

A prince who is not wise on his own cannot be well advised. —Machiavelli, The Prince The few always act in the interest of the few. —Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy

The chairman of the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics, Edmund Pellegrino, distinguishes two forms of politicized science: the first he associates with the Aristotelian pursuit of the good life, the second with the Machiavellian pursuit of self-interest. Politics of “the Machiavellian variety,” he writes, aims to promote “the selfish interests of groups or individuals or to prevent open discussion of opposing viewpoints.” It employs “free assertion, seductive one-sided argument, partial or distorted evidence, bombast.”1 Posed in these terms, Machiavellian politics clearly threatens both science and democracy. Leading science studies scholar Bruno Latour has repeatedly adopted a similar if somewhat more nuanced reading of Machiavelli, enlisting the Florentine in support of a view of science as strategic alliance building. As I explain in chapter 7, Latour portrays the establishment of scientific facts as a matter of enrolling supporters for scientific claims. For Latour, Machiavelli stands for the clever pursuit of epistemic power in an ever-changing world, where social values and scientific facts must be continually reestablished.2 This chapter offers a different reading of Machiavelli, more conducive to a democratic theory of science than either Pellegrino’s or Latour’s. Machiavelli not only embraces the contingency and flux of modern politics. He also highlights the importance of stable institutions that help citizens cope with shifting events. Moreover, he helps establish the basic conceptual framework for the modern idea of representation as correspondence

24

Chapter 1

in science, even as he suggests some key elements of a republican form of representation in politics. My account thus departs from the many recent studies that emphasize Machiavelli’s republicanism and discount his contributions to the basic worldview of modern science.3 Conversely, my reading also differs from the many interpretations that neglect Machiavelli’s republicanism and associate him with a disenchanted modern scientific worldview characterized by the egoistic pursuit of power, where government is merely “the technique of management.”4 By assuming that Machiavelli must be read as either a republican or a scientist, each of these established readings begs the question. They assume the very opposition between science and politics that Machiavelli helped create. This chapter shows, in contrast, that some of Machiavelli’s basic convictions—realism, instrumentalism, voluntarism, the rule of law, and faith in the competence of ordinary citizens—set the stage for both modern science and modern republicanism. More precisely, Machiavelli articulates distinct norms and purposes for science advisors and political actors—thus hinting at the institutional differentiation of modern society—and he also offers an account of how and why science should serve politics rather than the other way around. Machiavelli cannot be captured within a single interpretive principle—republicanism or scientism—because he is doing two things at once: inventing a modern rhetoric of expertise, and showing how to use expertise in a way that goes beyond short-term success and enhances the power and security of a principality or republic. Finally, this chapter identifies echoes of Machiavelli’s thought in both liberal theories of representative government and more participatory forms of representative democracy. Machiavelli’s Rhetoric of Expertise Machiavelli wrote both within and against the speculum principis or mirror-for-princes literature, a genre of texts that advised princes how to govern. Beginning in the early medieval period, hundreds of such texts discussed the same basic themes: the relation of kings to their counselors; how to avoid flatterers; whether a king is above the law; the king’s duties to his subjects; whether it is better to be feared or loved; and the merits of a native militia as compared to mercenary troops. Authors writing in this genre made flexible use of anecdotes and platitudes taken from ancient texts to provide both advice and propaganda for the rulers they served.5 During the fifteenth century, accompanied by a new apprecia-

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25

tion for the historically specific circumstances of ancient texts, elements of the mirror-for-princes genre came together in various strands of Renaissance humanism.6 In comparison to other authors in the mirror-for-princes genre, commentators have usually seen Machiavelli’s originality in his “realistic” doctrine of politics.7 Whereas most other advisors told princes how to be virtuous, Machiavelli showed them how to retain power. Although Machiavelli certainly advocates political realism over idealism, his realism is itself an ideal, requiring appropriate doses of bold imagination, and Machiavelli’s defense of his ideal is no less rhetorical than the most elaborate prose of his contemporaries.8 Drawing on established rhetorical conventions, Machiavelli opens The Prince with a few passages designed to awaken the interest and sympathy of his first intended reader, Lorenzo de’ Medici, to whom the book is dedicated.9 The Medici ruled Florence during most of the fifteenth century but had been forced into exile during the revival of the Republic, which lasted from 1494 until the Medici regained power in 1512. Machiavelli served in the Second Chancery of the Florentine Republic from 1498 to 1512, often engaged in diplomatic missions in which he was able to observe and converse with the leading political figures of the age. When the Medici returned to power, Machiavelli was arrested and tortured on suspicion of having conspired against them. Machiavelli wrote The Prince in the fall of 1513, while living outside Florence, involuntarily exiled from politics and hoping to acquire a position in the new government. This background, as well as Machiavelli’s lack of noble status, made it especially important for Machiavelli to ingratiate himself with his audience. He thus opens The Prince by drawing a parallel between his book and other immediately useful or status-conferring gifts commonly given to princes: “horses, arms, and vestments of gold cloth, precious stones, and similar ornaments suited to their greatness.” He goes on to explain that he has condensed “knowledge of the deeds of great men” acquired through “long experience in modern affairs and a continuous study of antiquity” into “a little book.” In a manner similar to the seventeenthcentury experimental scientists discussed in the next chapter, Machiavelli locates the value of his gift in the way it transforms work into knowledge. Like a scientific proposition based on a series of laboratory experiments, Machiavelli’s book allows the prince to understand “in a very short time” everything that Machiavelli has learned “in so many years

26

Chapter 1

and with so many hardships and dangers.”10 By thus emphasizing the practical usefulness of his advice, Machiavelli also echoes the long tradition of the mirror-for-princes literature. Machiavelli departs from the tradition, however, in his emphasis on the time-saving efficiency provided by his text.11 Whereas other humanist advice books had usually confined themselves to offering a series of maxims, commonplaces, and proverbs that the reader could draw upon in making decisions, Machiavelli offers a finished product of condensed knowledge. The reader will not need to engage in further deliberations, using the text as an aid, for the work has already been done. As Michael Oakeshott emphasizes, Machiavelli writes especially for the new prince of his day who needs a cheat-sheet to compensate for lack of experience.12 In this respect, the rationalist politics to which Machiavelli contributes favors upstarts and newcomers over veterans of public affairs—a dynamic apparent in the United States today with the symbiotic rise of campaign consultants and celebrity politicians at the expense of established political parties. Machiavelli also differs from other humanist authors, and suggests the rhetoric of modern science, when he denounces the same rhetorical techniques that he uses to such great effect. Immediately following the passages quoted previously, Machiavelli writes that he has “neither decorated nor filled this work with elaborate sentences, with rich and magnificent words, or with any other form of rhetorical or unnecessary ornamentation . . . for I wished that nothing should set my work apart or make it pleasing except the variety and gravity of its contents.”13 Whereas previous authors in the mirror-for-princes genre had explicitly used rhetoric and persuasion to tell princes how and why they should try to be virtuous, Machiavelli here suggests that advice based on normative ideals will weaken the prince. Only realistic and descriptive advice will strengthen him. Good advice, Machiavelli suggests, is about what is, not what ought to be. It is not surprising that passages such as this remind today’s readers of the modern scientific ethos, and I will discuss similar passages in the writings of seventeenth-century experimental scientists. But there is more going on here than a simple endorsement of scientific objectivity. In these passages, as Robert Hariman has argued, Machiavelli draws a distinction between the language of his text and its content, between rhetoric and knowledge.14 In saying that he will use plain language and not flatter the prince or beautify things, Machiavelli is distinguishing his approach from the flowery rhetoric common in the mirror-for-princes

Niccolò Machiavelli and the Popular Politics of Expertise

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genre. But rather than avoiding all convention and rhetoric, Machiavelli is creating a new rhetorical convention in which the author is absent from the text and the text is independent of social conventions. Machiavelli’s text reveals only its subject matter, not the author. The author is of course not entirely absent, but he positions himself as a transparent medium between the reader and the subject matter. Machiavelli is not actively representing the world; he is creating representations of the world. He is not speaking; the facts are speaking through him. Like the carefully worded laboratory reports discussed in the next chapter, Machiavelli employs a rhetoric of humility to retreat behind the method by which he induces his subject matter to speak. This emphasis on method appears most clearly when Machiavelli expresses his hope that someone of such “low and inferior social condition” as himself will not be thought presumptuous for daring to “examine and lay down rules” for princes. His objective social location, Machiavelli suggests, rather than anything particular to him as an individual, gives him the capacity to produce true and useful knowledge about politics: “Just as those who paint landscapes place themselves in a low position on the plain in order to consider the nature of the mountains and the heights, and place themselves high on top of mountains in order to study the plains, in like manner, to know the nature of the people well one must be a prince, and to know the nature of princes well one must be of the people.”15 Machiavelli here justifies his daring to speak to those of higher station by equating his social location with an epistemological location, thus objectifying what he had said previously about his personal qualifications and experience. He associates his capacity to provide useful knowledge not with personal virtue or effort or intellectual capacity but with the adoption of a particular perspective. Moreover, he explicitly presents himself not as an author who creates a new written work but as an observer who records preexisting phenomena.16 And by highlighting his “low and inferior social condition,” Machiavelli suggests that the perspective of observer is open to nearly everyone. Machiavelli thus presents his book as a distinctly public form of knowledge, a legitimation strategy that later becomes central to modern science. At the same time, however, as he also gives an account of the prince’s perspective, Machiavelli suggests that he not only observes the prince from below but alternates between one perspective and the other.17 In this respect, Machiavelli’s epistemological humility not only legitimates his claim to knowledge but also threatens to delegitimate political authority.

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If anyone can acquire knowledge of princely affairs, the prince may have trouble maintaining authority over his subjects.18 In this respect, the epistemic authority of Machiavelli’s political science, like that of scientific experts today, has the potential to either underwrite or undermine political authority. Machiavelli’s rhetoric of humility is even more pronounced in the preface to the autograph manuscript of his Discourses on Livy. He writes, “Even if my feeble intellect, my meager experience in current affairs, and my weak knowledge of ancient ones render this effort of mine defective and of little use, it may at least open the way for someone who with more ability, more eloquence, and more judgment will be able to carry out this plan of mine.”19 In this passage and many others, the author retreats not only behind his own individual text but also behind a historically progressive social enterprise of knowledge production. Regardless of Machiavelli’s individual success, he hopes to “open the way” for others. This notion later plays a key role in the public legitimation of modern science. In addition to removing himself from his text, Machiavelli also removes the text from society. This is most apparent in his well-known December 10, 1513, letter to Francesco Vettori, in which Machiavelli describes daily life at his country villa outside Florence. He has been banished from politics and is reluctantly engaged in mundane pursuits, he writes, tending to his property and socializing with the locals. When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dimiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death: I become completely part of them.20

This often-quoted passage is usually read as a romantic statement of the humanist commitment to intellectual inquiry and the cross-generational “conversation” of political theory.21 It also suggests an epistemology in which acquiring knowledge requires a departure from both the domestic concerns of the home (Machiavelli works in his study, not at the kitchen table), and the social world of everyday conventions. Machiavelli here faces the same problem of speaking to superiors with which he opens The Prince. In the letter to Vettori, Machiavelli adopts the conventions

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he rejects in the dedicatory letter of The Prince, and he dresses himself in a manner appropriate to “the ancient courts of ancient men.” But in both texts Machiavelli asserts a divide between language and politics.22 In the letter, when entering his study Machiavelli moves from day to night, from public life to (a male version of) private life, from the poverty and fear of death he shares with others to the individual solace of an ephemeral “food that alone is mine.” By thus removing himself from society, Machiavelli acquires an outsider’s perspective, analogous to observing the prince from the plains. Whereas other authors in the mirror-forprinces genre explicitly identified themselves with social and rhetorical conventions familiar to their readers, Machiavelli creates a rhetoric of distance. As I discuss in detail later, this sort of distance is a basic precondition for modern theories of representation. In addition to these challenges to the mirror-for-princes genre and the prevailing conception of political advice, Machiavelli also suggests a new understanding of the advisor’s subject matter: political power. Machiavelli is often credited with discovering the primacy of power in politics. This may be true, but as Hariman points out, more significant is that Machiavelli also helps establish the very notion that power is an object of discovery, an entity existing outside of human conventions, a thing that one can have.23 In terms of a distinction developed by Hannah Arendt, Machiavelli conceives power as force, a measurable capacity to compel obedience; other authors in the mirror-for-princes genre view power in a manner similar to Arendt’s notion of power as a potential for action that arises from the shared life of a community.24 They conceive power as manifest in social relations, embedded in a cultural context and exercised primarily through persuasive speech. When they seek to assert power over those they advise, they reproduce this conception of power by explicitly relying on artful persuasion, past authorities, and shared ideals. For these authors, citing previous authorities is not only a rhetorical technique but also the enactment of an epistemology grounded in shared language and history. Machiavelli’s Prince, in contrast, directly cites only two other authors: Virgil in chapter 17 and Petrarch in chapter 26.25 Indeed, despite adhering in many respects to established rhetorical conventions, Machiavelli announces that his study of power will avoid artifice, reject authorities, and defy conventions. He thus defines power as external to language and convention, and he thereby also redefines language and convention as impotent to guide power—without the aid, that is, of expert advice.

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Although Machiavelli’s redefinition of power as an object of study depends on the author removing himself from his text, it also makes Machiavelli himself indispensable to the wise exercise and control of power so conceived. By separating language and power, Machiavelli insinuates himself as a necessary mediator between the language of the classical texts he interprets and the power of the prince. This is the rhetorical stance of the modern expert, whose knowledge is deemed indispensable to politics, not least because everyone assumes political actors have power but lack knowledge. In this respect, Machiavelli’s Prince not only depicts a world that requires princes to assert themselves; it is also the author’s own self-assertion against the conventions of the genre. Machiavelli presents himself as the person who can link together what his text breaks apart: text and context, knowledge and convention, science and politics.26 Paradoxically, the separation of knowledge and convention makes knowledge more useful for controlling the world of convention. This idea appears most clearly in chapter 15 of The Prince, where Machiavelli again writes (again with false humility) that he fears being considered presumptuous for the way he departs from convention. He then continues, “But since my intention is to write something useful for anyone who understands it, it seemed more suitable for me to search after the effectual truth of the matter rather than its imagined one. Many writers have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen nor known to exist in reality.”27 Put simply, knowledge of reality is useful, and imagination is useless. Machiavelli famously goes on to argue that when the security of the state is at risk, useful knowledge may conflict with conventional morality. “For there is such a distance between how one lives and how one ought to live, that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done achieves his downfall rather than his preservation.”28 Machiavelli thus again draws a divide between truth and utility on the one hand, and convention on the other. True knowledge is useful, and useful knowledge is true, and both may defy convention. This does not mean that social conventions should be ignored, for both princes and experts must strive to remain relevant to the conventional world, but linking knowledge and power requires a willingness to reject convention.29 In this respect, as I show in the next chapter, Machiavelli’s rhetoric reappears in the modern expert’s ambiguous relationship to common sense.

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Contingency, Expertise, and Visual Politics If Machiavelli’s division between knowledge and convention helps establish the power of the modern expert, his view of politics as inevitably shaped by unpredictable events challenges that power. Through their engagement with the classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome, fifteenthcentury humanists had developed a new historical consciousness, a sense that their time was different from the past. Machiavelli reflects this historical sensibility when he emphasizes the precariousness of any effort to apply knowledge to politics. In this respect, he offers some hints for coping with the dilemmas created by the conception of expertise that Machiavelli himself did so much to create. If Machiavelli’s epistemology asserts an external standpoint from which to control political affairs, his political theory offers conceptual resources for democratizing that standpoint, such that ordinary citizens play a role in the constitution of political advice. In contrast to the early humanist reliance on ancient works of philosophy, Machiavelli focuses on the works of Livy and other ancient historians. He derives his generalizations from history and from his own experience, rather than from abstract principles. In the preface to the Discourses, Machiavelli laments that whereas sculptors, jurists, and doctors use past examples to develop rules for current practice, in political affairs past examples of virtuous conduct “are praised with astonishment rather than imitated.”30 He asserts that “all the sciences require experience in order to master them completely,” leading to his recommendation that commanders of armies should learn to hunt when young, because hunting provides useful knowledge and experience, as well as the skills for acquiring additional relevant knowledge in the future.31 As Oakeshott points out, it is only Machiavelli’s presumptive followers who believe technical advice can be useful without practical experience.32 Machiavelli himself knew they depend on each other. Not only should political leaders develop knowledge through engagement with concrete historical contexts, they should use their knowledge with specific reference to the changing contexts in which it is applied. All assessments of political events and personages are inconclusive and none are final. The world is always changing, interpreters bring their own biases, and there is no final judge.33 Ancient and medieval philosophers had also seen the earthly world as constantly changing, but they understood earthly change in light of the unchanging perfection of the heavens.

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Change was thus something to be minimized, if not eliminated. Machiavelli, in contrast, seeks to understand the constant flux of earthly life on its own terms, without subordinating it to a changeless realm of religious or moral truth. And where seventeenth-century scientists would magnify their power to control events by redefining nature as inert matter in motion, Machiavelli believes that occult forces often undo human plans. He refers often to “the power of heaven in human affairs,” noting that “things frequently arise and incidents occur against which the heavens have not wished any provision to be made.”34 Machiavelli’s appreciation for the contingency of human experience also appears in his view that it is impossible to have all the conventional virtues, “because the human condition does not permit it.” And even if people think they are acting according to virtue, the results of their actions may tell a different story. This is the irony of politics: “something which appears to be a virtue, if pursued, will result in his ruin; while some other thing which seems to be a vice, if pursued, will secure his safety and well being.”35 In this respect, political action always contains the potential for tragedy: “in the desire to bring something to a perfect conclusion, there is always some evil very near this good which arises so easily along with it that it seems impossible to avoid the one while wanting the other.”36 Eschewing what John Dewey would later call “the quest for certainty,” and what Isaiah Berlin would reject as the “ancient faith” in the basic compatibility of all values, Machiavelli argues that in politics one must always choose the least bad alternative: “an option that is completely clear and completely without uncertainty cannot be found,” and “one can never cancel one disadvantage without another arising from it.”37 It is thus a mistake to read Machiavelli as advocating an immoral or amoral view of politics. His point is rather that moral criteria have to be politically established. In a similar vein, and in contrast to fifteenth-century humanists who praised civic unity, Machiavelli argues that class conflict leads to good laws, civic liberty, territorial expansion, and hence to republican glory.38 Where the humanists saw class division as a threat to political stability, Machiavelli argues that Rome achieved greatness not in spite of its internal divisions and lack of stability but because of them. He thus also departs, as John McCormick has argued, from contemporary democratic theorists who idealize deliberative consensus.39 Indeed, Machiavelli’s Discourses cast Rome as the “new prince” among republics, continually disrupting established conventions. He argues that Rome could have pre-

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vented its internal conflicts only at the price of eliminating the key cause of its expansion and empire, and hence its greatness. Although in theory a republic might achieve perfect balance among its internal factions and between itself and other states, in practice “human affairs are in continual motion and cannot remain fixed,” leading all states to go through cycles of rise and decline.40 The impermanence of all governments makes legitimacy into a continual process rather than a substantive attribute of any particular regime. In this respect, Machiavelli suggests the perils of relying too heavily on technical expertise to provide fixed substantive standards for politics. Machiavelli’s prescription for harnessing change and delaying the inevitable decline of states rests in part on his much discussed concept of virtú or manly assertiveness. Although Machiavelli’s praise for decisive action is well known, it is important to remember that in discussing virtú Machiavelli confronts a paradox. On one hand, he notoriously insists that “it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under it is necessary to beat her and force her down.”41 On the other hand, Machiavelli also makes clear that the key factor in political success is not the particular approach adopted but whether the approach fits the times. In some contexts, an impetuous prince will be successful; in others, a cautious one. One’s approach is shaped by one’s character, so the best would be if one could continually adapt one’s character to the times—but this, Machiavelli asserts, is impossible.42 It seems that, when in doubt, assertiveness is usually the better bet, but the most one can expect is occasional and temporary success.43 For this reason, Machiavelli implicitly rejects both optimism and pessimism, each of which assumes a capacity to predict the future. But throughout his writings Machiavelli calls for hope and perseverance, most notably in a moving passage in the Discourses: “Men can side with fortune but not oppose her; they can weave her warp but they cannot tear it apart. They must never give up, for without knowing her goals as she moves along paths both crossed and unknown, men always have to hope, and with hope, they should never give up, no matter what the situation or the difficulty in which they find themselves.”44 It seems that Machiavellian virtú lies not simply in bold assertiveness but in perseverance. Hope and perseverance provide a way of coping with the paradox that success requires acting boldly, as if success were likely, while also recognizing that fortune may turn against you at any time. If Machiavelli creates the rhetorical style of the modern expert, he also highlights the contingencies of

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human life that inevitably frustrate those who reduce politics to the mechanical implementation of either moral or technical expertise. Machiavelli does think it possible for expertise to improve politics, but only when it is organized through politics. If the prince has too many advisors, Machiavelli argues, and if they advise him on all possible matters at their own discretion, he will lose their respect. He will also have difficulty choosing among their conflicting recommendations, and he will inadvertently place his advisors in competition with each other, which makes it likely that their advice will reflect their own interests rather than the prince’s. Instead, Machiavelli says, the prince must select a limited number of advisors and allow them to speak to him only regarding the questions he asks. The prince should ask questions frequently, but he should make decisions on his own and stick to them. For these reasons, Machiavelli notes, “a prince who is not wise on his own cannot be well advised,” and “good advice, from whomever it may come, must arise from the prudence of the prince, and not the prudence of the prince from good advice.”45 Here Machiavelli asserts the institutional priority of politics over expertise. The prince should do what he can to ensure the production and delivery of the best advice possible, but expert advice must always serve the ends of politics rather than the other way around. Whereas other authors in the mirror-for-princes genre had recommended the direct application of fixed lessons derived from past exemplars, Machiavelli’s advice focuses on the intellectual, ethical, and institutional preconditions for using advice successfully. Here we encounter something of a paradox, as Eugene Garver points out, because Machiavelli’s stated purpose in writing The Prince is to get a job as expert advisor with the Medici, but he seems to undercut that purpose with his subordination of experts to princes.46 The paradox makes sense, however, once we see that Machiavelli is offering much more than a didactic lecture on how to be a successful prince. A lecture of that sort would merely replace the traditional moral authorities Machiavelli ridicules with himself as a new authority. It would also contradict his critique of those who live according to theories (including his own) about how the world ought to be.47 So rather than setting himself up as a new expert authority, Machiavelli enacts his lesson through his book. On the surface, that is, Machiavelli’s advice consists of the injunction to imitate rather than merely admire the great deeds of past rulers. But Machiavelli repeatedly suggests that his various exemplars of past success do not themselves show how to relate past exemplars to current

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situations. Successful rulers of the past did not simply copy each other, and a prince who attempted to mechanically repeat their actions would fail to recognize that their success rested not merely on what they did but on how they adjusted their actions to their circumstances. A prince should not copy historical exemplars but use them as resources for innovative thought and action. He should, Machiavelli writes, “take from Severus those qualities that are necessary to found his state, and from Marcus those that are suitable and glorious in order to conserve a state that is already established and stable.”48 In this respect, as Garver argues, Machiavelli aims for the prince to imitate not the great deeds from the past he relates, but his argument itself.49 More generally, both the content and form of Machiavelli’s argument suggest that direct, unmediated claims to authority—whether those of hereditary princes, moralistic leaders, or technocratic experts—are less reliable than efforts to generate authority by empowering and inspiring those whose recognition and assistance one seeks, while being careful to not become dependent upon them. Machiavelli thus insists on a native militia over both mercenary and borrowed troops, because either the latter will be reluctant to fight, or if they do fight and win, they will become ambitious and threaten the prince.50 Similarly, Machiavelli explains that the prince should inspire the people’s loyalty not by seeking their love and approval, but by enhancing the glory of the state, because “friendships acquired by a price and not by greatness and nobility are purchased and not owned.”51 And when it comes to ministers and advisors, a prince must both “recognize their capacities” and “keep them loyal.” Princes must give ministers and advisors “a share of the honors and responsibilities,” so that their interests will become aligned with the prince’s.52 In sum, with regard to the military, citizens, and experts, the prince can best increase his power by empowering his supporters.53 In addition to cultivating the virtú of both princes and citizens, and ensuring that expertise fits the needs of political actors, Machiavelli urges his readers to cope with the contingencies of politics by focusing on the visible consequences of political action. Commentators often see a realist cynicism in Machiavelli’s discussion of appearance and reality. The prince, Machiavelli notoriously says, must appear to have conventional virtues but must not really have them.54 Cynical as this may sound, such passages acquire a richer meaning when read in light of Machiavelli’s contrast between visible and invisible grounds of political judgment. Whereas instrumental results are potentially open to evaluation by all citizens, the

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motives and intentions of political actors are not. Seen from this perspective, Machiavelli’s focus on appearances is not born of cynicism but of a recognition that in the turbulent context of Renaissance Florence his contemporaries lack shared standards of judgment. Machiavelli writes, “In the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no tribunal to which to appeal, one must consider the final result. . . . For ordinary people are always taken in by appearances and by the outcome of an event. And in the world there are only ordinary people; and the few have no place, while the many have a spot on which to lean.”55 In this fascinating passage, Machiavelli both criticizes and affirms a world in which “there are only ordinary people” who are “always taken in by appearances.” In such a world, where traditional authorities have lost their place, instrumental effectiveness offers a recognizable standard of judgment. Assessments of instrumental effectiveness are relatively easy to conduct and to agree upon with others, Machiavelli suggests, because they can be made with regard to visible effects rather than invisible intentions or motives. Just as one should seek models of virtue by looking not within the self, nor up into the heavens, but outward at the great deeds of one’s ancestors, one should assess the consequences of political decisions by their publicly visible results.56 Machiavelli applies a similar logic to one of the standard questions of the mirror-for-princes genre: is it better for the prince to be feared or loved? Machiavelli’s answer is that it is best to be both feared and loved, and a prince must always avoid being hated; but when it is impossible to be both, it is better to be feared than loved, “since men love at their own pleasure and fear at the pleasure of the prince.” Whereas fear depends on external relations of threat and coercion, “love is held together by a chain of obligation that, since men are a wretched lot, is broken on every occasion for their own self-interest; but fear is sustained by a dread of punishment that will never abandon you.”57 In a fragmented society of “ordinary people,” it is prudent to rely on visible threats rather than invisible love. Finally, the same logic of appearances appears once again in Machiavelli’s emphasis on the importance of public spectacles in establishing the prince’s authority. He tells the story of how Cesare Borgia created order in the Romagna by giving the “cruel and unscrupulous” Remirro de Orco full authority to govern the province. Once Remirro had brutally established order, in the process arousing the hatred of the populace, Borgia took a spectacular step to prevent the people’s hatred from being

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transferred to himself: “one morning at Cesena he had Messer Remirro’s body laid out in two pieces on the piazza, with a block of wood and a bloody sword beside it.” The spectacle “left the population satisfied and stupefied at the same time.”58 This concern with the visual language of politics, a key feature of Renaissance culture, later becomes central to the rhetoric of both modern science and liberal democracy. As I show in subsequent chapters, a similar politics of vision underwrites the image of the liberal-democratic citizen as a silent witness to the instrumental performance of representative government; and it appears in the seventeenthcentury experimental scientist’s self-presentation as a humble witness of public experiments.59 Not everyone makes judgments based on appearances, of course, and Machiavelli claims for himself a capacity to see beneath the appearances. “Men in general judge more by their eyes than their hands: everyone can see, but few can feel. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few touch upon what you are.”60 The implication here is that Machiavelli, as one of “the few,” can not only “see” but also “touch” the prince. These considerations expand on Machiavelli’s comments in the dedicatory letter to The Prince, in which he relied on the visual metaphor of observing the prince on the mountaintop from the perspective of the plains. In contrast to that earlier formulation, Machiavelli says here that he uses both sight and touch in evaluating the prince. His point, it seems, is that the expert relies on both “touching” and “seeing” his subject matter—that is, both close engagement with and detachment from the prince—but citizens can be expected to judge the prince’s actions with their eyes alone. Indeed, in his analyses of historical personages, and also in his reports on the various princes and despots he encountered during his time as a diplomat, Machiavelli assesses both characters and consequences, both motives and outcomes. Expert advisors have to look behind the scenes and avoid falling prey to the tricks and deceptions that rulers employ against both their own citizens and those who attempt to understand them.61 Republican Institutions and Popular Engagement Despite Machiavelli’s emphasis on the virtú of individuals, he also suggests that a key task for expert advisors is to design laws and institutions that help both leaders and citizens cope with the contingencies of politics. In this respect, Machiavelli offers an instructive perspective on some of the issues confronting contemporary efforts to mediate conflicts

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between and among laypeople and experts. He also challenges both political theory and the social studies of science to devote more attention to questions of institutional design. Some strands of republicanism, both in Machiavelli’s time and today, emphasize the civic virtue of individual citizens as the key to a healthy and vibrant republic. Similarly, much contemporary scholarship in bioethics and research ethics focuses on the moral dilemmas confronting individuals. Although Machiavelli certainly believes that civic virtue is important, he argues repeatedly that it can thrive only in a context of republican institutions: “men never do good except out of necessity, but where choices are abundant and unlimited freedom is the norm, everything immediately becomes confused and disorderly. Hence it is said that hunger and poverty makes men industrious and laws make them good.”62 Echoing Aristotle, Machiavelli argues that good institutions both foster and depend on good customs. A people that is completely corrupt cannot be improved by good laws, he writes, because “just as good customs require laws in order to be maintained, so laws require good customs in order to be observed.”63 Moreover, if the people become corrupt, changing the laws will not help, unless one also changes the institutions through which the laws are made. In republican Rome, for example, all citizens were entitled to seek key offices, which worked well as long as humility and fear of public disgrace dissuaded everyone except the most qualified from seeking office. But when people began to seek office on the basis of charm or power, rather than genuine ability, the institution of allowing anyone to seek office became harmful. Similarly, the Roman institution that allowed any citizen to propose a law, and to express an opinion on any proposed law, was good only as long as the people were good.64 Machiavelli recognizes that institutional procedures, which are “slow to move,” often fail when confronted with “extraordinary circumstances,” such as war or rebellion.65 But he argues for institutional means of addressing the limits of institutions. Because extraordinary means are sometimes necessary, they should be made lawful; otherwise, the people come to disrespect the law. Machiavelli thus defends the institution of “dictator” in republican Rome, because it provided a legal way to cope with extraordinary circumstances. Dictators should be appointed only for fixed periods, with their authority limited to the particular problem that necessitated their appointment. It is only extraordinary offices created through “private authority” and “extraordinary means” that harm republics, not those

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created through “ordinary means” and “in accord with public laws.” If a republic has no such institution, “it must necessarily come to ruin by obeying its laws or break them in order to avoid its own ruin.” And “if one establishes the habit of breaking the laws for good reasons, later on, under the same pretext, one can break them for bad reasons.”66 In addition to good institutions, Machiavelli argues, as well as both good fortune and inspiring leaders, a republic relies on its citizens taking an active role in politics.67 In this respect, as McCormick has argued, Machiavelli again differs from most republican thinkers, both before his time and since.68 Many models of republicanism—Sparta, Venice, Florence—were elective oligarchies, relegating the people to the selection of an elite who ruled with minimal public interference. This type of republicanism is a forerunner of liberal representative government, discussed in chapter 3, which is distinct from the communitarian version of republicanism popular among some democratic theorists today. The latter rests on the tradition of civic or classical republicanism, usually associated with Aristotle and Rousseau, in which virtuous participation in the collective enactment of one’s community is a key part of the good life. Machiavelli’s version of republicanism, which one might anachronistically call “democratic republicanism,” differs from both the elitism of the Venetian republic and the communitarianism of Aristotle and Rousseau. Popular participation, for Machiavelli, is not about pursuing the good life but about protecting oneself and one’s fellow citizens from domination. Doing so requires not merely civic virtue but institutions that facilitate public contestation of elite decisions.69 In reply to those who equate the people with a mob—“either a humble slave or a cruel master”—Machiavelli argues that this description applies only to a people not governed by laws.70 Moreover, in the absence of law, these attributes apply equally well to princes, “and most of all to princes, for each person who is not regulated by the laws will commit the very same errors as an uncontrolled crowd of people.” Both a prince and a people regulated by laws, in contrast, “neither rules arrogantly nor humbly obeys.” Laws are necessary for both princes and the people, “because a prince who is able to do what he wishes is mad, and a people that can do what it wishes is not wise.” Indeed, Machiavelli goes on to argue that, if both a people and a prince are constrained by laws, the people as a whole will actually be more competent than the average prince. If neither are constrained by laws, the people will make fewer and less serious errors. Moreover, when the people make mistakes, they learn from them,

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but “nobody can speak to an evil prince, nor is there any other remedy for him than the sword.”71 It is also worth noting, given recent scholarship on public participation in technical controversies, that Machiavelli also repeatedly expresses confidence in ordinary citizens’ capacity for intelligent political judgment. When the people must judge between competing views in political debate, Machiavelli writes, “it is only on the rarest of occasions that it does not select the best opinion and that it is not capable of understanding the truth it hears.”72 Machiavelli also believes that the people are better at selecting magistrates than a prince, and he thinks that when distributing offices the people deceives itself less often than the nobles.73 Machiavelli repeatedly praises the Roman tribunes, the representatives of the people, for their capacity to “cure the insolence of the nobles.”74 He notes with approval that the tribunes mediated not only between the people and the elites, but also among the elites, who would otherwise have failed to resolve their disagreements and faithfully execute the law.75 Machiavelli makes clear, however, that ordinary citizens are generally inclined to avoid becoming involved in politics. Unlike nobles, common citizens have little hope of usurping the liberty of others, so their main desire is simply “not to be dominated.”76 Some commentators take such statements as evidence of skepticism toward popular competence and participation. They see in this feature of Machiavelli’s thought a precursor to liberal theories of representative government that rely on a passive citizenry.77 But Machiavelli argues repeatedly that popular liberty can be realized only through institutions that facilitate vigorous political activity, especially when necessary to prevent domination.78 When Roman citizens wanted new laws, Machiavelli notes with approval, they protested, “running wildly through the streets, closing the shops”; or they left the city entirely, or refused to register for military service, “so that to placate them it was necessary to give them some measure of satisfaction.”79 Indeed, Machiavelli argues, “every city must possess its own methods for allowing the people to express their ambitions.”80 Machiavelli thus praises the Roman institutions that facilitated popular resistance to noble ambitions. As McCormick has emphasized, Machiavelli is especially fond of the Roman procedures for popular indictment and trial of both magistrates and prominent private citizens suspected of wrongdoing. Such procedures offered a key means, in addition to elections, of holding elites publicly accountable. Furthermore, Machiavelli argues that in a republic “judges must be many in number,” and he contrasts Rome’s

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large popular juries with Florence’s small council of eight judges, arguing that the latter is more subject to manipulation and intimidation by elites.81 Machiavelli recognizes that large popular juries may be vulnerable to demagogues who exploit popular prejudices, but he thinks demagoguery can be hindered by requiring accusations of wrongdoing to be publicly voiced and defended. Similarly, Machiavelli praises the Roman plebs who demanded the establishment of tribunes to represent them, and then vigorously defended the tribunes when necessary.82 Political elites will always try to usurp the liberty of the people, but the threat can be mitigated through formal institutions that give the citizenry real power. Despite his praise for popular political activism, Machiavelli also argues that in elections the people generally prefer a competent nobleman over one of their own.83 In this respect, Machiavelli differs markedly from today’s participatory democrats and communitarian republicans. Citing Cicero, Machiavelli notes that “the people, although ignorant, can grasp the truth, and they readily yield when they are told the truth by a trustworthy man.”84 As Alexander Hamilton argues in The Federalist, discussed in chapter 3, most people are more concerned with having their interests competently protected than with participating in politics. To the extent that the former requires the latter, Machiavelli insists on vigorous participation, but only to that extent. Of course, given the constant threat of domination by corrupt and incompetent governments (underestimated by Hamilton), not to mention the dangers posed by one’s fellow citizens, the citizens in a Machiavellian republic cannot afford to ignore politics. In contrast to liberal theorists of representative government, Machiavelli believes the people’s deference to competent leaders does not lessen their need to be involved in republican self-government. It just shifts the rationale for participation. In place of the collective self-expression and self-realization extolled by communitarian versions of republicanism, Machiavelli offers an ethic of instrumental, purposive, carefully targeted political engagement. Conclusion As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, some of Machiavelli’s interpreters think he offers the first modern science of politics, while others insist that his thought is distinctly nonscientific. The preceding discussion indicates revealing affinities between certain elements of Machiavelli’s

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thought and modern science, but they have little to do with standard notions of scientific method. Rather, these affinities appear in an epistemology that generates instrumental power through a rhetoric of social distance. Expert authority, for Machiavelli, rests on first creating a rhetorical gap between expert knowledge and social convention, such that the expert acquires unmediated access to how things really are beneath the conventions. The expert then humbly offers “a little book” that promises to help its reader reach back across the gap and act powerfully within the world of convention. Machiavelli combines this rhetoric of expertise with a profound awareness of the practical limits of expertise and the institutional requirements for its successful use. Because the world is permeated by contingencies, and every action has unpredictable outcomes, expert knowledge should not be mechanically applied to novel circumstances. Expertise is best used as one resource among many for creative thought and action. And expert advice must be structured to serve the needs of the state, not merely those of either political elites or experts themselves. More generally, Machiavelli suggests that lay citizens can rely on experts, politicians, and other elites only to the extent that they continually subject them to critical scrutiny. Such scrutiny cannot be carried out from the living room couch. It requires institutions that facilitate popular mobilization, education, and an ethos of public engagement. As McCormick writes, “Machiavelli suggests that a direct manifestation of the people within government, alongside a representation of them, is necessary to carry out successfully an appropriate patrolling of elites.”85 This direct manifestation of the people takes different forms: it ranges from structured deliberative assemblies, like the plebian council, to popular movements and “running wildly through the streets.” As I attempt to show throughout this book, neither experts nor politicians can represent their constituents without active involvement by those they represent, and such involvement requires different kinds of institutional mediation.

2 Power and Publicity in Modern Science

A piece of paper or a feather drawn lightly over any part of our bodies . . . excites in us an almost intolerable titilation. . . . This titilation belongs entirely to us and not to the feather. —Galileo, The Assayer

Recent public controversies over the role of science in politics usually include pleas for a return to the Enlightenment values associated with modern science: rationality, objectivity, and the pursuit of truth according to scientific method.1 Commentators often reinforce such pleas with references to Galileo, Newton, and other heroes of seventeenth-century science. Contemporary critics of science, they say, fail to appreciate the achievements of modern science and the reliance of those achievements on the methods developed in the early modern period. Moreover, they argue, critics of science threaten to undermine the rational basis of political decision making and even democracy itself. In this context, reconsidering the role of science in contemporary democracy requires taking a step back and telling a different story about the origins of modern science. The heroic tale offered by today’s selfappointed defenders of science, in which advocates of truth and democracy overcome the forces of superstition and ignorance, has little in common with the version told by over thirty years of research in the social history of science. It would be impossible to give a complete account of that version here, not to mention the diversity of approaches and assessments within that loosely defined field. But I want to outline certain elements of the social history of modern science that speak to the relationship between science and democracy today. The previous chapter showed how Machiavelli wrestled with the relationships among lay competence, expert knowledge, and instrumental

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power. I explained how Machiavelli’s approach to coping with these tensions retained much of the ancient and medieval humility toward the role of fortune in human affairs, while also introducing a distinctly modern belief in human creativity and control. This chapter explores how early modern science gave increased emphasis to creativity and control, without escaping the tensions among common sense, expert knowledge, and instrumental power evident in Machiavelli’s writings. Far from solving the dilemmas articulated by Machiavelli, the new science that emerged during the seventeenth century internalized them. Modern science incorporated these tensions into a form of knowledge that promised both technological progress and political legitimacy. Public acceptance of the new science—a term used here anachronistically, since the English word science did not acquire its current meaning until the late-nineteenth century2—rested not merely on the instrumental benefits it promised or on its perceived adherence to rational method. Its authority depended in large part on its portrayal as a distinctly public form of knowledge. Natural philosophers throughout Europe, and especially at the early Royal Society in England, produced and validated natural science by engaging select members of the public as witnesses to laboratory experiments. Seventeenth-century experimentalists devised methods for studying nature grounded in individual sense perception and craft knowledge, despite their rejection of the commonsense knowledge of nonscientists. And they presented the community of scientists as a distinctly open community, despite its actual exclusivity. The paradoxical conception of science and common sense explored in this chapter is still very much alive today. It appears whenever government agencies seek to legitimize their decisions with reference to mechanisms for public participation yet fail to seriously consider the recommendations that those mechanisms produce. It also appears in democratic theories that recommend carefully structured citizen forums as a substitute for everyday political engagement by ordinary citizens. And it underlies an elitist theory of political representation as both sanctioned by and superior to the common sense of lay citizens. Just as laboratories transform individual sense perception into experimental testimony and the authorization of scientific representations of nature, elections in liberal democracies turn common sense into political consent and the authorization of political representatives. Before taking up these points, however, it will be helpful to examine the role of common sense in early modern science.

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Science and Common Sense Fifty years ago most scholars saw in the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution a fundamental and comprehensive transformation in the Western conception of nature and natural philosophy. Recent scholarship has offered a more fine-grained picture in which continuities between ancient, medieval, and modern science are nearly as prominent as disjunctions. Although the early modern period was a time of astounding innovation, the usual strategy with regard to past ways of knowing was not outright rejection but accommodation. Historians have also shifted away from an earlier emphasis on scientific knowledge and ideas toward the study of how science is intertwined with social and political change. Nonetheless, it seems safe to say that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a series of major shifts occurred in the dominant Western conception of the physical world. Astronomers removed the earth from the center of the cosmos and put the sun in its place; natural philosophers embraced an atomistic and mechanistic conception of nature that gradually superseded the ancient and medieval view that divine purpose inheres in nature; experimentalists replaced the Aristotelian study of material qualities with the precise measurement of mathematical quantities. These transformations were neither immediate nor complete, and elements of ancient and medieval natural philosophy persisted or reappeared at various points well into the nineteenth century. But as natural philosophers began to construct the history of “the Scientific Revolution,” the scientific ideas of previous eras were gradually reinterpreted to eliminate their nonmechanical elements.3 By the middle of the seventeenth century, most European philosophers understood nature as inert matter governed by linear and uniform causal mechanisms, susceptible to precise measurement and quantification in terms of size, shape, and motion. Most relevant here is how the Scientific Revolution transformed the relationships among knowledge, power, and common sense to produce a theory and practice of scientific representation amenable to the emerging liberaldemocratic mode of political representation. Aristotelian natural philosophy was largely compatible with everyday experience. For Aristotle, human beings were endowed with faculties capable of directly perceiving the real properties of the world. Because the “form” of an object is embodied in its “matter,” human beings can perceive the forms of objects. In contrast to Plato, who conceived Forms as invisible Ideas and everyday objects as mere reflections of the Forms,

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Aristotle believed that ideal forms are contained in everyday objects. Human beings are naturally capable of perceiving universals in particulars.4 Similarly, Aristotle’s notion that earthly bodies move toward their natural ends—that an object rises because of the “fire” it contains or falls because it has more “earth” than the air around it—fit commonsense observation. This is not to say that Aristotelian science was purely inductive, nor that everyone’s experience counted equally. In his Topics, for example, Aristotle set out to “define a line of inquiry whereby we shall be able to reason from reputable opinions,” and he explained that “those opinions are reputable which are accepted by everyone or by the majority or by the wise.”5 Aristotle identified experience not with the perception of particular events or phenomena but with established common sense, with what “everybody knows.” The sun sets in the West; heavy bodies fall; an arrow shot up in the air falls back to same spot. Such generalizations provided the starting points for a science of nature largely in harmony with common sense. Indeed, until the seventeenth century, unusual events and observations did not create doubts about the commonsense understanding of the general patterns from which they departed. Unusual events were instead classified as either monsters or miracles. Natural philosophy concerned itself not with particular natural events but with “the general course of nature.”6 Following Aristotle, natural philosophy until the seventeenth century looked to experience for illustrations of, not justifications for, universal knowledge. Experience was not “evidence” but “evident.”7 By the sixteenth century, a variety of cultural developments were challenging the Aristotelian assumption of a basic harmony between science and common sense. The publication in 1543 of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, although not widely endorsed until much later, suggested that celestial motion does not correspond to common sense perception. Expeditions of exploration, trade, and conquest to the Americas, Asia, and Africa showed European peoples that other ways of life were possible, creating doubts about established customs. Renaissance humanism fostered a renewed faith in human creativity and suggested to many that knowing is a creative activity, rather than common sense perception of nature.8 The Reformation challenged the epistemological authority of the Catholic Church and insisted that individuals could and should cultivate an individual and immediate relationship to God. These and many other changes fostered both philosophical ambition and skepticism.

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Christian teaching had long maintained that human beings, and thereby human sense perceptions, are fundamentally flawed by original sin. But whereas medieval Christianity had reached a certain accommodation with Aristotelianism, the sixteenth-century combination of humanism and skepticism directly challenged the ancient assumption of an essential harmony between human sense perception and the natural world. By the mid-sixteenth century, humanists were drawing on Latin translations of Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, and other ancient skeptics who had been largely unknown in the Middle Ages. Both Protestant Reformers and Catholic Counter-Reformers employed skeptical arguments to assert that certainty is impossible in either religion or politics. For Reformers, skepticism undermined the authority of the Catholic Church. For Catholics, skepticism showed the need to embrace the Church on faith.9 A similar skepticism led early modern natural philosophers to obsessively examine a wide range of everyday instances in which common sense apparently fails to reveal the truth about nature. Distant objects appear smaller than they are; a stick partially submerged in water appears bent; vivid dreams seem real. Francis Bacon wrote that the human mind is like “an uneven mirror” that “in forming its notions mixes up its own nature with the nature of things.”10 Hobbes noted that everyone has seen the sun reflected in water, which proves that “colour and image may be there where the thing seen is not.”11 A century later, Voltaire, the great popularizer of modern science, ridiculed the pretensions of the learned but also argued that commonsense perceptions easily deceive, as when we see the sun as being “about two feet in diameter,” when in fact “it is a million times bigger than the earth.”12 Voltaire noted that it insults to person to say he has no “common sense,” but it is equally insulting to say he has only common sense, for common sense is “a middle condition between stupidity and wit.”13 For many philosophers at this time, common sense could no longer be trusted. Such considerations led many early modern thinkers, including Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke, to distinguish between “primary qualities,” which belong to the essence of things and cannot be experienced, and “secondary qualities,” which are mere appearances and do not resemble anything in the object.14 Experience of secondary qualities is caused by an object’s primary qualities, but the former do not reveal anything essential about the latter. The sweet smell of a flower, for example, or the titillation of a feather, as in Galileo’s example quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, are secondary qualities not located in the

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objects. These sensations are produced in our minds by the primary qualities of the objects. Primary qualities include such properties as bulk, number, and motion, which unlike secondary qualities, lend themselves to precise measurement. This distinction, as Steven Shapin puts it, “drove a wedge between the domain of philosophical legitimacy and that of common sense.”15 It also drove a wedge between natural scientists and lay citizens that persists to this day. This is not to say that seventeenth-century natural philosophers entirely rejected common sense. On the contrary: among the key elements of the emerging worldview was the humanist injunction to favor the evidence of one’s own eyes over textual, ecclesiastical, or political authorities. Natural philosophers sought to ground truth in the evidence of individual sense perception and subsequent internal reflection on one’s perceptions. The Royal Society thus took as its motto the phrase Nullius in verba (On no one’s word), explicitly distancing itself from the tendency of Scholastic philosophy to rely on the citation of ancient authorities. Locke wrote that the greatest threat to true knowledge lies in “the common received Opinions, either of our Friends, or Party; Neighbourhood, or Country. . . . As if honest, or bookish Men could not err; or Truth were to be established by the Vote of the Multitude.”16 Such appeals to individual sense perception constituted a radical challenge to the Christian doctrine that the human senses are inherently flawed. Drawing on medieval studies of alchemy and magic, Bacon and other natural philosophers argued that mastering nature’s secrets could liberate human beings from the consequences of the Fall.17 The early modern fascination with individual sense perception was often intertwined, in rhetoric but not in practice, with a conception of representation as the direct and unmediated portrayal of nature by an individual knower. This epistemological individualism in natural philosophy paralleled and drew strength from the Reformation claim that Christians should interpret the Bible for themselves, without the mediation of priests. As Martin Luther pointed out, nobody else “can go to heaven or hell for me.”18 Such ideas were taken up during the 1640s and 1650s by English natural philosophers associated with various radical protestant sects. They embraced a vitalistic view of nature as endowed with inner spiritual forces. Accordingly, they sought to discover nature’s secretes with the help of magic, astrology, alchemy, and number mysticism. Combining radical protestant theology with a Baconian belief in controlling nature for the sake of human welfare, they sought especially

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to improve the lives of craftsmen and other common folk.19 Vitalist views of nature thus reinforced Radical Protestant challenges to the authority of priests and ministers as representatives of divine will.20 In both science and religion, both philosophers and common folk aimed for an immediate link between the universal and the particular, between knowledge of God or Nature, on the one hand, and individual faith or sense perception, on the other. Although the natural philosophers associated with Radical Protestantism were later excluded from the Royal Society, their rejection of mediation became a defining feature of modern scientific rhetoric. Natural philosophers began to present their knowledge as a mirror of reality. Galileo and the Rhetoric of Demonstration The most dramatic seventeenth-century challenge to common sense was the replacement of the geocentric model of the cosmos with the heliocentric model of Copernicus and Galileo. The conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church has long been understood as the paradigmatic case of the tension between science and both religion and politics, and it is often cited by critics of political regulation of science.21 Most recent scholarship, however, of which there is no shortage, has departed from the long pattern of either vindicating or vilifying Galileo. Recent studies emphasize the intricate historical circumstances of the conflict and seek to do justice to both sides.22 Here I only want to highlight a few points relevant to the relationship between science and common sense. The myth of Galileo is that he was condemned by the Church for discovering the truth. Galileo is most widely known today as a lonely hero fighting a blind, despotic power. This telling obscures the fact that the conflict was not only about physical phenomena, but also about epistemological issues regarding how to study nature. The epistemological questions hotly debated at the time included whether physical knowledge must rely on direct sensory observation or may be derived through the use of instruments; whether religion in general and the Bible in particular have a legitimate role in scientific inquiry; and what the relationship and relative priority should be of astronomy and physics.23 Many at the time believed that scientific instruments, such as the telescope, distort human sense perception. They also thought it obvious that religion should play a central role in scientific inquiry. And they ranked the merely descriptive discipline of astronomy, considered a branch of mathematics, far below

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the causal science of physics. Finally, in addition to these and other epistemological issues, the Galileo affair involved various contests for power and authority, not only between scientists and theologians, but among and between mathematicians and natural philosophers, Catholics and Protestants, Dominicans and Jesuits, and various other individuals and groups.24 Of course, scientists know today that Galileo’s reasoning was essentially correct, but the evidence he offered was far from conclusive, and the reasoning of his opponents was not without merit. Galileo’s writings suggest that he was quite aware that he could not yet provide a decisive demonstration of Copernicanism.25 Galileo thus sought to reach an accommodation with the Church, so that he could continue to build his case, while avoiding condemnation. In his famous 1615 “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” Galileo drew on Augustine to propose terms of peace. On the surface, Galileo offered a fair and simple division of labor, quoting a now famous statement by Cardinal Baronio: “The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes.”26 Scripture promises salvation, Galileo argued, not philosophy, and so when properly understood, faith and reason do not conflict. And yet Galileo’s proposed truce between faith and reason simultaneously relied on and undermined the interpretive strategies of both the Church and Aristotelian natural philosophy. In his “Letter to the Grand Duchess,” Galileo repeatedly invoked the well-established topos of God’s two books, the Bible and the book of nature. As Mario Biagioli has argued, constituting nature as a book allowed Galileo to draw on the theologians’ absolutist mode of discourse and increase the authority of astronomy relative to natural philosophy and theology.27 By asserting himself as an authoritative spokesperson for one of God’s books, Galileo replicated the Counter-Reformation Church’s claim to be the uniquely qualified interpreter of the other. Galileo reinforced this strategy with his more general reliance on Aristotle’s view of experience, despite his attacks on Aristotelian philosophy. Like many other philosophers at the time, Galileo frequently referenced an existing stock of widely familiar experiences and commonplaces, often taken from the everyday life of commoners. As Peter Dear explains, despite conducting some informal experiments, Galileo did not provide detailed narratives of what he had in fact seen or done. In both his mechanical and astronomical writings, Galileo simply explained to his readers what happens in general.28 For Galileo, “empirical premises needed to command assent because they were evident,” not because they were

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based on evidence.29 And Galileo suggested that a science based on what is evident promised far more certain knowledge than theology. Despite retaining elements of Aristotelianism, Galileo also transformed Aristotelian natural philosophy by removing human beings from an active place within it. As James Bono has argued, Galileo’s writings rhetorically remove the author from the scene, thereby veiling his agency in the creation of scientific knowledge.30 In this respect, Galileo repeats aspects of Machiavelli’s rhetoric in The Prince. In the “Letter to the Grand Duchess,” for example, Galileo asserts a dichotomy between “debatable and demonstrative doctrines.” In contrast to theologians who endlessly debate religious doctrines, he writes, “it is not within the power of the practitioners of demonstrative sciences to change opinion at will, choosing now this and now that one.”31 Nature is “inexorable and immutable . . . and does not care whether or not her recondite reasons and ways of operating are disclosed to human understanding.”32 Galileo here reduces theological doctrine to a matter of subjective opinion or preference, and casts the scientist in the role of objective spokesperson of inert nature. He presents the book of nature as “fully transparent, that is, as something that could be read but not interpreted.”33 This view receives its most complete formulation in Galileo’s 1623 treatise The Assayer, in which he famously writes that the universe is a book “written in the language of mathematics.”34 Rather than interpretation, nature’s book requires decoding, and mathematics is the key.35 Whereas the scientist impersonally transcribes the book of nature, Galileo explains, biblical scripture is frequently allegorical and must be carefully interpreted. The Bible’s meaning is “frequently recondite and very different from what appears to be the literal meaning of the words.”36 Galileo specifies two key constraints on biblical interpretation. First, it must be consistent with demonstrated facts, which scientists alone determine. Galileo thus apparently gives theology the role of filling in the gaps left by natural philosophy, and those gaps, he suggests, will grow ever smaller over time.37 Moreover, Galileo’s proposed division of labor seems to grant science sole authority to determine the causes of natural phenomena. Church doctrine, in contrast, said that any link between an observed effect (e.g., tidal motion) and an unobserved cause (the rotation of the earth) cannot exclude the possibility that God could bring about the same effect through some other unobserved cause. For the Church, truth was a metaphysical issue involving questions of meaning and purpose that could not be settled by natural philosophy alone.38

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Galileo’s second constraint on biblical interpretation is that interpreters must remember that the Bible was written to accommodate popular understanding. Throughout the “Letter to the Grand Duchess,” Galileo enlists common sense to excuse the Bible for not stating the truth about nature. He argues repeatedly that “to accommodate the understanding of the common people it is appropriate for Scripture to say many things that are different (in appearance and in regard to the literal meaning of the words) from the absolute truth.”39 Because religion has to accommodate common sense, but science does not, science but not religion provides true knowledge of nature. In this respect, the key difference between God’s two books, for Galileo, is that the book of nature was not written for a human audience. As Biagioli puts it, “Galileo fashioned himself as the reader whom God had not planned to exist, but whose existence He had not explicitly forbidden either. . . . It was precisely because he was not expected to exist as a reader that he could read the truth in the book of nature.”40 Galileo’s rhetoric of science is thus closely intertwined with a particular image of common sense. Science contradicts common sense experience, but it also derives legitimacy from common sense in two distinct ways. First, Galileo draws heuristically on abstract ideas of what “everyone knows.” Second, he distinguishes demonstrative science from biblical interpretation with reference to the latter’s dependence on common sense. In sum, Galileo asserts both an institutional and an epistemological divide between science and common sense, thus reinforcing the ontological divide implicit in the distinction between primary and secondary qualities discussed previously. Experimentalism and the Utility of Science The conception of experience propagated by Galileo was challenged, but only in part, by the experimentalist approach to natural philosophy developed first by Francis Bacon and later by Robert Boyle and the Royal Society. These thinkers rejected both Aristotle’s logical demonstrations and Galileo’s mathematical demonstrations, arguing that earlier philosophers had leapt too quickly from a few meager particulars to generalizations.41 Similar to Machiavelli, the experimentalists reversed the medieval valuation of natural history and natural philosophy, transforming historical experience into a source of philosophical insight.42 This admittance of particulars into the sanctuary of natural philosophy was made

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possible by and helped promote a change in the standards of natural philosophical demonstration. Whereas so-called rationalist philosophers like Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes continued to insist that philosophy must demonstrate its conclusions with absolute certainty, the founders of experimental science argued that natural philosophy might properly reach merely probable conclusions of “moral certainty.”43 The experimentalists thus positioned themselves against what they saw as the dogmatic claims of the Scholastics and the epistemological pessimism of the Phyrronian skeptics. They argued for a probabilistic view of knowledge that would accommodate the insights of skepticism without preventing the creation of practical knowledge. The experimentalists thus challenged the medieval world’s rigid division between knowledge and opinion, and they rejected efforts to establish universal and necessary knowledge as dogmatic. Knowledge claims, they argued, need to be legitimated through public experiment, not logical compulsion. Whereas Scholastics classified unusual natural phenomena as monsters or miracles, and thus as irrelevant for studying the “common course of nature,” Bacon and his followers seized on such events as opportunities for natural philosophy.44 Natural philosophy was not a matter of generalizations about “how stones fall” but of detailed reports relating how a particular stone fell in a particular place, as seen by particular observers. Moreover, the experimentalists argued that natural philosophy need not rely on phenomena immediately evident to the senses, but could also study phenomena discerned by newly invented instruments such as the telescope, microscope, thermometer, and barometer.45 But Bacon also warned that instruments, if used improperly, may enlarge rather than reduce the flaws inherent in human sense perception. A telescope will enable a person to see farther, but it will not eliminate the optical illusions created by the naked eye. Given this dilemma, how could observers be sure that instruments did not distort the phenomena they revealed? The answer appeared in the idea of experimental method. Making representations that stood for nature required a method to legitimate both the instruments and those who employed them.46 Doing science without method, Bacon argued, would be “as if some kingdom or state were to direct its counsels and affairs not by letters and reports from ambassadors and trustworthy messengers, but by the gossip of the streets.”47 Expansion of knowledge, he wrote, depended upon a “studied correction of sense by reason.”48 By prescribing rules for conducting experiments, the experimentalists no less than the rationalists found ways of relegating the

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commonsense experience of ordinary people to the margins of science. Experimental science offered emancipation from the deceptions of vulgar sense experience, but it did so by means of a method available to only a few. The experimentalist “delegates of nature,” Simon Schaffer writes, arose in conjunction with a “schism between patrician and plebian culture.”49 The claim that modern scientific method could liberate science from the distortions of plebian common sense helped to strengthen a second major conceptual commitment of the new science, also familiar to students of Machiavelli: the idea that science could provide instrumental power.50 In a context of continual religious and political turmoil, many philosophers came to believe that the academic philosophy practiced at European universities was hopelessly impractical. Academic philosophy was widely condemned for its pedantic reliance on ancient texts and for its doctrine that every philosophical question has several equally valid yet incompatible answers. Bacon argued, for example, that “the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented.” What was needed, he said, are “methods of invention for directions for new works.”51 Seventeenth-century natural philosophers thus announced that they would abandon the litigious debates of Scholastic philosophers by attending to things rather than words, experimental evidence rather than ancient authorities, fixed rules of method rather than rhetorical tools of persuasion. Indeed, although science-based technology did not become a reality until the late-nineteenth century, early modern science was widely perceived as the source of many technological innovations. Whereas Scholastic philosophy had offered only endless controversy, geometry and the physical sciences promised useful technologies. Moreover, many early modern scientists argued not only that scientific truth led to instrumental power, but also that instrumental power confirmed scientific truth. “For fruits and works,” Bacon wrote, “are as it were sponsors and sureties for the truth of philosophies.”52 Indeed, according to one study, less than half of the research conducted during the early years of the Royal Society was devoted to “pure science.”53 As had Machiavelli before them, seventeenth-century natural philosophers did not so much apply knowledge to the world of practical affairs and popular culture as they developed knowledge through it. The perceived utility of science, moreover, was not limited to technological and commercial applications, but also appeared in the religious sphere. Although the Galileo affair pitted religion against science, in

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other contexts natural philosophy was deemed to provide more insight into the mind of God than holy scripture.54 Many of the leading figures of the new science, including Bacon, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton, pursued studies in alchemy and astrology with the specific aim of uncovering divine principles. The 1660 Restoration of King Charles II, and the founding of the Royal Society in the same year, channeled the synergy between Protestantism and the new science away from the radical protestant sects and toward the more conservative doctrine of liberal Anglicanism. Whereas London-based mid-century radicals had seen science as a tool for democratizing religion and society, the experimentalists of the early Royal Society left London for Oxford, Cambridge, and other universities to promote a vision of science as upholding the oligarchic ideals of the Restoration. They argued against vitalism and embraced a view of nature as lifeless matter set in motion by God. Whereas the radical sects believed that knowledge arose immediately from divine inspiration and intuition, the experimentalists saw it as the result of painstaking inquiry according to a prescribed method.55 Boyle’s experimental philosophy thus relied on a set of social norms and practices (discussed in the next section) that its proponents deemed conducive to religious piety, civil peace, technological progress, and commercial wealth. The notion that the new science could serve instrumental purposes stood in tension with the division that it asserted between science and common sense. If science relied on laboratory experiments isolated from the world of everyday experience, how could it solve problems within that world? If science required a method inaccessible to laypeople, how could it help them end their controversies? Rather than resolving these questions, the experimentalists internalized them within the conceptual framework of modern science. They constituted science as a distinctive enterprise that is both uniquely public and reserved for an elite. They gave modern science a double identity, what Bruno Latour calls the Janus face of science.56 Modern science is both generally valid and locally produced. It is both public, impartial, and supremely open to criticism and private, exclusive, and immune to objections from lay citizens. Modern scientific method thus internalized the ancient tension between knowledge and power. How was this tension managed? How did natural philosophers establish their enterprise as both disinterested and useful? How did they establish themselves as authorized spokesperson’s for nature’s attributes and their representations of nature as authoritative statements of fact?

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The Royal Society and Public Science Thinking of science as intertwined with common sense, and hence as a fundamentally public form of knowledge, goes against the long-standing image of science as the solitary pursuit of individuals. From deserts and mountain tops to libraries and laboratories, the pursuit of truth in Western culture has long been associated with isolation from society. But to say that scientific work is socially mediated need not contradict the relative isolation that science often requires. As philosophers such as Dewey and Wittgenstein taught, all thought relies on language, and language is a social phenomenon, so thought is necessarily social to some degree. Just because scientists are sometimes antisocial does not mean that science is asocial.57 And even if scientific propositions are initially produced in relative isolation, their truth status depends in part on public validation. Karl Popper thus famously argued that scientific objectivity depends not on the virtues of particular scientists but on the process of public scrutiny to which they subject their hypotheses.58 The question is, however, which public? And who belongs to it? Popper wrote that a scientific test of experience “is ‘public’ if everybody who takes the trouble can repeat it.”59 Restricting science’s public to those capable of “taking the trouble” effectively excludes laypeople from the making of science. This restriction is often entirely appropriate. But it also suggests that science’s actual public is far more limited than the rhetoric of science suggests. There is a long-standing tension between the exclusivity of scientific research and scientists’ efforts to enlist an inclusive notion of publicity in the public legitimation of their work. Although seventeenth-century philosophers proposed various ways of dealing with this tension, by the 1760s a dominant strategy had emerged, according to which natural philosophical knowledge was made not only for the public but through the public. As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer write in their seminal study on the philosophy of experiment, “Matters of fact were the outcome of the process of having an empirical experience, warranting it to oneself, and assuring others that grounds for their belief were adequate.” The modern scientific fact is thus “both an epistemological and a social category.”60 Not all science, of course, is laboratory science, and a complete account of the public legitimation of modern science would need to consider astronomy, botany, geology, and other nonlaboratory sciences. But recent studies of such nonlaboratory sciences have found similar strategies for coping with the tensions be-

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tween the locally specific conditions under which science is produced and the universal validity and utility science is expected to have.61 Shapin and Schaffer explore three means employed by Robert Boyle and his colleagues at the Royal Society for establishing the truth of experimental findings, each of which defined modern science as a distinctly public form of knowledge. First, they employed a material technology of experimental instruments. In some respects, of course, the new instruments of the day, including the microscope, telescope, and Boyle’s airpump, imposed a discipline on the senses that laypeople lacked. But as visual symbols of science, they also provided a material reference point for public identification with the new science. And by mediating between nature and the scientist, experimental instruments depersonalized scientific activity, thereby making science available for public appropriation.62 Second, the experimentalists relied on a distinct set of cultural values and practices. This “social technology” centered on an ambiguous understanding of the relationship between knowledge and communication. In one sense, the founders of the new science implicitly suggested that communication among scientists was not very important. What mattered most, as discussed previously, was individual sense perception, undistorted by the views of others. But this image of scientists as solitary spokespersons for nature belied their reliance on public witnesses to validate experiments.63 Voluntary assent by a diverse group of witnesses, the experimentalists argued, would correct the biases of individual sense perception feared by the skeptics.64 Of course, this approach worked only if everyone assented to having seen the same thing. Witness testimony had to be voluntary and not subject to human coercion, but it also had to be grounded in something more compelling than individual fancy; otherwise, the diversity of witnesses would produce a diversity of testimonies. As had Galileo before them, the experimentalists located a suitable compelling force in nature itself.65 Nature itself caused the uniformity of testimony among diverse witnesses. This idea allowed the experimentalists to present witness testimony as simultaneously public, collective, and the foundation of objective knowledge and voluntary, individual, and grounded in subjective experience. Not everyone’s voluntary assent, of course, was equally valued. Only credible witnesses could be expected to give reliable testimony. The experimentalists thus tried to ensure not only that many laboratory witnesses participated in any given experiment, but also that they were competent and trustworthy. Generally speaking, Shapin argues, the

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experimentalists saw the most reliable warrant of competence and trustworthiness in gentlemanly status. Because lying could lead to expulsion from the circle of gentlemen, only a gentleman-scientist could be trusted to tell the truth. Only gentlemen could control the private passions and interests that would inevitably cloud the judgments of lesser men. The testimony of gentlemen thus replaced tradition, religion, and speculative philosophy as an acceptable ground of belief.66 By relying on gentlemanly status as an indicator of honesty, the new science raised justified suspicions about its claim to be a distinctly public form of knowledge. Hobbes, for example, argued that Boyle’s laboratory was not in fact open to the public but allowed access to only a select group, many of whom were clergymen and thus, for Hobbes, unavoidably biased. The beliefs of this witnessing public, Hobbes argued, could not be considered truly representative of the public at large.67 Nor were all those admitted to seventeenth-century laboratories treated in an egalitarian manner, and the Royal Society did little to protect the proprietary rights of the craftsmen and tradesmen whose knowledge was used to design experiments.68 Although women were occasionally audience members at publicly performed experiments, they were not admitted to seventeenth-century laboratories. Whereas women had participated in the intellectual life of medieval convents and Renaissance courts, they were excluded from the scientific academies established throughout Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As the publicity and prestige of science increased, women were pushed out. Indeed, full membership in major European scientific institutions was completely barred to women until the mid-twentieth century.69 Scientific laboratories today are probably more closed to the public than ever before. Hazardous materials, intellectual property rights, and national security concerns dictate strict controls on public access. As Jan Golinski writes, On the one hand, the laboratory is a place where valuable instruments and materials are sequestered, where skilled personnel seek to work undisturbed, and where intrusion by outsiders is unwelcome. . . . On the other hand, what is produced there is declaredly “public knowledge”; it is supposed to be valid universally and available to all. . . . And the privacy of the laboratory, however practically necessary, is something of an ideological embarrassment.70

In this respect, Hobbes’s objections to the Royal Society highlight a tension between the exclusive and inclusive dimensions of modern science that continues to this day.

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Limitations on public access notwithstanding, by relying on gentlemen as trustworthy witnesses, seventeenth-century experimentalists associated themselves with a set of behavioral norms that defined science as public knowledge. They sometimes underscored these norms by performing experiments in public spaces outside of the lab. Indeed, by the end of the seventeenth century, scientist-entrepreneurs were making a business of demonstrating the wonders of nature. They relied especially on crowd pleasers like electricity, displaying their ingenuity (and generating new knowledge) in coffee houses, salons, and other public places. These were the forerunners of the eighteenth-century coffee houses and salons in which Habermas located the rise of a “bourgeois public sphere,” a realm independent of both the state and the market constituted by “people’s public use of their reason.”71 The public performance of experimental science was a key exemplar of the public use of reason, and it contributed to the establishment of the bourgeois public sphere.72 Habermas argued that by establishing the concept of a universal public, or “public opinion,” as the appropriate audience of public discourse, the bourgeois public sphere articulated a principle that was eventually used by excluded groups to force their way into the public sphere.73 This claim is no doubt correct, as far as it goes, and modern science has continued to serve egalitarian and emancipatory aspirations. In the Plan B case, for example, discussed in the introduction, critics of the FDA associated independent science advice with reproductive freedom. In another sense, however, by presenting itself as the public sphere to which anyone wishing to enter public life had to apply for access, the eighteenthcentury bourgeois public sphere marginalized the many “unofficial” public spheres constituted by women, peasants, and members of the working class. As Nancy Fraser has argued, “A discourse of publicity touting accessibility, rationality, and the suspension of status is itself deployed as a strategy of distinction.”74 This ambiguous legacy of the public sphere echoes that of modern science. The concept of science as public knowledge has also served both ideal and ideological functions, each of which have been intertwined with the public sphere. Although scientists today rarely legitimate their experiments before a witnessing public, the idea of science as public knowledge continues to serve a legitimating function in the politics of science.75 The third means by which experimentalists defined science as public knowledge rested on a “literary technology” for describing experiments.76 They wrote highly detailed accounts of their experimental procedures,

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suggesting that others could verify the results by simply following the report and replicating the experiments. In practice, neither public demonstrations nor meticulous lab reports were sufficient for establishing scientific claims. This remains true today. As Michael Polanyi argued, replicating experiments depends not so much on detailed research protocols as hands-on training in the tacit skills of building and operating experimental apparatus.77 More recent studies suggest the dilemma of an “experimenters’ regress”: the validity of replication rests on properly repeating the original experiment, but the only way to know whether one has properly repeated the experiment is that it replicates the results of the original.78 The only way to get out of such a dilemma is through social processes of negotiation and compromise through which scientists reach agreement on what will count as an adequate replication. Formal procedures and experimental evidence certainly play a role in such negotiations, but they do not determine them. Indeed, Boyle admitted that despite his meticulous laboratory protocols, few had been able to replicate his experiments.79 Nonetheless, by writing detailed accounts of experimental procedures and results, Boyle sought to create in the reader’s mind a vicarious experience of witnessing an experiment. If it worked, people would trust the account without either seeing or replicating an actual experiment. Boyle thus adopted a highly circumstantial writing style, reporting all possible particulars about any given experiment. He also included naturalistic engravings of the air-pump, allowing readers to better imagine how it worked. Diderot later employed a similar style in the illustrations of machines and instruments in his Encyclopedia.80 These methods echo Machiavelli’s emphasis on the world of appearances, and they foster a visual mode of knowing, what Golinski calls “the drive for ocular proof” and John Dewey lambastes as the “spectator theory of knowledge.”81 Boyle also sought to generate trust in experimental reports by using a highly modest literary style, conveying an image of impartiality and trustworthiness. Boyle achieved this in part by communicating both experimental successes and failed trials. Relating experimental failures implied that the scientist had nothing to hide. The use of plain language and an essay form served a similar function. Boyle cited others only as witnesses, not authorities. In describing this approach, he wrote, “I could be very well content to be thought to have scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.”82 Like Machiavelli and Galileo, Boyle did everything

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possible to remove himself from the scene, thus conveying the notion that not he was speaking but nature through him. Boyle’s modest literary style reinforced his commitment to separating questions of cause from questions of fact, and private beliefs from public actions. As proponents of the new science often pointed out, one can measure the moving hands of a clock without asking about the cause. Indeed, different clocks might work differently, even if their hands move in the same way. Only God can know what really makes the clock work, and religious humility requires that one acknowledge God’s power to create the same natural phenomena in a variety of ways. Boyle thus encouraged experimentalists to speak confidently about matters of fact observed in the laboratory, but when it came to matters of cause, he aimed to “speak so doubtingly, and use so often, perhaps, it seems, it is not improbable, and such expressions, as argue a diffidence to the truth of the opinions I incline to, and that I should be so shy of laying down principles, and sometimes of so much as venturing at explications.83 Boyle thus describes the measured tones and endless qualifications that we now expect of the experimental scientist. A similar style appears in the writings of Thomas Sprat, Joseph Glanvill, and other early members and publicists of the Royal Society.84 As I discuss in later chapters, nonscientists have often adopted this rhetoric of humility to direct attention away from their individual decisions and toward facts that appear to compel assent. When policymakers want to avoid responsibility for their decisions, what better way to do so than to let “the facts speak for themselves”? Parallel to this boundary between experimental facts and their metaphysical causes, the experimentalists drew another boundary between the public character of laboratory experiments and the private opinions of those who performed them. With the Restoration in 1660, the Royal Society received permission to assemble and publish free of censorship, and it agreed in return to not study religious issues.85 The experimentalists thus distinguished their approach from modes of thought that blurred public and private; above all, from the religious “enthusiasm” of the Protestant sects. Here Hobbes and Boyle were on common ground. They both feared epistemic individualism.86 Both condemned the “private judgment” of religious and political questions, because it threatened to erode the epistemic basis of political authority and community. Boyle thus published guidelines for scientific discourse that prohibited ad hominem attacks, and advised participants in scientific debates to treat each other as potential converts rather than enemies.87 The Royal Society

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excluded only atheists and enthusiasts from religious debate, as members of these groups were deemed too extreme to be safe. As I show in the next chapter, a similar separation between private beliefs and public actions underlies liberal theories of representative government. Newtonian Politics The Boylean program dominated the formative years of the Royal Society, from the 1660s to the 1680s. But it never completely displaced the rationalist impulses associated with thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes. Indeed, in many respects the two came together in the work of Isaac Newton. Although Newton’s work is today often seen as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution, his writings were criticized by many at the time as a return to the metaphysical speculations of the Scholastics. His appeal to the “ether” as the cause of physical motion, for example, raised objections from those concerned that it would revive the ancient view of nature as endowed with purpose. Similarly, whereas Boyle had clearly distinguished his probabilistic experimental science from the certainty of mathematics, Newton’s achievement rested on his synthesis of mathematical calculation with observational data. Not content with Boyle’s probabilistic ethic of humility, Newton sought to derive physical theories of mathematical certainty from laboratory experiments.88 Despite these differences between Newton and Boyle, Newton’s philosophy was enlisted in support of the same moderate political values as Boyle’s. The publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687 quickly became the centerpiece of a program of social, political, and religious order centered on personal self-restraint, government in the public interest, Anglicanism, and prosperity through Christian virtue. Through a series of lectures endowed by Boyle in his last will and testament of 1691, Newton’s friends and followers extolled what they took to be the social and political doctrine underwritten by his discoveries. Social stability, they argued, depends on God’s will, evident in the operation of the universe, as discerned by Newtonian science.89 Social order requires citizens who accept a strong but restrained monarchy and a tolerant but authoritative Anglican Church. The aim was to find a middle way between the religious enthusiasm and democratizing tendencies of the puritan sects, on the one hand, and absolutism of either the Catholic or Hobbesian variety, on the other. Newton’s followers thus employed his discoveries to refute a wide range of enemies, including radical

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Whigs, Deists, atheists, Epicureans, libertines, and freethinkers. Against both vitalism and materialism, the Newtonians conceived matter as divinely created but lifeless, its motion controlled by the divine laws revealed by Newton, rather than either internal purposes or the random clashing of atoms.90 In this respect, as Margaret Jacob notes, “the Newtonian Enlightenment was intended by its participants as a vast holding action against materialism and its concomitant republicanism, against what is best described as the Radical Enlightenment.”91 Nonetheless, by helping to establish relatively independent religious and scientific institutions, Newtonianism had the unintended effect of promoting the rise of voluntary associations and the idea of an independent public sphere.92 Conclusion Early modern natural philosophers gave the notion of publicity—and, to a limited extent, actual members of the lay public—a key role in the conduct and rhetoric of modern science. In concert with the idea of experiment, the notion of publicity mediated between the local and universal, practical and philosophical dimensions of science. Constituting modern science as a public form of knowledge allowed scientists to plausibly claim that the knowledge they produced was both universally true and locally applicable. It also allowed them to present themselves as the only qualified spokespersons for nature, while simultaneously removing themselves from the scene of representation. They masterfully performed myriad activities to create representations of nature, and then, when the representations were complete, they turned to their admiring publics to humbly declare that they had done nothing but let the facts speak for themselves.93 As the following chapters show, these conflicting dimensions of seventeenth-century science continue to shape both political and scientific representation in democracy today.

3 Consent and Competence in Representative Government

The English people thinks it is free. It greatly deceives itself; it is free only during the election of the members of Parliament. As soon as they are elected, it is a slave, it is nothing. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job. —President George W. Bush, Mobile, Alabama, September 2, 2005

The conception of science as public knowledge established in the seventeenth century does not have any necessary political implications. Proponents of the 1660 Restoration of the British monarch drew ideological support from the “form of life” defended by experimentalists at the Royal Society. The experimentalists, for their part, forged alliances with Restoration elites to oppose natural philosophies that seemed to threaten their program, including the vitalism associated with radical Protestant sects. In this respect, seventeenth-century science was closely allied with monarchy and opposed to democracy. Nonetheless, during the eighteenth century, concepts associated with early modern science—reasoned deliberation, publicity, common sense, instrumental power—played a key role in the emergence of liberal theories of representative government. These points are worth remembering today, when many assume that science and democracy necessarily either reinforce or oppose each other. Advocates of representative government used the notion of science as public knowledge to both legitimate political representation and exclude most people from its practice. Thinkers as diverse as Burke, Rousseau, and Madison shared a voluntarist conception of popular sovereignty. Like the experimentalists of the Royal Society, they believed most ordinary citizens incapable of reasoned deliberation. Indeed, for Burke and

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Madison, the people’s primary task was to occasionally express its consent to rule by wise elites. Like the Royal Society’s conception of scientific method, representative government internalized a tension between elite reason and common sense. In this respect, early theorists of representative government conceived political representation both against and through modern science. And by associating representation with rational deliberation, and democracy with a passionate citizenry, they defined political representation in opposition to democracy. Commentators today usually portray political representation as necessary for coping with the size and complexity of modern states. The founders of representative government agreed, but they were also convinced that it offered a way of dealing with the perceived incompetence of unruly citizens. Scholars today echo this view when discussing the relation of science and democracy. They acknowledge that science incorporates both egalitarian and elitist elements (e.g., egalitarian norms of publicity and transparency on one hand, and merit-based restrictions on membership on the other). But when it comes to democracy, they equate democracy with its egalitarian elements (e.g., voting rights) and neglect its elitist elements (voting is a process for selecting representatives whom voters deem, in one respect or another, more qualified than others).1 Indeed, commentators generally equate calls for the “democratization” of science with efforts to increase the quantity rather than the quality of public engagement. This chapter shows that this populist view of democracy is embedded within the liberal theory of representative government. It also shows that this view of democracy stems from a time when most people believed that democracy necessarily led to majority tyranny. This historical legacy suggests that finding a place for science within representative democracy depends on rethinking the relationships among science, democracy, and representation. Taking up this task requires looking beyond the cognitive dimensions of science. As the previous chapter indicated, science is not only a body of knowledge but also a set of norms and institutions, an orientation toward experience and action with potential resonance for politics. Ezrahi thus explains that just as studies of religion in politics must address more than the pursuit of salvation, the study of science in politics must include more than the place of reason and knowledge in public affairs.2 Science is often equated with scientific knowledge or method, but it is also a set of symbols, metaphors, practices, and ways of seeing. To be sure, modern science did not cause the development of a particular conception of

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political representation. Rather, science provided a conceptual toolkit that was among the sociocultural resources available to those promoting liberal-democratic ideas and institutions. Some writers made more use of this toolkit than others, but scientific modes of thought and action eventually became firmly embedded within the liberal theory of representative government. This chapter examines the conceptual dynamic between rationalist conceptions of science and liberal theories of representative government, drawing especially on Rousseau and The Federalist. The liberal theory of representative government presented here will be familiar to most political theorists, but its paradoxical relationship with modern science has not been sufficiently appreciated. Liberal Consent and Parliamentary Sovereignty The story of modern representative government begins with the idea of consent. For John Locke and other opponents of royal absolutism, people remain in a state of nature “till by their own consents they make themselves members of some politic society.”3 Despite its frequent association with popular political participation and empowerment, consent is a highly ambiguous concept. Its centrality within liberal theories of representation has often allowed representative governments to betray their democratic promise. Modern representative bodies originated during the Middle Ages as a means for kings to secure the consent of feudal lords and their subjects to taxation. When medieval parliaments expressed consent to royal commands on behalf of their subjects, they aimed not to restrain royal power but to facilitate it. Nonetheless, as localities developed institutions of local self-governance and began to petition parliament with grievances, consent gradually came to imply consultation between parliament and those it represented. Another important precedent for modern representative institutions appeared in the church councils associated with the Conciliar movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Conciliar movement located final authority over religious doctrine with the community of Christians rather than the Pope. Drawing on the Roman legal principle Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus tractari et approbari debet (“What touches all should be considered and approved by all”), the Conciliar movement argued that by consenting to the appointment of representatives, the represented agreed to abide by their decisions. Early modern thinkers combined these medieval conceptions of consent with

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natural rights theories to conceptualize consent as an expression of popular will and, as such, the source of government legitimacy.4 The rise of consent, and its association with popular election, involved an implicit rejection of an older and arguably more democratic method of selecting governments: selection by lot. Selection by lot does not express the consent of the governed. Citizens might consent to choose their governors by lot, but selection by lot does not involve any expression of will or consent. But in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century struggles against absolute monarchy, selecting public officials through popular election appeared much fairer than allowing them to simply inherit their posts. Despite highly restrictive voting rights, Bernard Manin explains, the difference between lot and election seemed relatively minor.5 In addition, the growing populations of early modern states left citizens a relatively small chance of being randomly selected to govern, so it did not matter much if this chance were slightly decreased by replacing selection by lot with selection by election. The rise of election as a way to select rulers had a certain irony, given that political theorists had long associated election with aristocracy.6 Indeed, consent theory is in principle compatible with all kinds of governments, ranging from absolutism to radical democracy. In the former, consent might imply merely that in some mythical past every member consented to join a founding political community. Alternatively, consent might be taken to require frequent popular elections. The latter sense is how radical democrats like the English Levellers and the French Jacobins understood it, arguing that the principle of consent implies a right to vote. Most liberal thinkers, however, especially those associated with the moderate politics of the Royal Society, resisted such radical implications of consent theory. As Locke noted, the principle of consent involves the major problem of determining what will count as a “sufficient declaration of a man’s consent.”7 Locke sought to address this problem with the distinction between express and tacit consent: whereas express consent requires some explicit and intentional act by the person giving consent, tacit consent is given by “every Man, that hath any Possession, or Enjoyment, of any part of the Dominions of any Government.”8 Tacit consent, that is, does not require voting rights. Scholars disagree on the extent of Locke’s sympathies for those urging a closer link between consent theory and popular suffrage. The point here is that if the ideas of representation and consent are not linked in some way to the right to vote, they easily lose their connection to popular political engagement and become mat-

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ters of elite reason and competence. The question is then transformed from whether citizens have made an actual expression of consent to the question of what citizens would have consented to, had they been given an opportunity to express their consent. Government legitimacy becomes a matter of “hypothetical consent.”9 This conceptual shift prevents liberal theory from endorsing tacit consent to tyranny, because someone who has tacitly consented is obligated only to the terms they would have accepted under the “original contract” that created the government in the first place. In this respect, it is not consent itself which creates obligation, but rather the requirements of the original contract. These requirements, social contract theorists argue, can be derived from the presumed features of a “state of nature” (regardless of whether the latter is given historical, anthropological, or merely heuristic status). From this perspective, the legitimacy of political representation rests not on popular consent but on the social contract, the terms of which political philosophers are happy to explicate. As Hanna Pitkin puts it, “You did not consent to be obligated, but rather are obligated to consent, if the government is just.”10 Depending on who is deemed capable of evaluating the justice of government, what initially seemed like a democratic revolution against political absolutism may easily become a way of justifying expert rule. The source of elite authority is simply shifted from divine right and traditional privilege to expert assessments of the social contract. In this respect, the liberal theory of consent is consistent with the eighteenth-century idea of “virtual representation,” according to which representatives who share the interests and sentiments of their constituents can speak for them without any expression of consent by their constituents. Indeed, the dominant seventeenth-century meaning of the word consent was actually closer to the idea of “general agreement” or “consensus” than to the expression of individual will associated with voting.11 Locke thus defended the right of the poor to be represented without necessarily arguing that they had a right to vote.12 A century later, the British crown’s response to the American colonists’ demand of “no taxation without representation” was to argue that the colonists already were represented, in the same manner as the residents of nonvoting boroughs like Manchester or Birmingham.13 Both representation and consent were conceived primarily as matters of knowledge rather than politics, or, more precisely, as epistemic resources for suppressing political conflict. In this respect, the liberal theory of representative government rests on a rationalist division between science and politics.

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Edmund Burke, for example, told his constituents that when representing them he “conformed to the instructions of truth and nature.”14 As Pitkin explains, Burke “sees interest very much as we today see scientific fact: it is completely independent of wishes or opinion, of whether we like it or not; it just is so.”15 For Burke, the point behind representing all the various interests of the nation was not to allow them to balance each other out. It was to bring to light all the evidence required for determining the national interest. Just as Enlightenment rationalism assumes that scientific research converges on a single truth about nature, Burke believed that elite representatives would eventually discern the objective public interest. It follows that, like most of his contemporaries, Burke locates sovereignty with Parliament rather than the people.16 Rousseau on Science and Popular Sovereignty By the late eighteenth century, many liberals had come to associate representative government with popular sovereignty rather than parliamentary sovereignty. In this respect, they were and remain indebted to Rousseau’s theory of the social contract, which gave the task of lawmaking to a sovereign “general will.” Given his frequent association with participatory democracy, it is ironic that key aspects of Rousseau’s concept of popular sovereignty echo the absolutism of Robert Filmer and Jean Bodin.17 Specifically, Rousseau’s view of popular sovereignty incorporates norms of immediacy and voluntarism that are also central to the absolutist view of law as identical to the will of the monarch. Rousseau shifts the locus of sovereignty from the king to the people, but he retains the identification of sovereignty with will rather than reason or judgment. This much is a familiar—if contested—reading of Rousseau. What I show in this section is that Rousseau’s conception of popular sovereignty is intertwined not only with royal absolutism but also with his critique of modern science. Along the way I also highlight several of Rousseau’s provocative insights into the social dimensions of science and technology. Generally speaking, scientific rationalism serves Rousseau as a constitutive counterimage to the innate good sense of ordinary citizens. Because Rousseau’s understanding of popular sovereignty underlies liberal theories of representative government, rethinking either sovereignty or representation requires rethinking modern science. Rousseau wrote his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, known today as the First Discourse, in response to the question posed for an essay

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competition by the Academy of Dijon: “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals?”18 Most of his contemporaries answered yes, but Rousseau vehemently argued the opposite: “Our souls have been corrupted in proportion to the advancement of our science and arts toward perfection.” Rousseau makes clear, however, that the evil social effects of science are not a distinctly modern problem but are rather “as old as the world.”19 Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Constantinople—all began virtuous, especially Rome, but they were eventually corrupted by higher learning. Echoing the debate between the “ancients and the moderns” among his contemporaries, Rousseau contrasts urbane and sophisticated Athens, which Rousseau stylizes as “modern,” with ancient Sparta, “as renowned for its happy ignorance as for the wisdom of its laws.”20 Departing from the premise underlying the Academy’s question, Rousseau goes on to argue that the arts and sciences do not by themselves either purify or corrupt morals. They are only a proximate cause of corruption. The arts and sciences are not essentially virtuous endeavors with a few unfortunate side effects. Rather, they “owe their birth to our vices”: astronomy arises from superstition, geometry from greed, physics from curiosity, and moral philosophy from pride.21 The arts and sciences both result from and foster moral corruption. “Born in idleness, they nourish it in turn.”22 In contrast to Rousseau, most people today draw a sharp boundary between science and technology and their social effects, conceiving the latter as largely unconnected to the former—as in the familiar slogan “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Although Rousseau is surely mistaken in his blanket condemnation of scientists, he offers a provocative warning to consider not merely the moral outputs of science and technology, so to speak, but also the morality of their inputs. When Rousseau claims that science originates in idleness, he does not mean that scientists are idle in the sense of being inactive—“Would God they really were!” he jokes—and his real concern is not idleness but the “misuse of time,” which he calls “a great evil.”23 Science is a misuse of time because its few successes depend on innumerable “errors, a thousand times more dangerous than the truth is useful.”24 Errors are dangerous, not for any direct harm they cause, but because they represent lost opportunities to cultivate virtue and combat injustice. This waste is inexcusable in a world of extreme inequality and widespread suffering: “no decent man can ever boast of having any leisure as long as there is some

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good to be done, a fatherland to serve, unhappy people to comfort.”25 Scientists belong to those who are “abominable enough to dare have superfluities while other men die of hunger”; they are people “who dare feed their idleness with the sweat, blood, and labor of a million unhappy men.”26 In a context of extreme social inequality, even the greatest successes of the arts and sciences merely “spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened,” making them into “happy slaves.”27 Although few today would agree with such claims, Rousseau’s words may well find an echo in the conscience of any scholar or scientist who occasionally wonders whether his or her intellectual pursuits serve more to escape the world than to improve it. In addition to distracting people from social injustice, Rousseau argues, science tends to makes people more anxious rather than more happy or virtuous. One need only consider “the continual worries of Doctors and Anatomists about their life and health.” Because science generally reveals more problems than remedies to address them, “it is no wonder if it only increases our fears and makes us fainthearted.”28 Today’s science studies scholars call this the production of nonknowledge: every increase in knowledge is accompanied by a corresponding increase in ignorance. And the ignorance that science creates is not merely a lack of knowledge, which might still be bliss, but rather a knowledge of ignorance, which in some cases creates anxiety.29 Despite these various allegations concerning the concrete social effects of science, Rousseau repeatedly praises science in the abstract: “Science is very good in itself, that is evident.” Like other Enlightenment thinkers, he believes that acquiring knowledge “is to share in the supreme intelligence.” The basic problem, therefore, is not science as such but that science “is not made for man . . . he has too limited a mind to make much progress in it, and too many passions in his heart not to put it to bad use.”30 Limited intelligence and excessive passion mean that scientists continually disagree with each other: “each crying from his own spot on the public square: Come to me, I alone do not deceive.” This leaves nonscientists, then as now, with nowhere to turn when they want reliable knowledge about something. “In this multitude of different opinions, what will be our criterium in order to judge it properly?”31 Rousseau here takes diversity of scientific opinion as a sign of incompetence and corruption. True science, he suggests, produces immediate consensus. One often hears a similar argument today from those who view Darwinian natural selection as “just a theory,” thus assuming that disagreements among

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evolutionary biologists indicate a failure of the basic Darwinian framework. Rousseau here also exhibits the tendency of both critics and defenders of modern science to view it from the outside, as it were, in terms of its self-presentation as unified, objective, impersonal knowledge. Rousseau might thus be accused of neglecting the various social resources, discussed in the previous chapter, that scientists employ in creating such knowledge. But one can hardly blame him, given the way scientists since the seventeenth century have concealed their reliance on such resources behind a façade of objective method and consensual truth. To put this in the language of representation, Rousseau shows little appreciation for the various social factors that mediate the scientific representation of nature. As Boyle well knew, evidence alone cannot resolve disagreements among scientists, unless the necessary social and material practices are in place. And the social mediation of scientific representation inevitably leads to disagreements. But Rousseau makes no distinction between science-in-the-making, which often involves a “multitude of different opinions,” and established scientific knowledge. Indeed, it is ironic that disagreement in science seems like failure to someone like Rousseau, who adopts the rationalist story that scientists have been telling about themselves. Perhaps Rousseau adopts this story intentionally, as it serves his purpose of criticizing modern science. Even more tellingly, it also serves his later purpose of asserting the same ideal of unmediated consensus in political representation. The division between abstract science-in-itself and concrete science-inthe-making reappears at the end of the First Discourse, when Rousseau revises his blanket condemnation of the arts and sciences to exclude the greatest scientists of his age. Echoing the standard Enlightenment image of the solitary scientist, Rousseau writes, “Those whom nature destined to be her disciples needed no teachers.” Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and their ilk were carried forward by their “vast genius.” Teachers would only have confined them within the limits of the teachers’ own thinking. Such “few men” of genius, Rousseau says, those who “walk alone,” should be the only ones allowed to practice science.32 Interestingly, even though he says great scientists require no teachers and should not seek to please the masses, Rousseau makes clear that they do require patronage. If Cicero or Bacon had not held the prestigious government posts they did, “can it be believed, I say, that their work would not have reflected their status?” Great scientists, therefore, should

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be appointed to government councils and courts, both for their own sake and to advise those in power. In this way scientists may “obtain the only recompense worthy of them: that of contributing their influence to the happiness of the People to whom they will have taught wisdom.” Rousseau goes on plead for a reconciliation of “virtue, science, and authority . . . working together.” He thus puts a twist on Plato’s ideal of philosopher-kings who accept power reluctantly, as the necessary price of self-preservation in a society essentially hostile to them. According to Rousseau, in contrast, if science remains separated from power, not only will political leaders and ordinary citizens suffer, but “learned men will rarely think of great things.”33 Without government patronage and the motivation afforded by pursuing what commentators today call “science in the public interest,” scientists will not achieve the heights of great men like Cicero and Bacon. Here is perhaps the germ of the Cold War “social contract for science” mentioned in the introduction: science pursues an esoteric method that cannot be comprehended or controlled by politics, while simultaneously depending on politics for institutional support. Science can provide society with useful knowledge only if it remains free of political interference. “As for us,” however, Rousseau quickly notes, for “common men not endowed by Heaven with such great talents,” the situation is very different. All those “who could not go far in the learned profession” should be “rebuffed from the outset and directed into arts useful to society.”34 Those of modest talents should stay out of science. A mediocre scientist might have been a great artisan. To be sure, everyone has a moral duty to appreciate God’s handiwork, but this duty need not be fulfilled through science. “Scripture in a thousand places exhorts us to revere the greatness and goodness of God in the wonders of His works; I do not think that it has anywhere prescribed to us the study of Physics.”35 Indeed, the difficulty of discovering the secrets of nature indicates that God meant them to remain hidden.36 For common people, virtue is best served by naive appreciation of nature’s beauty, unmediated by the methods and categories of science. Rousseau later states in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality that although there may be a few exceptional people, like Socrates, capable of living according to reason, “the human race would have perished long ago if its preservation had depended only on the reasoning of its members.”37 Whereas Rousseau believes most people should not seek to unlock the secrets of external nonhuman nature, he identifies civic virtue with the

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mutual transparency of citizens’ inner natures. He has been much celebrated for arguing that ordinary citizens require only internal reflection to become virtuous, not sophisticated moral philosophy or scientific knowledge. “O virtue! sublime science of simple souls, are so many difficulties and preparations needed to know you? Are not your principles engraved in all hearts, and is it not enough in order to learn your laws to commune with oneself and listen to the voice of one’s conscience in the silence of the passions?”38 Just as geniuses must avoid teachers for fear of corrupting their natural talents, common folk must avoid science and philosophy, else they interfere with their unmediated access to the wisdom of their hearts. Before human beings became morally corrupted, they “found their security in the ease of seeing through each other.” Today, however, “one no longer dares to appear as he is.”39 Rousseau thus links his rejection of mediation in the pursuit of truth to ideals of authenticity, transparency, and immediacy in social relations. As Jean Starobinski puts it, Rousseau’s philosophy is “aimed primarily at establishing or reestablishing the sovereignty of the immediate.”40 This fascination with immediacy echoes the rejection of mediation associated with the public image of modern science. In this respect, Rousseau’s thought is closely intertwined with science, despite (or perhaps because of) his relentless critique of it. In sum, for Rousseau, those few with exceptional talent should pursue scientific knowledge of external, nonhuman nature, unmediated by teachers or social customs but institutionally linked to political power. Everyone else should restrict themselves to unmediated appreciation of both external nature, and especially their own internal natures and those of their fellow citizens. The ideals of consensus, immediacy, authenticity, and transparency that Rousseau asserts in his critique of modern science reappear in his conception of popular sovereignty. Moreover, Rousseau’s assertion of a contrast between the citizenry’s reliance on common sense and government’s need for scientific knowledge prefigures his conception of the relationship between law and administration, popular sovereignty and representative government. In these respects, Rousseau’s conception of political representation relies on a particular view of scientific representation. The skepticism toward the social mediation of conflict that characterizes Rousseau’s view of science reappears in his famous concept of the general will. Rousseau insists that the general will, ideally, is unified and unanimous. “The more harmony there is in the assemblies . . . the more dominant as well is the general will.”41 Moreover, Rousseau argues that

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discerning a unanimous general will does not require public deliberation, as today’s deliberative democrats argue, but rather each citizen’s internal reflection in silence. “If, when an adequately informed people deliberates, the citizens were to have no communication among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the deliberation would always be good.”42 Although many participatory democrats disagree, it seems that that the only way for people to deliberate “with no communication among themselves” is for the deliberation to remain strictly internal, within the mind of each individual.43 Rousseau excludes public deliberation from the process of discerning the general will, because he fears that deliberating citizens would influence each other’s assessments of what the general will requires. Deliberation carries with it the risk that “fear and flattery” would make the most powerful private wills unanimous, thus obscuring the general will and hindering the public good.44 Rather than exchanging reasons and arguments, Rousseau wants citizens to silently intuit their own and their compatriots’ deepest needs and convictions. Just as experimental scientists purify their scientific texts of their social trappings and allow them to speak immediately in nature’s voice, Rousseauean citizens search within themselves for unmediated access to the general will. Rousseau thus praises nondeliberative public events like festivals, parades, and spectacles over the Parisian theater, because in the theater people vicariously experience the emotions of the actors on stage rather than their own.45 Like the public demonstrations of scientific experiments mentioned in the previous chapter, festivals and parades provide opportunities for public acclamation, not deliberation. Ordinary citizens play the role of reliable witnesses, not contentious participants. Similarly, when citizens vote on the general will, they do not express “whether they approve or reject the proposal” but rather their opinion on “whether it does or does not conform to the general will that is theirs.”46 Citizens who vote on whether a legislative proposal complies with the general will assert cognitive evaluations of its truth, not reflective judgments regarding its relation to their ideals or desires. In this respect, the general will is analogous to the modern idea of a scientific fact, as the seventeenth-century founders of modern science constructed it: unmediated, unanimous, timeless. A vote on the general will does not express one’s will, as such, but rather one’s opinion on whether a proposed law corresponds to the community’s identity.47

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Just as the modern scientist is said to discover preexisting properties of nature, the Rousseauean citizen discovers a preexisting general will.48 Similarly, just as scientists today like to remind their critics that truth does not depend on majority vote, Rousseau states that neither the quantity of votes nor the extent of the franchise are relevant for determining the general will. All that matters is the common interest that unites them. Put differently, Rousseau turns to the natural, commonsense, unmediated reasoning of ordinary citizens for the same reason that the founders of modern science turned to scientific method: to escape the inconclusive, frustrating, error-prone—in a word, mediated—world of deliberation and discussion. The yearning for immediacy and authenticity that leads Rousseau to ban deliberation from the process of discerning the general will also motivates his argument against representation: “Sovereignty cannot be represented for the same reason it cannot be alienated. It consists essentially in the general will, and the will cannot be represented. Either it is itself or it is something else; there is no middle ground. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not nor can they be its representatives; they are merely its agents. They cannot conclude anything definitively. Any law that the people in person has not ratified is null; it is not a law.”49 Because laws must be general, and because Rousseau thinks that representatives can be only delegates who mirror particular interests, representatives with decisionmaking power would corrupt the generality of the law. That is why the English, who allow representatives to make laws, are free only on election day, as Rousseau explains in the epigraph to this chapter. Rousseau’s ethic of authenticity makes representation seem like slavery.50 More specifically, Rousseau believes representation contradicts freedom and democracy for two closely related reasons: first, representation violates the expressive character of political action, because it separates popular will from government decision making; second, by facilitating deliberation, representation threatens the autonomy of citizens’ individual judgments regarding the general will. In Rousseau’s Social Contract, political participation is reduced to voting, because only in voting are individuals potentially independent of their fellow citizens. Such independence is crucial for the undiluted expression of popular sovereignty, which Rousseau identifies with the will. And whereas opinions and interests may be easily shared, a person’s will is personal. Put simply, my representative could decide to buy me a drink, based in part on my expressed opinion that I would enjoy a drink, but it makes little sense for my representative to decide whether I want a drink. 51

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Deliberation and representation do have a place in Rousseau’s polity, but they are reserved to the government. Rousseau’s “delegates” include administrators, judges, and experts, but not lawmakers. The elite few who deliberate seek the best means to implement the ends chosen by the sovereign people. Citizens cannot be represented by the legislative power, which in making laws declares the general will, but they are represented by the executive, “which is only force applied to the law.”52 The government, for Rousseau, is the only legitimate representative of the sovereign, because it makes judgments. Judgments, unlike the will, can be represented. Similarly, Rousseau argues that only the government can select magistrates (i.e., administrators), because only the government can undertake particular measures that do not apply universally. The sovereign people, in contrast, can act only through laws that apply to all.53 In a democracy, Rousseau argues, with the Athenian model in mind, the people are both the sovereign and the government, both the source of the law’s authority and its executors. And because acting with regard to particular cases (as the government) may corrupt the people’s capacity to act generally (as the sovereign), democracies are not suited to fallible human beings. If a democratic government is to select magistrates, he writes, it should do so by lot, as then it has to make only this one decision and must not actually select the magistrates. Rousseau concludes that elective aristocracy is the best form of government.54 In sum, as Urbinati argues, Rousseau attributes to the people the same conception of sovereignty that Filmer and other monarchists associated with the king: sovereignty as will.55 To the delegates, Rousseau attributes the qualities associated with judges: deliberation and judgment. Under Rousseau’s social contract, the people can express their will, but they cannot deliberate; and the delegates can deliberate, but they cannot decide. This split between popular voluntarism and elite reason in Rousseau’s political theory parallels a similar division between ordinary citizens and elite geniuses in his critique of modern science. It also prefigures the liberal theory of representative government, which focuses on the electoral authorization of competent public officials. The Competence of Representative Government Elements of Rousseau’s conception of popular sovereignty reappear in the liberal theory of representative government that emerged from the French and American revolutions. They remain central to the prevailing

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understanding of political representation. The powerful defense of the United States Constitution offered by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist combined a belief in popular sovereignty with a distinctly American faith in instrumental reason and expert competence.56 Whereas Rousseau emphasized popular will and rejected representation, The Federalist emphasizes elite competence and embraces representative government. In this respect, they are two sides of the same liberal-rationalist coin. For Madison and Hamilton, as for allied spirits such as Montesquieu, Sieyes, and Burke, competence means not only technical competence but also virtues of character such as honesty, virtue, patriotism, wisdom, and humility. Not surprisingly, these are the same virtues associated with the gentlemen-scientists of the Royal Society. This section shows how the relationship between representatives and constituents in liberal theories of representation echoes that between expert method and common sense in modern science. My aim here is not to offer a general assessment of the U.S. Constitution’s democratic credentials, but rather to highlight the relationship between expert competence and popular consent in the theory of representation defended by Madison and Hamilton. A key feature of the American Revolution was the popularization and radicalization of the notion that the people are sovereign. The divine right of kings had never been prominent in the American colonies, and the idea of popular sovereignty was well established by the mid-eighteenth century.57 But during the course of the Revolution, popular sovereignty became radicalized, such that it came to mean, as one commentator wrote at the time, “a power existing in the people at large, at any time, for any cause, or for no cause, but their own sovereign pleasure, to alter or annihilate both the mode and essence of any former government, and adopt a new one in its stead.”58 This view of popular sovereignty led many Americans, echoing Rousseau, to treat political representation as inherently suspect. The inhabitants of Albermarle County, Virginia, were not alone when they declared in a 1776 resolution that representation was a “necessary evil in an extensive Country, where all the people cannot meet at one place to transact their public concerns.”59 Continual appeals during this time to a nebulous concept of “the will of the people” led to widespread mistrust of representatives and the adoption of “binding instructions” to representatives in many of the American state legislatures.60

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Given this context, Madison and Hamilton had their work cut out for them when they set out to defend a system of government designed to move on the “pivot” of “the principle of representation.”61 One of their key resources in this effort was the idea of competence. The competence of elected representatives, they hoped, would replace binding instructions and direct mandates as a way to promote the public good and establish confidence in government. They appealed frequently to the idea that those who governed should be of greater talent, knowledge, wisdom, and virtue that those who elected them. In contrast to the aristocracies of wealth and privilege that characterized absolute monarchies, representative governments would be led by a “natural aristocracy” of competence. Whereas traditional aristocracies were embedded within local traditions and identified with the corporate interest of broad social groups, the natural aristocracy would be identified through an individualized competitive selection process. Even a participatory democrat like Thomas Jefferson was convinced that the natural aristocracy is “the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society,” and the best form of government is that which “provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi.”62 This association of the natural aristocracy with qualified individuals inversely corresponded to the Founders’ universalist language of individual rights. The latter was a key component of popular sovereignty, and the language of rights expressly denied the relevance of competence. Of course, women and minorities were generally excluded from both the theory and practice of political rights, and the existence of about a half million slaves at the time of the founding remains a stark reminder of the limits of universalist rhetoric.63 The point here is that the populist language of rights could coexist with the elitist language of competence precisely because they both focus on individuals. They are the twin pillars of the standard liberal or juridical view of representation, which models representation on a one-to-one contract between an individual principal and his or her agent. One of the key problems with the idea of a natural aristocracy is that nature itself remains silent on who belongs to it. The talents and virtues of the natural aristocracy may be natural, in part, but its members must be selected by fallible human beings. The liberal theory of representation thus inevitably raises the question of how to design political institutions that will tend to produce governments composed of natural aristocrats. This is what Madison and his compatriots set out to do.

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The long dominant “liberal” or “pluralist” reading of The Federalist viewed it as a framework for interest-group politics. Scholars saw representatives as either neutral umpires of interest-group competition or selfinterested delegates of competing groups.64 Over the past few decades, however, many commentators have come to interpret Madison and Hamilton as balancing popular sovereignty with impartial representation, hoping that an elected elite would promote the public good. The two interpretations are partially compatible, because Madison’s recognition that “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” and his recommendation of various “auxiliary precautions” to balance competing interests, do not invalidate his ideal of elite competence.65 Madison was simply more skeptical than, for example, Edmund Burke, that competent elites would harmonize social interests and eliminate conflict.66 Moreover, old and new interpretations agree that the authors of The Federalist believed representation is done by representatives, not by those they represent. Citizens elect representatives, but citizens do not participate in representation. For Madison and Hamilton, the purpose of political institutions is the selection of a virtuous elite capable of making wise decisions in the public interest. Elected governments then have the task of refining citizen preferences through rational deliberation, such that, in Madison’s famous phrase, “the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good, than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.”67 Unlike Rousseau, Madison associates competence with lawmaking and not merely administration, but he holds a similar view of popular sovereignty. For Rousseau the general will is discovered through a silent vote, and for Madison it is distilled by elite representatives from the noisy expression of factional interests, but for both popular sovereignty is a matter of will rather than reason or judgment. Madison and Hamilton argue that transforming popular will into wise legislation first requires competent representatives. Every political constitution, Madison writes, should aim “to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.” Second, every constitution should take “precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”68 A “competent legislator” requires not only “an upright intention and a sound judgment” but also “a certain degree of knowledge of the subjects on which he is to legislate.”69 Madison here explicitly contrasts the proposed federal constitution with the popular-democratic state

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constitutions adopted during the mid-1780s. The state legislatures had employed various measures to keep representatives close to the people, including annual election of delegates (though in most states by the state legislature), unicameral legislatures, short terms of office, provisions for recalling legislators at any time, and the absence of an independent judiciary. These popular-democratic measures, Madison states, led to an embarrassing record of “blunders” and “deficient wisdom.”70 Although the proposed House of Representatives will remain relatively close to the people, the U.S. Senate, Madison promises, will be composed of members whose long terms of service will give them an incentive to develop the requisite expertise. How are citizens to elect these competent representatives? In part by casting a wide net. Madison emphasizes that under the proposed Constitution anyone can run for office without regard to wealth, birth, religious faith, or profession. With the exception of requirements for age, citizenship, and residency, the U.S. Constitution replaced substantive qualifications for office with the procedural requirement of popular election. Any citizen may be a legislator “whose merit may recommend him to the esteem and confidence of his country.”71 As Alan Gibson points out, Madison here assumes that the “natural aristocracy” will be fairly evenly distributed across the country, such that every voting constituency will have at least a few to choose from. Madison also assumes that people’s public reputations will be a sufficient guide to their actual merit as political representatives. Most important, he assumes that voters will be sufficiently competent to recognize and compare the merit of the various candidates who compete for their favor.72 Here the liberal theory of representative government depends on a certain amount of competence on the part of the electorate. Madison thus repeatedly expresses his view that the people, although sometimes temporarily misguided, will not repeatedly choose corrupt legislators, and certainly not in all government bodies at once.73 He acknowledges “a degree of depravity in mankind,” but he insists that there are also “other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” Republican government, he argues, “presupposes the existence of these [latter] qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”74 Such statements challenge the long-standing “liberal” reading of Madison as a proponent of self-interested individualism. These virtues of a republican electorate, however, serve primarily to select competent rulers rather than to engage in self-rule. Madison believes that over the long run “the cool and deliberate sense of the com-

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munity” should “ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers.”75 But he also thinks the people should act primarily at election time, and he is highly suspicious of popular political activity that extends beyond the voting booth. For Madison, citizen participation is usually motivated by unruly passions that produce “factions” concerned only with their narrow group interest. The only exceptions are those rare occasions when citizens justly rise up to defend themselves against an oppressive government.76 Would it not be beneficial, Madison asks, to have a “temperate and respectable body of citizens” that would “suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?”77 Noting that many ancient constitutions had representative institutions, Madison argues that what distinguishes the proposed U.S. Constitution from the past “lies in the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity, from any share” in the government.78 Madison thus contrasts the proposed “republican” constitution with a “pure democracy,” which he says is inevitably dominated by “spectacles of turbulence and contention.”79 Madison draws here upon democracy’s ancient historical meaning of rule not by “the people” in today’s inclusive sense, but by a particular class, namely, the poor and uneducated. By thus associating representation with republicanism, and democracy with mob rule, Madison drives a wedge between representation and democracy. The Anti-Federalists seize on these elitist features of the proposed Constitution, and their objections offer some insight into the limitations of the liberal theory of representative government. The Anti-Federalists argue that the proposed system will produce a traditional aristocracy of wealth rather than a natural aristocracy of competence.80 The AntiFederalists predict—correctly, as it turns out—that a legislature chosen through popular election in large districts will tend to be composed of upper-class citizens. In the proposed districts of approximately forty thousand citizens, as opposed to the small districts of a few thousand then used for state legislatures, only wealthy candidates will have the established reputations and practiced social skills required to get elected. Most important, the small size of the proposed legislature means that it cannot possibly be representative of all the different types of people in society. According to the Anti-Federalist “Brutus,” The very term, representative, implies, that the person or body chosen for this purpose, should resemble those who appoint them—a representation of the

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people in America, if it be a true one, must be like the people. . . . They are the sign—the people are the thing signified. . . . It must then have been intended, that those who are placed instead of the people, should possess their sentiments and feelings, and be governed by their interests, or, in other words, should bear the strongest resemblance of those in whose room they are substituted.81

The Anti-Federalists thus appeal to an older view of representation, mentioned in the introduction, associated with the medieval and early modern notion that the king or parliament “stands for” the nation. They also echo Burke’s notion that representatives should share the sentiments and feelings of their constituents, while deploying that notion for more participatory democratic ends than Burke intended. Where Madison tends to conceive representation as a matter of replacing the represented, competently performing tasks they could not perform themselves, the AntiFederalists insist on a continuing presence of the represented in the process of representation. Although they also conceive representation as the replacement of something that exists before representation (social identity rather than general will or group interest), they seek to mitigate the exclusion of the electorate by requiring that the representative assembly mirror or resemble the electorate’s social composition.82 By thus raising the issue of resemblance or representativeness, they offer a partial but important challenge to the liberal theory of representation. Madison and Hamilton respond to the Anti-Federalist charge on both conceptual and pragmatic grounds. Madison maintains that Anti-Federalist concerns about the relatively small size of the proposed Congress are misplaced, because in large groups passions are more easily aroused and a large assembly will easily be coopted by a few demagogues.83 Additionally, Hamilton argues, most citizens in fact prefer to be represented by those more competent than themselves, and in any case there are too many different types of people to include one of each in the legislature. “The idea of an actual representation of all classes of the people by persons of each class is altogether visionary.” The only way to achieve it would be to forcibly require each social group to send one or more of its members to Congress. Left to choose on their own, Hamilton argues, artisans and manufacturers will give their votes to merchants. The former know they share interests with the latter, and they also know that their own “habits in life” have not given them the “acquired endowments” needed for effective work in a deliberative assembly. Indeed, merchants are the “natural representatives” of artisans and manufacturers. More generally, Hamilton asserts, the best representatives are people “whose situation leads to

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extensive inquiry and information” regarding the interests and dispositions of those they must represent.84 In sum, Madison and Hamilton believed the task of representatives is to assess the views and interests of their constituents and then convert these into policies that promote the public good. The new Constitution did not rely on formal mechanisms to establish an aristocratic republic, and it empowered a comparatively broad white male electorate. It left the selection of the natural aristocracy to the people themselves. Indeed, as Gibson argues, the Federalists sought institutional constraints on the popular will “because they were certain that the system would be responsive, not because they sought to prevent it from being responsive.”85 Nonetheless, while retaining a commitment to popular sovereignty, Madison and Hamilton clearly sought to limit what they saw as the excessive democratization of state legislatures during the 1780s, and they conceived representation in terms of the impartial competence of an elected elite. In this respect, their theory of representation echoed the voluntarist conception of popular sovereignty defended by Rousseau. Similarly, it contained a tension between public witnessing and elite method similar to that embedded in the rhetoric of modern science. Liberalism’s Epistemic Division of Labor The preceding discussion of The Federalist and Rousseau points to an epistemic division of labor at the heart of the liberal theory of representative government. Popular sovereignty is channeled into voting, through which citizens express either their narrow group interests or their private opinions on the general will. Elections authorize competent rulers, who serve the public undisturbed until the next election. The representative assembly is implicitly modeled on an idealized scientific community, engaged in rational deliberation for public ends, while citizens play the role of lay witnesses to professional demonstrations of expert prowess. Different versions of this basic view of representation appear in the writings of a wide range of liberal thinkers, including Montesquieu, Sieyes, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and (to some extent) John Stuart Mill.86 It is also a central feature of realist and neorealist theories of democracy from Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter to Niklas Luhmann and Giovanni Sartori, among others.87 Now an epistemic division of labor clearly has much to recommend it, perhaps even more today than in Madison’s time. It is simply impossible

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in modern societies for every citizen to participate intelligently on every issue—or rather, given time and space limitations, for every citizen to participate in any manner at all on every issue—so some sort of division of labor is practically necessary.88 As Mark Warren nicely puts it, ordinary citizens “want safe airplanes and food, not the chance to participate in meat inspection and airline safety.”89 A division of labor grants representative governments the latitude they need to find the best means for promoting citizens’ interests, while citizens remain the final judges of whether government has in fact fulfilled their interests.90 Nonetheless, as Urbinati argues, when representation is reduced to confidence in an expert elite, it loses its connection to the electorate.91 The dimension of representativeness disappears, as the Anti-Federalists feared, because the electorate is no longer imaginatively present in the process of representation. Democratic theorists have thus sought various ways of reconceiving liberalism’s division of labor, so as to reconcile Madison’s concern with governmental competence with more participatory conceptions of citizenship and representation. One line of thinking advocates a division of labor in which experts determine the means of politics and citizens choose the ends. Thomas Christiano has argued, for example, that democratic citizens are like the passengers on a ship: they say where they want to go, and the captain decides how to get them there. Citizens should participate in shaping the aims of law and policy, but it is both unnecessary and undesirable for them to invest time and effort in shaping the means and strategies whereby government pursues their aims, “as long as the means and strategies are separable from the aims.”92 Unfortunately, this assumption often is mistaken. If aims and means are not developed in conjunction with each other, the aims are likely to be either utopian or mundane, and the means counterproductive. Other commentators suggest a division of labor that focuses not on means and ends but on a parallel distinction between technical knowledge and political judgment. Urbinati, for example, drawing on Mill, argues that lay citizens lack the technical competence required to evaluate the internal, discipline-specific features of expert performance, but they may have sufficient deliberative competence to judge the external outcomes of expertise.93 Insofar as citizens cannot competently evaluate expert claims, she suggests, reliance on professional competence depoliticizes representation and renders it incompatible with democracy. These conceptions of expertise, widely accepted within contemporary democratic theory, underlie the familiar notion that in a democracy

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experts should provide apolitical technical advice for public officials and other citizens. The latter make deliberative judgments, informed perhaps by expertise but grounded in nontechnical knowledge and interests accessible to all. As the saying goes, experts should be “on tap, not on top.” The core features of this conception of expertise can be traced back to Weber’s influential analysis of bureaucracy, with the difference that political theorists today usually argue that political decisions should be generated through public and deliberative processes. These conceptions of expertise also echo Habermas’s association of science and technology with a universal “cognitive interest” in the instrumental control of nature and society. Technical rationality, for Habermas, is not governed by any particular political interests but by a universal human interest in controlling one’s environment.94 Technical rationality poses no inherent threat to other human values, as long as it remains confined to its particular sphere.95 To be sure, this conception of technical rationality motivates Habermas’s call for the democratic control of technology.96 But like all critiques grounded in an ontological or prepolitical division between science and politics, Habermas’s critique cannot go beyond a policy of containment. It protects politics from the presumed rationalizing and dehumanizing forces of science and technology, but it never engages the creation of scientific knowledge or technical artifacts themselves. The Habermasian critique of technology, as Andrew Feenberg argues, “ends up agreeing implicitly with technocrats that the actual struggles in which people attempt to influence technology can accomplish nothing of fundamental importance.”97 Although they may protect politics from science and technology, the Weberian and Habermasian conceptions of expertise do not show how to make the politics that may arise within science and technology more democratic. Moreover, it is not always the case that citizens lack competence to evaluate expert claims. As Aristotle pointed out, those who possess a specialized skill are not always the best judges of their own work: “A house, for instance, is something which can be understood by others besides the builder: indeed the user of a house . . . will judge it even better than he does. In the same way a steersman will judge a rudder better than a shipwright does; and the diner—not the cook—will be the best judge of a feast.”98 Or in E. E. Schattschneider’s memorable formulation: “It is not necessary to be an automotive engineer to buy an automobile or to be an obstetrician to have a baby.”99 Such considerations motivated Machiavelli’s conviction, discussed in chapter 1, that ordinary citizens can evaluate

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public officials according to the public consequences of their work. I expand on this notion in chapter 9, showing how, given appropriate institutional conditions, lay citizens might use a variety of proxy indicators to make intelligent judgments of expert competence—not only regarding its external outcomes but also its internal politics. It is also not necessarily the case that reliance on expert competence depoliticizes representation. Critics of rationalism have thus offered several distinct arguments directed less against rationalist views on the political role of experts than the rationalist dichotomy between lay and expert knowledge itself.100 First, laypeople cannot always rely on experts to resolve conflicts over issues that may seem purely technical—such as health and safety regulations, fiscal policy, and pollution control—because experts themselves often have conflicts of interest, and there is little reason to believe that experts, as individuals, are inherently more trustworthy than nonexperts. Second, many of the technical concepts central to contemporary regulatory policy, such as “maximum tolerated dose” or “excess deaths,” encode both implicit assumptions and explicit decisions about how to balance competing values and interests.101 Third, when expert disagreements have political implications, efforts to reach expert consensus often employ political means, including voting and subtle forms of coercion. Based in part on such considerations, Warren has offered a less rigid conception of the epistemic division of labor. Warren argues that expert authority is constituted in part by the existence and vitality of “institutionalized opportunities for discursive challenge” and a “critical political culture” that enable both experts and laypeople to publicly challenge expert claims whenever the need arises.102 Expertise is indirectly shaped by political institutions, and under certain conditions lay citizens may become directly involved in shaping expertise. But Warren also argues that when it comes to expertise “the lure of democratic participation operates at the margins,” when controversial side effects or a failure to achieve expert consensus make the political implications of expertise explicit. Warren here suggests that under normal conditions experts can be left alone to do their work. The shortcoming of this view is that if public deliberation on expert claims is confined to “the margins,” to cases of technical breakdown or uncertainty, it cannot challenge the power relations embedded in past processes of scientific research and expert advice. For much of modern Western history, the problem with established medical advice on child-

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birth was not that it was uncertain, but that it viewed pregnancy as a medical condition and ignored many women’s concerns and experiences.103 Similarly, government spending on medical research in the United States has long been shaped by the lobbying efforts of scientific associations, private corporations, and both public and private universities and research institutes. One consequence has been a tendency to emphasize research on high-technology cures of most concern to the wealthy over cheaper preventative measures based on nutrition and lifestyle changes.104 Even in the absence of technical breakdowns or uncertainties, an elitist approach to setting the public research agenda is unlikely to adequately represent the needs and interests of most citizens, including many whose taxes pay for it. A similar point can be made with regard to government nutrition guidelines. During the 1980s, as Marion Nestle documents in her book Food Politics, the many competing parties with a stake in the federal government’s official dietary advice were able to forge a fragile consensus. The Dietary Guidelines issued in 1985 “appeared to constitute a universal and commonly accepted approach to reducing risks for a broad range of chronic diseases.”105 The consensus, however, had been achieved by sacrificing clarity, such that the new guidelines avoided stigmatizing any foods as “bad.” They substituted negative-sounding phrases like “avoid too much” with the more cheerful “choose a diet low in.” The older recommendation to “choose lean meat” became “have two or three servings of meat.” Part of the shift had to do with a shift in strategy within the food industry, especially among meat and dairy producers. They realized that they could sell more food if they stopped resisting dietary guidelines, as they had in the past, and instead actively used such guidelines to market their products. Such marketing efforts were themselves facilitated by a shift from food to nutrition in the language of government dietary guidelines. Guidelines suggesting that people should eat more of something usually referred to specific foods (grains, fruits, vegetables). But when recommending that people eat less, they invariably cited nutrients (such as saturated fat and cholesterol). Because beneficial nutrients of one kind or another can be found in nearly every kind of food, the shift to a language of nutrients facilitated the food industry’s marketing efforts. And all of this remained consistent with an underlying scientific consensus about the basic components of a healthy diet. Observing that established technical knowledge may encode narrow political interests does not change the fact that not all citizens can or

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should be involved in decision making on every sociotechnical issue. It does suggest, however, that public deliberation and representation is required, not only in cases of obvious technical failure or public controversy, but also at the front end of technical development. It is required to prevent unjust power relations from becoming embedded within an expert consensus. Efforts of this sort might draw on a pragmatist model of expertise, also briefly articulated by Habermas, according to which the values and interests embedded within science and technology are subjected to political deliberation, and political goals are adjusted in light of the technical means available for their realization.106 In other words, political representation not only requires technical expertise but also occurs within technical expertise. The pragmatist model does not imply an elimination of the boundaries between science and politics, but rather a recognition that such boundaries need to be politically established.107 Although modern societies depend on an epistemic division of labor, it should not be conceived along the lines of a prepolitical division between scientific and political representation. Conclusion Liberal theories of representative government employ technical competence as a source of substantive knowledge, symbolic claims, and institutional principles that cast citizens as witnesses rather than participants. They ground political representation in public officials’ presumed competence to promote the substantive interests of their constituents. Liberal theories of representative government thus draw a sharp division between state institutions and civil society. The state has the task of discerning the public good through deliberation among an elected elite, and citizens are expected to express their consent through voting in occasional elections. As Urbinati puts it, the former is the “domain of competence” and the latter the “domain of consent.”108 From this perspective, elections are not linked to public discourse and the generation of political opinions, interests, and identities. Elections merely select an elite capable of discerning the public interest through rational deliberation. The liberal emphasis on elite competence is not confined to the state, however, as it has also played a key symbolic role in the constitution of the liberal-democratic public sphere. As Ezrahi has argued, the practical application of the same scientific principles to diverse situations vindicates the liberal-democratic faith in human equality.109 Scientific knowl-

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edge helps define the physical limits of political action, thus assuring those suspicious of democracy that popular freedom will not lead to anarchy. Scientifically determined relations of cause and effect seemingly provide an extra-political standard for observing citizens to evaluate the government’s performance. Moreover, the liberal-democratic focus on visible policies (and, more problematically, policy consequences), rather than invisible motives, makes it easier for citizens to develop a sense of ownership in the policies implemented in their names. Whereas moral or traditional claims to authority rely on subjective criteria hidden from public view, instrumental effectiveness is at least potentially open to judgment by an observing public. All of this suggests that modern liberalism, no less than modern science, internalizes a tension between elite knowledge and common sense. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the Royal Society linked the elitism of scientific method to an image of the citizen-witness who testifies to the veracity of laboratory experiments. In a similar manner, liberal theories of representative government link the potentially subversive idea of popular consent to an elitist theory of hypothetical consent. Both modern science and modern liberalism connect elite reason with popular consent, while ensuring that the former retains power over the latter. The tension between the rationalism and voluntarism of liberal representative government thus parallels the tension between the exclusivity and publicity of modern science. These tensions also underlie the modern dichotomy between democracy and political representation. If the purpose of politics is to discover truth through rational deliberation, those deemed most capable of such deliberation can represent everyone else, and there is little reason to subject representation to democratic norms. In this respect, as noted previously, the standard view of representative democracy as oxymoronic rests on a rationalist view of both science and politics.110 Despite the shortcomings of liberal theories of representative government, we should not dismiss their concern with governmental competence. Consider President Bush’s infamous comment, quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, praising Michael D. Brown, director of federal government relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina. Because the government had in fact utterly failed to muster a competent response to the disaster, Bush’s comment revealed with bitter irony just how costly incompetence can be.111 More generally, the entire Bush presidency made clear that expertise should be a key component of representative democracy. Some sort of division of labor between experts and lay citizens is

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both necessary and desirable. But most democratic theorists continue to assume a liberal-rationalist version of the division of labor, because they discount the social and political dimensions of expertise. By assuming a dichotomy between lay judgment and expert knowledge, democratic theorists merely shift liberal rationalism outside the domain of political representation. They shield politics from rationalist expertise, but they fail to fully challenge the rationalist view of expertise itself. Put in the terms of this chapter, by emphasizing possibilities for deliberation and judgment by ordinary citizens, democratic theorists have effectively challenged Rousseau’s voluntaristic conception of popular sovereignty. They have also shown why a Madisonian enthusiasm for elite competence should not be allowed to dominate the political activities of lay citizens. But contemporary democratic theory has yet to fully reconsider the underlying basis of the liberal model of representation. Developing a coherent understanding of representative democracy, and finding a place within it for scientific expertise, depends on more thoroughly rethinking the traditional view of expertise. Before taking up that task in part II of this book, the next chapter further illustrates the dilemmas of liberal rationalism with reference to government advisory committees in the United States.

4 Liberal Rationalism and Government Advisory Committees

The task of the committee—providing scientific peer review—is politically neutral and technocratic, so there is no need for representatives. —Cargill v. United States, 173 F.3d 323 (5th. Cir. 1999)

The preceding chapters offer a historical and conceptual perspective on the politicization of science advisory committees discussed in this book’s introduction. The first part of chapter 1 explained how Machiavelli developed a rhetoric of expertise that promised unmediated access to the facts, concealing the expert’s own work in the creation of expert advice. Chapters 2 and 3 showed how modern scientists and philosophers created an amalgam of modern science and representative government, held together by an abstract dichotomy between will and reason. They reserved both scientific and political representation to a reasoning elite, which derived its legitimacy from the willing but silent consent of a witnessing public. It should now be apparent that both sides in the Plan B controversy assumed a liberal-rationalist view of representative government. Each side assumed that expertise best represents public interests when it remains epistemologically and institutionally insulated from popular expression of those interests. Before moving on to consider challenges to the liberal-rationalist image of representation, this chapter shows how it shapes the politics of government advisory committees in the United States. Specifically, this chapter illustrates the politics of liberal rationalism with reference to the fair balance provision of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which is the key legislation governing the composition of such committees in the United States.1 FACA requires the membership of federal government advisory committees “to be fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed by the

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advisory committee.”2 My analysis of various articulations of FACA’s balance provision reveals that most current advisory committee guidelines rest on a double standard that echoes the liberal-rationalist dichotomies between will and reason, politics and science. Most guidelines direct agencies to evaluate potential expert members of advisory committees solely in terms of their professional qualifications, and nonexpert members in terms of their political interests. This double standard has fostered judicial, administrative, and political controversies and conundrums, suggesting a need to rethink the prevailing mode of conceiving fair representation on government advisory committees. To avoid misunderstandings, it may be worth noting that the politics of advisory committee guidelines cannot be equated with the politics of advisory committees, and there is inevitably a gap—sometimes a very large gap—between what the guidelines prescribe and what actually happens in advisory committees’ day-to-day work. This does not mean, however, that the guidelines are irrelevant. Not only do they provide a normative backdrop that potentially shapes how advisory committee members go about their tasks, but advisory committee guidelines also offer insights into how agency administrators and other public officials understand the concept of representation and its role in government advisory committees. Legislative and Judicial History of FACA’s Balance Provision In fiscal year 2007, 52 agencies of the U.S. government maintained 915 active advisory committees composed of about 65,000 members.3 The composition of these committees is governed by a variety of federal and agency-specific rules and regulations, foremost among which is FACA. FACA became law in 1972, more than twenty years after concern over industry influence on government advisory committees led the Justice Department to prepare the first federal advisory committee guidelines in 1951. In the intervening period, Congress considered a variety of bills to regulate advisory committees, several of which included versions of the balance provision quite different from the final legislation. This history is not reviewed in detail here, but highlighting just a few early formulations of the balance provision shows how later interpretations of the provision rewrote legislative history to squeeze it into a liberal-rationalist mold. During the 1969–1970 legislative session, the Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations held hearings on S 3067, a bill “to provide

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for consumer, small business, and labor representation” on advisory committees that advised the Bureau of the Budget on the approval of public information requests of federal agencies.4 This bill, which did not pass, applied to only a very limited number of committees. Then in the spring of 1971, the House considered HR 4383, a bill that applied to all federal advisory committees and contained the formulation of the balance requirement later included in FACA: “fairly balanced in terms of points of view represented and functions to be performed.” The House report on the bill, however, included a more specific formulation than the legislation itself, stating that the bill would require advisory committees to include “representatives of conservation, the environment, clean water, consumer, or other public interest groups.”5 In contrast to the later focus on “direct interests” by the federal courts, this formulation suggests that advisory committee members represent abstract disembodied interests, not the concrete individuals presumed to hold those interests. While the House was considering HR 4383, the Senate took up three separate bills on advisory committees. One required that “at least onethird of the members” would be people “who are knowledgeable and competent to represent the interests of the public with respect to the subject matter of such committee” (S 1637).6 This was the first bill to explicitly call for the appointment of committee members to represent not the direct interests of “public interest groups” and their members, but the abstract “interests of the public” as such. It thus differed from both previous and subsequent efforts to protect the public interest by ensuring a balance of competing direct interests. Another bill (S 1964) contained the vague requirement that advisory committees be “fairly balanced in terms of the particular responsibilities of the committee.”7 A more expansive call for public representation appeared in a third bill (S 2064), which required advisory committees to be “representative of all those who are legitimately interested in the responsibilities and functions of the committee.”8 The reference here to people who are “interested,” rather than to those who “have an interest,” suggests a conception of subjective, direct interest rather than abstract, disembodied interest. Exactly whom this formulation includes, however, depends entirely on who is deemed to be “legitimately” interested. It potentially includes both people in other countries and members of future generations. In June and July 1971 the Senate held twelve days of hearings on federal advisory committees.9 A subsequent compromise bill (S 3529) rejected

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both the explicit group representation requirement of S 1637 and the vague formulation of S 1964, requiring instead that membership of any advisory committee “shall be representative of those who have a direct interest in the purpose of such committee.”10 The balance requirement is barely mentioned in the Senate report accompanying the compromise bill, and it apparently received little attention. The report’s only reference to the balance requirement notes that there was “considerable opposition” to the requirement in S 1637 that one-third of the members represent the public interest, particularly from agencies whose committees deal with “such issues as national defense and foreign policy, trade secrets . . . financial institutions and markets,” as well as “information concerning the competence and character of individuals” such as that addressed by grant review committees.11 Then as now, people were suspicious of the notion that advisory committees concerned with technical matters ought to include members specifically charged with representing the public interest. Seeking to accommodate such concerns, the report notes, the compromise bill eliminated the one-third requirement for public representatives but kept the provisions for public transparency and participation. In the end, when a House-Senate conference committee prepared a bill for consideration by the full Congress, it adopted the formulation of the House bill (HR 4383), quoted earlier. This did not prevent the Senate report on the bill from summarizing the balance requirement with reference to its own version, stating that the bill required advisory committees to be “representative of those who have a direct interest in the purpose of the committee.”12 The federal courts have repeatedly seized on this statement as indicative of the “legislative history” of FACA, thus neglecting the other congressional formulations of the balance requirement. Congress passed the compromise bill in September, and President Richard Nixon signed it into law on October 6, 1972. Since FACA’s passage, Congress has occasionally sought to alleviate the ambiguities of the balance provision by specifying in the authorizing legislation for particular advisory committees precisely which fields of expertise they are to include.13 And in the case of some committees, Congress has specifically prohibited consideration of political affiliation in selecting members. Amendments to FACA were introduced in the Senate in 1989 (S 444) and 1991 (S 2039). Both of these bills, which failed to become law, would have required all federal advisory committees to have a plan for achieving balanced membership, including a specification of

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the factors to be considered and a statement as to whether members would represent nongovernmental interests, and if so, which parties or interests they would represent. Congress successfully amended FACA in 1997 to exempt the National Academy of Sciences from most FACA requirements, but it did not revise the balance requirement. Indeed, the ambiguities contained in the various congressional formulations of the balance provision have persisted. One federal judge thus described FACA as an example of “unimpressive legislative drafting,” and characterized its provisions as “obscure, imprecise,” and open to conflicting interpretations.14 It is not surprising, therefore, that the ambiguities of FACA’s legislative history have led to similar ambiguities in federal court decisions. The dominant approach, however, has interpreted the balance provision through a liberal-rationalist lens, conceiving fair representation in terms of a split between expert knowledge and citizen interests. The federal courts have occasionally acted to remedy what seem to be obvious violations of FACA’s balance requirement, but they have not offered a definitive standard of advisory committee balance. The courts have usually viewed FACA’s balance requirement in terms of the “direct interests” of plaintiffs, in part because standing to sue in U.S. federal courts requires that plaintiffs show they have suffered an actual “injury in fact” that was caused by the defendant and that the court has the authority and capacity to redress. In a 1983 case, for example, the court wrote: “the legislative history makes clear, the ‘fairly balanced’ requirement was designed to ensure that persons or groups directly affected by the work of a particular advisory committee would have some representation on the committee.”15 Given that the direct interest standard does not appear in the language of FACA itself, and that the legislation leading up to FACA included a variety of formulations of the balance provision, it is misleading for the court to claim that “the legislative history” of FACA conclusively supports the direct interest standard. The court determined that the plaintiff had a plausible claim to represent the direct interests of a particular group of people, and therefore, that it deserved a seat on a federal advisory committee that would potentially affect those people. There are several other cases in which federal courts have relied on the direct interest standard to require that advisory committees rectify imbalances by including additional members.16 In several cases, however, federal courts have refused to rectify alleged imbalances, sometimes to preserve a perceived executive branch prerogative to solicit advice

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conducive to its goals. In other cases, courts have explained their refusal to rectify alleged imbalances by arguing that whether an interest group adequately represents those it claims to represent—and hence, whether one of its members should be included on an advisory committee—is a political question that cannot be determined by the courts. The most revealing such case is a 1989 case heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals,17 in which Judge Silberman noted that the relevant points of view are “virtually infinite,” and that he could not conceive of a “principled basis” for a court to determine which points of view deserve representation.18 A direct interest might be taken to refer to “economic, ideological, or intellectual interest (or all three).”19 Furthermore, Judge Silberman argued, courts cannot determine which committee members represent which interests. “Everyone in the entire United States is a consumer of food products, so I do not understand why any American—including all those who have already been appointed to the Committee—would not legitimately be considered a consumer representative.”20 Judge Silberman’s assessment was disputed by the other judges in the case, but it has been endorsed in several other federal court cases.21 In their assumption that those suing to be included on federal advisory committees must demonstrate a narrow individual or group interest in the committee’s topic—rather than, say, information, arguments, or social perspectives relevant to its deliberations—the rulings in these cases offer a further illustration of the liberal-rationalist model of representation. According to one view, articulated by Judge Silberman, the courts cannot rectify imbalances in advisory committees, because it is impossible to say which interest group has the best claim to represent a particular interest. Individual interests are seen as essentially subjective, and everyone has diverse and conflicting interests, which they rank order in all sorts of different ways. Therefore, interest groups can only claim to represent abstract general interests, not particular individuals holding direct interests. An environmental group, for example, may well speak for a logger’s genuine interest in preserving the forest, but not for his stronger interest in preserving his company and his job. From this perspective, it is inherently suspect for an interest group to claim that it represents any actual people.22 According to another view, interest groups do represent the direct interests of both their members and others with similar interests, so questions of committee balance are judiciable. When a committee obviously excludes such direct interests, judges holding this view have required that agencies include their representatives on

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the committee in question. The two sides agree, however, that the key issue is whether advisory committee members represent the direct, subjective, individual interests of their constituents. The basic view of the citizenry is that shared by liberal theories of representative government. Everyone seems to assume that advisory committees are adversarial rather than deliberative bodies, a view that subverts their institutional purpose within representative democracy, as I argue in chapter 9. Moreover, judges on each side of this dispute have failed to articulate a conception of fair balance applicable to the expert committee members not charged with representing interests. For the most part, the courts have left it to administrative agencies to apply FACA’s balance provision to expert committee members. Science and Politics in Federal Agency Guidelines As noted in the introduction, one of the central issues in advisory committee balance is the relationship between science and politics. Public officials tend to assert the need for strict boundaries between science and politics, yet scholarly studies of agency practice reveal a far more flexible and permeable boundary.23 Indeed, contrary to widespread belief, most U.S. federal advisory committees are not composed exclusively or even primarily of technical experts. According to one study, of the 976 federal advisory committees in existence in 2004, only about one-third (344 committees) were composed of more than 75 percent technical members, defined as people holding an advanced degree or significant professional experience in science, engineering, or medicine. Another third (353 committees) had no technical experts whatsoever.24 Moreover, observers often disagree on whether an advisory committee is primarily technical. Nonetheless, federal advisory committee guidelines assume the need for a sharp division between science and politics. A powerful manifestation of this assumption appears in the classification scheme for federal government employees: Regular Government Employee (RGE), Special Government Employee (SGE), representative, or consultant. RGEs are long-term government employees, very few of whom serve on advisory committees. Consultants are usually experts serving on National Institutes of Health (NIH) special emphasis panels, which conduct peer reviews of research proposals. Experts employed on a temporary or intermittent basis on federal advisory committees are usually classified as SGEs. Representatives are those who serve

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as spokespersons of particular groups or organizations. Committees may include any mixture of categories, but the issues relevant here arise with regard to committee members classified as either SGEs or representatives.25 It might seem that the distinction between SGEs and representatives would greatly simplify the task of ensuring advisory committee balance, because it suggests separate criteria for evaluating expert and nonexpert nominees to advisory committees. With regard to experts, the task would be to solicit a balance of scientific disciplines; in the case of representatives, it would be to ensure a balance of political interests. This apparently straightforward approach, however, overestimates the objectivity of scientific experts, and it underestimates the expertise of interest group representatives. The category of Special Government Employee was created by Congress in 1962 to relax conflict of interest laws for advisory committee members, thus making it easier for them to serve “without relaxing basic ethical standards or permitting actual conflicts of interest.”26 SGEs were first distinguished from “representative” members of federal advisory committees in a presidential memorandum of May 2, 1963, “Preventing Conflicts of Interest on the Part of Special Government Employees,” issued by President John F. Kennedy. The memorandum stated, It is occasionally necessary to distinguish between consultants and advisers who are Special Government Employees and persons who are invited to appear at a department or agency in a representative capacity to speak for firms or an industry, or for labor or agriculture, or for any other recognizable group of persons, including on occasion the public at large. A consultant or adviser whose advice is obtained by a department or agency from time to time because of his individual qualifications and who serves in an independent capacity is an officer or employee of the Government.27

President Kennedy’s memorandum groups together representatives who speak for the direct interests of particular groups with those who speak for abstract interests of “the public at large.” It distinguishes both these types of representatives from committee members selected for their “individual qualifications” who serve in an “independent capacity.” It might seem strange that independence is here contrasted with speaking for the public interest, as those who speak for the public interest, including many scientists, are presumably independent of particular interests. The contrast makes sense, however, if it is meant to imply a distinction between those who have professional qualifications and those who represent

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interests of any kind at all. This distinction parallels the liberal-rationalist divides between facts and values, science and politics. It effectively translates Madison’s conception of representative government into a framework for staffing advisory committees. The provisions of the Kennedy memorandum remain in effect today. Indeed, recent guidelines emphasize the importance of properly classifying committee members, and prospective members are warned: “don’t ever begin your committee until you know what your status is going to be while serving on a committee.”28 The only significant change, contained in the 1982 guidelines issued by the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) and repeated in several recent memoranda, has been to remove the category of public interest representative. The OGE now defines “representatives” simply as committee members who speak for others with an interest in the topic of the committee.29 The OGE explains that “representative members are not being appointed on committees to exercise their own individual best judgment on behalf of the Government. Instead, representatives serve as the voice of groups or entities with a financial or other stake in a particular matter before an advisory committee.”30 A staff member at the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO, formerly the General Accounting Office) further explains that “representative members are expected to represent a particular and known bias—it is understood that information, opinions, and advice from representatives are to reflect the bias of the particular group that they are appointed to represent.”31 These statements reaffirm the association of “individual and independent judgment” with expert rather than lay members, as well as the notion that the task of representatives lies in advancing the direct interests of particular individuals or groups. This dichotomy between expert judgment and popular will is a legacy of the liberal-rationalist image of representative government. The OGE formulated these guidelines partly in response to some confusion, itself quite revealing, associated with the ambiguities of the word represent and its cognates. As quoted previously, President Kennedy’s memorandum states that a representative is anyone with “a capacity to speak for firms or an industry, or for labor or agriculture, or for any other recognizable group of persons, including on occasion the public at large.”32 This formulation leaves open the possibility that scientists might themselves be construed as a “recognizable group of persons.” Indeed, a 2004 GAO report found that several government agencies were classifying some of their committee members as “representatives” of particular

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scientific fields, such as biology or toxicology.33 This practice is made possible by the fact that congressional authorization statutes and committee charters rarely specify the category or categories of members to be appointed. Moreover, authorizing legislation sometimes uses the term represent to mean speak for a particular constituency, such as labor or business, and sometimes to mean stand for a particular body of knowledge or scientific discipline.34 In its response to the GAO report, the OGE objected to the GAO’s interpretation of the Kennedy memorandum and the OGE guidelines, arguing that there was nothing ambiguous about them: “It is simply not logical to say that a field of or area of expertise is a ‘group of persons.’ ”35 The OGE insisted that the only reason that agencies were appointing experts as representatives was to avoid burdensome conflict-of-interest requirements, which apply to members appointed as SGEs but not to those appointed as representatives. The OGE may well have been correct as to why agencies were appointing experts as representatives, but there is nothing illogical about the notion that experts may constitute a “group of persons” with interests. Just consider the long history of universities and other research institutions lobbying the government for public funds.36 In an essay published over forty years ago, Harvey Brooks offered a tellingly ambiguous account of “representation of the scientific community” on government advisory committees. Brooks explained that “scientific advisory committees are not legislative bodies,” but he also defended the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) against charges of being unbalanced by noting that “there have always been industrial scientists on the PSAC.”37 The 2004 GAO report was similarly ambiguous. It agreed with the OGE that agencies were probably appointing scientists as representatives to avoid conflict-of-interest requirements, but the GAO argued that in some cases experts may be appropriately classified as representatives. Such cases, however, constitute an exception that should be carefully distinguished from the regular use of expertise: “Fields of expertise may be defined as a stakeholder community only in instances where the subject matter a committee is addressing would have a particular impact on a field of expertise— for example, biologists, teachers, or doctors—but not in cases where the experts are called upon to provide expert advice on the basis of their individual judgment.”38 The GAO thus acknowledged that experts may have interests, while insisting that when they do they should be treated as representatives and not as experts. The GAO thus maintained the liberal-

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rationalist view of representation and the dichotomy between science and politics on which it rests. Conclusion The preceding discussion suggests that regulatory guidelines aimed at implementing FACA’s balance provision have followed two widespread but mistaken assumptions: experts do not have interests, and representatives do not have expertise. Some commentators have responded to the problems with the interest-based model of advisory committee balance by rejecting the entire notion of selecting a balance of nonexpert committee members. Indeed, some people seem more willing to apply the idea of balance to experts than to nonexperts. “Balancing interest groups has no place in panel formation; balancing disciplines does.”39 A more persuasive response appeared in a 1989 report on FACA by the advocacy group Public Citizen, which argued against the “schizophrenic approach” of using different conflict-of-interest reporting requirements for SGEs and representatives.40 The report recommended replacing the current “dual system” with a single conflict of interest reporting requirement for all advisory committee members. The report also recommended amending FACA to require that committees have at least “some representatives” of both affected industries and public interest groups, as well as state or local governments, except in cases where the agency in question makes a specific finding that particular interests are not relevant to a particular committee.41 Although the Public Citizen report held to the direct interest model of advisory committee representation, it correctly rejected the prevailing divide between experts and nonexperts. Recent changes in advisory committee guidelines implicitly recognize the difficulties with a rigid division between experts and nonexperts. In a 2005 memorandum the OGE notes that one potential reason to classify committee members as representatives is that they are “expected to engage in regular consultations with outside groups or stakeholders” and may have access to “privileged or confidential information” from such stakeholders. Nonetheless, the OGE notes, it “may be rare” for representatives to have authority to bind the outside groups they represent to positions adopted within a committee. This is “because of the difficulty a member would have in reaching consensus or agreement among the various interested stakeholders or groups on issues before a committee.”42 The OGE here recognizes what political thinkers since Burke have argued:

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if representatives bind themselves too closely to their constituents, they will not be free to adjust their positions in the course of deliberation, rendering genuine deliberation impossible. Such concerns have led several agencies to establish guidelines for identifying conflicts of interest among committee members appointed as representatives.43 Such measures implicitly acknowledge that even committee members appointed as representatives need to be relatively independent of their constituents. However, they do not fundamentally challenge the prevailing assumption of a narrow interest-based model of representation. The situation is similar with regard to committee members classified as experts (SGEs). There seems to be a growing recognition that even experts have distinct “points of view.” According to the 2004 GAO report, out of nine different advisory committees at nine different agencies, all nine considered ethnicity and gender, eight considered geography, and six considered employment sector in their appointment decisions.44 However, the report concluded that only the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responding to previous GAO recommendations, consistently assessed candidates’ past public statements on relevant issues and other information needed to fully assess the “points of view” of expert committee members. It is difficult to balance the points of view on a committee without fully assessing what they are. In these various respects, the liberalrationalist model of representation continues to shape the politics of government advisory committees in the United States.

II Democratizing Representation in Science and Politics

5 Thomas Hobbes and the Authorization of Science

Leasure is the mother of Philosophy; and Common-wealth, the mother of Peace, and Leasure. —Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Efforts to rethink the liberal-rationalist view of representation outlined in the previous chapters will find few more intriguing interlocutors than Thomas Hobbes. One of the first and most powerful critics of Cartesian dualism, Hobbes puts science in a political context without reducing it to politics. He thus challenges recent critics of constructivist science studies who assume that giving up Enlightenment rationalism is the first step on a road toward either mob rule or a totalitarian state. Conversely, Hobbes calls on science studies to devote greater attention to the distinctly political dimensions of science. And by showing how science and politics become intertwined, Hobbes challenges political theorists who conceive politics in opposition to the sciences. Finally, Hobbes’s account of representation is instructive for efforts to democratize the politics of science, and it offers a suggestive approach to the representation of nonhumans. As with Machiavelli, much Hobbes scholarship can be divided into two camps.1 The first severs Hobbes’s political theory from his natural philosophy, arguing that whichever one focuses upon, they are best understood separately from each other.2 Despite the insights generated by such studies, they fail to see Hobbes as the systematic thinker he aspired to be, and they reproduce an untenable dichotomy between science and politics. The second camp interprets his thought as a precursor of positivist social science and behaviorism. According to this reading, which fills some with hope and others with dread, Hobbes applies the seventeenthcentury’s mechanistic conception of nature to politics, thus offering the

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first genuinely scientific theory of politics.3 A variation on this reading portrays Hobbes as a Grand Artificer, seeking to redesign and control society according to mechanistic principles.4 There is no lack of evidence for these interpretations, but by focusing on the impact of Hobbes’s natural philosophy on his political thought, they neglect not only the reverse relationship, but also how the boundary between the two has been historically constructed. Other interpretations, in contrast, like the one offered here, emphasize the relationships between Hobbes’s political theory and his natural philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of language.5 Among these is the seminal study by Shapin and Schaffer, discussed in chapter 2. Shapin and Schaffer argue that Hobbes sees natural science as holistically related to social conventions and political interests. Hobbes fails to win the contest for public credibility, they argue, because Boyle’s version of science is more compatible with Restoration society.6 Shapin and Shaffer thus conclude their book with the ironic observation that Hobbes’s loss to Boyle in the contest for public influence substantiates Hobbes’s own conventionalist view of science: “As we come to recognize the conventional and artifactual status of our forms of knowing, we put ourselves in a position to realize that it is ourselves and not reality that is responsible for what we know. Knowledge, as much as the state, is the product of human actions. Hobbes was right.”7 Shapin and Schaffer here suggest that “reality” plays no causal role in the construction of scientific facts. Hobbes is thus cast as a tragic figure who was “right” that scientific knowledge is determined by its social context, and for that very reason he lost his fight against Boyle. In this respect, as Latour and others have argued, Shapin and Schaffer transform Hobbes into a spokesperson for a polemical version of the strong program in the sociology of scientific knowledge.8 Their concluding statement thus arguably contradicts more careful formulations of the strong program, which explicitly acknowledge that scientific knowledge is shaped by empirical evidence.9 But it fits the relativist image of the social studies of science that its critics love to hate. Although Latour has also been a favorite target of such critics, he actually argues “No, Hobbes was wrong,” because Hobbes invents a “monist society” populated by the “naked calculating citizen” for whom “Power equals Knowledge.” Latour’s Hobbes is an über-constructivist who seduces Shapin and Schaffer into “swallowing politics as the only valid source of explanation.”10 Where Shapin and Schaffer cast Hobbes as the tragic loser in his debate with Boyle, Latour sees Hobbes and Boyle as

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coauthors of our “modern constitution.” The result of their dispute is the division between science and politics that persists to this day. Latour writes, Boyle is not simply creating a scientific discourse while Hobbes is doing the same thing for politics; Boyle is creating a political discourse from which politics has to be excluded, while Hobbes is imagining a scientific politics from which experimental science has to be excluded. In other words, they are inventing our modern world, a world in which the representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract.11

The division between science and politics gives the modern constitution its authority. Political authority rests on the free consent of citizens, who are deemed free only when they deny or evade natural constraints. Scientific authority rests on the objectivity of scientists, who are thought objective insofar as they remain independent of politics. Boyle attempts to insulate science from politics, argues Latour, and Hobbes attempts to reduce science to politics, but both deny the dependence of each sphere on the resources of the other. Latour goes on to argue that despite how Hobbes’s and Boyle’s theories deny the interdependence of science and politics, in practice they each acknowledge the importance of mixing political and scientific resources. Hobbes implicitly acknowledges that the state relies on science and technology, but his political theory portrays the state as a purely human artifact. This contradiction between theory and practice, which maintains the image of an ontological boundary between science and politics, is one that “practice resolves but can never express.”12 Latour’s reconstruction of the Hobbes-Boyle debate serves him well in his brilliant analysis of the modern paradox of science and politics. Poor Hobbes is cast as an anxious relativist who doggedly pursues a grand project of remaking the world with nothing but social relations, unable to admit his secret reliance on material things. He seems like a distant ancestor of the Bush administration official who famously chided those in the “reality-based community” for expecting that political decisions should respect established facts.13 Given the many insights generated by Latour’s work, it might seem like academic quibbling to object to his reading of Hobbes. But the problem is not merely that Latour ignores key elements of Hobbes thought; it is that these very elements offer promising resources for avoiding the modern dilemmas that Latour identifies. Moreover, as I discuss in chapter 7, Latour has been carrying some Hobbesian baggage,

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including a juridical theory of representation inimical to democracy. As explained in the introduction and chapter 3, juridical theories conceive representation in terms of a one-to-one substitution between representer and represented. Only part of Hobbes’s view falls under this label, but that seems to be the part that Latour has adopted. In sum, Latour and many other commentators trace a radical-constructivist conception of science and politics back to Hobbes, although he did not hold such a conception; and they take from him a juridical conception of representation, although his thinking about representation goes well beyond it. One might be tempted to simply toss Hobbes aside and start from scratch, but in the following I pursue a different strategy. I offer an interpretation of Hobbes that shows how he bridges the constructivist and rationalist elements of his thought with his materialist metaphysics and social theory of language. Hobbes does argue that scientific knowledge is a human creation (how could it not be?), but its creation is both constrained and enabled by various material, social, and linguistic relations. Hobbes does insist that science should be subject to the will of the sovereign, but his argument reveals a greater historical sensibility than his critics recognize. That is, he does not argue that science is politics, but rather that under certain conditions, science easily becomes politicized. In the second half of the chapter, I show how Hobbes’s nominalist theory of knowledge reinforces his constructivist conception of political representation. Although Hobbes’s theory of representation has juridical elements that reappear in liberal political thought, its constructivist elements challenge the liberal model. Whereas the liberal theorists discussed in chapter 3 believed that representatives take the place of a preexisting public will, Hobbes conceives representation as a matter of constituting the citizenry. I argue that this aspect of Hobbes’s thought offers conceptual resources for a democratic response to politicized science. Nominalism, Materialism, and the Social Language of Science As noted in the introduction, debates over the politics of science frequently feature defenders of traditional conceptions of science accusing their constructivist critics of being in denial about reality. They repeat Hume’s suggestion that the insincerity of philosophical skeptics becomes obvious when the party is over and, like everyone else, they exit by the

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door and not the window. Anyone who thinks reality is “constructed,” they say, should try making that claim in an airplane at 35,000 feet. Hobbes’s nominalism has made him subject to similar charges. Ian Hacking describes nominalism as one of the “sticking points” or irresolvable points of conflict in recent arguments between constructivists and their critics.14 Simply stated, nominalists believe that scientists impose order on the world; their critics believe that scientists discover the world’s inherent structure. Critics have often read Hobbes’s nominalism as a form of radical constructivism. Michael Oakeshott, for example, argued that for Hobbes a scientific proposition “is not an assertion about the real world.”15 Richard Peters claimed that Hobbes holds a “bizarre and authoritarian theory of truth” that anticipates Nazi science and Lysenkoism.16 For Sheldon Wolin, Hobbes’s view of science and politics has an arbitrary, despotic structure, “indifferent to external facts of geography, economics and culture.”17 And for Peter Dear, in a Hobbesian polity “there would be no philosophical experts. The only ‘expert’ is the king, the central authority who disciplines all reasoning, by the sword if necessary.”18 In a similar vein, several scholars have found similarities between Hobbes’s philosophy of science and logical positivism, which offers a “private” version of nominalism, insofar as it reduces the meaning of words to logical relations independent of society.19 The logical positivist reduction of language to logical forms—an effort initially motivated by a very Hobbesian concern to reduce ideological conflict—is indeed reminiscent of Hobbes’s effort to reconstruct science and philosophy on the model of geometry. Geometry has the great advantage, Hobbes argues, of producing indisputable knowledge.20 And Hobbes certainly embraces some form of nominalism when he writes that there is “nothing in the world Universall but Names; for the things named, are every one of them Individuall and Singular.”21 And hence, “True and False are attributes of Speech, not of Things.”22 Given the destruction of the Tower of Babel, Hobbes argues, and the gradual development of different languages in different countries, “how can any man imagine that the names of things were imposed from their natures?”23 But does Hobbes’s rejection of the notion that the names of things correspond to their natures entail a belief that science cannot hook up with reality? Whether Hobbes was entirely consistent in his use of terminology is not here at issue.24 The charge of radical constructivism neglects both Hobbes’s materialism and his social theory of language, each of which I can only briefly touch upon here.

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Writing in the context of the religious battles surrounding the English Civil War, Hobbes develops his materialism partly in response to the various religious factions and Scholastic academics who, Hobbes believes, dupe the people with talk of incorporeal spirits. After all, he writes, “who, that is in fear of Ghosts, will not bear great respect to those that can make the Holy Water, that drives them from him?”25 Similarly, Hobbes attacks Boyle’s refusal to engage the ontological question of whether a vacuum exists, because Hobbes thinks the idea of an invisible, incorporeal vacuum is not just philosophically absurd but politically dangerous.26 In this respect, Hobbes’s materialist ontology is closely linked with his political goals. Hobbes shares the view of early modern skeptics, noted previously, that our sense perceptions do not provide direct and unmediated knowledge of the world. And he also shares the response to skepticism developed by members of the “Mersenne circle,” a group of philosophers with whom Hobbes was associated while in France intermittently during the 1630s and throughout the 1640s, including Marin Mersenne, Pierre Gassendi, and René Descartes. These philosophers agree that although our senses may deceive us about the real properties of world, we can be sure that our perceptions are caused by the mechanical motion of the world having an impact upon our senses. In contrast to Descartes, however, Hobbes does not posit the existence of a disembodied mind. Indeed, he consistently maintains that “every part of the Universe, is body; and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe.”27 For Hobbes, in contrast to Descartes, human knowledge is entirely grounded in material experience, and there is no separate immaterial self that observes the sense impressions in one’s mind.28 This means, as Samantha Frost shows in an important study, that Hobbes does not share what became the standard liberal image of the autonomous self. Hobbes’s “thinking-bodies” are enmeshed in material and social relations, such that interdependence and heteronomy are central to Hobbes’s view of the self.29 Nor does Hobbes’s materialism assume the inert, lifeless matter associated with other versions of seventeenth-century mechanism. Hobbes does reject the Aristotelian notion that matter has intrinsic purposes, as well as the vitalism of the radical Protestant sects, because he fears that they introduce uncontrollable forces into politics. But Hobbes develops an account that Frost calls “variegated materialism,” which envisions a variety of different material forms, including thinking, speaking human bodies.30 As Frost argues, Hobbes does not simply shift the self to the matter side of Descartes’ dualism,

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leaving us with a cold, inert, dumb self. Rather, Hobbes rejects the dualism altogether. Indeed, the assumption that Hobbes’s materialism reduces human life to unthinking matter assumes the very Cartesian dualism that Hobbes seeks to avoid. This is important, because Hobbes’s materialism renders a radical-constructivist conception of science impossible. How do Hobbes’s thinking-bodies acquire knowledge of their world? Like many of his contemporaries, Hobbes believes that our ideas about the external world result from sense impressions that are nothing but motions inside our bodies, but these motions are caused by interactions between the motions of real things outside of us and previously existing internal motions.31 Although our ideas never directly correspond to the outside world, this does not prevent us from intellectually reconstructing what must be in the real world in order for us to have these particular ideas. Thus, Hobbes writes, “it is more accurately said, that we see the sun, than that we see the light.”32 Hobbes’s mechanistic theory of perception suggests that objects that appear similar to us—say, objects that are blue—really are similar. The images in our brains are caused not merely by our own fantasies or ideologies but by the motions of the things we see. Hobbes’s philosophical materialism reinforces what one might call his political materialism—that is, his attention to the material dimensions of politics. Contrary to Latour’s characterization, Hobbes explicitly and repeatedly highlights the reliance of a commonwealth on “the Plenty, and Distribution of Materials conducing to Life.”33 Similarly, Hobbes’s conception of power includes not only all manner of social relations— reputation, success, affability, nobility, and the like—but also “Arts of publique use, as Fortification, making of Engines, and other instruments of War.” Although the “the true Mother” of such technologies is science, they are “brought into the Light, by the hand of the Artificer.”34 Hobbes’s materialism is closely linked with his social theory of language, which provides another bulwark against any sort of radical constructivism. Hobbes believes that humans and animals both have a capacity for passively registering experience, but that only humans develop language. Humans share their faculties of sense with animals, but through “the help of Speech, and Method, the same Facultyes may be improved to such a height, as to distinguish men from all other living Creatures.”35 Language allows humans to organize the flood of sense impressions, which in turn creates a capacity for rational thought. Whereas the natural mind can only

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register things as particulars, the invention of language allows humans to go beyond the perception of particulars and register the same particular thing under different names or conceptions, as well as different particular things under the same name or conception. This makes it possible to associate individual things into classes, and then, when encountering a new thing, to identify its properties according to its membership in a class of things.36 The natural mind responds passively to the real attributes of things, and language allows humans to create general categories that link those things together in terms of real similarities and differences. Finally, the positivist or radical constructivist reading of Hobbes’s nominalism also neglects Hobbes’s distinction between the relation between words and things on the one hand, and the relation between words and ideas on the other.37 This distinction leads to a “public” or social interpretation of Hobbesian nominalism. Hobbes argues that the proper use of language requires that people remember not only the ideas that link names with things, but also the reasons why particular names are used to denote particular objects or signify particular ideas.38 As an example, he cites the proposition that two and three make five, which “has been determined by the common consent of speakers of the same language.”39 Hobbes makes clear that such “common consent” to the meaning of words is manifest in “the actual use of terms” and is usually not explicit.40 “For it is incredible that men once came together to take counsel to constitute by decree what all words and all connexions of words would signify.”41 Consent to the use of words does not imply that speakers have actively agreed that a word will name the same thing or signify the same idea to each of them. Consent implies only that the word in fact has the same meaning for those who use it. Consent to the meaning of words is the result of a materially embedded social process, and it has little to do with the choices or decisions of either speakers or hearers. The criterion for the proper use of language is thus not express consent but social efficacy, and efficacy is determined in part by the material properties of things.42 In Williams James’s succinct formulation of the same point, “Names are arbitrary, but once understood they must be kept to.”43 Although extremely cursory, this summary suggests that the reading of Hobbes as embracing some sort of positivist nominalism or radical constructivism, which would reduce science to either macrosocial forces or the subjective opinions of those in power, fails to capture key features of Hobbes’s thought. Moreover, by neglecting the social and material di-

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mensions of Hobbes’s thought, such readings view Hobbes through a liberal-rationalist lens. They attribute to Hobbes an epistemology based on an abstract rational individual who creates knowledge in private. To be sure, as Quentin Skinner argues, Hobbes developed his mechanistic view of liberty as individual freedom-of-motion in explicit opposition to the republican view of liberty through collective self-government.44 In this respect, Hobbes contributed to the emergence of liberal rationalism. But by exaggerating the rationalism and individualism in Hobbes’s conception of science, typical readings of Hobbes’s nominalism are more Hobbesian than Hobbes himself. The Politics of Definition One might still ask, however, whether Hobbes’s nominalism leads inevitably to political absolutism.45 If so, then a Hobbesian willingness to politicize science would pose a threat to any sort of democratic politics. Hobbes famously argues that the basic cause of the English Civil War was the lack of stable linguistic conventions, and he often seems to be looking for a way to establish indisputable verbal definitions.46 For Hobbes, “The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity.”47 But Hobbes also makes clear that scientists alone cannot eliminate verbal ambiguity. Stabilizing language is easier for small communities of scientists than for the political communities that encompass them, but the difference is one of degree rather than kind.48 Because defining a word requires “the raising of an idea of some thing in the mind of the learner . . . the definition of it can be nothing but the explication of that name by speech.”49 And because scientists must use speech to explicate definitions, their efforts are vulnerable to the very linguistic ambiguities that Hobbes wants to avoid. Defining and explicating the names used in reasoning is not enough to stabilize their meanings, because the problem of uncertain signification “belongs not so much to names, as to those that use names, for some use them properly and accurately for the finding out of truth; others draw them from their proper sense, for ornament or deceit.”50 Hobbes even says that his own exposition of first philosophy is only “sufficiently demonstrated to all those, that agree with me in the use of words and appellations,” and in Leviathan he admits that his readers will have to look within themselves to confirm his conclusions; “For this kind of Doctrine, admitteth no other Demonstration.”51

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These doubts about the efficacy of definitions reinforce Hobbes’s more general concerns, meticulously documented by Skinner, about the power of reason to eliminate controversy.52 For Hobbes, “Reason it selfe is alwayes Right Reason. . . . But no one mans Reason, nor the Reason of any one number of men, makes the certaintie; no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it.”53 Like today’s science studies scholars, Hobbes here contrasts “Reason it selfe” with the practical use of reason, suggesting that the latter is more important for understanding the relationship between science and politics. Those who claim themselves to be more knowledgeable than others seek merely to establish their own interest as right reason, thus “bewraying their want of right Reason, by the claym they lay to it.”54 Similarly, Hobbes mocks political advisors who rely on basic common sense in their private affairs, “where their particular interest is concerned,” but when advising others “they study more the reputation of their owne wit, than the successe of anothers buisnesse.”55 Hobbes’s overall point is that science requires language, which is always embedded in social conventions, making it an unreliable tool for maintaining linguistic certainty. All speech, including and perhaps especially scientific speech, involves an inherent element of risk. As Arendt says of human actions, and Latour of scientific claims, the power of words depends on how they are taken up by others.56 Hobbes thus explains that “hee that pretendeth any proofe, maketh Judge of his proofe him to whom he addreseth his speech.”57 Here one might note a difference between Hobbes’s view and the recent attempt by Harry Collins and Robert Evans to conceive expertise as a “real and substantive” attribute of individuals.58 For Hobbes, in contrast, what matters is whether the claims of reason are accepted by the relevant audience. In the end, despite Hobbes’s many promises about the contribution of science to civil peace—and despite all the critiques of his allegedly positivist, rationalist, despotic reconstruction of language and knowledge— Hobbes’s conception of science includes a profound recognition of science’s inherent weakness. Science is weak because its dependence upon social and linguistic conventions exceeds its ability to stabilize them. For Hobbes, “The Sciences, are small Power; because not eminent; and therefore, not acknowledged in any man; nor are at all, but in a few; and in them, but of a few things.”59 Hobbes’s humanist critics need not worry so much about the rationalizing power of Hobbesian science. To adapt

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Louis Hartz’s comment about majority rule in America, Hobbesian science is “an amiable shepherd dog on a lion’s leash.”60 But of course there is more to the story. For even if the lion’s leash usually hangs quite loosely around science’s neck, it is Hobbes’s own lion, or rather sea monster—mighty Leviathan—who is holding it. And when the need arises, Leviathan will pull the leash tight. Those who read Hobbes as a radical constructivist thus emphasize his view that civil peace requires a unified and indisputable sovereign authority. Indeed, Hobbes repeatedly argues that parties to a dispute must agree on a public arbitrator “to whose sentence they will both stand, or their controversie must either come to blowes, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”61 As this statement suggests, and in contrast to some scholarly assessments, it does not matter to Hobbes whether the dispute is political, religious, or scientific.62 Hobbes does suggest that disputes in civil science, politics, and religion are more common than in natural philosophy. In principle, however, not even geometry, the most indisputable of sciences, is immune to political conflict. “For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any mans right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, That the three Angles of a Triangle, should be equall to two Angles of a Square; that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of Geometry suppressed.”63 The sovereign’s authority extends to all spheres of activity relevant to civil peace, including science, and only the sovereign can judge what is relevant.64 What is important to notice, however, is that Hobbes sees little point in attempting to define in advance which areas of science are subject to sovereign command. In this respect, Hobbes does not equate knowledge and power, as Latour writes, but rather conceives the politicization of science in social and historical terms, as something that happens whenever scientific and political claims intersect. As I argue in chapter 8, which particular aspects of science are political at any given time is in part a practical question that cannot be determined by philosophers alone. Moreover, although Hobbes’s nominalism does facilitate the politicization of knowledge, it does not entail or require political absolutism. Indeed, Hobbes’s nominalism supports other aspects of his thought that offer important resources for a democratic rather than absolutist response to politicized science. Although historians will rightly warn against presentist distortions of Hobbes’s intent, the fact that Hobbes hated democracy

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need not prevent his democratically inclined interpreters from selecting a few items from his toolbox. In the remainder of this chapter I consider two such tools: Hobbes’s conception of the people and his view of the state, placing them in the context of his theory of representation. Although elements of Hobbes’s theory support a juridical model of representation similar to the liberal theories considered in chapter 3, his view of the people as constructed through representation challenges those theories. Just as Hobbes views scientific knowledge as constructed out of real attributes of nature, he sees the collective identity of the people as constructed from individuals’ real political aspirations and imaginative capacities. The moderate nominalism of Hobbes’s natural philosophy thus reappears in his political theory. The multitude’s authorization of the sovereign, and their resulting collective identity as a state, depend on their ability and desire to imagine themselves as represented by the sovereign. Constructing the People Hobbes formulated his theory of representation in opposition to both theorists of the divine right of kings and parliamentarian advocates of popular sovereignty and limited government.65 Defenders of the divine right of kings, such as Robert Filmer, had argued that all sovereignty comes directly from God, and that Parliament is hence a strictly consultative body with no decision-making authority. They reinforced their claims with reference to so-called mysteries of state (arcana imperii), suggesting that kings had to make judgments based on obscure, ineffable considerations that outsiders could never fully comprehend.66 Such arguments for absolute monarchy were challenged during the early stages of the English Civil War by advocates of Parliament who claimed that natural society consists of free communities. And therefore, as one parliamentary writer put it, “every Monarch hath his power from the consent of the whole body” of the people.67 The parliamentary writers thus echoed the Renaissance humanist tradition that had conceived the natural human condition in terms of self-governing communities. The parliamentarians conceived representation as a matter of both acting on behalf of the people and representing an image or likeness of the people. When royalists argued that Parliament could not defend the people’s interests as competently as the king, the parliamentarians responded that Parliament necessarily represents the interest of the people, because it

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is such a good likeness of the people. Parliament is, Henry Parker wrote, “vertually the whole kingdom it selfe.”68 The parliamentary writers thus conceived representation in terms of accurate correspondence between representative and represented. The Levellers agreed with the parliamentarian criticism of the royalist appeal to divine sanction and elite competence, and they shared the parliamentarians’ view that Parliament should be a likeness of the people. But the Levellers argued that the existing Parliament was not, in fact, sufficiently representative.69 Situating himself among these three factions—royalists, parliamentarians, and Levellers—Hobbes agrees with both the Levellers and the parliamentary writers in their rejection of the theory of divine right of kings, and he also agrees with their claim that political authority rests on the consent of the people. But Hobbes scoffs at the notion that “the people” can act as one to authorize an assembly to represent them. For Hobbes, there is no such thing as the body of the people prior to its representation by the sovereign. Hobbes thus maintains what Skinner calls a “derisive silence” on one of most hotly debated questions of his time: what is a satisfactory likeness of the people?70 Levellers and parliamentarians had argued intensely over which social groups should be included in Parliament, and what the numerical proportion should be between Parliament and the population it represents. Hobbes says nothing about these questions, because he does not consider Parliament, or any other representative body, to be a likeness of the people in the first place. For both historical and philosophical reasons, Hobbes thinks the parliamentary assumption of a natural unity of the people ridiculous. And he sees nothing but inevitable factionalism in their notion that the people must be represented by a multiple and diverse body, such that citizens of different walks of life would all find a resemblance of themselves within the representative assembly. Hobbes develops his own theory of representation to avoid these perceived problems. In his early political writings, The Elements of Law and De Cive, Hobbes locates the sovereign’s authority solely in the people’s submission. In Leviathan, however, Hobbes says the people authorize a sovereign representative.71 They either covenant with each other to authorize a sovereign, or they each create an individual covenant with a conquering power to spare their lives in exchange for obedience, on the expectation that others will do the same. Hobbes recognizes that there will always be people who claim natural authority over others based on their superior competence, but such claims are specious, for they wrongly assume that “Master and

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Servant were not introduced by consent of men, but by difference of Wit.” Bees, ants, and certain other creatures may be said to live in naturally constituted societies, Hobbes writes, but humans can live together peacefully “by Covenant only, which is Artificiall.”72 For Hobbes, as for Machiavelli, there is no plausible prepolitical basis for political order, and so order must be created through politics. More generally, and unlike much modern social science, Hobbes conceives politics as something that cannot be fully reduced to or explained by historical, material, ethical, legal, religious, or social factors. Today the dispersion of politics and the rise of network governance make it impossible to follow Hobbes in identifying politics with the state. Nonetheless, his view of politics as providing a framework for other social activities remains instructive. I return to Hobbes’s conception of politics when considering what makes science political in chapter 8. Because humans are prone to violent competition, Hobbes tells us, people in the “state of nature” agree with each other to give up their rights to govern themselves, and they authorize one person or assembly to represent them. They “reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will.”73 By agreeing with others to form a commonwealth, individual members of “the multitude” become “authors” of a sovereign power, which is an “actor” that acts in their name. Their agreement to create a commonwealth is performative; it does not precede but rather entails the formal authorization of a representative of that commonwealth. Hobbes thus explains that “in every agreement the persons making the agreement must exist before the agreement itself. But prior to the formation of a commonwealth a People does not exist, since it was not then a person but a crowd of individual persons.”74 For Hobbes, the creation of a commonwealth and the authorization of its representative occur simultaneously. Where both the parliamentary writers and the Levellers had assumed that representation requires resemblance between the representative and a preexisting natural community, Hobbes argues that the people constitutes itself by authorizing a representative. In this respect, Hobbes challenges the standard liberal view of representation, according to which representatives either mirror or refine the collective will of a preexisting sovereign people. Hobbes’s argument is important for our understanding of democracy today, because the common view that representation poses a threat to democracy, as discussed in the introduction, rests on a view of representation as resemblance of a preexisting public will.

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It is also important to note that, for Hobbes, each member of “the multitude” is equally qualified to authorize the sovereign. Hobbes admits that those few who follow what Hobbes deems to be correct scientific method may acquire knowledge superior to the multitude. But this is the exception that proves the rule that “they that have no Science, are in better, and nobler condition with their naturall Prudence; than men, that by misreasoning, or by trusting them that reason wrong, fall upon false and absurd generall rules.” Most important, Hobbes argues that people’s mental and physical faculties are sufficiently equal that “the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he.” Although some people may in fact be intellectually superior, their superiority is rarely so overwhelming as to prevent others from disputing it. True science, Hobbes writes, “very few have, and but in few things.”75 The very specialization that confers expertise renders expert aspirations to rule others implausible. Or to paraphrase Steve Fuller, as well as Socrates in Plato’s Apology, experts are laypeople in almost everything they do.76 Hobbes proceeds to mock the pretensions of the learned, arguing that the only reason to deny a basic equality of intelligence is “but a vain conceipt of ones own wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves.” People might acknowledge that others are “more witty, or more eloquent or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.” The reason is that “they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance.”77 Even if everyone is not equally competent, it behooves us to assume that we are, because most people are too vain to be convinced otherwise. Despite the centrality of this epistemic egalitarianism to his philosophy, or perhaps because of it, Hobbes is at pains to resist any radical political implications. This position is most obvious with regard to women, whom Hobbes includes in some of his statements regarding natural equality, while failing to draw any consequences for their role in society.78 Moreover, Hobbes assumes that few people are satisfied with equal status, and so he argues, against the republican tradition, that vanity and anxiety will induce most people to strive for acknowledged superiority over others.79 This assumption underlies his case for an absolutist state grounded in a formal conception of representation. For Hobbes, the very thing others saw as grounds for democracy—the lack of any person or class of persons

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with superior competence—actually requires the authorization of a sovereign government with nearly absolute power. Juridical Representation and Unitary Democracy In some respects, as the preceding section suggests, Hobbes offers a powerful formulation of the juridical view of representation central to liberal theories of representative government. He does this in at least two ways: first, with his apparent restriction of citizens’ involvement in representation to the moment in which they authorize the sovereign representative; and second, with his unitary conception of political society. These elements of Hobbes’s thought dominate many assessments, but their implications for theories of representation have not always been fully appreciated. Whereas Rousseau rejects representation as incompatible with popular sovereignty, Hobbes elevates representation into an absolutist principle of political authority. Yet both Rousseau and Hobbes (the latter with some qualifications, discussed shortly) conceive representation in terms of the authorization of a representative.80 In this respect, they both think the representative substitutes for and effectively replaces the represented. Regardless of whether the subject’s rights are renounced or transferred, Hobbes writes, “he is said to be Obliged, or Bound, not to hinder those, to whom such Right is granted, or abandoned, from the benefit of it.”81 Put simply, Hobbesian subjects may not interfere with their representative’s actions on their behalf. Whereas contracts between individuals in civil society are enforced by the sovereign, and thus may be limited to an authorization to perform certain specific actions, there is no earthly power that could enforce limits on the citizens’ authorization of the sovereign. (The only exception is when citizens are faced with death at the hands of the sovereign, in which case Hobbes recognizes a natural right to resist.) To be sure, Hobbes allows for limited substantive standards against which the people might judge whether the sovereign is adequately representing them.82 Hobbes writes, for example, that both God and the laws of nature imposed a duty on the sovereign to procure the peace and safety of the commonwealth.83 Moreover, the grounds of sovereignty go beyond a minimal concern for public safety, because “by Safety here, is not meant a bare Preservation, but also all other Contentments of life” that individuals can acquire for themselves without hurting others,

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including science and technology.84 Hobbes also makes clear that the sovereign cannot rely on fear alone to ensure obedience but must also educate the subjects concerning the grounds of their rights and obligations.85 And Hobbes explains that the sovereign is liable to certain “Natural Punishments,” such that intemperance leads naturally to disease, negligent government to rebellion, and rebellion to slaughter. Violations of the law of nature inevitably produce “naturall, not arbitrary effects” that amount to punishments for injustice.86 As Kinch Hoekstra puts it, contrary to radical constructivist interpretations, “Even the great artifice Leviathan must inhabit the natural world.”87 Nonetheless, Hobbes clearly does not believe that citizens should be actively involved in guiding or restraining sovereign authority, and these limited substantive standards do little to expand Hobbes’s theory of representation beyond a narrow focus on authorization. Unlike Machiavelli, Hobbes viewed political conflict as an invidious threat to public safety. He thus opposed the ancient republican idea of mixed government, branding it a violation of the very meaning of “this word body politic,” which “signifieth not the concord, but the union of many men.”88 A government that divides the power to rule among diverse institutions, Hobbes argues, will inevitably degenerate into competing factions and eventually civil war.89 Having rejected mixed government, Hobbes also rejects the republican idea of liberty that it was intended to defend: freedom from domination and participation in self-government. As mentioned previously, Hobbes undertakes a bold and fundamental redefinition of liberty as “absence of externall Impediments.”90 This redefinition of liberty as “corporall Liberty” allows him to argue in Leviathan that even the subjects of an absolute sovereign retain significant liberty within “the Silence of the Law.”91 As Richard Tuck has noted, Hobbes’s unitary image of the commonwealth is strikingly similar to Aristotle’s notion of a degenerate or extreme form of democracy, where the rule of law gives way to the decrees of populist demagogues.92 Whether or not Hobbes actually got the idea from Aristotle,93 Hobbes states repeatedly that all commonwealths created through institution (in contrast to those established by the forceful “acquisition” of a conquering power) begin as democracies. What Hobbes means by democracy, however, is nothing more than people voluntarily agreeing to form a commonwealth and abide by the majority decision on what sort of commonwealth to form.94 Indeed, it turns out that Hobbes thinks democracies necessarily degenerate into

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either aristocracies or monarchies, and a democracy is “no more than an aristocracy of orators, interrupted sometimes with the temporary monarchy of one orator.”95 If every Hobbesian commonwealth begins democratic, none remains so, if democracy is taken to include a role for the people beyond merely authorizing its rulers.96 At the heart of Hobbes’s theory of representation, then, appears a unitary conception of democracy similar to the collectivist elements of Rousseau’s social contract. This connection helps explain some of the dilemmas raised by prevailing conceptions of representation, including Latour’s, which I explore in chapter 7. Specifically, when the represented are conceived as a unitary body, representation easily becomes a matter of substituting for the represented. Representing the State by Fiction Despite the prominent role of unitary democracy and formal authorization in Hobbes’s theory of representation, it would be a mistake to reduce it to those dimensions. Indeed, it is worth looking in more detail at Hobbes’s famous discussion of representation in chapter 16 of Leviathan, where he suggests a provocative way to think about the political dimensions of scientific representation. Hobbes writes, “A Person, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction. When they are considered as his owne, then is he called a Naturall Person: And when they are considered as representing the words and actions of an other, then is he a Feigned or Artificiall person.”97 This fascinating passage suggests a distinction between “natural persons” and “artificial persons,” and within the class of artificial persons, between those who represent others “truly” and those who represent others “by fiction.”98 In the next paragraph Hobbes draws an analogy to the persona or mask of a stage actor, suggesting that being a “person” entails representing either oneself or another. Natural persons represent themselves, and their words and actions are “owned” by themselves. Artificial persons represent some other person or something, and their words and actions are attributed to whom or what they represent. Representatives do not “own” the actions they undertake on behalf of others. In line with Hobbes’s discussion of sovereign authorization, not representatives but their constituents must “own up to” or take responsibility for their representative’s actions. As persons,

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representatives are capable of speech and action, but when acting in their capacity of artificial persons, they are not accountable for the speech and actions they take on behalf of others. Hobbes’s formulation also suggests, as David Runciman points out, that he intends the term artificial to mean feigned, contrived, or forged, rather than unreal, fake, or nonexistent, as some commentators have assumed.99 Something that is contrived or forged, such as a forged signature, is not what it seems, but it still has a real presence in the world. In this sense, the actions of representatives are contrived as belonging to some other person or thing—namely, their constituents—but they are not unreal, because they actually occur and have real effects. Hobbes’s sovereign is thus best understood as an artificial person, because it takes real actions that represent the commonwealth. But what or whom does the sovereign represent? And does the sovereign represent “truly” or “by fiction”? A commonwealth is formed, Hobbes writes, when “a Multitude of men” agree with each other to grant, by majority vote, a single person or an assembly of persons “the Right to Present the Person of them all, (that is to say, to be their Representative;).”100 Hobbes does not say that the sovereign represents the individuals who constitute the “multitude.” The sovereign represents the people only constituted as a person, state, or commonwealth. This means that the sovereign does not represent individual citizens but only the people in their abstract collective identity. The multitude is made into one person, Hobbes writes, “with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular. For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One.”101 In this respect, Hobbes’s view differs from the standard liberal view that conceives representation in terms of a one-to-one contract between representatives and individual citizens. Hobbes also says that the commonwealth or state has no capacity to “doe any thing, but by the Representative, (that is, the Soveraign).” Indeed, the state is an abstraction—“I speak not of the men, but (in the Abstract) of the Seat of Power”—and abstractions, according to Hobbes’s nominalism as discussed previously, are elements of language used to signify conceptions.102 In this case, the abstract idea of the state signifies collectively authorized power. Because the state is an abstraction and cannot act on its own, it cannot authorize its own representative, and so it cannot be represented “truly.” The state, therefore, can only be represented “by fiction.”

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What is representation by fiction? “There are few things, that are uncapable of being represented by Fiction,” Hobbes writes. Such things include inanimate objects such as churches, hospitals, or bridges, as well as “Children, Fooles, and Mad-men that have no use of Reason,” and also an “Idol, or meer Figment of the brain . . . as were the Gods of the Heathen.” Because inanimate things and people who lack reason cannot authorize their own representatives, they must be represented by fiction. This point follows from Hobbes’s earlier discussion of authorization, where he stated that only “persons” capable of taking responsibility for their actions can authorize a representative. Inanimate things, children, the mentally incompetent, and idols are not persons in this sense. Because these people and things cannot authorize their own representatives, their representatives must be authorized by a third party. In the case of inanimate objects, the third party may be “those that are Owners, or Governours of those things.” The owner of a bridge, for example, might appoint someone to maintain it, and that person would represent the bridge by authority of the owner. Similarly, with regard to children and others who lack reason, “he that hath right of governing them, may give Authority to the Guardian.” A guardian represents a child in the sense of taking care of the child. In the case of idols, Hobbes writes, “the Authority proceedeth from the State.” And because there is no property in the state of nature, there are no owners who could authorize someone to represent a person or thing by fiction. Therefore, Hobbes concludes, there cannot be representation by fiction “before there be some state of Civill Government.”103 It thus seems that the state, for Hobbes, belongs to the class of children, hospitals, bridges, and other people or things that cannot authorize their own representatives and are thus represented by fiction. The state cannot act by itself, else it might conflict with the sovereign, so the state cannot be a natural person.104 The state is arguably closer to “the Gods of the Heathen” than Hobbes’s other examples of representation by fiction, because both the state and the gods—unlike madmen, hospitals, bridges, and children—are not owned or otherwise in a relation of dominion prior to being represented. Indeed, prior to being represented, the state does not even exist.105 Authorizing the sovereign thus creates the fiction that the people can act together responsibly as a unified state. Hobbes’s discussion implicitly raises the question of the audience of representation.106 If people refuse to recognize the representative of a

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bridge as such, the bridge itself cannot do anything about it. Maintaining the fiction thus requires that both citizens and the sovereign contribute to the appearance that the person represented by fiction (the state) is acting on its own. In this respect, and in contrast to the juridical account outlined previously, Hobbes sees representation as an ongoing process of imaginatively constructing a relationship between citizens and their representatives. As Runciman puts it, “Representation by fiction will only work if real persons are able to establish a framework of real actions through which responsibility can be attached to something that cannot itself act.”107 The multitude fictitiously ascribes responsibility to the state, which is nothing but the people in their fictitious capacity to act as a single unit. Put differently, the people create the conditions necessary for the actions of the sovereign to be attributed to them in their collective identity as a state. By authorizing one person or assembly of persons, the multitude creates both a fiction of themselves as a unified person (a state) and an artificial person (a sovereign) that represents the state by fiction. Citizens must conceive themselves as represented by the sovereign, or else they would fail to see the sovereign and its punishments and decrees as legitimate, which would lead the entire commonwealth back to a state of war. But they cannot identify themselves too closely with the sovereign—as do the democratically inclined Levellers and parliamentarians, in Hobbes’s view—because the people would then rebel whenever the sovereign fails to respond to their immediate desires. The constiuents must see the sovereign as one of them, so that they feel represented, but not as merely one of them, so that they recognize the sovereign as what unites them. As Paul Dumouchel explains, “Men must recognize themselves in the sovereign, but this representation of themselves must at the same time hide them from themselves.”108 In this respect, Hobbes’s theory of representation contains a crucial aesthetic dimension. The sovereign not only represents the power of the citizens but is also a representation of power itself. The famous frontispiece of Leviathan thus conveys the idea that the sovereign is simultaneously composed of and lords over the people. The citizens, and also we the readers, can see ourselves in the sovereign, but only in part, for the people who constitute the Leviathan remain faceless. The people are unified by being reduced to their common elements.109 Hobbesian representation requires the imaginative projection of a unified people, the state, which is given life by the words and deeds of the sovereign and maintained in the political consciousness of the people.

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By thus expanding the idea of representation beyond an instrumental one-to-one contract between individual citizens and their representatives, Hobbes challenges juridical models of representation, even as other aspects of his thought reinforce such models. As Dumouchel argues, the goal of Hobbesian representation is not to manifest or reproduce the actions, perspectives, or opinions of the constituents, but rather for the constituents to own the representative’s words and deeds.110 For Hobbes, it is both unnecessary and impossible for the representative to mirror all the features of the multitude. In this respect, Hobbes challenges the standard liberal image of political representation as analogous to a correspondence theory of truth. Authorizing Nature’s Spokespersons Hobbes’s conception of representation by fiction also suggests a way to conceive the representation of interests, identities, and entities that either cannot or do not authorize their own representatives.111 Theorists of representation have long wrestled with the question of how to conceive representation of this sort. One might distinguish at least three classes of such constituents: 1. people who for contingent reasons are either physically prevented from voting or choose not to vote, but who may otherwise articulate their interests or contest how others represent them (felons, people with physical or mental illness, people who are too busy, too poor, too alienated to vote); 2. people who are legally barred from voting, but who may otherwise articulate their interests or contest how others represent them (resident aliens, people in foreign countries, children); 3. people and things who necessarily can neither vote nor articulate their interests or contest how others represent them (human infants, animals and other nonhumans, future generations). These categories are obviously rather fluid, and there may be a strong case to make that infants and animals are quite capable of expressing certain basic interests. Nonetheless, all of these people and things present challenges for any theory of political representation. There are many precedents, however, for extending the concept of representation beyond the authorizing decisions of individual voters. Indeed, as mentioned in the introduction, it arguably belongs to the concept of political represen-

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tation itself that representatives take account of abstract interests and do not remain bound to the expressed desires of their voters. From this perspective, constitutional protections and other established institutions might be understood as the means by which past representatives sought to represent the interests of future generations. Similarly, public deliberation is in part an effort to represent interests not expressed in regular electoral politics. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson thus suggest that representatives need to consider not only their electoral constituents but also their “moral constituents.”112 This notion animates the various institutional mechanisms advocated by deliberative democrats, such as consensus conferences, citizen juries, and deliberative polls. Thompson has even proposed a Tribune for Noncitizens to represent foreigners in national legislatures.113 As suggestive as such efforts are, there are still many questions about how to conceive the relationship between representatives and their nonauthorizing constituents. These questions are of particular interest to environmental political theorists concerned to find a way to represent nature in contemporary politics. Recognizing that, as Robert Goodin puts it, “disembodied interests are simply incapable of marking paper ballots,” environmental political theorists generally end up recommending that humans adopt the role of nature’s trustee.114 This seems to be a practical approach, but it does not solve the problem of how to identify the interests that nature’s trustees should represent. As Michael Saward points out, leading accounts of representing nature in environmental politics often suggest the possibility of unmediated access to nature’s interests.115 They present the representation of nature in terms of a unidirectional transmission of a preexisting objective value to a passively receptive representative. John Dryzek recommends, for example, that we respectfully “listen to signals emanating from the natural world,” apparently without any role for scientists or other co-interpreters of these signals.116 Science is certainly not the only way to mediate the representation of nature’s interests, and putative representatives might also appeal to religion, tradition, common sense, and various other potential mediators. The point is that without articulating a process of mediation, claims to represent nature’s interests echo the rationalist view of representation traditionally associated with both modern science and liberal democracy. Hobbes’s notion of representation by fiction suggests a way to move beyond a one-way transmission belt conception of representing nature’s interests.117 For Hobbes, nearly anything can be represented by fiction;

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it all depends on the owner authorizing a representative. To act in your own name, you need to be a natural person, but merely to act, you do not need to be a person at all. Representation by fiction requires only a person by fiction (the person or thing represented), an actor (the representative), an owner (who authorizes the representation), and an audience (for whom the representation is performed).118 Like the inanimate things, children, fools, and gods mentioned by Hobbes, natural entities and processes cannot authorize those who represent them. As noted previously, Hobbes says the representatives of inanimate things, children, and fools must be authorized by those who own, govern, or have “dominion” over the people or things to be represented. The authority to represent idols and gods, in contrast, who are not owned by anyone, proceeds directly from the state. Using Hobbes’s terminology, one might say that environmentalists who aim to represent the interests of a particular animal species, habitat, or ecosystem might be authorized by the private owners or public authorities with legal rights to the nonhumans in question. The authority to represent nature’s interests, from this perspective, does not directly rest on knowledge about nature, but rather on the formal authorization by those with legal control over it. If natural entities cannot object to how they are being represented (a debatable point), objections may be raised by those who authorized the representatives. Representing nature in this sense is analogous to a lawyer representing a charitable trust, in which the beneficiaries also cannot object to how it is being represented.119 This Hobbesian perspective on representing nature allows one to avoid the vexed question of whether it even makes sense to speak of nature having interests in the first place. For Hobbes, representation involves not the discernment of constituents’ genuine interests or identities, but rather the attribution of words and actions to them. If a polar bear’s duly authorized representative says that it wants its habitat protected, and the representative’s audience accepts the representative claim, nothing else needs to be said. Of course, what it means to be duly authorized may be highly contentious, but Hobbes makes clear that all representatives in civil society represent either by authority or at the pleasure of the sovereign.120 Disputes over who holds authority to represent the polar bear, therefore, will be adjudicated by the sovereign. In a democratic society, where the people are sovereign, the resolution of conflicts over who properly represents the polar bears becomes a political question to be determined through democratic processes.

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Taken by itself, Hobbes’s notion of representation by fiction does not offer a full account of representing nature’s interests, but it does suggest that environmentalists might complement the moral and epistemic justifications of their representative claims with claims based on formal authorization. Formally authorized environmental representatives already exist, of course, in the form of environmental protection agencies, environmental interest groups who participate in administrative proceedings, and other formalized state and nonstate modes of soliciting input from nature’s advocates. Conceiving such agencies and interest groups as formally authorized spokespersons for nature may be one way to enhance their public legitimacy. Of course, the political representation of nature’s interests is not the only way to represent nature. Scientific representations of nature, for example, aim not in the first instance to protect nature’s interests, although they may well be intertwined with such efforts, but rather to facilitate the assessment, prediction, and control of natural entities and processes. Chapter 2 showed how scientists have often presented themselves as nature’s spokespersons. When the words and actions of scientists are “considered their own,” as Hobbes would put it, they have failed as scientists. To say that scientists speak for themselves implies that the representations of nature they produced reflect their own interests or biases rather than properties of nature. Using Hobbes’s terminology, we could say that a scientist is an “artificial person” who represents “by fiction,” because the processes and entities of which a scientist makes representations cannot authorize those representations. Who authorizes scientists to represent nature by fiction? Whoever has “dominion” over the natural entities and processes in question. Who that might be, for Hobbes, is not easy to determine. Hobbes states clearly that the “Author of Nature,” as well as its creator and governor, is God.121 In a commonwealth, however, although God may be the author of nature, God cannot be the author of scientific representations. God makes only raw, complex, teeming nature, not the isolated laboratory phenomena that scientific propositions represent. Because scientists create these isolated phenomena and thus presumably have dominion over them, one might argue that scientists could authorize themselves to represent those phenomena. Hobbes also makes clear, however, that there is no science in the state of nature, in part because science requires the leisure and security that only a commonwealth can provide, and in part because science relies on a sovereign authority to arbitrate disputes.122 Assuming that the sovereign

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has dominion over all the material things within its territory, one can conclude that scientists—like the representatives of the “Gods of the Heathen”—can represent nature only with sovereign authorization. Using Hobbes’s terminology, one might also say that the things scientists represent are attributed “ownership”—that is, responsibility—for what scientists say and do in their name. This line of thinking goes beyond Hobbes’s intention, because Hobbes presumably did not believe that bridges, madmen, and children should be deemed responsible for what their representatives do in their name.123 But if we take “responsible” to mean causal rather than moral responsibility, Hobbes’s notion of representation by fiction casts an interesting light on scientific representation. We could say that scientists do not represent things “truly,” because the things do not authorize the scientists to represent them. Scientists represent things “by fiction,” because scientists attribute causal responsibility for the knowledge they produce to the nonhumans they represent. This attribution does not imply that either the things themselves or the claims scientists make about them are imaginary or unreal. It means only that the attribution of responsibility is in some sense a fiction, and therefore it has to be socially maintained. Scientists rely on each other and the broader society to create and sustain representations of nature. Conclusion Hobbes cannot be counted among history’s winners. In addition to losing his philosophical battle against the Royal Society, Hobbes’s belief in absolute monarchy lost out to liberal democracy, and his materialist metaphysics was drowned out by Cartesian dualism. Nonetheless, Hobbes raised questions about the amalgam of modern science and representative government that have come back to haunt today’s democracies. Can scientific knowledge be permanently insulated from politics? Can political representatives mirror or filter a preexisting public will? Hobbes’s answer to both questions is no. Hobbes thus challenges those trying to locate an essential boundary between science and politics, as well as those who seem all too happy to collapse them together. For Hobbes, science becomes political whenever it becomes enmeshed in relations of conflict and power—a view I expand upon in chapter 8. Hobbes also pushes participatory and radical democrats to reconsider their tendency to avoid serious consideration of representative institutions; and he challenges the tendency of deliberative democrats to neglect the egalitarian

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dimensions of formal procedures of authorization and accountability. By offering a formal, nonepistemic justification for authority, Hobbes can help us avoid the elite potential of deliberative theories of democracy. Hobbes also suggests that the tasks of any sovereign include ensuring that science does not threaten civil peace. If the people are responsible for every act of the sovereign, as Hobbes argues, then they are responsible for the sovereign’s authorization of scientific representations of nature. Although today’s critics of the social and environmental impacts of science tend to blame either individual scientists or modern science itself, Hobbes suggests that citizens hold ultimate responsibility for the public consequences of scientific knowledge. To return to Shapin and Schaffer’s previously quoted statement, but now with a twist, one might say that being “responsible for what we know” is a matter of moral and political rather than causal responsibility. Hobbes was “right” that “it is ourselves and not reality” that is politically accountable for the production of knowledge. Hobbesian citizens are accountable for the scientific research that governments sponsor in their name. As long as science remains politically neutral, Hobbes’s doctrine of popular accountability has few implications for science. Like any person authorized to represent someone or something, scientists have the freedom to select appropriate means for fulfilling the purpose for which they are authorized. But whenever scientific claims become politically controversial, the people are accountable for the sovereign’s intervention to mitigate the controversy. Hobbes does not think that accountability for the sovereign’s actions entails participation in its decisions. For this and other reasons, Hobbes does not provide anything like a democratic theory of science. Efforts to develop such a theory, however, might well draw on aspects of Hobbes’s thought.

6 John Dewey and the Reconstruction of Representation

Actively to participate in the making of knowledge is the highest prerogative of man and the only warrant of his freedom. —John Dewey, “Science as Subject-Matter and as Method” Each individual may indeed be a worse judge than the experts; but all, when they meet together, are either better than experts or at any rate no worse. —Aristotle, Politics

No single thinker in the history of political thought has explored the relationship between science and democracy as fully and thoughtfully as John Dewey. Contemporary democratic theorists have usually read Dewey as a participatory or deliberative democrat. I consider him here as a theorist of both political and scientific representation. Dewey offers a number of resources for infusing a democratic spirit into Hobbes’s constructivism. Dewey earned his pay as a professional philosopher, but he aspired to a plain writing style and a broad audience. Unlike most of his colleagues, he sought to focus his work on practical problems rather than academic debates. Indeed, although he was frequently engaged in scholarly debates, in some respects his work found more resonance among social reformers than academic philosophers. During the 1920s, Deweyan pragmatism motivated many to enter the newly emerging professions of health care, social work, and related fields. Pragmatism’s problem-oriented outlook offered an alternative to both the arrogance of technocratic professionalism and the sentimentality of much charity work. Professional philosophers in the United States, in contrast, by the 1950s had turned their attention to the refined abstractions of symbolic logic and language analysis. They came to regard Dewey as “a nice old man who hadn’t the vaguest conception of real philosophical rigor or the nature of a real philosophical problem.”1

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During the second half of the twentieth century, Dewey and pragmatism more generally enjoyed a revival, initiated in large part by Richard Rorty.2 Like Dewey, Rorty wanted to move beyond the interminable debates between realism and antirealism and the false alternatives they assume. But as many have pointed out, Rorty’s “antirepresentationalism” departed from Dewey in significant respects. Rorty set himself the task of “denying that the notion of ‘representation,’ or that of ‘fact of the matter,’ has any useful role in philosophy.”3 Although Rorty acknowledged that the world is “out there,” he urged us to think of the world as nothing more than the beliefs of a particular society about the world. The world itself is “well lost,” and “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones.”4 In contrast to Rorty, as I show in the following discussion, Dewey believed that conversational constraints become intelligible only in the context of material constraints. These constraints are “the world,” and they are not lost.5 Also unlike Rorty, Dewey saw a close link between science and democracy. Dewey’s theory of inquiry and truth shared much with his fellow pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. But where Peirce focused on the purposes of the scientific community, and James on psychology and ethics, Dewey developed a conception of truth with a distinctly social and political dimension.6 Dewey thus often described science as a model of democratic decision making. He also believed that science enables collective problem solving and encourages the virtues of character required of democratic citizens.7 Such sentiments have led critics to read him as either an advocate or an unwitting ally of positivism, technocracy, militarism, and corporate liberalism.8 Dewey clearly tended toward hyperbole when urging science upon his readers. And it did not help that James gave Dewey’s theory of truth an individualist twist by asserting that ideas are true when they are “satisfactory,” and that “individuals will emphasize their points of satisfaction differently.” James also notoriously recommended that truth-claims be assessed according to their “cash-value.”9 Neither James’s nor Dewey’s conception of science can be reduced to such blurbs, however, and Dewey’s theory of inquiry is quite different from that assumed by many critics. Indeed, it makes little sense to criticize Dewey’s view that democracy should emulate science without exploring in detail what he means by science. Dewey has both a critical project and a constructive project that have little in common with any sort of scientism.

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Dewey’s critical project highlights the interdependence of epistemic individualism—the notion that knowledge is a property of individuals— and liberal, realist, and elitist theories of representative government. He notes two essential traits in liberal theories of representative government: first, the assumption that individuals are naturally endowed with the requisite capacities to participate intelligently in public affairs; and second, the notion that frequent elections, general suffrage, and majority rule suffice to ensure the responsibility of elected officials. These two assumptions, Dewey says, are “logically bound up” with each other, and they are both false.10 Despite his early fascination with Hegel, Dewey also argues that organic or communitarian conceptions of the state do not offer a genuine alternative to these assumptions but merely negate them. In place of isolated individuals set in opposition to the state, organic views absorb individuals into an all-encompassing state that suppresses individuality. In thus situating himself between liberalism and communitarianism, Dewey prefigures much recent work in deliberative democratic theory.11 Dewey’s constructive project—or what he calls “reconstruction,” as all constructions confront a given world and begin in medias res—goes beyond a critique of epistemic individualism to consider how science and expertise can best contribute to democracy. Rather than merely debunking collectivist and liberal conceptions of political representation, Dewey shows how representation in a democracy depends on state institutions that facilitate civic engagement in local settings. Dewey frames this project in part as a response to the odd combination of disappointed idealism and debilitating cynicism that he saw in so-called realist theories of democracy. Lippmann’s Lost Public As I noted toward the end of chapter 3, “democratic realists” have long argued that the overwhelming scale and complexity of industrial society render the classical idea of active democratic citizenship obsolete. Even the limited task of holding government elites accountable on election day—let alone more expansive conceptions of citizen engagement— exceeds the capacities of most citizens. One of the first and most prominent democratic realists was the journalist Walter Lippmann. Although the so-called Dewey-Lippmann debate is well known, it is worth highlighting a few points.12

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Echoing Machiavelli’s realist rhetoric, Lippmann sets out in The Phantom Public to examine democracy “in the cold light of experience.” He presents himself as someone “who has lived through the romantic age in politics” and is now “sober and unimpressed.”13 Lippmann goes on to argue that because public officials rely on expert knowledge, ordinary citizens can never fully understand the workings of government. The “private citizen,” Lippmann notes, continues to feel an obligation to attend to politics. “Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. They are managed, if they are managed at all, at distant centers, from behind the scenes, by unnamed powers. . . . He lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.”14 Lippmann does not blame public incompetence but rather “the theory of democracy.” This theory leaves citizens “saddled with an impossible task,” which is nothing less than “to have an opinion worth expressing on every question.” No citizen today, Lippmann argues, not the president of the United States or a professor of political science, can live up to “the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen.”15 Although Lippmann was one of Dewey’s harshest critics, Dewey shared much of Lippmann’s critique of contemporary politics, while disputing his rejection of democratic ideals. In his review of Lippmann’s The Phantom Public, Dewey argues that Lippmann’s criticisms of democratic theory are “aimed in some degree at a man of straw.”16 Democratic ideals, Dewey argues, have not had the historical influence that Lippmann attributes to them. No theory of democracy motivated the creation of modern democratic institutions, because these institutions emerged primarily in response to economic and technological change. Moreover, Dewey argues, as I did in chapter 3, that the modern democratic citizen has generally been conceived as a critical witness of representative government, rather than an active participant in it. Because liberal democracy has conceptualized the citizen as little more than an “umpire in last resort,” Lippmann is wrong to associate prevailing views of democracy with the idea of an “omnicompetent citizen.”17 Dewey agrees with Lippmann, however, that a lack of transparency in public affairs has made genuine democratic citizenship extremely difficult. The increasing obscurity of the causes and effects of public policy prevents citizens from understanding—much less participating in—the activities of government officials. As Dewey later wrote in The Public and Its Problems, the time when “a man might entertain a few general

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political principles and apply them with some confidence” is long gone. “The ties which hold men together in action are numerous, tough and subtle. But they are invisible and intangible.”18 Citizens’ inability to discern the public consequences of political action, Dewey argues, has brought about an “eclipse of the public.” The public has become a “ghost.”19 The conflict between technical complexity and political transparency identified by Lippmann and Dewey still presents a major challenge for democratic politics. Environmental politics, for example, often revolves around threats that remain largely imperceptible to the human senses, such as radiation, pesticides, or global warming. Relying on scientists for information about threats to their health and the environment, citizens are deprived of the concrete experiential resources that might otherwise motivate political action. As Ulrich Beck has written, “Experience— understood as the individual’s sensory understanding of the world—is the orphan child of the scientized world.”20 Arendt argued in a similar vein that by debunking the naive realism of ordinary experience, modern science makes it difficult for citizens to feel at home in the world.21 In their concern with the experiential basis of politics, these authors echo Machiavelli’s notion that politics is a matter of appearances; in a republic, Machiavelli believed, citizens hold leaders accountable for the perceived consequences of their actions. Dewey sought to respond to such concerns without abandoning his belief in democracy. A State of Representatives Inspired by Lippmann’s biting indictment of prevailing democratic ideals, Dewey writes The Public and Its Problems to show how democratic theory can be both hard-headed and hopeful. Dewey opens the book by setting out to find Lippmann’s phantom, titling the first section “Search for the Public.” The opening paragraph makes clear that Dewey is not going to try to beat the journalist at his own game; the public will not be found by disputing Lippmann’s troubling statistics on citizen ignorance and apathy. Nor will collecting new facts suffice. Many people, Dewey writes, “suppose that facts carry their meaning along with themselves on their face. Accumulate enough of them, and their interpretation stares out at you.” But this is not the case, because people tend to view facts in light of their favored doctrines. In politics there is “an immense gap between facts and doctrines,” leading to the type of skepticism displayed by Lippmann. Some might be tempted, Dewey notes a few pages later, “to

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drop all doctrines of this kind overboard, and stick to facts verifiably ascertained.” But this will not work either, because “political facts are not outside human desire and judgment,” and political theories “do not grow up externally to the facts which they aim to interpret; they are amplifications of selected factors among those facts.”22 Not only are facts “theory-laden,” as every aspiring philosopher of science now learns, but theories are “fact-laden” as well—or at least they should be. So Dewey accepts Lippmann’s facts—indeed, despite his reputation among some as a romantic participatory democrat, Dewey’s account of citizen incompetence and self-centeredness is even more dismal than Lippmann’s. But Dewey integrates these facts with an intriguing theory of representation that challenges Lippmann’s basic assumptions about democracy. Dewey first demolishes the standard theories of the state. The Hegelian organic state is an idle abstraction, Dewey argues, unconnected to the historical development of actual state institutions. The same goes for the liberal state of social contract theory, which Lippmann had simply assumed as a backdrop to his bleak picture of democracy. Both these theories, as well as their many variations, see the modern democratic state as the result of “state-forming forces,” such as ideas of freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty. These theories thus echo the doctor’s solemn explanation, in Molière’s satire, that opium puts people to sleep because of its dormitive power.23 Just as recent work in science studies has shown that science is not made scientifically, Dewey teaches that modern states rest on much more than what commonly goes under the name of statebuilding. To get beyond idealized conceptions of the state, Dewey proposes to “start from acts which are performed . . . and consider their consequences.” He quickly adds that it is also necessary to consider “intelligence, or the observation of consequences as consequences,” which is to say, in terms of the acts that bring them about. It is an “objective fact,” Dewey continues, that perception of the consequences of actions “leads to subsequent effort to control action so as to secure some consequences and avoid others.”24 Despite Dewey’s enduring enthusiasm for contingency and change, he believes that human beings have a fundamental drive to exert some degree of conscious control over their lives. Placing himself in a humanist tradition that extends from the Renaissance to the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century and beyond, Dewey asks in another context, “Is it possible for a living being to increase its control of welfare and success? Can it manage, in any degree, to assure

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its future? Or does the amount of security depend wholly upon the accidents of the situation?”25 Asserting any degree of conscious control over one’s life becomes very difficult, Dewey argues, when actions have indirect consequences that extend beyond those immediately involved in the interaction. For Dewey, this difficulty is the germ of the public. “The public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have the consequences systematically cared for.”26 Dewey considers private those interactions that do not affect anyone beyond those engaged in the interaction; interactions that have consequences beyond those so engaged he calls public. The passive language in Dewey’s formulation—“all those who are affected”—reflects the objective quality he attributes to publics that are not yet organized and aware of themselves as a public. Indeed, a term like protopublics would better capture his meaning, for Dewey goes on to explain that a public comes into being only when it is organized by the state. The state arises from—or better, consists of—efforts to respond to the indirect consequences of human actions. Dewey conceives such responses as political representation. Because people indirectly affected by the actions of others are often not in a position to shape or control those actions, “it is necessary that certain persons be set apart to represent them, and to see to it that their interests are conserved and protected.” These persons are the state. Democratizing Hobbes’s nominalism, Dewey argues that neither the state nor the public has an abstract existence that extends beyond the concrete persons who constitute it by acting on its behalf. The state always “acts through concrete persons.” These persons “are now officers, representatives of a public and shared interest.”27 Dewey’s meaning is not always clear, but he seems to envision a process whereby individuals take it upon themselves to represent a shared interest in regulating the indirect consequences of other people’s actions. These people are public representatives, and they constitute the state. Representatives seek to promote the public interest by responding to the indirect consequences of private actions. The “primary problem of the public,” Dewey writes, is to “achieve recognition of itself as will give it weight in the selection of official representatives and in the definition of their responsibilities and rights.”28 Unorganized publics do not first organize and then select representatives; they are organized by individuals who thereby become representatives. Only then, once a public is organized, does it have “weight” in the selection of subsequent

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representatives. Here is Dewey’s best attempt to summarize his view: “The lasting, extensive and serious consequences of associated activity bring into existence a public. In itself it is unorganized and formless. By means of officials and their special powers it becomes a state. A public articulated and operating through representative officers is the state; there is no state without a government, but also there is none without the public.”29 Again echoing Hobbes, Dewey suggests that public representatives partially construct the same public they represent. Representatives cannot simply mirror a preexisting public will, because representation involves organizing and articulating the public itself. Dewey departs from Hobbes, however, by explicitly including a substantive normative standard within his concept of representation. The specific content of the normative standard remains a matter for political practice, but Dewey asserts that “all governments are representative in that they purport to stand for the interests which a public has in the behavior of individuals and groups.”30 For Dewey, representatives must, by definition, seek to promote the public interest. This does not mean representation is always successful. Like all human beings, representatives experience conflicts among their different social roles, and their various private obligations and desires may conflict with their tasks as representatives. The most one can hope for is that their concern for public interests dominates their private desires. “What is meant by ‘representative’ government is that the public is definitely organized with the intent to secure this dominance” of public over private interest.31 Given, as Madison said, that “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” the public must be organized to ensure that representatives promote public interests. In this respect, like more recent theorists of political representation, Dewey avoids reducing his concept of representation to the activities or attributes of any single individual or institution. Representation involves the government, the state, and a diversity of self-conscious publics. Dewey also makes clear that publics arise with respect to all types of activities. It does not matter whether the activities in question are “carried on by a king and his prime minister or by Cataline and a fellow conspirator or by merchants planning to monopolize a market.”32 All that matters is whether the activities in question have consequences that extend beyond those immediately involved in the activity. All activities with indirect consequences create a protopublic, and simultaneously, a need for representatives that transform the protopublic into a self-

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conscious public, aware of itself and capable of responding intelligently to conditions that affect it. Similarly, public representatives need not be associated with state institutions as normally understood. In particular, those who represent the public need not be elected or appointed or otherwise formally authorized to represent the public. Dewey says that he intends the terms government and state functionally, without reference to specific institutions. Just as some people would call the male heads of patriarchal families “officers of the family interest,” every voter is “an officer of the public. He expresses his will as a representative of the public interest as much as does a senator or sheriff.”33 The distinction between public and private, Dewey writes, marks a distinction “between persons in their private and in their official or representative character. The quality presented is not authorship but authority, the authority of recognized consequences to control the behavior which generates and averts extensive and enduring results of weal and woe.” Dewey thus locates the authority of public representatives not in any act of procedural authorization, such as appointment or election, but in the substantive authority that rests on their capacity to respond to the recognized consequences of private action. Similarly, Dewey explains, “Government is not the state, for that includes the public as well as the rulers charged with special duties and powers.”34 All members of the government represent the public, but not all representatives are members of the government. Some recent studies in democratic theory build on Dewey in this respect, highlighting the many nonstate venues in which “citizen representatives” make plausible claims to speak or act for others.35 What sort of consequences are sufficiently “extensive and enduring” to merit the creation of a public? When is the state justified in intervening to control the activities of private associations? Dewey writes that only “important” consequences call forth a public and a state, but he acknowledges that judgments of importance are subject to “error and illusion” and “vagueness is not eliminated from the idea of importance.”36 The most one can do is specify factors to consider in judging the importance of indirect consequences; such factors include “far-reaching character of consequences, whether in space or time; their settled, uniform, and recurrent nature; and their irreparableness.” These criteria are of limited help, of course, as people inevitably disagree about how to apply them in practice. Indeed, there is “often room for dispute” regarding the boundary between public and private, and so the line “has to be

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discovered experimentally.”37 Put differently, how to constitute a public is a distinctly political question. This question is not immune to reasoned argument, and Dewey insists that in recent years societies have developed “better methods of thinking” that enable “observation of consequences which were concealed from a vision which used coarser intellectual tools.”38 As I discuss later in this chapter, Dewey locates the primary exemplar of such methods in the modern sciences. By making the constitution of publics and the state a political question, Dewey distinguishes his view from approaches that rest on prepolitical foundations, including both the all-encompassing idealist state and the minimal liberal state. Dewey does not argue that the foundations typically used to justify political claims—God, Truth, Nature, History, and so on—do not exist. His point is that their value resides in their contribution to concrete experiences, judgments, and courses of action.39 Dewey’s position also differs, however, from the currently widespread notion that everything is somehow political, a view I discuss in detail in chapter 8. Echoing early pluralist theory, Dewey highlights the virtues of friendships, families, and other private associations characterized by “an intimate and subtle sense of the fruits of intercourse.” He notes the value of private associations formed for distinctive purposes: science, religion, art, sports, commerce, and so on. Each of these has “its own peculiar quality and value.” The face-to-face relationships of local associations “generate a community of interests, a sharing of values, too direct and vital to occasion a need for political organization.”40 Like Hobbes, Dewey suggests that the state is usually indifferent to private associations, including scientific associations. Against the Aristotelian view of politics as the key locus of human fulfillment, echoed today by some communitarians and civic republicans, Dewey emphasizes the value of nonpolitical relationships. Despite this appreciation for private associations, Dewey’s normative concept of representation distinguishes his position from the pluralist view of the state as a neutral arbiter of group interests. The state is an association that holds preeminence over other associations, and as soon as private interactions affect people not participating in them, “suddenly the gears of the state are in mesh.” It is impossible to say in advance when state intervention is justified, and the scope of the state is “something to be critically and experimentally determined.”41 Just as the constitution of publics is a political matter, so are the boundaries of state regulation of those publics. Put differently, not everything is politi-

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cal, but anything may become political, and what counts as political is itself a political question. “The all-inclusive nature of the state signifies only that officers of the public . . . may act so as to fix conditions under which any form of association operates.” States should create conditions that support the distinctive activities of private associations, but this does not make those activities themselves political. Not everything affected by the state is part of the state, and not everything affected by politics is political. Indeed, the very existence of the state “presupposes values due to non-political forms of living together which are but extended and reinforced by the public through its agents.”42 Following this logic, Dewey explains that doctor-patient relationships, business contracts, and questions regarding sex and marriage are usually private; but professional licensing, property law, and marriage law are not. All such designations are provisional, however, and whenever private activities have public consequences they become subject to state regulation.43 Dewey’s conception of the public resonates with the notion of technological publics developed by Andrew Feenberg. Feenberg argues that citizens today are constituted as publics by the common experience of particular technologies. “In the new technical politics,” he writes, social groups are constituted by a “framework that defines and organizes them: ‘we,’ as patients, users of a domestic computer system, participants in a division of labor, neighbors of a polluting plant, are the actors.”44 When technologies serve only narrow interests, people may respond by resisting, transforming, or otherwise challenging the values embedded within the technologies. Although today’s consumer, transportation, and communication technologies tend to fragment local communities, they simultaneously facilitate translocal “technically mediated subgroups” linked by the shared use of and subjection to technology. Given the fragmentation of local publics, Feenberg suggests that “the technical network itself” might serve as an alternative locus of representation.45 This spatial dislocation of technological constituencies means that if technologies are to facilitate democratic representation, the typical fixation on the territorial state as the locus of representation must be reconceived to transcend national borders. Like Feenberg, Dewey emphasizes the material constitution of publics, noting that technical and economic changes “alter the modes of associated behavior,” as well as “the quantity, character and place of impact of their indirect consequences,” thus creating a need for new publics.46 The

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state is thus always in flux. “Almost as soon as its form is stabilized, it needs to be re-made.”47 It is important to note, however, that Dewey also emphasizes the value of established state structures. Public representatives cannot fully assess all the changing consequences of private actions. But they can, as Machiavelli recommended, establish “certain dikes and channels” that limit and render somewhat predictable the indirect consequences of private actions. Libertarians view such structures as commands that limit individual freedom. But libertarians assume that the state is created by an authorizing act of will. Where Rousseau employed this assumption to assert a union of the state with the general will, libertarians assume that the will of the people, expressed through the state, inevitably conflicts with the wills of individuals. “If a will is the origin of the state, then state-action expresses itself in injunctions and prohibitions imposed by its will upon the wills of subjects.”48 Similarly, when state authority is justified by nothing more than a hypothetical social contract, or the latest election or opinion survey, citizens have little reason to obey. They might well ask, “Why should the ruler’s will have more authority than mine?” Citizens then experience state action as force rather than authoritative lawmaking. For Dewey, however, laws are not commands but “structures which canalize action; they are active forces only as are banks which confine the flow of a stream, and are commands only in the sense in which the banks command the current.”49 Even criminal law, he argues, is best understood not as a matter of prohibitions but as making the consequences of certain actions predictable. Simply put, Dewey attempts to either replace or complement (he is not always clear) the formal authority of representatives, based on popular sovereignty, with substantive authority, based on their capacity to recognize, organize, and effectively regulate emerging publics. The authority of representatives, for Dewey, rests on some combination of authorization and competence. Dewey thus challenges the focus on popular elections in liberal theories of representative government. The “counting of heads compels prior recourse to methods of discussion, consultation and persuasion.” Majority rule, by itself, is as foolish as its critics claim. “But it is never merely majority rule.”50 The means by which a majority becomes a majority are more important. These means, Dewey believes, should include both lay deliberation and scientific advice.

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Technical Expertise and Communicative Culture Thus far it might seem that Dewey’s search for the public is primarily a top-down affair of representatives constituting new publics. But Dewey outlines several means by which protopublics are more likely to become aware of themselves, and thereby, to represent themselves: citizen participation and contestation; a rich civic culture, characterized by dense networks of communication, or what today has become known as social capital; and the embodiment of technical expertise in social relations. Like Habermas and other deliberative democrats today, Dewey locates the defining feature of civil society in communication and the creation of shared meanings, rather than the voluntarist pursuit of economic goals or the guarantee of civil and political rights.51 Unlike many deliberative democrats, however, Dewey emphasizes the importance of cultural practices, material conditions, and scientific expertise in public deliberation. The state is no better than its officials, Dewey writes, so only by “constant watchfulness and criticism of public officials by citizens can a state be maintained in integrity and usefulness.”52 Similarly, in a letter written years later, Dewey insists on “the absolute importance of democratic action in determining the policies of the government—for only by means of ‘government by the people’ can government for the people be made secure.”53 As recent theorists of political representation have maintained, representation does not contradict political participation but depends on it. Active political participation is not, however, merely a matter of citizens expressing their individual wills. Not only is the isolated will blind and dumb, it is powerless; willpower alone is not enough to get most citizens off the couch. Democracy, Dewey asserts, “must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion.”54 This does not mean, as suggested previously, that all associations need to be democratized in the sense of adopting democratic modes of deliberation and decision making, because democracy is more than a way to make decisions. Dewey conceives democracy as an institutionally differentiated mode of communal organization that enables the “liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common.”55 In Dewey’s most succinct and well-known formulation, “The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy.”56 There is no such thing as “the individual” apart from a person’s relationships with others. And

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because individuals are members of many different groups, each group needs to “interact flexibly and fully with other groups.”57 More contacts with other groups entail “a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond,” which in turn fosters a “liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.”58 This suggests that finding a proper role for science in public affairs depends on bringing the scientific community into interaction with other groups. In this respect, it is only partly accurate to say, as has James Bohman, that Dewey and other pragmatists believe that “science itself is organized democratically” or that “science is successful precisely because it is democratic.”59 For one thing, although Dewey insists that democracy cannot be reduced to voting, majority rule retains a prominence in democracy that it lacks in science. More generally, Dewey views science as one social institution among many, both subordinate to and provisionally autonomous from the state. For Dewey, organizing science democratically means maximizing its modes of exchange with other social institutions, subject to regulation by the state, while ensuring that it continues to pursue its distinctive purposes. In addition to citizen engagement mediated by diverse groups, Dewey argues that publics become aware of themselves through observing and assessing their own activities, thereby giving them meaning. Human association is natural, but a community requires communication among its members. Without communication, associated life continues, interactions and transactions occur, and people create various interdependencies. “But when the phases of the process are represented by signs, a new medium is interposed.” Signs and symbols make it possible to assess, consider, and discuss current and future modes of association. This process amounts to the “conversion of the physical and organic phase of associated behavior into a community of action saturated and regulated by mutual interest in shared meanings.”60 Such creation of shared meanings, for Dewey, is not primarily a matter of reaching agreement through intersubjective speech, as for many of today’s critics of liberalism.61 Dewey conceives the creation of shared meanings as closely intertwined with collective problem solving, a process that goes beyond public discourse and has material, cultural, and technical dimensions. The office of public representative is not restricted to an ethereal realm of pure language, because the “buildings, property, funds,

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and other physical resources involved in the performance of this office are res publica, the common-wealth.”62 When these public things become “issues,” they mediate the generation and representation of new publics.63 Another key precondition for publics to become self-conscious is the public dissemination of scientific knowledge and habits of thought. Like Hobbes, Dewey believes that “knowledge is communication as well as understanding.”64 But for Dewey, scientific communication manifests itself not primarily in the distribution of knowledge but in the diffusion of certain habits of mind. He thus asserts that “the future of democracy is allied with [the] spread of the scientific attitude.”65 Many readers take such statements as evidence of a technocratic view of politics. Sheldon Wolin, for example, claims that Dewey sought to create “a culture oriented towards reinforcing the hegemony of scientific values.” Dewey failed to realize that “science, technology, and corporate capital are essentially impenetrable to, and unincorporable with, democracy.”66 By neglecting this essential difference between science and democracy, Wolin argues, Dewey inadvertently supported capitalist technocracy. Dewey’s first response to such criticisms is to show how they amount to special pleading. Historically, Dewey shrewdly remarks, the charge that science is devoid of moral values has been advanced by “theologians and their metaphysical allies,” and their arguments inevitably invoke a need for “some other source of moral guidance”—namely, themselves.67 The segregation of facts and values serves the interests of those who would apply their expertise in moral values to protect others from the allegedly corrupting effects of science. In addition, Dewey himself offers a series of arguments against the technocracy feared by his critics. First, if the masses are incompetent, as technocrats assume, they will not accept rule by experts. Second, “in the absence of an articulate voice on the part of the masses,” experts will become “a specialized class” that is “shut off from knowledge of the needs which they are supposed to serve.” Whether experts are polling citizens on their political views or immunizing children against smallpox, they require the cooperation of laypeople. The degree of experts’ reliance on popular cooperation varies by context, of course, and Dewey might be accused of idealizing the mutual dependence of experts and lay citizens.68 Nevertheless, Dewey’s view finds support in recent social movements that have succeeded in shaping both the priorities and procedures of scientific research, especially in biomedicine, by exploiting experts’ dependence on popular cooperation in the creation

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and use of knowledge. Finally, Dewey argues that if experts isolate themselves from society, they become “a class with private interests and private knowledge.” Government by experts is nothing but “an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few.”69 More generally, Dewey believes that expert knowledge should not remain the preserve of an elite class but should be integrated into society. The political contribution of experts “is not shown in framing and executing policies, but in discovering and making known the facts upon which the former depend.” Citizens do not need to become “omnicompetent,” a fantasy that Lippmann rightly ridiculed. Instead, citizens require “the ability to judge of the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns.” Citizens need to learn to judge when and how expert knowledge might contribute to the resolution of public problems. Such judgments do not require as much knowledge as people often assume. Much specialized knowledge is already “embodied in implements, utensils, devices and technologies,” such that people employ them without being able to reproduce them. There is today an urgent need for further “currents of public knowledge” that “blow through public affairs.” The sciences should become an “effective possession of the members of the public.”70 Dewey thus challenges the standard liberal conception of the epistemic division of labor, discussed in chapter 3, suggesting that lay and expert judgments should inform each other. One of Dewey’s suggestions for pursuing this goal is to disseminate scientific knowledge through the arts.71 Dewey argues that “ideas are effective not as bare ideas but as they have imaginative content and emotional appeal.” The goal, therefore, should be to bring about “the union of ideas and knowledge with the non-rational factors in the human make-up.”72 For Dewey, attempts to promote the “public understanding of science,” as it is now called, should rely as much as possible on aesthetic modes of communication. In addition to such efforts, Dewey also seeks to promote the public dissemination of science by rethinking what science is in the first place. Dewey understands scientific knowledge as a social product, so the public dissemination of expertise amounts to returning it to its rightful owners. Just as the commercial class mistakenly views wealth as something they have personally produced themselves, the “great conceit” of the intellectual class is to think that intelligence is an individual endowment.73 Understanding this great conceit requires a more detailed look at Dewey’s philosophy of inquiry.

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Scientific Practice and Common Sense The history of science and philosophy of science were long separate academic fields, divided along the lines of the fact/value dichotomy. Historians said what scientists had done, and philosophers showed what they ought to do. The history of science, moreover, was largely the history of scientific ideas. The “historical turn” of the nineteenth century initiated an integration of the philosophy and history of science, but by the 1920s most of Dewey’s colleagues had little interest in concrete scientific practice. Although logical positivism had various strands, and Dewey had much in common with left-wing logical positivists like Otto Neurath and Philipp Frank, Dewey often found himself confronted by philosophers who saw the task of philosophy in “rationally reconstructing” scientific theories to insulate them from ideology.74 Although Dewey praised the logical positivists’ suspicion of ideological manipulation of science and philosophy, he was highly critical of their overall program. Dewey was especially critical of the positivist dichotomy between science and politics, arguing that it concedes politics to those committed to transcendental or antirationalist ideologies.75 Similarly, natural scientific practice, for Dewey, belies the dualist metaphysics assumed by most philosophers. Philosophers must judge the work of the scientist “by what he does and not by his speech when he talks about his work (when he is likely to talk in terms of traditional notions that have become habitual).”76 Like much recent work in science studies, Dewey seeks to develop a theory of science “in accord with actual scientific practice.”77 This does not imply a rejection of efforts to formulate general rules concerning how science is and should be conducted, but developing such rules depends in part on the study of scientific practice. Dewey’s emphasis on the practical activities of scientists leads him to reject the traditional categorical division between scientific knowledge and common sense. For Dewey, science merely refines and expands the problem-solving procedures by which nonscientists develop their capabilities. Dewey identifies freedom with “traits of carefulness, thoroughness, and continuity . . . ability to ‘turn things over,’ to look at matters deliberately, to judge whether the amount and kind of evidence requisite for decision is at hand, and, if not, to tell where and how to seek such evidence.”78 The ideal of science “is wholly a moral matter, an affair of honesty, impartiality, and generous breadth of intent in search and communication.” It is opposed to “vested bias and prejudice, to one-sidedness

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of outlook, to vanity, to conceit of possession and authority, to contempt or disregard of human concern in its use.”79 Science is more a way of thinking than a particular body of knowledge. Although scientists may employ complex theories and procedures not linked in any immediately discernible way to sensory experience, “the vine of pendant theory is attached at both ends to the pillars of observed subject-matter. And this experienced material is the same for the scientific man and the man in the street.”80 Far from seeking to subordinate politics to the alien powers of scientific rationality, Dewey conceives science as a refined form of everyday problem solving. Science and common sense differ, of course, in all sorts of ways, but the difference is a matter of different purposes and degrees of abstraction, not fundamentally different methods. “Compared to scientific knowing, the distinguishing feature of common sense, everyday kind of knowing, is that it is specific.”81 Commonsense statements refer to specific times, places, and events. Scientific propositions, in contrast, aim for universality. The degree to which science achieves this aim depends not on conformity to logical criteria of justification, but on “the extent and refinement of the practical operations of laboratory instruments and other apparatus and techniques at command.”82 With such laboratory techniques and instruments, as well as specialized languages, science departs from the particularities of common sense. By translating “water” into “H2O,” scientists open up a range of possible connections and transformations that remain hidden to common sense. It is therefore ironic, Dewy notes, that common sense knowledge is typically disparaged as “merely practical,” because the value of science over common sense lies in its greater practical power.83 Deweyan Instrumentalism By grounding his philosophy of science in scientific practice, Dewey highlights the role of human agency in science. Like other human activities, scientific activity is always shaped in part by people’s aims, desires, or goals, whether those goals are deemed of immediate or ultimate value. Most philosophies of science acknowledge this at least implicitly, but some conceptualize scientists’ goals far more narrowly than others. For Dewey, the common notion that scientific activity is driven solely by intellectual purposes fails to account not only for the purposes that science serves in society but also for the purposes, desires, interests, and values that enter into the making of science itself.

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All inquiry, according to Dewey, begins with an “indeterminate situation,” a situation which is “disturbed, troubled, ambiguous, confused, full of conflicting tendencies, obscure, etc.”84 Inquiry begins with the desire to respond to this disturbed and troubled situation, followed by the transformation of the indeterminate situation into a “problematic situation,” and then into a specific “problem” to be solved. Scientific problems are thus not, as people often assume, simply those things that scientists choose to study out of idle curiosity—or at least they should not be. If the problems of science do not emerge from genuine dilemmas of experience, the resulting inquiry “degenerates into sterile specialization, a kind of intellectual busy work carried on by socially absent-minded men.”85 In this respect, the “indeterminate situations” that initiate inquiry are like the protopublics discussed previously. Just as inchoate publics require representatives to articulate themselves, scientific inquiry depends on researchers with sufficient resources and motivation to transform an indeterminate situation into a determinate problem. The philosopher Philip Kitcher has described a similar sort of motivation in terms of scientists’ judgments about the “scientific significance” of a research problem. Kitcher argues, like Dewey, that science is never merely the pursuit of truth pure and simple; it is the pursuit of those truths that scientists deem significant. Scientific significance can be either theoretical or practical, pure or applied, and it can be associated with either instrumental goals or what Kitcher calls “natural curiosity.” Moreover, theoretical and practical significance are often interwoven. Kitcher thus echoes Dewey in rejecting the standard division between science and technology, because it ignores both the practical benefits of much “pure” research and the epistemic significance of many “applied” scientific projects.86 Despite common misunderstandings, Dewey’s notion of inquiry as purposive interaction goes beyond a rationalistic, instrumental understanding of science. For Dewey, interaction with the world through scientific inquiry, and as part of human experience in general, is a fundamentally passionate and moral enterprise. Although Dewey recognizes that “emotion without thought is unstable,” he despairs that the promoters of modern science have asserted a view of science as devoid of emotion. For Dewey, “The separation of warm emotion and cool intelligence is the great moral tragedy.”87 He insists that “physics, chemistry, history, statistics, engineering science, are a part of disciplined moral knowledge so far as they enable us to understand the conditions and agencies through

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which man lives, and on account of which he forms and executes his plans. Moral science is not something with a separate province. It is physical, biological and historic knowledge placed in a human context where it will illuminate and guide the activities of men.”88 For Dewey, science is part of moral knowledge to the extent it enriches human life.89 In other words, Dewey does not think that science should be restricted to determining the most effective means for achieving morally or politically determined ends. But neither does he believe that science can determine the ends of politics. Rather, science provides insight into how ends and means may be adapted to each other.90 Technocratic instrumentalism, in contrast, gives science the task of providing efficient means for pregiven ends. Technocrats thus often find themselves producing instrumentally efficient answers for the wrong problems. Addressing the problem of traffic congestion by widening highways, for example, ignores the basic problem of what causes traffic congestion to begin with. Dewey’s theory of inquiry, what he calls “the method of intelligence,” does not limit inquiry to any single, pregiven goal. Unlike technocratic instrumentalism, “intelligence frees action from a mechanically instrumental character.”91 It allows new purposes to develop through the process of inquiry. Dewey thus replaces the ancient division between ontological categories of nature and experience, essence and existence, with a distinction between two modes of experience: uncontrolled and controlled. These modes of experience do not represent fixed categories, but each can be transformed into the other through deliberate human action.92 What Dewey calls “natural” or “uncontrolled” experience consists of pregiven sequences of cause and effect, indifferent to human purposes. Natural experience becomes distinctly human experience when causes are deliberately employed as means, and when effects become consequences of directed action.93 The world will change anyway, Dewey argues, whether we act upon it or not. Better, then, that we actively change the world in a manner that both informs and advances our goals, rather than passively awaiting whatever changes may come. Dewey suggests we think of both science and philosophy as instrumental tools, because they can both provide means of reconstructing the situations out of which they arise.94 Dewey’s critics, of course, have often seen him as something of a control freak, lacking appreciation for the aesthetic dimensions of experience. According to John Patrick Diggins, for example, “pragmatic man identifies knowledge with control rather than understanding, with mas-

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tery rather than meaning.”95 Such assessments are not entirely mistaken, and Dewey was certainly a bit deaf to the problems with trying to master contingency. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that Dewey challenges the dichotomy between “meaning” and “mastery” assumed by many of his critics. Indeed, he believes that “mastery” can provide meaning in two distinct ways. First, mastery itself can be a locus of meaning. Even though Dewey thinks the distinguishing feature of science and technology is their instrumental power, he repeatedly notes that they also serve aesthetic purposes. “Making and using tools may be intrinsically delightful,” and “the pursuit of knowledge is often an immediately delightful event; its attained products possess esthetic qualities of proportion, order, and symmetry.”96 Dewey thus speaks to the joy of discovery so often cited by scientists and engineers as the motivation for their work. Second, Dewey argues that the instrumental power of science and technology, rather than threatening the immediate pleasures of experience that give life meaning, may actually enhance such pleasures. “Enjoyments that issue from conduct directed by insight into relations have a meaning and a validity due to the way in which they are experienced. . . . Even in the midst of direct enjoyment, there is a sense of validity, of authorization, which intensifies the enjoyment.”97 Understanding the underlying causes and means of perpetuating a meaningful experience may enhance the experience. For example, it might increase the pleasure of watching a sunset or drinking a glass of wine to understand something about astronomy or viticulture. In this respect, science “marks an added depth, range and fullness of meaning conferred upon objects of ordinary experience.”98 Of course, as Brian Wynne argues, science may also incorporate and convey threatening meanings of environmental risk and political exclusion.99 Such risks were not as apparent in Dewey’s time as today, but even so, he may not have fully appreciated how science can undermine rather than enhance aesthetic experience. Nonetheless, Dewey’s affirmation of meaning in science offers an important resource for science studies scholars, whom critics often accuse of being antiscience. Donna Haraway echoes Dewey when she rightly argues that “taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology.”100 Neither Dewey nor STS is either proscience or antiscience, and the assumption that one must choose between these stances obscures the political question of how science should be socially organized.

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Realism and Relativism Beyond the narrow view of “mastery” often attributed to Dewey by his critics, his defense of an instrumentalist theory of inquiry has often led readers to ask whether he also has an instrumentalist view of scientific theories. Are scientific theories merely self-contained analytical tools or do they describe real things and processes? Despite Dewey’s insistence that such questions were misguided, he was repeatedly asked to confront them, which involved him in the never-ending debate between realists and relativists. During the 1990s this debate found its way into the mass media under the rubric of “the science wars.” To some commentators, cited in the introductory chapter, STS scholars seem to endorse a radical form of relativism, according to which scientific accounts of reality are no more true than those of witchcraft, astrology, or common sense. Clarifying Dewey’s position in this debate might help resolve some of the misunderstandings and disagreements among today’s science warriors. Dewey creates the perception that he endorses some form of relativism when he denies the need for any claims “about the real object or the real world or the reality.” For Dewey, there simply is no need for a theory of reality “in general” or “as such.” The key reason is that science assesses reality by engaging with it, and such engagements always occur in particular contexts. The transformations wrought by scientific inquiry occur only with reference to particular existences. “Water is not drunk unless somebody drinks it; it does not quench thirst unless a thirsty person drinks it.” When we anticipate the consequences of our actions in the world, and use our anticipation to effectively direct action, we have generally valid knowledge of the world. Dewey thus replaces the traditional scientific claim to universal truth with a more modest claim for general effectiveness. Indeed, Dewey argues that scientific knowledge simply is the capacity to direct change. “It is not that knowing produces a change, but that it is a change of the specific kind described.”101 By being placed into new existential relations, the object for knowledge becomes an object of knowledge. This does not imply a denial of “reality,” but it does suggest a conception of reality rather different from the traditional view of reality as a set of preexisting objects to which theories passively correspond. For Dewey, reality is the world encountered through successful intervention, and “knowing is not the act of an outside spectator but of a participator inside the natural and social science.”102 As Hacking puts it, “We shall count as real what we can use to intervene in the world to

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affect something else, or what the world can use to affect us.”103 Dewey agrees with the traditional view that reality is what scientific theories represent, but he thinks that scientific representation involves more than passively reflecting reality. If science is understood in terms of the capacity to direct change, knowing cannot be conceived on the model of observation. For Dewey, “The significant distinction is no longer between the knower and the world; it is between different ways of being in and of the movement of things; between a brute physical way and a purposive, intelligent way.”104 In contrast to the empiricist view that knowledge begins with sense impressions that force themselves upon a passive mind, Dewey argues that knowing requires purposeful interaction with the world. Dewey conceives such interaction as a form of making. “We know an object when we know how it is made, and we know how it is made in the degree in which we ourselves make it.”105 Dewey thus firmly locates his philosophy of science in the “maker’s knowledge” tradition of Bacon, Hobbes, and Vico. Most important, these transformational effects of inquiry do not reside in the mind of the observer. Where William James had emphasized the changes in individual consciousness effected by practices of inquiry, Dewey argues that inquiry brings about existential changes in the objects of inquiry. Dewey’s critics read such claims as an endorsement of ontological relativism, that is, the notion that science can never discover reality, because it always shapes the things it studies. In response Dewey points out that his view actually presupposes that the world exists prior to inquiry. If inquiry requires engagement with the world, it needs a world to engage with. “All deliberate action of mind is in a way an experiment with the world to see what it will stand for, what it will promote and what frustrate. The world is tolerant and fairly hospitable. It permits and even encourages all sorts of experiments. But in the long run some are more welcomed and assimilated than others.”106 Elsewhere Dewey remarks, “An object . . . is that which objects: that which gets in the way of the carrying out of some plan entertained by a person.”107 Human efforts to change the world always confront the world’s resistance, but such resistances only exist as scientific objects for us as the outcome of inquiry.108 The world is full of many things, and only some of these become “objects” of and through inquiry. Bruno Latour, discussed in the next chapter, draws a similar distinction between “matters of concern,” which shape human life in myriad ways, and the “matters of fact” that comprise established scientific knowledge.109

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Although Dewey’s claim that procedures of inquiry cause changes in the world may appear fairly obvious in the case of laboratory sciences, it is less straightforward with regard to sciences that do not depend on experiments. Bertrand Russell thus pointed out in his review of Dewey’s Logic that knowledge of a star could not be said to affect the star.110 In response, Dewey acknowledged that not all branches of science rely to the same extent on making changes in the things studied. In astronomy changes are only introduced in the technology of observation, not in the object of observation itself. Astronomy progresses not by manipulating the stars, but by improving the instruments and theories used for observing them. Nevertheless, Dewey asserted, knowledge of a star does not actually begin with the “star,” but with a twinkling light in the night sky. Earlier societies may have built myths or religions around such twinkling lights; in any case, they probably experienced stars differently than people who have assimilated even the most basic facts of modern astronomy. People today experience the star as known, differently than before—for Dewey, more deeply and fully. The star as an object of knowledge is thus indeed a new object. Most important, this new object causes existential changes in the knower. With the advent of the star as a known object, people actually experience it differently. This knowledge should supplement and not displace whatever aesthetic or religious experiences people continue to have of the star, thus making their experiences richer and more fulfilling.111 Scientific Content and Context Dewey reinforces his account of how knowing causes changes in both the world and the knower with a parallel account of the relation between scientific inquiry and its social context. As I noted in chapter 2, science has traditionally been seen as an individual affair, from the lone philosopher contemplating the heavens to the solitary researcher toiling at a laboratory bench. Similarly, empiricist epistemologies conceive knowledge as correspondence between an individual mind and the external world.112 I showed previously how Dewey challenges the epistemic individualism that underlies liberal theories of political representation; he offers a similar challenge to rationalist theories of representation in science. Dewey does not believe that science simply mirrors social conditions. He explains that the natural sciences are “relatively independent of social issues,” and in comparison to the social sciences, the influence of society

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in the natural sciences is “indirect.”113 The mechanistic worldview, for example, which dominated scientific thought until the nineteenth century, gained prominence in part because it helped explain the phenomena of concern to then-emerging industries, such as mining. Similarly, Dewey points out that the idea of evolution, now firmly associated with Darwin, actually appeared first in theories of culture, such as those of Vico and Comte.114 More generally, and in contrast to the liberal conception of knowledge as an attribute of individuals, Dewey argues that “the whole history of science, art and morals proves that the mind that appears in individuals is not as such individual mind.” Rather, the mind is “a system of belief, recognitions, and ignorances, of acceptances and rejections, of expectations and appraisals of meanings” that are intimately bound up with social custom and tradition.115 This conception of mind does not imply a denial of individual subjectivity or agency. But just as inquiry always involves interaction between the knower and the known, individual thought is always intertwined with habits, traditions, and other elements of social life. Even the most abstract logical symbols have meaning only within a social context.116 How far does this social context extend? Is it restricted to a particular scientific community or does it include lay publics? What determines the boundary and relationship between the “context” and “content” of science? Dewey does not have much to say on these questions, which have been central to recent work in science studies, but what he does say is highly suggestive. Long before Kuhn, Dewey argued that the validation of scientific claims always depends on the assessment of particular scientific communities. But unlike Kuhn, he went on to suggest that nonscientific publics should also be involved in validating some scientific claims: While agreement among the [scientific] activities and their consequences that are brought about in the wider (technically non-scientific) public stands upon a different plane, nevertheless such agreement is an integral part of the complete test of physical conclusions wherever their public bearings are relevant. The point involved comes out clearly when the social consequences of scientific conclusions invoke intensification of social conflicts. For these conflicts provide presumptive evidence of the insufficiency, or partiality, and incompleteness of conclusions as they stand.117

Put simply, the “complete test” of scientific theories requires assessing their consequences in the world outside the laboratory. This passage echoes Dewey’s critique, in The Public and Its Problems, of the prevailing distinction between pure and applied science: “Science is converted

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into knowledge in its honorable and emphatic sense only in application.” The separation between pure and applied science ensures that the former will be “truncated, blind, distorted,” and the latter directed toward the financial gain of a few.118 More generally, because scientific representations of nature are responses to problematic situations, and because problematic situations are bound up with social conditions, science that creates an “intensification of social conflicts” is incomplete. Scientific propositions, of course, may well be complete within a narrow conception of the problems they are meant to resolve. The social conflicts associated with genetic engineering do not invalidate the theory of the double helix. But resolving these conflicts requires more than merely accommodating social norms to scientific change; it requires also that science respond in effective ways. “The notion of the complete separation of science from the social environment is a fallacy which encourages irresponsibility, on the part of scientists, regarding the social consequences of their work.”119 Given that “social conflicts” usually involve laypeople, Dewey’s comments hint at a need for some form of lay participation in science and science policy. Conclusion Dewey has often been charged with offering few specific suggestions on how to link his philosophical writings with the political challenges that confront his readers.120 Indeed, he repeatedly insisted, with considerable justification, that offering policy proposals was not his job. But Dewey was also never explicit about exactly how experts and lay citizens are supposed to communicate. He also underestimated the problems arising from scientific specialization, which tends to enclose different fields of expertise within their own frames of reference. And he did little to address, let alone resolve, the tension between the meritocracy of the scientific community and his notion that something like the scientific method could be extended throughout society.121 It is worth remembering, however, that Dewey did not conceive science as a foreign way of knowing to be imposed on the common sense of an ignorant public. For Dewey, science is a refinement of commonsense inquiry—its potential enormously magnified through methods, techniques, and instruments, but otherwise basically similar to everyday efforts to resolve problems by intervening in the world. Bringing science into society, therefore, is merely returning to the people what science borrowed—a bit like if a

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friend were to take your car for the weekend and give it a tune-up before returning it. The remaining chapters of this book follow Dewey in declining to offer specific policy proposals. Instead the aim is to take some of Dewey’s insights—political representation constructs the same publics it represents; not all representatives are authorized as such; democracy requires both voting and public communication; lay deliberation and technical expertise can enrich each other; science is a social process that engages and transforms the world—and with these resources in hand, develop a set of conceptual tools for thinking through recent efforts to relate science and democracy. One promising such effort is that of Bruno Latour.

7 Bruno Latour and the Symmetries of Science and Politics

Truth independent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed superabundantly . . . but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology. —William James, Pragmatism No reality without representation! —Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature

Bruno Latour investigates the intertwining of science and politics through a “symmetrical anthropology” that treats the representation of humans and nonhumans in tandem.1 Perplexed, intrigued, annoyed, and otherwise inspired, several commentators have written thoughtful overviews and critiques of Latour’s work.2 Rather than repeating their efforts, I focus here on Latour’s treatment of representation and its implications for democratic theory and practice. In short, I read Latour not primarily as an analyst of sociotechnical networks, but as a theorist of democracy. Latour’s explorations of science and politics frequently revolve around the question of representation.3 He insists that “there are not two problems, one on the side of scientific representation and the other on the side of political representation, but a single problem.”4 Modern science, technology, and politics, Latour argues, have all relied on the intertwining of scientific and political modes of representation. In their self-understandings, however, modern societies have conceptualized science and politics, facts and values, humans and nonhumans as largely insulated from each other. Latour expands the symmetry principle of the strong program in the sociology of scientific knowledge, which defended a symmetrical

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approach in the analysis of accepted and rejected scientific claims.5 Philosophers and historians had tended to locate the cause of accepted claims in nature, and that of rejected claims in society. They used social factors to explain why scientists distorted evidence or adopted false theories, such as phrenology or Lysenkoism, but they excluded social factors from their accounts of successful science. The strong program, in contrast, showed how interest, ideology, and other factors apparently external to science play a role in both the acceptance and rejection of scientific claims. If one wants to explain how something becomes accepted as true, the strong program argued, its truth cannot figure as part of the explanation. Truth is no less social, and no more natural, than falsity. A corollary principle stated that analysts must remain neutral toward competing parties in scientific controversies, so that their own categories do not obscure those of the actors they are studying. As mentioned previously in connection with Hobbes, Latour argues that the strong program gave up traditional scientific realism merely to embrace its mirror image, a “social realism” in which social factors acquired the status of fixed explanatory variables. The strong program neglected the role of nonhumans in shaping both facts and citizens. Latour thus extends the strong program’s symmetry principle to include a symmetrical treatment of humans and nonhumans.6 Both humans and nonhumans play a role in the construction of scientific facts. Latour continues to endorse the principle of neutrality, however, arguing that “the task of defining and ordering the social should be left to the actors themselves, not taken up by the analyst.”7 In the rest of this chapter I show how Latour’s extension of the symmetry principle to nonhumans offers an evocative way of avoiding the irresolvable controversies between realists and constructivists. Latour echoes Dewey’s view that the best way to end such pointless debates is not to answer the questions they raise but to develop new and more interesting questions. Latour’s extended symmetry principle also provides a vocabulary for conceptualizing the role of nonhumans in both scientific and political representation. At the same time, however, the symmetry principle potentially obscures significant asymmetries between science and politics. That is, as political subjects and scientific objects become socially stabilized, they become invested with very different attributes and capacities. Latour has always acknowledged the importance of such asymmetries, but his impassioned defenses of the symmetry principle fit uneasily with his efforts since the early 1990s to explore the political

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implications of science studies. In the last section of We Have Never Been Modern, for example, Latour calls for the creation of a “parliament of things,” and in Politics of Nature he outlines a new “political ecology.” To properly represent both humans and nonhumans, he argues, we must “engage in politics.”8 Such formulations suggest that scientific and political representation are not entirely symmetrical after all. Perhaps the most important asymmetry (discussed in the next chapter) is that political institutions have the task of structuring democratic responses to the politicization of other associations to which citizens belong, including those associated with science. Established scientific institutions, in contrast, do not usually have the task of structuring politics. Before examining such asymmetries, however, I want to outline some of the insights generated by Latour’s various attempts to treat scientific and political representation in tandem. Politics and Science Unbound State-centered approaches in political theory and political science long assumed that politics, by definition, is a matter of authoritative rule through state institutions. Contemporary scholarship, in contrast, echoing Dewey, seems to find politics everywhere. From factories to forests and from bedrooms to boardrooms, locations and relations previously deemed private and nonpolitical have either become enmeshed in state politics or have themselves become sites of political conflict. And the politicization of science, perhaps the hardest nut to crack, suggests that no social practice is immune to politics. Politics today is “institutionally unbound.”9 There is also a sense in which science has become institutionally unbound. Philosophers long sought to specify “demarcation criteria” that would distinguish scientific from nonscientific modes of thought and activity. None of these efforts has been able to establish a philosophical consensus on the essential nature of science and what distinguishes it from nonscientific practices, institutions, or beliefs. It seems impossible to establish a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for calling something scientific. Many of the attributes typically associated with science (logic, reason, method, evidence, and so on) can also be found in nonscientific activities, and no single list of attributes is shared by all the fields of study typically deemed part of science.10 In many respects, of course, scientific institutions and their established norms remain at the center of

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scientific activity.11 But sociological studies of scientific practice also make clear that scientists work not only with other scientists but also with laboratory technicians, animal and human subjects, government and corporate funders, ethics committees, and many other actors. Coming from the other direction, political theorists have fared no better in their efforts to assert philosophical boundaries between science and politics. Saying that the purpose of a scientific community is the pursuit of truth, or the explanation and control of empirical phenomena, does not tell you anything more specific than to say that the purpose of a political community is justice or liberty.12 In each case, disputes arise about how to fulfill these purposes, and the resolution of such disputes involves many common resources. Efforts to draw philosophical boundaries between science and politics inevitably rely on stereotypical views of one or the other. Latour and other proponents of actor-network theory have made science’s lack of determinate boundaries into a focal point of their approach to understanding science. They argue that to study science one must “follow the actors.”13 Science is as scientists do: “In a given period, how long can you follow a policy before having to deal with the detailed content of a science? How long can you examine the reasoning of a scientist before having to get involved with the details of a policy? . . . All we ask of you is not to cut away the thread when it leads you, through a series of imperceptible translations, from one type of element to another.”14 Like Dewey, Latour argues that understanding science requires above all that one begin with the everyday activities of scientists themselves. From this perspective, scientific knowledge and scientific practices are not confined to the minds of individual scientists, but are socially distributed. The knowledge, skills, and apparatus required for conducting a single experiment in many fields of science is distributed across multiple actors and locations. This is most obvious in fields requiring large technical apparatus, such as high-energy physics or molecular genetics. But it also applies to seventeenth-century naturalists who relied on others for evidential warrants of knowledge about icebergs, comets, and other things they had not seen themselves.15 And relying on others means relating to others. Such relations cannot be confined to the “context of discovery,” as philosophers have traditionally argued, because they also play a role in the justification of scientific claims. In light of this socially distributed character of scientific work, Latour conceives science in terms of a dual process of purification and media-

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tion. In the mediation process, human and nonhuman actants establish alliances with other actants. Using the term actant rather than actor indicates a symmetry between humans and nonhumans. It also departs from the standard modern idea of the self-conscious rational human actor. Latour thus associates actions with associations of actants, not with individual actors. Individuals may be attributed with actorial roles, but only because of the alliances they have established among diverse human and nonhuman actants. “B-52s do not fly, the U.S. Air Force flies.”16 Critics of Latour’s use of the actant concept have accused him of anthropomorphizing nature.17 Latour’s rhetorical flourishes have sometimes suggested a perfect symmetry between humans and nonhumans, such that the latter could be understood as engaged in all of the same sorts of activities as the former. But the charge that Latour anthropomorphizes nature ignores his repeated rejection of efforts to attribute any essential qualities (human or otherwise) to nonhumans. In any case, in his more recent work Latour has abandoned the notion of actants in favor of the idea that humans and nonhumans are always already bound together in associations. As with the earlier terminology, Latour’s aim is not to attribute any essential properties to either humans or nonhumans, but rather to evoke the perspective of science-in-the-making, prior to the establishment of scientific facts. From the perspective of science-in-themaking, nonhuman actants may be said to act insofar as scientists cannot yet predict what they will do. In his study of Louis Pasteur’s discovery of the microbe, for example, Latour shows how only the implicit cooperation of a broad range of allies could socially establish Pasteur’s discovery.18 The transformation of “disease” from an individual affliction managed according to ad hoc local practices into a societal problem subject to scientific control relied upon a diversity of players: civil servants and epidemiologists who collected and evaluated public health data; epidemiologists who documented the effects of Pasteur’s techniques; the public hygiene movement to promote Pasteur’s ideas. Finally, Pasteur needed to learn how to control the microbes themselves. He thus developed laboratory techniques for isolating microbes from their natural environments, allowing him to first study their behavior and then, once he had gotten them to cooperate, control them in the world outside. Predicting events outside the lab, however, required extending the conditions of the laboratory itself. In the first dramatic public trial of Pasteur’s vaccine, for example, where he vaccinated half of the sheep at a

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farm in Pouilly-le-Fort, Pasteur had to first convince the farmers to provide laboratory-like conditions. The vaccinated and nonvaccinated animals had to be marked and separated from each other; the animals’ temperatures had to be measured and recorded daily; control groups had to be established. This export of the lab to the farm was a delicate affair: too many changes and the public would no longer perceive the trial as a “real-world” application; too few and Pasteur would not be able to detect the vaccine’s effects. More generally, Pasteur’s knowledge of how to control microbes did not simply diffuse through an unchanged society. The breweries, hospitals, and milk processing plants that wanted to control microbes and eliminate infectious diseases had to adopt many of the same techniques and apparatuses that Pasteur had used in his lab. As Ian Hacking puts it, “Few things that work in the laboratory work very well in a thoroughly unmodified world—in a world which has not been bent toward the laboratory.”19 In this respect, Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power is a regular feature of scientific practice. Scientific practices discipline not only the behaviors and identities of scientists but also the various contexts in which they are developed and applied.20 Scientists like Pasteur, Latour argues, establish scientific facts by mediating among diverse allies, establishing themselves as “obligatory points of passage” among them. Just as Machiavelli sought to insinuate himself as an essential mediator between the prince and the people, Latour’s scientists establish themselves as mediators who hold together the hybrid alliances they establish. The alliances that establish scientific facts are eventually concealed by what Latour calls purification.21 The contingent victory of a hybrid alliance is recast as the heroic achievement of a scientific genius, such as Pasteur, who is portrayed as unlocking the secrets of Nature. The result is a scientific or technological artifact that would not exist but for the network of relations between humans and nonhumans, but which, as it enters the circulation of daily life, is unmistakably an object and not a subject. The purification of scientific practice facilitates the rhetoric of humility explored in chapters 1 and 2. Scientists engage in the various practices of mediation required to create representations of nature, but when the representations are complete, they humbly declare that they have done nothing but let the facts speak for themselves.22 This rhetoric of humility, favored by Machiavelli, Boyle, and science advisors today, allows scientists to remove themselves from the scene. They present their knowledge and themselves as objective, devoid of any subjectivity. At the same time,

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however, scientists make clear that only they are capable of making the facts speak at all. Their humility thus rings somewhat hollow, but that does not reduce their power to short-circuit political deliberation by appealing to the facts.23 From this perspective, the traditional view of scientific representation is not merely apolitical but profoundly antipolitical—or rather, it contains an antipolitical politics.24 Ever since Plato’s philosopher returned to the cave, scientific representation has been used to silence discussion and suppress politics. The Greeks thus “rendered democracy powerless as soon as it was invented.”25 In this respect, Latour argues, the traditional image of science is a response to “two fears, the loss of any certain access to reality and the invasion by the mob.”26 When science is purified of social relations, it seems to provide a precarious link between humans and the world, and it offers a cudgel for keeping the mob at bay. The basic assumption is that “only a Science that is not made by man will protect a Body Politic that is in constant risk of being made by the mob.”27 This fear of the mob appears in the liberal view of popular sovereignty as the willful expression of subjective preferences, devoid of deliberation and judgment, as discussed in chapter 3. Rationalism in science and irrationalism in politics thus hold each other in place, and their opposition is echoed in the traditional dichotomy between direct democracy and representative government. Direct democracy allows the mob free reign, but the expert rulers of representative government promise relief. Like Dewey, Latour asks us to abandon the subjectivist view of popular sovereignty, as well as the dichotomies between politics and science, subjects and objects, that underlie it. “The social world is no more made up of subjects than nature is made up of objects.”28 Subjects and objects are coproduced as results of hybrid practices. Also like Dewey, Latour highlights the political stakes of the subject-object dichotomy. But where Dewey emphasizes the way this dichotomy enables technocratic politics, Latour presents it as a response to such politics: “the subject was the human caught up in the polemic of nature and courageously resisting objectivization by Science.”29 Latour sees the standard liberal view of the subject as a fundamentally defensive posture, conceived to protect human freedom from domination by objective science. He thus argues that if we give up the standard idea of objective science, and see that science is inevitably social, then science will no longer threaten to objectify society. Moreover, the standard liberal view of the subject will become unnecessary. The mob will no longer be a threat, and we will not need to

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fear losing the world. Latour thus aims both “to free science from politics” and to “free politics from science.”30 From this perspective, Latour’s rejection of social explanation—that is, the use of fixed categories like class interest or bourgeois ideology to explain sociotechnical processes— follows a distinctly political logic. The idea is to avoid establishing any source of epistemic power that might be used to silence the masses. Subjects and Objects of Representation For Latour, avoiding the two fears mentioned earlier requires a new understanding of both political subjects and scientific objects. Objects are not as strange and distant as the traditional view of science makes them out to be; and subjects are not as naked and defenseless. The traditional divide between subjects and objects relegates all entities to one side or the other of an ontological divide, ignoring the proliferation of relations between humans and nonhumans. A soil sample, a laboratory-bred mouse, and a strand of DNA are not best understood as elements of “nature,” since they would not exist without human intervention. Indeed, neither humans nor nonhumans ever appear in society without the mediation of the other. Scientists do not represent natural objects any more than politicians represent human subjects; both represent “associations” or “assemblages” of humans and nonhumans. Raw nature—what William James called “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”—certainly exists, and it may be knowable through divine inspiration or other modes of transcendence. But in the mundane world of human affairs, raw nature never appears as such. Humans encounter nature only in the company of its various mediators. “As soon as we add to dinosaurs their paleontologists, to particles their accelerators, to ecosystems their monitoring instruments . . . we have already ceased entirely to speak of nature.”31 Just as Hobbes and Dewey showed how political representation constructs its publics, Latour teaches that scientific representation is an ontological activity, partially constituting the things it represents. To be sure, these things are not constituted out of thin air, and real properties of nature shape and constrain human efforts to represent them. In this respect, the common charge that constructivism assumes philosophical idealism and denies the existence of a preexisting world falls wide of the mark. The constructivist claim is not that reality does not exist, but that real properties of nature only enter human life through various forms of mediation—that is, through representation, as indicated in the epigraph to this chapter.32

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Latour links his account of scientific objects with a parallel notion of human subjects. Citizens of modern societies interact continuously with scientific objects, and yet strain to conceive themselves as free subjects. Just as communitarians have argued that the standard liberal subject assumes the possibility of remaining essentially “unencumbered” by history, culture, and family, Latour shows how it also assumes independence from nonhumans.33 Free subjects and scientific objects, therefore, are opposite sides of the same coin. Similarly, the dehumanization or “objectification” of human beings is the flip side of the “subjectification” of scientific facts. Both involve a practical deconstruction of the relations that support a particular claim. Subjectivity and objectivity, politics and science, therefore, must be treated in tandem, as the endpoints of a continuum along which relations are established and maintained. Latour writes, “Even the shape of humans, our very body, is composed to a great extent of sociotechnical negotiations and artifacts. To conceive of humanity and technology as polar opposites is, in effect, to wish away humanity: we are sociotechnical animals, and each human interaction is sociotechnical. We are never limited to social ties. We are never faced only with objects.”34 There is no such thing as an original, nonmaterial, nontechnical human who imposes its will on inert and shapeless matter. Human lives are permeated by technical objects, and these objects play an important role in constituting human subjectivity. This claim is not Latour’s alone, of course, and pragmatist, feminist, postmodern, communitarian, and republican theorists have long challenged the image of the autonomous rational subject commonly (and to some extent mistakenly) associated with liberalism. They have also highlighted the importance of the affective and corporeal dimensions of political subjectivity. Research in this vein suggests that one’s status as a political subject cannot be taken as the starting point of politics but must rather be continually renegotiated and reestablished through politics, often in either explicit or implicit opposition to those who lack such status. A key source of conceptual ferment in this regard has been the attempt to move beyond the Enlightenment image of nature as either inert matter to be manipulated at will, or a source of foundational claims used to suppress political contestation.35 Attending to the various “given” elements of human experience, such as those associated with human finitude and corporeality, offers a potential route to reconceiving traditional notions of political subjectivity. It also leads to a new understanding of representation.

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Representation as Delegation As the discussion so far suggests, Latour frequently couches his symmetrical treatment of humans and nonhumans in the language of representation. “There is not much difference between people and things: they both need someone to talk for them. . . . In each case the spokesperson literally does the talking for who or what cannot talk.”36 What do the spokespeople say? “Only what the things they represent would say if they could talk directly.”37 Despite his rejection of many of the basic concepts underlying liberal-rationalist theories of representation, Latour here conceives representation in terms very similar to Rousseau, Burke, Madison, and a traditional reading of Hobbes. He follows a juridical model in which the representative substitutes for the represented, just as a lawyer substitutes for her client. Indeed, in a seminal early essay with Michel Callon, Latour explicitly adopted Hobbes’s juridical theory of representation, linking it with Michel Serres’s notion of translation: “Whenever an actor speaks of ‘us,’ s/he is translating other actors into a single will, of which s/he becomes spirit and spokesman.”38 This conception of representation as delegation is inadequate for democracy, as I explain in more detail shortly. But for exploring the social dimensions of science and technology, it has considerable heuristic value, which is especially apparent in an early and much-cited article, “Where Are the Missing Masses?”39 Here Latour conceives technologies in terms of their capacity to perform tasks that people would otherwise fulfill themselves. As a general rule, he writes, “every time you want to know what a non-human does, simply imagine what other humans or other non-humans would have to do were this character not present.”40 Latour goes on to describe technologies as the “delegates” of the people whose work they perform. Hinges and doors are the delegates of those who would otherwise have to tear down and rebuild a wall every time a person wanted to go through it; an automatic door-closer is the delegate of a porter; automatic seat belts are delegates of those who want to reduce automobile fatalities; traffic lights and speed bumps are delegates of police officers, and so on. Whenever people want a particular task to be performed but would prefer not to do it themselves, they can delegate it to a technology. Latour’s account of technologies as delegates highlights at least two important aspects of the politics of technology. First, it suggests that the traditional ontological division between society and technology, between

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the moral purposes of human beings and the instrumental work of technology, fails to capture the various ways they shape each other. The porter who delegates her task to an automatic door-closer was herself the delegate of those who wanted to keep the door closed. The porter’s routinized behavior, automatically opening and closing the door whenever someone approaches, is itself a form of technology. Latour’s examples suggest that we locate various human and nonhuman delegates at different places along an ontological continuum. Different kinds of humans and nonhumans differ only relatively rather than absolutely in the degree to which they can be trusted to perform their delegated tasks. This does not mean, of course, that there are no differences between them. Nonhuman delegates can generally be relied upon to perform their delegated tasks with only periodic maintenance. Moreover, they have a “built-in inertia” that makes it more difficult to change their instructions than those of a human delegate.41 Human delegates, in contrast, generally require ongoing supervision and discipline. Second, Latour’s account shows how technologies embody the goals and values of those whose tasks they perform. An automatic door-closer embodies the moral prescription to keep the door shut, as well as an unintended prescription against those in wheelchairs or carrying large packages who might have trouble getting through the door before it closes. Similarly, a factory assembly line conveys the prescription to work according to a certain speed set by management.42 Such embedded values may change over time, and recent studies have shown how users often adapt technologies to purposes not intended by their designers.43 Despite helping to clarify these aspects of the politics of technology, conceiving technologies as delegates has important limitations. Most obviously, Latour’s account suggests that technical delegates do work that humans could otherwise do themselves, but that is clearly not always the case. A human could do the work of a door-closer or traffic light, but what about a steam engine or nuclear power plant? These technologies both magnify and transform human capabilities, and they cannot be sensibly understood as performing tasks that people could otherwise do themselves. Moreover, even if it makes sense to think of discrete technological artifacts as delegates, the concept cannot be easily applied to the vast technological systems that emerge gradually through diffuse social processes and today pervade daily life. Contemporary systems of transportation, communication, financial exchange, or energy production and distribution are not discrete products of

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intentional design, nor do they fulfill clearly defined tasks.44 One might still ask to what extent such technical systems represent public interests, but it makes little sense to think of them as delegates of particular individuals or groups. Representation as Circulation A view of representation as delegation reappears throughout Latour’s writings, but it loses some of its juridical cast in his more recent accounts of representation in science. Whereas Latour writes of users delegating tasks to technologies, his writings on science show how propositions circulate between those who seek to establish them and their many allies. Latour develops this notion of representation by way of exploring what it means for a scientist to explain something. Why would a scientist—or anyone else, for that matter—want to explain something? The best thing about explanations, Latour argues, is that they allow a person to be in two places at once. Rather than trying to change a situation by engaging with it directly, one can be somewhere else and attempt to change the situation by explaining something about it. “Explanatory power” is the power to intervene in multiple contexts without actually being in any of them. Explanations allow a person to “act at a distance.” The person who wants to explain something takes a small number of elements or features from one setting, transports them to another setting, and reassembles them into a representation that corresponds to the original setting. Latour thus portrays scientific explanation as a social process in which the explainer substitutes for the things he or she explains.45 A key feature of Latour’s account is that he does not seek to eliminate the substitutions entailed by explanation; he merely seeks to make them publicly visible. This leads to his discussion of representation as “circulating reference.” Latour’s notion of circulating reference offers a powerful challenge to the long-standing image of scientific representation as a mirror of nature. As Dewey argued, philosophers have traditionally asserted an ontological division between matter and mind and then devised theories of representation to bridge the gap they had themselves created. It was, Latour remarks, “as if they had tried to understand how a lamp and a switch could ‘correspond’ to each other after cutting the wire and making the lamp ‘gaze out’ at the ‘external’ switch.”46 When one begins with the assumption of a stark divide between objects and subjects, the representa-

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tion of the former by the latter becomes a mysterious and esoteric affair reserved to a few. In fact, representation is a practical activity that potentially involves both scientists and nonscientists. Representing hybrid associations of humans and nonhumans does not require a heroic leap across a subject-object divide but rather multiple translations across a series of small divides. In one often-cited example, Latour describes the steps scientists take when studying a transition zone between forest and savannah in the Amazon: first subdivide an area of soil with a grid, then take soil samples from each part of the grid, identify their colors on a color chart, translate the colors into numbers, and use the numbers to create a diagram that represents the relationship between forest and savannah. At each stage, matter is translated into form, only to become matter for the next translation. The resulting diagram is a representation of the forest, but it depends on a long series of concrete translations. As Latour puts it, “The quality of a science’s reference does not come from some salto mortale out of discourse and society in order to access things, but depends rather on the extent of its transformations, the safety of its connections, the progressive accumulation of its mediations, the number of interlocutors it engages, its ability to make nonhumans accessible to words, its capacity to interest and convince others, and its routine institutionalization of these flows.”47 Circulating reference is a way of keeping something—in this case a lump of Amazon soil—constant through a series of translations. The more such translations are routinized and institutionalized, and the more they become embedded in machines and other material artifacts, the more stable they become. Whereas the dominant modern concept of representation is oriented toward the truth of a proposition, the notion of circulating reference emphasizes scientists’ ability to intervene in the world. Here Latour echoes Dewey’s theory of inquiry, as well as Kuhn’s view that normal scientific activity, though partly aimed at providing accurate accounts of reality, is dominated by the immediate goal of manipulating and controlling phenomena.48 Latour’s notion of circulating reference highlights the practical activity of creating a chain of references, as well as the practical capacities that such chains create. Reference “circulates” because it can be traced from one end of the chain to the other in either direction. A map represents a landscape not only because it provides a picture of it, but also because it enables the person who has it to plan her trip. The progressive reduction of locality, particularity, and materiality effected along the

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chain of reference produces an amplification of calculation, standardization, and control.49 The abstract quality of a map is precisely what increases its owner’s power to intervene in the landscape it represents. Representation as Mediation In Politics of Nature, Latour expands on his view of science as circulating reference and develops a practice-oriented account of representation in both science and politics. The representation of humans and nonhumans are not two separate enterprises, Latour argues, but complementary components of the “progressive composition of the cosmos,” the common world (or worlds) shared by associations of humans and nonhumans.50 Assembling a cosmos requires the work of politicians, scientists, moralists, economists, and many others, each involved in “stirring the entities of the collective together in order to make them articulable and to make them speak.”51 Each profession contributes its own particular capacities and specialized skills to this common work. There is a division of labor but not of the collective. Scientists do not have privileged access to a more fundamental reality of “primary qualities” that remains beyond the reach of nonscientists. There is no point in denying that everyone works in the same world. “We might just as well tell masons, plumbers, carpenters, and painters to collaborate without ever telling them to what public building they are to apply their successive and complementary talents!”52 The progressive composition of this common world, Latour argues, should occur through an “explicit procedure” characterized by “due process.”53 Latour offers an elaborate account of a “new bicameralism” in which he describes how collectivities might identify, evaluate, and then accept or reject new “propositions” that seek admittance to the common world. Stem cell research, for example, or a new global warming policy, might be understood as hybrid propositions seeking admission to the United States. Whether the propositions at the center of such controversies become accepted parts of the collective depends not only on scientists but also on many nonscientists. As critics have pointed out, Latour says little about the unequal power relations that shape such controversies.54 He asserts repeatedly, however, that the power associated with reified categories of science and society—such as the power of experts— should not be allowed to short-circuit the laborious process of articulating all relevant claims.

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A good collective, Latour argues, is highly responsive to applicants for admission, promotes vital connections among existing members, and sees itself as an ontological experiment constantly in revision.55 Latour thus rejects the image of an inert and passive nature conveyed by the phrase “representation of nature.” But, he argues, “it will still be necessary to represent the associations of humans and nonhumans through an explicit procedure, in order to decide what collects them and what unifies them in one future common world.”56 Latour does not explain why he switches from the noun representation to the verb represent, but presumably he means to emphasize the activity of representing over the potentially coercive power of fixed representations of nature. Latour makes clear that representation requires work, and the work of representation always involves uncertainty and always transforms what it represents. There is no such thing as immediate representation. Latour thus uses the term spokesperson to designate “the whole gamut of intermediaries between someone who speaks and someone else who speaks in that person’s place.”57 The notion of speech designates “not someone who was speaking about a mute thing, but an impediment, a difficulty, a gamut of possible positions, a profound uncertainty.”58 Just as wheelchairs and hearing aids help people with disabilities, science and politics provide “speech prostheses”—language, conventions, communication technologies, and the like—that allow nonhumans and humans to speak.59 Speech is always mediated, such that “no beings, not even humans, speak on their own, but always through something or someone else.”60 With the notion of spokesperson . . . we are extending doubt about the fidelity of the representation to nonhumans. . . . The speech of all spokespersons, those of the old science and those of the old politics, becomes an enigma, a gamut of positions running from the most complete doubt—which is called artifact or treason, subjectivity or betrayal—to the most total confidence—which is called accuracy or faithfulness, objectivity or unity.61

Latour thus rightly suggests that the representation of nonhumans involves no less doubt, work, and mediation than the representation of humans. Latour also maintains, echoing Dewey, that representation always shapes both the representative and the represented. Both politicians and scientists, he writes, “delight in the art of transformations.” Their tasks are not quite the same, however. Scientists transform nonhuman entities through laboratory work to “obtain reliable information”; politicians transform human constituents “to obtain the unheard-of

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metamorphosis of enraged or stifled voices into a single voice.”62 In this respect, political talk is never “straight,” or clear, direct, and unmediated. It always follows “curved lines,” shaped through “endlessly repeated gatherings” that progressively compose a collective.63 Scientific talk, in contrast, is “curved” in practice, that is, mediated by alliances, conventions, instruments, and so on. But once scientific facts are established, scientific speech follows straight chains of reference that link nonhuman entities with propositions about then, as discussed previously. As this brief summary suggests, Latour’s symmetrical approach to representation in science and politics shows how scientific representations of nature have long been enmeshed with the institutions and procedures of political representation. Political representatives today rely on a wide variety of scientific representations, including opinion polls, science journalism, and expert testimony in courts, legislatures, and bureaucracies. Lay citizens have also increasingly sought representation within scientific institutions. Interest group representatives, for example, as discussed in chapter 4, today hold seats on many science advisory committees; “public members” sit on second-tier peer review panels at the NIH; and patient advocacy groups and other civil society organizations seek to shape both the aims and methods of scientific research. Neither scientific nor political representation can do without the other, and Latour is right to treat them in tandem. A key shortcoming of Latour’s account, however, is that it remains within the basic logic of representation as substitution between represented and representative.64 Latour’s “gamut of positions” runs from an entire lack of substitutability to complete substitutability. When representation is successful, Latour writes, “what you are saying is what I would have said if I had spoken.”65 To be sure, Latour recognizes that “betrayal” is inevitable. “A representative who demands that citizens faithfully obey him has no more sense than citizens demanding that politicians faithfully represent them.”66 Moreover, Latour states repeatedly that representative relationships should never be taken for granted; they must be continually maintained through ongoing mediation. But despite Latour’s emphasis on the necessarily imperfect quality of any effort to speak for others, his ideal remains a juridical view of representation as substitution: “the multitude becomes a unit—representation—before the unit becomes a multitude again—obedience.”67 This view of representation may be appropriate for the sciences, where scientists assemble a single statement of fact from a hybrid multitude of

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actors, instruments, theories, and observations. And it also captures certain political contexts, such as elections, in which diverse and conflicting opinions are momentarily unified into a single decision: this candidate or that one. And Latour’s view of representation resonates with some calls for descriptive similarity between political representatives and their constituents, where a multitude of experiences typical of a particular social group are symbolically unified in the social identity of a particular representative. But as I explain in chapter 9, electoral authorization and descriptive similarity or resemblance are only two elements of democratic representation. Citizens may sometimes have good reason to expect that descriptively similar representatives will be preferable to representatives who are not descriptively similar. But this expectation may also remain unfulfilled. Citizens must have recourse, therefore, to other modes of representation, especially those focused on accountability and the generation and promotion of interests. Latour’s account of representation says little about such matters. Similarly, Latour’s claim that representation occurs when the “the multitude becomes a unit”—which he apparently takes from a traditional reading of Hobbes—captures only the moment of electoral authorization, neglecting everything that precedes and follows it. Latour thus discounts the fact that the winners of elections are usually expected to represent not only those who voted for them but also those who voted against them, as well as many who did not vote at all. Nonvoters who may require representation, as noted before, include children, animals, people in other countries, and future generations. These diverse constituents have conflicting identities and interests, which means that representatives inevitably “betray” some constituents even as they remain “faithful” to others. Latour’s account obscures this internally differentiated character of democratic representation. Like liberal theorists of juridical models of representation, Latour focuses on the “due process” of authorizing representatives, neglecting the politics that surrounds it.68 More generally, the limits of Latour’s account of representation become apparent in light of a careful look at the distinction between representation and substitution. In political theory, as suggested previously, a view of representation as substitution underlies the typical participatory democratic critique of representative government. Participatory democrats commonly argue that because governments inevitably fail to mirror the citizenry, representation offers only a second-best, pragmatic

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alternative to participatory governance in local institutions. But as Pitkin pointed out long ago, substitution is not the same as representation. Substitute teachers or football players, for example, are not usually selected by the ones they replace. Nor are such substitutes directly responsible to those they replace, but rather to their employers or professions. Nor are the actions of substitutes usually binding upon, or otherwise attributed to, those they replace.69 And as Urbinati writes, “A political representative is unique not because he substitutes for the sovereign in passing laws, but precisely because he is not a substitute for an absent sovereign (the part replacing the whole) since he needs to be constantly recreated and dynamically linked to society in order to pass laws.”70 To be sure, there is a certain common sense appeal to conceiving representation as a matter of “re-presenting.” But in politics, as Dewey explained, constituent interests and opinions are often inchoate or nonexistent prior to being elicited, educated, and aggregated by public officials.71 Although Latour offers a brilliant account of how representation transforms what it represents, by conceiving representation as a matter of substitution, he locks representation into questions concerning the relative presence or absence of the represented. A more promising approach, which I outline in chapters 9 and 10, is to view representation as distributed across a variety of different kinds of institutions. Representation is institutionally differentiated. Showing how that is so requires attention to the asymmetries between science and politics. Fixity and Flux A corollary of the strong program’s symmetry principle stated that analysts must remain neutral with regard to competing parties in scientific controversies; otherwise, their own categories will obscure those of the people they are studying. Despite his criticisms of the strong program, Latour continues to endorse neutrality as a methodological principle.72 He has also frequently made clear that symmetry between humans and nonhumans is a methodological principle of empirical research, not an ontological claim.73 And yet, as suggested previously, Latour’s defense of these methodological principles often goes far beyond their role in studying the construction of subjects and objects. Like many other contemporary theorists, for example, Latour argues that the “iconoclastic gesture” of “speaking truth to power” inevitably reinforces epistemic foundationalism. Speaking truth to power thus underwrites the ultimate source of

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the injustices it denounces.74 In making such arguments, Latour often shifts from methodology to social or political theory, or what he calls “cosmology.” To the extent this shift is either unannounced by Latour or unnoticed by his readers, it creates considerable difficulties. Latour warns, for example, against efforts to “transform the group to be constituted into an aggregate of fixed elements and, in so doing, make the variable constitution of groups impossible and the exercise of autonomy or liberty impracticable.”75 Efforts to understand science in light of established sociological categories threaten to subvert the political process of creating a common world, as described previously. If we are to assemble a common world through due process, “it is necessary above all not to start with beings with fixed opinions, firmly established interests, definitive identities and set wills.”76 The key lies in “never ever starting with established opinions, wills, identities and interests. It is up to political talk alone to introduce, re-establish and adjust them.”77 However Latour intends such statements, they sound like general normative claims rather than methodological postulates for science studies. In a different formulation of the same point, Latour contrasts “Science,” which is characterized by “certainty, coldness, aloofness, objectivity, distance, and necessity,” with “Research,” which is “uncertain; open-ended; immersed in many lowly problems of money, instruments, and knowhow; unable to differentiate as yet between hot and cold, subjective and objective, human and nonhuman.” He suggests that “the second model is wiser than the former,” and that perhaps “science studies is anti-Science, after all, but in that case it is wholeheartedly for Research.”78 Scientists, politicians, and those who study them, Latour insists, should avoid the established categories of Science and embrace the indeterminate world of Research. They should always start their work “from scratch.”79 In some respects, Latour’s embrace of flux over fixity echoes a similar sentiment in the writings of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Dewey. Each of these thinkers criticized efforts to ground epistemic certainty on sources external to politics. But whereas Hobbes called for an all-powerful sovereign, and Machiavelli and Dewey emphasized the importance of habits and institutions for shaping and channeling political action, Latour often seems to endorse a hyperskepticism that continually interrogates all established categories. With his polemical attacks on established categories, Latour seems to shift from methodological insistence on the symmetrical treatment of

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humans and nonhumans toward a decisionist political theory in which both actors and analysts are unconstrained by stable institutions. In thus sliding from methodological symmetry to ontological symmetry, he discounts the role of provisionally established sociotechnical institutions and concepts in promoting exactly the sort of democratic politics he endorses. This is unfortunate, because a society without institutions, in constant flux, is biased toward those with resources to surf the flux. The liberalconstitutionalist commitment to the rule of law offers a bulwark against the abuse of power and a court of appeal for the powerless. Latour is rightly concerned about the power of established knowledge and institutions to dominate the powerless, but he neglects their potential to protect them. Latour’s intense skepticism toward sociotechnical structures and institutions has led several critics to accuse him of ignoring established power differences in society. As Daniel Lee Kleinman argues, an overemphasis on processes of construction “turns our gaze away from the effects of the already existing attributes of the world in which science is practiced.”80 Discounting established institutions neglects the way that modes of practice congeal and solidify over time, creating a highly differentiated institutional landscape. Modern societies are functionally and institutionally differentiated. Just as constructed scientific facts become “black-boxed” and thereby facilitate the construction of new facts, political values and decisions become socially embedded and institutionally stabilized such that they shape, enable, and constrain subsequent thought and practice. Building on such considerations, Steve Fuller argues that Latour’s view of the politics of science is better suited to a free-market model of decentralized innovation than to representative democracy.81 Although these criticisms capture an important blind spot in some of Latour’s polemics, it is also not difficult to extract an effective response from his writings. Latour’s expressed skepticism toward social institutions conflicts with the historical sensibility evident in his own theory of science. In Science in Action, for example, Latour explains that those who study science should adjust their methods in light of the degree to which a particular scientific claim has become established. The methodological injunction to “follow scientists around” requires nothing less. As long as scientists’ claims are contested, Latour writes, scientists are “hard-core relativists.” But once facts have become established, they are “dyed-in-the-wool realists.” It makes little sense, therefore, to treat established facts as relative to society and politics, because “the cost of

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dispute is too high for an average citizen, even if he or she is a historian and sociologist of science.” Relativism only makes sense in a context of scientific controversy, when scientists themselves are relativists and are seeking to establish relations among heterogeneous allies. Echoing Machiavelli, Latour reminds science studies scholars that they need to adjust their methods to the times. Whenever scholars failed to make such adjustments in the past, they got put off balance. “Either they went on being relativists even about the settled parts of science—which made them look ridiculous; or they continued being realists even about the warm uncertain parts—and they made fools of themselves.”82 Put differently, scholars should acknowledge the historical development of institutions, as well as their resulting solidity and resistance to challenge. Indeed, Shapin once suggested that Latour offers “a new, but sociologically recognizable, vocabulary for describing institutionalization.”83 Despite Latour’s repeated call to ignore established institutions, he also offers a powerful argument for doing the opposite. And because Latour rarely makes clear whether he is making methodological or cosmological claims, the overall impression is profound ambivalence. Conclusion Read as political theory rather than research methodology, Latour’s writings offer the most innovative effort since Dewey to conceive science and politics from the perspective of democracy. Avoiding the rationalist dichotomy that plagues liberal theories of representative government, Latour shows how scientific and political representation draw on similar resources to shape and reshape the same world. Latour’s ambivalence toward institutions reflects a basic paradox of constitutional democracy: how to establish an institutional framework that does not destroy the creative freedoms it aims to protect. Latour confronts the paradox in an instructive way in his introductory essay for the edited volume Making Things Public. Here Latour rightly urges readers to look beyond conventional institutions of representation and explore the myriad “assemblies” in which humans and nonhumans assemble themselves, including shopping malls, artistic installations, and Internet chat rooms.84 Latour recommends skepticism toward any claims regarding the relationships among different types of institutions. The first task is to broaden one’s view of where, when, and by what or whom the representation of nonhumans and humans might take place. The question is “How to devise

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an assembly of ways of dissembling instead of sending a convocation to gather under the common dome of ‘One Politics Size Fits All’?”85 But Latour acknowledges that, in the end, the anarchic project of identifying unconventional modes of assembling humans and nonhumans must be complemented by the constructive task of establishing boundaries and relationships between different types of assemblies. “It would be too easy simply to recognize the many contradictions as if we could be content with the absence or demise of all political assemblies, as if we could abandon for good the task of composition.”86 The question thus becomes “Can we make an assembly out of all the various assemblages in which we are already enmeshed?”87 Is there, or could there be, an overarching set of institutions that mediate relations within and among the diverse venues where scientific and political representation occur? Dewey called this overarching set of institutions “the state,” a concept currently undergoing major revision in light of globalization and the proliferation of nonstate modes of governance. In this respect, Latour’s ambivalence about institutions reflects familiar dilemmas associated with the tension between democracy and constitutionalism.88 If citizens govern themselves through the institutions of a constitutional state, what legitimizes the institutions themselves? The next chapter considers this dilemma and Latour’s question in terms of different ways of conceiving the politics of science. If politics affords a way of assembling the cosmos, how does science become political?

8 How Science Becomes Political

Science is not politics. It is politics by other means. —Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France Although one could multiply the ways in which human activities become “political,” the main point lies in the “relating” function performed by political institutions. —Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision

To say that science has been politicized implies that it was previously not political. And assuming that politicization is reversible, things that have become political can be depoliticized as well. But what does it mean to make something political? How does one know that a particular change or event qualifies as an instance of the larger phenomenon of politicization? When critics charged the Bush administration with politicizing science advisory committees, what exactly did they mean? Some STS scholars have identified different ways that science and technology become political, but they have not considered what these different kinds of politics have in common.1 Such considerations are implicit, however, in any effort to understand how science becomes political. That is, without some sense of the distinguishing characteristics or “family resemblances” of different kinds of politics, it would be impossible to recognize them as instances of the same activity at all.2 By making explicit one’s conception of politics, it becomes possible to assess its explanatory potential and normative and conceptual commitments. It is also true, of course, that the meanings of complex and controversial concepts like politics and politicization are both historically contingent and essentially contestable, and any generic definition is inevitably subject to challenge.3 As Dewey suggested, what counts as political often

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becomes a political question itself. My aim in this chapter, therefore, is not to tell everyone what politics really is, nor to subvert practical efforts to shift received boundaries between science and politics. On the contrary: the purpose of asking how science becomes political is to facilitate such efforts by exploring their normative stakes and potential contribution to representative democracy. In contemporary scholarship, prevailing views of politics differ methodologically, substantively, and institutionally. With regard to methodology, sociologically oriented scholars strive to derive their conceptions of politics primarily by observing political actors. Echoing Latour’s injunction to “follow the actors,” they insist that politics should be defined only with reference to particular contexts. Politics is simply whatever a particular group of people say it is. Philosophically oriented scholars, in contrast, tend to aim for universally valid concepts. From Aristotle to rational choice theory, there is a long history of efforts to specify the essential features of politics. This methodological difference between sociological and philosophical conceptions of politics overlaps in part with a substantive difference, whereby social scientists tend to reduce politics to the pursuit of individual self-interest, as in rational choice and behavioral theories, while philosophers often equate politics with the cooperative pursuit of a shared common good, as in communitarian and classical republican theories. (Of course, some social scientists find empirical evidence of deliberative or communitarian conceptions of politics, and some philosophers defend the rational pursuit of self-interest on principle.) Finally, with regard to the institutional locus of politics, political scientists long associated politics exclusively with state institutions. But today most scholars agree that politics occurs in the most diverse social locations (families, businesses, laboratories, and so on), leading some to conclude that everything is political.4 Power, Conflict, Collective Action Latour rightly notes that calling everything political depletes the meaning and usefulness of the concept, and it also creates impossible burdens for citizenship. Were all social relations to become political, citizens would be “crushed by the fabulous expansion of their worries, would throw up their hands in despair . . . and fall back to sleep.”5 Political theorists have made similar arguments.6 Latour develops a brief account of five different types of politics that highlights the limits of state-centered views. He

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argues, for example, that new biomedical tests “are ‘political’ in the sense that they produce new associations between humans and nonhumans (like all activities).” Also political in this sense are “the almost daily discovery of extra-solar planetary systems.”7 This sort of politics would apparently even include events not involving any human activity at all, such as earthquakes or tornadoes, as long as they bring about changes in the world where humans live. Latour here slides from correctly rejecting the view that such events “have nothing to do with politics,” which they often do, to the claim that they are political. Indeed, according to this sense of politics, anything that affects politics is political. Because nearly everything may be said to affect politics in one way or another, Latour seems to undermine his criticism of the notion that “everything is political.” Indeed, at the end of this article Latour writes that “yes, ‘everything is (cosmo)political’ but not at all in the same way.”8 Moreover, Latour never explains what the different types of politics he describes have in common. Thinking about the commonalities among different types of politics may be facilitated by a view that responds to the methodological, substantive, and institutional disagreements noted previously. First, with regard to method, understanding the politicization of social institutions and practices, including those associated with science, requires linking conceptual and normative reflection with empirical research. It requires thinking about the growing intersection of science and technology with various social, economic, and political practices and institutions. In contrast to the focus on abstract concepts of many philosophical approaches, it seems clear that conceptions of politics are historically contingent, shaped by social structures and political decisions, including those associated with science and technology. In contrast to the focus on local processes of construction in many sociological approaches, a historically informed constructivism needs to consider how some constructions acquire considerable stability over time. Just as constructed scientific facts become “black-boxed” and thereby facilitate the construction of new facts, political concepts become socially embedded and institutionally stabilized such that they shape, enable, and constrain subsequent thought and practice. I do not know whether it is easier to reshape the institutionalized conceptual categories associated with modern liberalism, for example, than those associated with the modern sciences, but it seems that any difference is one of degree rather than kind. Second, on a substantive level, a generic conception of politics should avoid both reductive and inflationary approaches; it should neither

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define away one’s normative hopes, nor equate politics with those hopes. One such view, articulated by Mark Warren, locates politics at the intersection of power, conflict, and collective action. To put it more precisely, paraphrasing Warren, politics is a subset of social relations in which people face pressure to undertake collective action in the context of conflict over the means, goals, or domain of their activity, where at least one party seeks to resolve the conflict through the exercise of power.9 Power takes various forms, of course. It may be physical, economic, or cultural. It may be exercised directly through command or indirectly through structuring people’s choices, interests, or identities. As conceived here, the common feature of different forms of power is that they elicit compliance of some kind. Some argue, of course, drawing on Foucault, that all social relations involve “disciplinary” or “productive” power that shapes people’s behaviors and self-conceptions. For Foucault, power is not merely exercised in the form of commands; power pervades all social relations and forms of knowledge, and it thereby constitutes people’s identities. Even if one adopts this view of power, however, it remains useful to distinguish those power relations in which power is contested from those where it is not.10 Because sociotechnical dilemmas are often intertwined with various forms of power, science and technology today easily become political. Third, with regard to the institutional question of where politics occurs, this view of politics allows one to “see how politics can be a pervasive potential of every social relation without identifying every social relation with politics.”11 Saying that “everything is political” makes it impossible to understand how something that was previously not political can become political. It may be that any given framework for social decision making is inevitably structured by political assumptions, and hence, in this extended sense, science is inevitably political. But this does not mean that all decision-making processes within scientific institutions can or should be conducted through politics. Ideas, practices, or institutions become political when both power and conflict appear where previously either or both were either lacking or suppressed, accompanied by a shared interest in reaching a binding resolution to the conflict. This conception of politics is not neutral. As Warren points out, it privileges normative and explanatory concerns associated with democracy.12 In particular, this view of politics highlights the stakes of politicization. Once something becomes political, it becomes necessary to find ways of resolving conflict and exercising power without relying on

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shared religion, culture, or tradition to provide conclusive normative guidance. Such “foundational” resources may well have a legitimate role in politics, but in a pluralist society, what role they play is itself a political question. Additionally, this view of politics facilitates efforts to distinguish specifically political relations from other forms of social relations, thus highlighting the specific institutional requirements of political decision making. This view of politics also allows one to specify at least three conditions under which science is likely to not be political. First, whenever collective rules, decisions, or actions emerge from relations of intimacy, custom, habit, or generally accepted ways of life, they may involve neither conflict nor power and thus not be political. Most people hope their relations with colleagues, neighbors, friends, and lovers will usually take this form. Similarly, much of what takes place in state institutions—for example, routinized ceremonies or bureaucratic rule following—may not be very political at all. The customs and routines of laboratory work may also be nonpolitical in this sense. Such routinized procedures may have been established through politics, but once relations have been stabilized—black-boxed, as it were—politics may be gradually replaced by cooperation based on implicit or explicit consensus. This may be entirely desirable, and as Dewey understood, it is important to not underestimate the advantages of private, nonpolitical relations. Many bioethical dilemmas, for example, especially in the realm of clinical bioethics, are arguably best resolved in private, through nonpolitical relationships between patients and their families, friends, and doctors. The legal and institutional framework of such nonpolitical relationships, however, easily becomes political, and often rightly so. A second sort of nonpolitics appears in situations where collective rules, decisions, or actions involve conflict but no power. Conflicts of opinion, for example, are nonpolitical when they can be resolved through open discussion leading to voluntary agreement, without need to reach binding decisions or impose sanctions for noncompliance. Conflicts are also nonpolitical or quickly depoliticized when, if consensus proves impossible, dissenters are both able and willing to walk away. As long as exit costs are low and nobody has the capacity to enforce decisions, conflicts probably remain nonpolitical. An argument between friends about where to go for dinner, for example, is probably not a political conflict—unless one friend is the other’s employer and has the power to compel compliance.13 Similarly, in many academic settings, and perhaps on some science advisory bodies, discussion and debate often remain nonpolitical, as

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long as participants face no sanctions for failing to reach agreement, and as long as any agreements they do reach are not imposed on others. Discussions among colleagues at scientific conferences often take this form, and when they do not most wish they would. Even when scientific work or scholarly research has political origins or effects, it may be evaluated by provisionally established standards specific to particular scientific institutions.14 But when people evaluate intellectual claims in light of their political origins or effects, when they fail to maintain a boundary between conflicts of opinion and the power of professional status, employment, or funding, and especially when one party to a conflict is able to enforce his or her views by threatening to sanction others, then intellectual debate has become political. Finally, situations where there is power but no conflict are also best conceived as nonpolitical—or what Warren calls latently political, because conflicts may be suppressed. Because the powerless in modern societies face enormous physical and psychological pressures to endorse the terms of their powerlessness, observers should not take such endorsements at face value. At the same time, however, relatively powerless members of hierarchical organizations, such as the Catholic Church, or the constituents of elected representatives, might embrace a reasoned acceptance of their relative lack of power. University and laboratory hierarchies certainly create power differentials, but if they seem legitimate to those involved, power relations may remain nonconflictual. In situations of thoroughgoing cultural hegemony or physical vulnerability, however, when the powerless either cannot critically evaluate or cannot effectively contest the terms dictated by the powerful, it may be more appropriate to speak of latent or suppressed politics. Suppressed politics is the reservoir out of which many new political issues and actors emerge.15 In this respect, the politicization of science might be compared to the politicization of other social practices and institutions once deemed essentially nonpolitical. The workplace and the family, for example, have been politicized to a certain extent as part of efforts to fight discrimination and domestic violence, respectively. In each case, politicization involved contesting previously unquestioned relations of power, thus shifting those relations from the domain of suppressed politics into the political sphere. Politicization was a necessary step toward alleviating injustices. This conception of politics has a number of advantages for understanding the politics of science. First, as suggested previously, it allows one to see how science is often not political. When conflicts of opinion

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on a science advisory committee are amicably resolved through fair and open discussion, and when none of the participants is able to impose his or her view through exercising power, such conflicts are probably best deemed nonpolitical. Voting on science advisory committees, in contrast, amounts to the political resolution of conflict through the equal distribution of power.16 Although it is becoming more common for U.S. advisory committees to produce majority and minority reports, most committees try to avoid it. From this perspective, much of the work of science advisory bodies is not political. Their work generally has political origins and effects, but taken by themselves, science advisory committees are often able to conduct their work in a manner properly considered nonpolitical. The second advantage of this conception of politics is that it illuminates the moral and political stakes of politicizing science. It enables one to identify contexts where it makes sense to seek the democratization of expert advisory bodies and other scientific institutions. Insofar as democratization involves the equalization of power, it might be understood as an especially good way of responding to politics.17 This means, among other things, that where there is no politics, there is no need for democracy. Democratic politics is arguably the best form of politics, but it is often inappropriate for relations among friends and colleagues, as long as compliance with collective agreements remains more or less voluntary and not subject to enforcement through the exercise of power. Democratized power is less coercive than other forms of power, but it remains potentially coercive. Neoliberal enthusiasts of market approaches to public problems underestimate the potential for politics to provide both effective solutions and personally fulfilling activity. But as Latour suggests when criticizing the “fabulous expansion” of citizens’ worries, politics involves power-laden conflict in which ideals are compromised and personal identities challenged.18 Because most people would understandably prefer to avoid such compromises and challenges, it is prudent to seek the democratization of science in only those social locations where justice requires it. Insofar as the professional norms and collegial relationships among scientists provide sufficient resources for resolving disputes and forging agreements—and insofar as those agreements enjoyed some degree of reasoned acceptance by the general public—science may be best understood as nonpolitical. Such collegial harmony and public acceptance is today often lacking, however, which means that science easily becomes political.

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Power-laden conflicts within scientific institutions may lead to the violation of epistemic and institutional norms, but they need not. It depends on how such conflicts are resolved. If power is equally distributed among the members of a laboratory, for example, they will need to resolve their conflicts through either deliberation or voting, rather than the exercise of power. In this respect, the recognition and legitimization of power-laden conflict may foster knowledge production. How should societies respond to the politics of science? There are at least three possible responses: displacement, suppression, or institutionalization. The first two of these are antipolitical, in the sense that they seek to eliminate rather than legitimize the politics of science. Liberals often favor displacing politics onto market mechanisms. Those who view the scientific community as a “marketplace of ideas,” for example, argue against any role for political authorities in regulating science.19 Just as consumers seek to maximize individual preference satisfaction, the argument goes, scientists seek to maximize their individual professional success and intellectual satisfaction. In either case, any political interference with the respective market incentives threatens to disrupt the sublime process of mutual adjustment that ultimately serves the public good. Liberal approaches in bioethics, as I argue briefly in chapter 10, take a similar approach when they displace the public dilemmas associated with biotechnology onto the private choices of rights-bearing individuals. Another antipolitical response to the politics of science appears in various fundamentalist efforts to suppress the pursuit or dissemination of scientific knowledge whenever it conflicts with a particular group’s basic beliefs. Religiously motivated efforts to ban stem cell research or human cloning often take this form. Critics of such efforts are at least partially mistaken, however, in denouncing them for politicizing science. To the extent such efforts use religious or ideological appeals to short-circuit public deliberation and debate, their implied aim is to bring the politics of science to an end. The fundamentalist politicization of science implicitly seeks to render politics unnecessary. Conversely, when religious appeals are offered in a spirit of inclusive public deliberation, they may invigorate political conflicts within and about scientific institutions. The third response to politicized science, institutionalization, is what I pursue throughout this book. Machiavelli teaches the importance of institutions that facilitate various forms of public engagement. And Dewey and Latour suggest that democratic modes of politicizing science enhance possibilities for public deliberation and contestation, as well as helping

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to ensure that science serves public purposes. Institutionalizing the politics of science neither suppresses nor displaces it, but instead renders it amenable to a democratic response. In this respect, as Warren notes, “democracy is the most political way of responding to politics.”20 And if representative democracy is the best form of democracy, then democratic representation is the best response to the politics of science. Asymmetries of Science and Politics At this point it is important to remember that the politicization of science always occurs in a particular context, and a key feature of today’s context is the long history of efforts to exclude politics from science. Many of these efforts have themselves been firmly institutionalized, leading to various asymmetries between science and politics. Efforts to understand such asymmetries need not attribute anything essential to current modes of relating science and politics. Such efforts are best conceived as provisional assessments of current practice, rather than yet another attempt to draw philosophical boundaries between science and politics. Science is a cultural-institutional “space,” as Thomas Gieryn writes, whose contents actors periodically redefine through power-laden negotiations (“boundary work”). But the space of science has never been “initially empty,” and negotiations over what counts as science are always shaped by the results of past negotiations.21 As Dick Pels argues, recognizing that science is shaped by society and politics “does not necessarily dictate a radical agnosticism concerning the boundaries between science and politics as functionally differentiated subsystems in the social division of labour.”22 It would be odd, indeed, if five hundred years of modernity had not established certain asymmetries between science and politics. One current asymmetry between science and politics is that they have different institutional centers of gravity. Despite his insistence on a symmetrical methodology for studying scientific practice, Latour offers an illuminating account of certain features of scientific institutions that distinguish them from other social institutions. The key difference between politics and science, Latour argues, has little to do with their cognitive attributes, their methods, or their respective rationalities, but primarily with scientists’ use of laboratories.23 By reducing the infinitely complex outside world to purified and manageable forms—figures, formulae, chemical stocks, laboratory-bred animals, and so on—scientists acquire control over things to a degree that nonscientists never can. Scientists can

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then practice manipulating the things brought in from outside, making as many mistakes as they wish. Politicians, in contrast, might be held accountable for any of their mistakes. The specificity of science, then, lies not in the cognitive virtues praised by rationalists, but in the practical capacities associated with a particular sort of institution. Many other institutional and noninstitutional venues play important roles in scientific practice, but laboratories of one form or another arguably remain at the center. Another currently well-established asymmetry between science and politics has to do with what Pels calls their distinctive “timescapes.” In contrast to political representation, scientific representation usually takes longer and is subject to provisional completion. Put in the most general terms, science relies on slowness. “If science is indeed politics continued by different means, the invention of the calm space and easy pace of the laboratory precisely grants the ‘different means’ by which science is singled out as special (but not too special).”24 The key feature of laboratories, which they share with other institutional locations for intellectual work, is that they provide a partially estranged, provisionally detached social setting from which to develop an autonomous perspective on reality. The autonomy thus provided does not rest on a rationalist commitment to value freedom or particular methodological rules but rather on institutional features that slow things down. In a similar vein, Feenberg distinguishes the different types of representation engaged in by politicians and engineers with respect to their temporal attributes. Technology depends on the gradual accumulation of skills, resources, and expertise, each of which requires time. Although democratic theorists often blame the loss of popular control over political decisions on the physical expansion of the polity, the loss of popular control over technical decisions arises in large part from the expansion over time of expert knowledge and skills. Technology thus always represents the past; it is “the bearer of a tradition that favors specific interests and specific ideas about the good life.”25 Whereas political representatives must consider the present needs and desires of their constituents, technical specialists “represent the interests which presided over the underdetermined technical choices that lie in the past of their profession.”26 Representation in politics, of course, is also shaped and constrained by its own history, most obviously by the existing constitutional and legal framework. But most laws and even many constitutions can be more easily changed than established technical systems.

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Latour also highlights the particular timescape conducive to the legitimate production of scientific and political representation. Appeals to established science, philosophy, and other foundational warrants for political action cause a “short-circuit in the composition of the common world.” Latour calls instead for a “slowing down that is made possible by due process, which I have chosen to call representation.”27 Latour thus associates both scientific and political representation with slowness, and he contrasts each with efforts to cut short practices of mediation in favor of the immediate certainties promised by foundational epistemologies (or one might add, the Rousseauean virtues of candor and common sense). Latour certainly has a point, and anyone familiar with the dogmatic tendencies and frantic pace of today’s media-driven politics can only agree. Scientists and other academics today also face increasing pressure to produce according to the managerial ethos and efficiency requirements of corporate funders. But even if processes of scientific and political representation both require more time than they currently enjoy, it may still be true that pressures to accelerate hurt science more than politics. Put differently, whereas acceleration nearly always infringes on the norms of science, the norms of politics sometimes require it. As I discuss in the next chapter, political representation underlies a temporal dynamic that occasionally imposes a normatively justifiable pressure to decide. A third asymmetry between science and politics, corresponding to the first, is that the modern state functions as an institutional center of gravity for politics. Just as the dispersed networks of modern science retain connections to laboratories and other laboratory-like settings, contemporary political actors and institutions continue to rely upon the far-flung capacities of modern states. To be sure, political actors of all kinds today make claims to stand or speak for others at local, national, and transnational levels, challenging the long-standing assumption that national states provide the most authoritative form of political representation. Dewey grappled with this issue nearly one hundred years ago, and the proliferation of nonstate politics has continued ever since. Emerging forms of network governance, in which diverse public and private institutions shape and implement public policy, suggest that national states are at most first among equals. The history of modern democracy is closely linked to both science and the state, but as politics extends beyond the state, democracy needs to follow or else be left behind.28 Nonetheless, insofar as states retain control over the legitimate means of

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violence, they remain indispensable for ensuring the basic physical security upon which democratic practices depend. As such practices increasingly involve the representation of issue-based rather than territorial constituencies, states remain crucial for securing conditions of equal access and respect for human rights. Moreover, given that most citizens today have few opportunities to formally authorize those claiming to speak for them in the emerging global public sphere, national states retain a central role in systems of political representation that extend beyond state boundaries. A Political Framework for Science Asserting a limited priority for state institutions over other social institutions suggests a further asymmetry between science and politics: politics generates an institutional and legal context for science. Even if much political activity no longer revolves around state institutions, it is still the case that politics, in the very broadly instrumental sense adopted here, involves attempts to organize, control, shape, or influence other social activities. According to the view presented here, politics involves not only power and conflict but also pressure to take collective action, often in the form of legally binding agreements. Scientists certainly engage in rhetorical, power-laden processes of reaching agreement, but their agreements generally do not carry the force of law. Agreements among scientists are usually not legally binding upon others, whereas many elected officials are authorized to reach agreements binding upon their constituents. In this respect, we remain the heirs of Hobbes. Scholars in science and technology studies, however, have often treated political actors as merely one “social group” among others, thus flattening the institutional landscape and neglecting the possibility that political institutions may have a distinctive role to play in shaping science and technology.29 The notion that politics has some sort of priority to other modes of social activity may sound reminiscent of Aristotle’s view of human beings as “political animals” and political science as the “master art.” Today such claims easily sound insufferably quaint and nostalgic. To paraphrase Latour’s question quoted at the end of the previous chapter, how could there possibly be a single political sphere that would encompass all the diverse cultural sites in which humans and nonhumans are assembled? The question is not whether all the various local, national, and

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transnational locations in which humans and nonhumans are represented might somehow be subjected to the coordination and care of a global state. Whatever else one might say about “the political,” it clearly takes different forms in different cultures, and it may take still different forms in global institutions that seek to bridge cultures. And the question is certainly not whether politics is somehow more noble, fulfilling, or “truly human” than other activities, as civic republicans and participatory democrats sometimes suggest. Whatever its potential educational effects, politics is a difficult and often unpleasant mode of solidifying identities and enforcing decisions. As noted previously, politics is potentially present in all social relations, but we can be thankful that most social relations are not in fact regulated through politics.30 A better question is whether it makes sense to view politics, and by extension, political representation—in all its diverse modes and locations—as having the task of facilitating scientific representation in a way that does not apply in reverse. Democracy and science may be mutually dependent, but they depend on each other in different ways. A distinction that may help clarify the issue is that between “politics” and “the political.” Carl Schmitt famously saw the political in the existential decisions of an authoritarian ruler that define the boundary between friend and enemy. Wolin suggests a more pluralist and participatory view: politics is the institutionally legitimized pursuit of competitive advantage; the political involves collective decision making about common concerns.31 This approach captures the difference between processes of political contestation and deliberation (politics) and provisionally stabilized modes of conducting such processes (the political). Wendy Brown thus suggests that “we carve a distinction between the politicization of particular relations and endeavors, for example, science or canon formation or sex, and the bearing of this politicization on the political where the latter is understood as the distinct problematic of the values and powers binding collectivities.”32 Politicization might be understood as the process whereby new concerns are introduced into the political. But “theoretical politicization of any activity or relation is not the same as theorizing the political, just as the presence of power, precisely because it is everywhere, cannot be equated with the problem of how we do and ought to order collective life.”33 Politicizing science by revealing suppressed relations of conflict and power, for example, does not yet establish a political framework for responding to such power-laden conflicts.

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Latour develops something similar to this notion of politicization when he describes the function of the “first house” in his “new bicameralism” as having the task of “taking into account” or detecting and assessing new candidates, both human and nonhuman, for admission to the collective.34 Latour persuasively argues that such “taking into account” is not a task specific to politicians or political institutions. But it also seems clear that the constitution or framework that structures this “taking into account” is a distinctly political framework, in a sense similar to Wolin’s notion of “the political.” Although I cannot fully explore their relationship here, it is worth noting that politics and the political—or more simply, political activities and their cultural, legal, and institutional framework— continually shape each other. Like any structure, constitutional constraints on the politics of science are sustained by the same agents they constrain. As an example consider how scientists frequently call for politicians to respect their “right to research.”35 Such calls usually seek to insulate science from social and political interference. Sponsors of California’s Proposition 71 of 2004, for example, promoted it in response to what many saw as the Bush administration’s ideologically driven policy on stem cell research. In addition to establishing $3 billion in public funding for stem cell research, the voter initiative enshrined in the California State Constitution “a right to conduct stem cell research.”36 It did little to insulate science from politics, however, and implementation of the proposition was plagued by controversy from the beginning. What few recognized is that asserting a right to research does not establish that a particular line of research is in fact worth pursuing. Rights protect choices; they do not guide choices.37 For example, it may be a violation of the right to research, as well as counterproductive, to legally ban some types of research—such as research attempting to link race and I.Q.38— but such research may still be unwise for reasons scientific, ethical, political, or all three. In this respect, asserting a moral or constitutional right to research should be understood as a way of initiating rather than concluding public deliberation on what types of research government should restrict or promote and how it should do so. More generally, a structure of rights claims cannot effectively protect science unless it is enlivened by political engagement on behalf of those claims. That is why John Stuart Mill believed that minority rights would never be safe “unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief.”39 Rights claims are most effective when their proponents eschew the temptation

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to avoid politics, attempting instead to combine talk about rights with efforts to generate the institutional and popular support that give rights their real power. Without popular engagement in the politics of science, a political framework for science can neither protect nor promote it. Conclusion One might conclude that at the level where politicization occurs— namely, among individual actors—political and scientific representation are symmetrical enterprises. They each draw upon more or less the same human and nonhuman resources, and they each extend into the most unexpected corners of the universe to bring new entities into the common world. Indeed, at the individual level, those trying to politicize science often compete for material and cultural resources against those seeking to scientize politics. But at the constitutional level of the political, where the congealed results of past conflicts structure newly emerging relations among humans and nonhumans, political representation provides a structure for scientific representation. This is not to deny that scientific and technical practices establish new political structures, but it specifies what it means to say they do. Political representation is one practice among many required for articulating, assembling, and mediating among the constituents of a common world. But it also has the particular task of establishing a provisionally stable framework within which such articulating, assembling, and mediating takes place. This provisionally stable political framework is not a homogenous blob. It includes various kinds of institutional and noninstitutional venues, different types of customs, habits, and practices. In this sense, “the political” does not designate a single ideal of public deliberation or decision making but an internally differentiated landscape of practices and institutions. The next chapter explores how these various practices and institutions, including those normally associated with science, potentially contribute to representative democracy.

9 Elements of Democratic Representation

We are about to reach the point when both scientists and politicians begin to worry not merely about specific issues, but about the theoretical status of science in our political and constitutional system, and no longer rely on the assumption . . . that science and democracy are natural allies. —Don K. Price, The Scientific Estate Political representation is primarily a public, institutionalized arrangement involving many people and groups, and operating in the complex ways of largescale social arrangements. What makes it representation is not any single action by any one participant, but the over-all structure and functioning of the system, the patterns emerging from the multiple activities of many people. —Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation

From Hobbes to Dewey to Latour, critics of liberal rationalism offer not idle theories but reflections on and of actual historical developments in science and politics. Critiques of liberal rationalism, Ezrahi notes, have had “a wider resonance” that has weakened the public authority of science and its symbolic support for liberal democracy.1 Without objective scientific knowledge to unite a heterogeneous public, it becomes more difficult to legitimize shared programs of political action. Citizens today are less likely than in the past to believe public officials can get things done, and state institutions have lost authority compared to other major social institutions. Although this loss of state authority has many causes— including the weakening of national governments relative to multinational corporations, transnational organizations, and other global players—a decline in the legitimating power of science is arguably among them. In this respect, declining faith in liberal rationalism may support libertarian and fiscal conservative conceptions of politics. Equating a failed liberal rationalism with political representation as such, libertarians

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restrict representative governments with balanced budget requirements, term limits, privatization, and deregulation. For conservative libertarians like Milton Friedman, a decline in instrumental effectiveness appears to be an acceptable consequence of their strategy of cutting taxes to “starve the beast” of government.2 Although the “science wars” critics of constructivism have tended to be leftists rather than libertarians, many of them share the libertarian assumption that instrumentally effective politics depends on a rationalist view of science. But rather than cheering the decline of instrumentalism, they mourn it. Declining public faith in scientific truth and rationality, they suggest, fosters a corresponding decline in the political activism it once supposedly motivated.3 Yet another postmortem for liberal rationalism associates its decline not with a corresponding decline in bold political action but with blind faith in such action. Some commentators thus blame postmodern constructivism for encouraging the Bush administration’s hubristic use of state power for ideological goals, such as the Iraq War. According to Joshua Micah Marshall, “They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because ‘the facts’ aren’t really facts, at least not as most of us understand them.”4 After all, if expertise is “socially constructed,” then what is to prevent the president from constructing it however he likes? What is to stop the hired guns who use bogus studies to manufacture uncertainty on one issue after another? In sum, commentators have identified the alleged cultural ascendance of constructivism over rationalism with both the rise and decline of righteous political action. Aside from their tendentious readings of postmodernism and constructivism, these assessments throw out the democratic baby with the rationalist bathwater. It may be that a certain brand of relativist individualism underlies various antidemocratic aspects of today’s consumer culture. Constructivism reduced to the construction of consumer desires has little to offer democracy.5 But many critics of constructivist science studies ignore the possibility of conceiving democracy in a way that avoids rationalism without abandoning either reasoned argument or social justice. That was Dewey’s aspiration, and it animates much contemporary political theory.6 One promising effort in science studies has been Steve Fuller’s social epistemology, which he associates with a “republican” approach to science policy. Against Michael Polanyi’s “republic of science,” which portrayed science as a deregulated market economy, Fuller aligns

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his version of republicanism with Karl Popper’s open society.7 Fuller asserts that republicanism’s central ideal is public deliberation, protected by the “right to be wrong.”8 Science has “failed to apply the democratic spirit to itself,” Fuller writes, which is that of an “experimenting society.” He proposes various institutional means of “constituting science as a democratic polity.”9 The basic goal of these measures is to equalize power and facilitate deliberation both among and between scientists and lay citizens, which in turn promises to produce more innovative and more socially responsive science. By reading republicanism through Popper’s critical rationalism, Fuller overemphasizes the deliberative component of republicanism. There is more to republicanism than a “right to be wrong.”10 Indeed, some of Fuller’s own reform proposals do not require deliberation. Additionally, Fuller’s version of republicanism often seems similar to what Rawls calls a “comprehensive doctrine,” a set of values and beliefs applicable to all areas of social life. Fuller does not specify what type of democratization or what sort of republicanism might be most appropriate for various scientific and political institutions or the polity as a whole. This is important, because not every association in a democracy needs to be organized democratically.11 This is true not merely for practical reasons but because democracy, as Dewey argued, often benefits from associations that are nondemocratic or only partially democratic. Highly exclusive associations, including Marxist, feminist, and black separatist associations, for example, have effectively promoted the inclusion of their constituencies in mainstream politics.12 Moreover, different kinds of associations have different educational effects on their members, as well as different effects on public discourse and public decision making. Trade-offs between different associational effects are inevitable.13 A large, hierarchical environmental organization, for example, probably represents its members primarily in a trustee sense, requiring little input from its members. It will not foster individual autonomy as much as a small group that requires its members’ active participation, but it is more likely to effectively represent their concerns in the public sphere. Conversely, associations that cultivate political skills through internal dialogue and debate, such as universities, often lack a unified position on public issues, and thus may fail to publicly promote their members’ views.14 Because no single association can achieve every effect to an equal degree, citizens should have access to a range of different types of associations, and hence to a range of different modes of representation.

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Representation Unbound Once one recognizes that different institutions have different purposes, it makes little sense to evaluate them all according to the same standard.15 Not every institution can be expected to meet the same standards of public participation and deliberation, expert competence, or formal authorization and accountability. Given that science advisory committees, for example, have avowedly different purposes than legislatures, courts, or citizen advisory panels, they should be evaluated according to different standards. This point leads to the question of how to identify the distinctive purposes of particular institutions. There are many possible approaches. Jeffrey Tullis differentiates institutions in terms of the public goods they provide. He argues that the U.S. Congress represents popular will, the courts protect individual rights, and the president promotes national security.16 Ethan Leib, in contrast, associates different institutions with different roles in the policy process: elected representatives set the agenda, expert advisory committees propose solutions, think tanks offer “organized reasons,” and randomly selected popular assemblies, he proposes, should be appointed to make decisions.17 In contrast to these approaches, this chapter suggests a framework for examining the purposes of different institutions in light of their distinctive modes of representation.18 In this respect, I follow Hanna Pitkin’s classic study on the concept of representation. For Pitkin, representation is a complex concept that includes multiple elements. Drawing on the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin, Pitkin examines the family of words associated with representation and shows how speakers use them in various contexts, including but not only the history of political thought. She distinguishes her approach from standard mid-century “conceptual analysis,” however, noting that “political theory is not confined to philosophical puzzles; its problems are only partly or sporadically philosophical or conceptual.” Although Pitkin offers a single definition of representation—“representation, taken generally, means the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact”—she then also notes that “the single, basic definition is not much help.” More important, she says, would be “a way of doing justice to the various more detailed applications of representation in various contexts.” None of the various theories of representation in the history of political thought is entirely wrong, she says, but most are incomplete. Her aim is “to interpret each view . . . by identifying

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the context for which it is correct and exploring the assumptions and implications imposed by that context. This process discloses the meaning of representation. . . . what the thing is.”19 Pitkin’s account recalls the famous tale of the blind professors examining different parts of an elephant, each believing he or she has discovered the real thing—a snake, a tree—when in fact each has grasped only part of the whole. Although I do not share Pitkin’s ambition of identifying the essence of representation—which she pursued not though speculative philosophy, it should be noted, but by examining uses of the word in ordinary language—my aim in this book has been in part similar to hers: to show how different theories of representation each capture a significant element of what representation could and should be in a democracy. Rousseau, Madison, and Burke emphasize the representative’s competence; Hobbes highlights the formal authorization of the representative, as well as the construction of a public through representation; Dewey shares Hobbes’s constructivism but stresses participation and deliberation by the represented; Latour shows how representation in science and politics frequently shape each other. My discussion of these authors in the preceding chapters has sought to highlight different elements of an internally complex concept of democratic representation. Another key feature of Pitkin’s view is that it goes beyond the typical fixation on national political institutions to consider entire political systems. As suggested in the epigraph to this chapter, Pitkin conceives representation in terms of an institutionally mediated system of relationships, “the patterns emerging from the multiple activities of many people.”20 These patterns, especially the relationships between and among representatives and constituents, not the actions of individual representatives, constitute the locus of representation.21 As stated before, representation in a democracy requires different institutional and noninstitutional venues, and different venues make different contributions to representative democracy. Iris Young, Nadia Urbinati, Mark Warren, and other contemporary political theorists build on this notion when they conceive representation as, in Young’s words, “democratic discussion and decisionmaking . . . mediated through and dispersed over space and time. Rather than a relation of identity or substitution, political representation should be thought of as a process involving a mediated relation of constituents to one another and to a representative.”22 In contrast to some of Latour’s formulations, Young explains that representatives who speak for their constituents are not

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speaking as the constituents would have spoken. People have multiple identities, social groups are internally diverse, and no single representative or representative institution can possibly make entirely present the full individualities of their various constituents. Young thus calls for “pluralizing the modes and sites of representation.”23 The quality of representation, for Young, does not lie in the accuracy or faithfulness of substitution. Instead it rests first on the number and quality of connections, and second on the number of modes and sites of representation. Young identifies three modes of representation, each articulating a certain aspect of citizen identities: opinions, interests, and social perspectives. I take a somewhat different approach, focusing on five different modes of relation between representatives and constituents. For convenience, I call these “elements” of democratic representation: authorization, accountability, participation, deliberation, and resemblance. My aim is to understand how these concepts function within, or contribute to, a normative conception of democratic representation. This list of concepts is not meant to be exhaustive, and one could choose others. Most institutions facilitate several of them, weighted differently according to the purpose of the institution. The rest of this chapter very briefly sketches each of these concepts, showing how they might contribute to democratic representation. Where political theorists tend to view such concepts as shaped primarily through social history and political discourse, this chapter follows STS research in showing how they are also constituted by science and technology. Various local, national, and international systems of representation differ enormously, of course, and I do not aim to present an ideal system. Nonetheless, the history reviewed in this book suggests that these concepts have become provisionally established components of current thinking about science, democracy, and representation in Western societies. Although these concepts acquire different meanings in different contexts, they are likely to remain sites of contestation for the foreseeable future. Authorization Political theorists distinguish between authorization and the authoritative.24 It is one thing to be in authority by virtue of having been authorized to hold an office of some kind. It is something else to be an authority and to have an authoritative opinion on a particular topic by virtue of knowledge or experience. Those who accept the statement of someone

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who is an authority do so because they acknowledge the person’s expertise. Those who obey the command of a person in authority do so because they accept both that the person has been duly authorized and that the command lies within the person’s jurisdiction. For convenience one might refer to the authority of an office holder as procedural authority and that of an expert as substantive authority. At first glance, this distinction might seem to parallel the modern divide between science and politics. But like politics and science, procedural and substantive authority often become intertwined. Generally speaking, with the demise of traditional authorities and the rise of individual consent as the key source of political legitimacy, political authority becomes both more necessary and more problematic. It becomes more necessary for integrating society and preserving order, because traditional sources of social cohesion no longer do the job. It becomes more problematic, because people of authority seem to threaten individual autonomy.25 This threat underlies participatory democrats’ healthy skepticism toward representation. Such skepticism should not be taken too far, however, because authority and authorization not only establish representation, but also have the potential to democratize it. Conceived in a narrow sense, authorization is a strictly formal element of representation that by itself says nothing about the substantive activity of representing.26 Hobbes thus asserted, as explained in chapter 5, that popular authorization of the sovereign imposes no obligations upon it. As long as the representative’s activities fall within the terms of the authorization, someone who has been authorized to represent others may undertake that task in all sorts of ways. Hobbes believed that the sovereign could be authorized by a hypothetical social contract. In modern democracies, in contrast, the most common way of authorizing representatives is through popular elections. Liberal theories of representation, explored in chapter 3, conceive elections in terms of what theorists variously call a delegate, principal-agent, or juridical model of representation. The sovereign people, a unified willing subject, elects and thereby authorizes representatives to act on its behalf. A representative government, in this view, is a defense attorney writ large. The people act politically only on election day, when they render a unified and monotone decision. The juridical model of representation is clearly inadequate for contemporary democracy, but it is worth recalling its egalitarian origins. Remember that for Hobbes, everyone’s mental and physical faculties are sufficiently equal to prevent anyone

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from convincing everyone else to accept an expert’s judgment in place of her own. Among the various practical barriers to technocracy is the Hobbesian notion that most people are simply too obstinate to acknowledge the authority of experts on matters of everyday common sense. Put in a democratic context, it follows that each voter’s choice carries the same authorizing force, regardless of his or her substantive authority on the matters at issue. This is the beauty and horror of the universal franchise: no matter how ignorant, impulsive, or self-interested the voters, their votes each carry the same force of law. Even political theorists and science studies scholars get only one vote! Historically, of course, the justifications offered for popular elections, and later, for expanding the suffrage, have gone far beyond Hobbes’s theory of consent. Tocqueville argued, for example, that in the long run, despite their many short-term errors, democracies tend to produce more competent governments than aristocracies.27 But the case for popular elections does not rest solely or even primarily on their contribution to governmental competence. Voters are not an academic search committee, and they apply a wide range of criteria when choosing a person to represent them.28 Indeed, perhaps the most powerful case for selecting representatives through popular elections relies on the principle of medieval church councils that every person affected by a decision should approve that decision. Dewey echoed this principle when he called for the organization of democratic publics around those indirectly affected by private decisions. In an era of globalization, as discussed previously with reference to Hobbes, the idea that a government should grant voting rights to everyone affected by its decision raises intriguing questions about how to involve nonresidents, nonhumans, and other nonvoters in relevant government decisions. A related justification for popular elections is their contribution to the symbolic inclusion of all members of a political community.29 In this respect, the rejection of competence as a criterion for voting rights becomes especially important in light of the recurrent use of literacy tests and other epistemic requirements to exclude minorities from full citizenship. Indeed, popular elections hold special importance for those who lack political and cultural power. In contrast to elections, many informal processes of decision making (lobbying, old boy networks, etc.) privilege those with the cultural and financial resources required to navigate such processes. Additionally, to the extent that formal procedures depersonalize political decisions, they make it easier for citizens who lack relevant

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resources and experience to take on the socially difficult task of engaging in politics. Most people find it less intimidating to cast a secret ballot than to present an argument at a town hall meeting.30 Finally, the notion that each citizen’s vote should have equal legal force also reflects Mill’s conviction that each person’s “own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode.”31 Regardless of whose view is more correct, each citizen must retain final authority over his or her vote. Although participatory democrats are generally skeptical of electoral democracy, they also advocate the involvement of all citizens, regardless of competence, in shaping decisions that affect them. As Benjamin Barber writes, “A citizenry cannot speak truth to power because it does not pretend to know what truth is.”32 And as Hobbes insisted, even if citizens base their decisions on expert recommendations, they must find a way of “owning” their decisions. For liberal theories of representative government, such ownership rests on public recognition that policies are based on considerations of instrumental effectiveness rather than private interest. Democratic representation, in contrast, while still relying on expertise, generates a sense of public ownership in government decisions through various modes of civic engagement. Habermas captures this point in his account of the tension between the “facticity” of laws sanctioned by majority vote on the one hand, and the “validity claims” generated through public deliberation on the other. Whereas his earlier work on the public sphere asserted a dichotomy between interest-based voting and reason-governed deliberation—a dichotomy still apparent in some deliberative democratic theory—Habermas’s more recent work suggests a close link between them. He thus explains that “validity claims are Janus-faced: as claims, they overshoot every context; at the same time, they must be both raised and accepted here and now if they are to support an agreement effective for coordination. . . . The universalistic meaning of the claimed validity exceeds all contexts, but only the local, binding act of acceptance enables validity claims to bear the burden of social integration for a context-bound everyday practice.”33 Deliberation generates various more-or-less persuasive reasons for decision makers to adopt one option or another. But the power of reasons to generate collective political identities—self-conscious publics, in Dewey’s sense—rests on linking these reasons to legally binding decisions, such as those rendered by an election or by majority vote in a legislature or other institution. Without a link to authorized decisions of

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one kind or another, deliberation risks becoming “just talk”—a point well understood by the frustrated members of citizen juries and other deliberative forums when they fail to generate significant resonance with either ordinary citizens or public officials.34 To be sure, Habermas insists that the formal authorization conferred by voting should have “an internal relation to the search for truth.” Voters should deliberate before they cast their ballots, and their search for truth is merely “brought to a provisional close under the pressure to decide.”35 But in comparison to deliberative democrats who neglect such mundane factors as “the pressure to decide,” Habermas makes clear that deliberation is only one component of democracy. The institutions that provide opportunities to express popular preferences and opinions—elections, referenda, formal rights of assembly and protest, and so on—should be informed but not replaced by deliberative modes of participation. As Habermas’s reference to “the pressure to decide” suggests, the formal dimensions of democracy become indispensable once one recognizes the constraints of political time. Neither scientific inquiry nor citizen deliberation has any inherent time limits, but political decision making usually does.36 In politics, not to decide is a type of decision, and public officials cannot wait for citizens to become sufficiently knowledgeable about the relevant issues before making decisions or holding elections. Politics occurs in time, so at any given moment—say, election day— imperfectly deliberative procedures must be employed to pass imperfect judgments on the political outcomes produced since the last election.37 The acceptance of time constraints—indeed, the embrace and perhaps even instrumental use of such constraints—is not merely a contingent feature of politics but part of what it means to think and act in a distinctly political manner. One study of a bioethics advisory council, for example, shows how public officials used a lack of expert consensus to create a “moment of decision” that reinforced both their own political authority and the authority of politics as such.38 Time is not only a constraint, of course, but also a resource. In contrast to the ideal of immediacy associated with Rousseauean direct democracy, which reduces popular sovereignty to periodic electoral expression of popular will, the mediating institutions of representative democracy extend politics over time. Pierre Rosanvallon thus asks us to see “democracy as a conjunction of temporalities.”39 From this perspective, representation becomes an ongoing process, rather than a series of

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isolated moments of authorization. And authorization becomes more than a strictly formal category; it shapes the substantive activity of representation. In Young’s formulation, “As a deferring relationship between constituents and their agents, representation moves between moments of authorization and accountability. Representation is a cycle of anticipation and recollection between constituents and representative, in which discourse and action at each moment ought to bear traces of the others.”40 Memories of the conditions of authorization (deliberations, protests, promises, programs, etc.) are carried into the subsequent relations between representatives and constituents. Representatives always face issues that could not be anticipated at the moment of authorization, and to respond to such issues in the public interest they must engage in deliberation—both with other representatives and with constituents. This means that representatives should not be bound by direct mandates to their constituents. But when making decisions, representatives should bear in mind the public deliberation that preceded their authorization. As Urbinati notes, echoing Latour’s account of “circulating reference,” the uniqueness of modern democracy “lies in the circularity elections create between the state and society.”41 Put differently, voting is not deliberative, but it potentially reflects and generates deliberation. Voting is a blunt instrument that registers only yes or no answers. Like other measurement devices, votes never fully capture what they measure. You could write the reasons for your vote on the ballot, but nobody would read it. Nonetheless, elections potentially reflect and embody judgments about political opinions, ideas, and proposals, and how they have played themselves out in the past or are likely to play themselves out in the future. Despite these potential linkages between voting and deliberation, democratic representation embraces egalitarian voting rights as an ideal with its own integrity, not merely a pragmatic concession to time constraints or the need to legitimize governments. Just as children are not imperfect adults, ignorant voters are not imperfect deliberators. It may lie within the logic of democracy that all citizens should have opportunities to become more deliberative, just as all children should grow into adults. But democratic politics always occurs in time, at particular moments in the self-realization of citizens. These individual moments should not be tyrannized by the image of a perfect deliberative future. In contrast to the authorization of democratic legislatures through popular elections, the members of courts, cabinets, advisory boards, and

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bureaucracies are generally authorized through appointment by elected officials and their surrogates. Such appointments establish tenuous linkages between appointed officials and directly elected representatives. According to the traditional instrumental theory of expertise, these linkages establish the public authority of those so appointed.42 But of course judges, bureaucrats, and other experts are not only in authority but also and often primarily an authority on some particular topic. Previous chapters examined some of the ways that expert authority is established and maintained. By casting science as a distinctly public form of knowledge, scientists since the seventeenth century have presented themselves as spokespersons of a universal human interest in instrumental control.43 In addition, the substantive authority of experts often depends on a public image of science as characterized by authoritative procedures of various kinds, including laboratory protocols, institutional hiring rules, and the licensing or certification procedures of professional associations. During the past thirty years, however, especially in the United States, the parties to sociotechnical controversies increasingly resort to legal challenges against the expert claims of their opponents. Government agencies are thus forced to turn from making simple statements of fact— “substance X is a carcinogen”—to providing detailed accounts of the procedures they used to determine the facts. The response to a lack of trust in scientific procedures has been to underwrite scientific authority with administrative procedures. Indeed, agencies have found that including a wide range of competing experts and interest groups in the deliberations of expert advisory bodies tends to strengthen their authority.44 This procedural mode of establishing expert authority through contentious processes plays a key role in what Sheila Jasanoff calls the “civic epistemology” of the United States. The political culture of Great Britain, in contrast, tends to place more weight on the public service of experts, and German institutions tend to ground expert authority in consensusoriented deliberations among a carefully specified group of qualified participants.45 All of this suggests that political and scientific authority are intertwined in culturally specific ways, and it might seem pointless to distinguish between them. However, despite being linked in certain ways, scientific and political authority mobilize different capacities. First, when linked to the coercive power of the state, the electoral authorization of political representatives brings with it the power to compel compliance with decisions, regardless of whether the individuals being coerced ac-

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cept the representative’s authority. Although resorting to coercion may undermine authority, authority may also legitimate coercion.46 Coercive power certainly plays a role in science, as do economic and cultural power; one need only consider the power exercised by peer review, hiring, and promotion committees. But the authority of scientists rarely holds as much coercive potential as does that of high-level public officials in modern states. Second, in contrast to the time constraints of politics mentioned previously, scientists generally seek as much time as possible to ensure the reliability of their claims. There are various contingent pressures that reduce a scientist’s time for research (e.g., funding constraints, tenure requirements, not to mention the joys and burdens of everyday life), but these features of scientific practice highlight the norm they challenge. Scientists have repeatedly found, for example, that political pressures to promise imminent cures for disease conflict with the temporal realities of research. At best, science is unpredictable; at worst, it takes a very long time. In this respect, the different time horizons of political authority and scientific authority often bring them into conflict. Third, scientific and political authority have different relationships to formal decision making. Although it clashes with the traditional image of science, many scientific institutions—expert advisory committees, university administrative bodies, research laboratories, and the like—make collective decisions through voting.47 However, their voting is primarily a pragmatic device to conclude discussion, and perhaps secondarily a way of conveying equal respect for all (invited) opinions. It does not rest on an equal right to self-governance, as does the universal franchise in politics. Similarly, although formal authorization plays a crucial role in constituting expert authority, it authorizes experts only to speak on behalf of their particular institution or field of expertise. Scientists may also be understood as authorized to speak on behalf of nature, as I suggested in connection with Hobbes. But scientists are generally not authorized to make decisions on behalf of those who authorized them. Nor did acquiring a PhD make me the representative of my dissertation committee. This is why the primary role of scientific institutions in democratic representation is to produce knowledge or provide advice, which political decision makers should consider along with other relevant factors such as campaign promises, constituent opinions, party ties, and personal convictions.48 Finally, random selection presents yet another mode of authorization that is attracting growing interest in the politics of science. Organizers of

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citizen juries and other deliberative forums usually recruit participants in part through random selection. Random selection (i.e., selection by lot) was central to the democracy of ancient Athens, and it played a role in every republican constitution from ancient Rome to the Italian republics of the Renaissance. It disappeared as a constitutional device at the end of the eighteenth century, due in part to the rise of consent as the dominant principle of political legitimacy.49 Citizens might consent to have their governors chosen by lot, but selection by lot does not involve an expression of consent. Instead, random selection offers an impersonal, quasi-scientific way of selecting representatives. Insofar as the authority of science is seen as a universally valid and hence public form of authority, random selection offers a symbolic form of public authorization. In the Italian republics, for example, selection by lot was seen as a way of removing the allocation of political office from partisan competition.50 The scientific authority associated with random selection, however, differs from that of appointed members of courts, bureaucracies, and expert advisory committees, in that the latter are usually authorized holders of substantive expertise. Random selection, in contrast, produces a body of citizens who may lack any relevant expertise at all. Indeed, in the case of citizen juries and other deliberative forums, as I discuss shortly, that is precisely the point. Random selection is supposed to produce a group of lay citizens that lacks expert knowledge. Nonetheless, one might argue that if professional certification authorizes experts to represent the public’s best interests, random selection does the same for laypeople. Juries in the U.S. legal system, for example, are chosen in part through random selection.51 The technical procedure of random selection arguably lends those selected a certain type of “lay authority.” But authority to do what? The authorization of legal juries is limited to making decisions about matters of fact, or at most, matters of law. They are not authorized to make new laws. Moreover, jurors represent primarily in the descriptive sense of making representations of diverse perspectives and opinions, thus enriching deliberation, a topic discussed shortly. They may also makes representations of individual and group interests, insofar as doing so makes deliberation more inclusive. But they do not represent in the sense of acting on behalf of others, except in the very broad sense of promoting the general interests of society as a whole. Although in some cases it may be advisable to grant randomly selected citizen panels or minipublics authority to make legally binding decisions, it seems that for the most part democratic representation requires that

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such bodies limit themselves to an advisory role. The primary reason is that random selection does not provide a means for citizens to hold such bodies publicly accountable. Accountability Like authorization, accountability is in the first instance a formal feature of representation and by itself says little about the substantive activity of representing. Whereas authorization usually precedes representation, accountability follows it. Elections thus function, ideally, both to authorize public officials and to hold them to account. Electoral accountability also facilitates anticipatory representation: the promotion of interests that representatives expect their constituents to express in an upcoming election. In this respect, the purpose of holding representatives accountable is less to sanction them for past performance than to create an incentive for acting in a way agreeable to their constituents.52 In practice, however, the idea that voters hold public officials to account for actions definitively attributable to them is usually, as John Dunn puts it, an “astonishingly optimistic” ideological fiction. It ignores the “inherent opacity of all human action,” as well as the avoidance of responsibility encouraged by the separation of powers and the informational deficit of most citizens.53 The concept of accountability should not to be limited to the reward or sanction of public officials through voting. Whereas studies on electoral accountability tend to focus on the idea of “holding someone accountable” with punishments or rewards for performance, deliberative democrats have examined accountability as a matter of “giving an account” of the reasons underlying political decisions.54 As noted previously, representatives arguably owe an account not only to their electoral constituents but also to their “moral constituents”—that is, children, nonresidents, disadvantaged groups, and future generations significantly affected by their decisions. Understood in this sense, the accountability element of democratic representation overlaps with the deliberation element, to the extent that citizens expect one another to justify their political actions and opinions with reasons. For deliberative democrats, therefore, as Simone Chambers writes, “accountability replaces consent as the conceptual core of legitimacy. A legitimate political order is one that could be justified to all those living under its laws.”55 Consent does not disappear, but it is linked to either formal or informal requirements for representatives to give an account of their claims to

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represent their constituents. When the constituents are incapable of objecting to such claims, objections must come from others who make competing representative claims.56 In contrast to this notion of deliberative accountability, most efforts to promote accountability in science have adopted a managerial ethos. As the role of knowledge in economic growth increases, both public and private funders of science want assurances that their money is well spent. Managers have thus developed both short-term activity measures and long-term strategic planning requirements to demonstrate how scientists make use of allocated resources. With the growth of applicationoriented science, widely discussed under the rubric of “Mode-2” knowledge production, scientists face increasing pressure to render an account of their research costs, time-management, and the potential marketability of their research.57 Framed in this way, accountability procedures cast the relationship between scientists and nonscientists in contractual terms; the assumed model of representation is a juridical principal-agent relationship. This does not facilitate the robust interaction between representatives and their diverse constituents central to democratic representation. But if one conceives scientific experts, like Hobbes suggests, as possessing a form of delegated public authority, then experts owe citizens an account of how they fulfill their public responsibilities. “By allowing experts to act on their behalf,” Jasanoff argues, citizens “grant to experts a carefully circumscribed power to speak for them on matters requiring specialized judgment.”58 From this perspective, democracies require institutionalized procedures that allow citizens to ensure that experts have not overstepped the bounds of their delegated authority.59 In recent years a similar conception of accountability has appeared in a wide range of efforts to ask scientists, expert advisors, and science policy makers to give a public account of their work.60 Several of Fuller’s policy proposals, for example, create incentives for scientists to make a public case for new research projects, in part by encouraging interdisciplinary research.61 If a high-energy physicist can make her research proposal comprehensible to a microbiologist, chances are that an educated layperson would be able to understand it as well. In a similar vein, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has required since 1997 that grant proposals specify not only the “intellectual merit” but also the “broader impacts” of the proposed research. Responding to congressional demands for greater accountability, as expressed in the Government

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Performance and Results Act of 1993, the basic idea was to generate data showing the public benefits of taxpayer-funded research. Applicants must state how their proposed research will “advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training and learning,” “broaden the participation of underrepresented groups,” or “enhance the infrastructure for research and education, such as facilities, instrumentation, networks and partnerships.” Although the NSF has invested much energy in implementing the broader impacts requirement, the focus so far has been on education and outreach efforts to inform the public about new research. There seems to have been little explicit effort to use the criterion as a way of shaping the selection and design of research projects themselves. The response by grant applicants has been mixed, with some welcoming greater attention to the social dimensions of their work and others finding it a confusing, burdensome, and inappropriate intrusion into pure science. Although critics have sometimes complained that the criterion is unclear, a 2001 report by the National Academy of Public Administration found that most difficulties arise from basic philosophical objections to its implication of a close link between science and society.62 The mixed results of these efforts suggest that formal accountability requirements are no more effective than the citizens and public officials who make use of them. Opening science funding criteria or expert advisory processes to public scrutiny, for example, will have little effect unless citizens scrutinize and public officials respond. As noted before, expert authority is not merely threatened but also constituted by opportunities for public challenge. To the extent that public challenges to expert claims receive an adequate response, such challenges may actually strengthen expert authority. Conversely, insulating experts from public accountability is likely to eventually undermine their authority.63 There is no guarantee, however, that efforts to hold experts accountable will actually enhance or restore their authority, and some efforts of this kind have actually eroded public trust in both experts and governments. A prominent example is the “GM Nation?” public engagement exercise in the United Kingdom, which in summer 2003 sponsored a series of nationwide deliberative events involving more than a thousand people, as well as 40 regional events and 629 local meetings attended by several thousand more. The project website received 2.9 million hits, and organizers received 37,000 feedback forms. Without going into the intricacies of the debate surrounding the project, it was widely seen as resulting in

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increased public skepticism toward genetically modified food, scientific experts, and the British government.64 The notion that laypeople should have opportunities for challenging expert claims also raises the difficult question of whether, to what extent, and under what conditions laypeople can actually make such challenges on a reasonable basis. Assuming a situation where two or more experts disagree on, say, the safety of genetically modified food or a new prescription drug, can laypeople make a reasonable choice between them? Some argue that because experts and laypeople inhabit fundamentally different worldviews or paradigms, laypeople can only accept expert recommendations on faith or authority, not rational understanding. Such claims are overly abstract, however, and they neglect the everyday occurrence of people accepting expert claims—such as that a plane will fly or that a medication will cure a disease—without thereby relying entirely on faith in experts, nor yet having an understanding of the technical basis of such claims.65 Even if laypeople cannot directly assess the relative merits of the arguments offered by two experts, they may be able to use indirect evidence, such as the experts’ relative familiarity with each other’s positions or their relative capacity to offer counterarguments, as reasons for believing one or the other. That is, even though laypeople do not have access to the experts’ own reasons for their claims, they may have reasons for believing that one expert has better reasons than the other. Additionally, if one expert has greater sources of potential bias or conflict of interest (e.g., research funding), laypeople would be justified in believing the expert with fewer such conflicts of interest. (In contrast, laypeople have difficulty identifying biases incorporated into the basic assumptions of an entire discipline—for example, the tendency of epidemiology and toxicology to focus on different causes of disease.) Finally, laypeople might be able to assess the relative credibility of experts with reference to their proven track record of making successful predictions of obvious phenomena or otherwise providing advice that turned out to be correct in a way accessible to common sense: such as “if you take this medicine, you will feel better,” or “if you give us enough money, we will put a man on the moon.” The sheer number of experts holding a particular position, in contrast, is not always a very reliable indicator for laypeople to use in choosing between two positions, if only because the members of the smaller group of experts may be more intellectually independent from each other than the members of the larger group.66

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Such strategies for assessing expert advice might be understood as the conversion of objectivity into neutrality. Whereas “objectivity” generally refers to the impersonality of the procedures used to produce scientific knowledge, “neutrality” refers to either the absence, or more likely, the balancing, of social values and political interests. In policy-oriented expertise, the search for neutrality is both more appropriate and more attainable than objectivity.67 Indeed, claims to objectivity rarely suffice to settle political questions, unless people agree in advance to let the procedure settle the question (e.g., as with a coin toss). And given the illstructured nature of most policy questions, any determination of the specific problem to be settled is itself a political decision. Neutrality, in contrast, may not always provide correct decisions, because not all elements of a problem can be assessed according to the same standard of correctness. However, because nonexperts are at least potentially capable of assessing it, neutrality provides a formal standard for the public accountability of expertise. Participation Democratic theorists, as noted previously, long tended to conceive participation as fundamentally antithetical to representation. In this respect, they assumed the liberal-rationalist conception of representation outlined in the first part of this book. During the past twenty years or so, the rise of deliberative democracy as the dominant framework in democratic theory has fostered a rethinking of both participation and representation. In contrast to the expansive hopes for participatory democracy common during the 1960s and 70s, much recent democratic theory has a more chastened, economical conception of participation. Democratic theorists like Jürgen Habermas, Mark Warren, Jane Mansbridge, and James Bohman argue against, in Bohman’s words, “impractical attempts to apply demanding forms of participation in every area of social life.”68 Though eschewing fixed boundaries on where participation may occur, deliberative democrats have often seen participation in technical policy areas as the most impractical of all. In this respect, they have tried to show how robust citizen participation remains possible within the constraints imposed by social and technical complexity.69 Such constraints on citizen participation have been repeatedly challenged by activists, social movements, and their supporters in STS and its

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precursors in the sociology, history, and philosophy of science. Calls for public particpiation in science and science policy first gained prominence in the 1920s and 1930s. They emerged in response to a series of societal developments, including the growing specialization and professionalization in science, engineering, medicine, and law; the rise of technocratic state planning; and the role of scientists in developing chemical weapons during the First World War. The leading advocates of citizen engagement were scientists associated with socialist organizations, such as J. D. Bernal, a prominent British physicist and member of the Communist Party until 1933. During the Cold War, the question of public participation in science found little place within the “social contract for science,” as discussed in the introduction.70 Since the late 1960s and 1970s, however, public particpation of various forms has led to fundamental changes in scientific research and technological design. Langdon Winner wrote in 1977 that as far as possible “the processes of technical planning, construction, and control ought to be opened to those destined to experience the final products and full range of social consequences.”71 Organizations and movements dedicated to the environment, consumer protection, workplace safety, women’s health, indigenous peoples, and patients’ rights, among many others, have significantly shaped a wide range of technologies.72 Similarly, medical research has been fundamentally transformed by efforts to move beyond the assumption of a white, middle-aged, male patient, so as to accommodate the diverse bodies and needs of men, women, children, and various other social groups.73 If deliberative democrats have been urging a chastened view of participation, most people affiliated with STS have either not heard their message or not agreed with it, and public participation in science and technology continues to attract the attention of a wide range of scholars and practitioners.74 Indeed, public participation in the politics of science and technology has become a standard—in some places routinized—feature of contemporary politics. More so in Europe than elsewhere, and perhaps especially in the United Kingdom, no government science report can avoid the obligatory call for more “public engagement.” Recent assessemnts of these procedures, however, find a stuborm persistence of the “deficit model” of science-society relations, such that calls for public participation appear alongside renewed efforts to elicit public defererence to science.75 More insidiously, the communicative construction of subject positions such as “expert,” “citizen,” or “administrator,” each associated

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with fixed expectations, may create dynamics of exclusion beneath a facade of citizen input.76 Citizen engagement exercises might even function as a form of disciplinary power, channeling and defusing popular demands rather than shaping political decisions. In terms of the argument of this book, participation in science policy is always vulnerable to being absorbed into a liberal-rationalist model of representation. Efforts to prevent that might be well served by consideration of a few points. First, who counts as a participant in democratic representation is often a contested issue, and it is often bound up with science. Much participation in sociotechnical controversies is directed at shifting the boundaries of inclusion, challenging assumed conceptions of whom a particular government is obligated to represent. The politics of global climate change, for example, often revolves around conflicts between the national governments that implement policies and the globally distributed local constituencies that suffer their effects. These conflicts, the identity and authority of their protagonists, and even the global public sphere itself are all constructed in part by scientific models, instruments, and organizations.77 A study by Marybeth Long Martello, for example, shows how a complex intertwining of political claims, visual representations, and scientific authority facilitated the establishment of Arctic indigenous peoples as participants in the science and politics of climate change. Indigenous people have become spokespersons for at risk arctic populations, both by participating in global environmental institutions and by drawing on traditional knowledge to contribute to mainstream climate science. Climate scientists, for their part, have produced scientific representations of the Arctic ecosystem, including its human inhabitants, often accompanied by photographic representations of indigenous people in their changing environment. Climate science thus both speaks for the concerns of indigenous peoples and validates their efforts to speak for themselves. Martello concludes that “political representation shapes and is shaped by the ways in which environmental science envisions the world and bolsters or inhibits the invisibility and voice of its citizens.”78 Second, regardless of how bureuacratized public engagement exercises may initially seem, they often take on their own dynamic. Although public engagement exercises, such as the “GM Nation?” public consultation project in the United Kingdom, may be established with the aim of calming public unease, they easily generate new critiques. Sponsors and organizers may lose control over the process and outcomes may be quite unexpected for all involved.79

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Third, participation takes many different forms, and the more forms it takes, the more it contributes to democratic representation. Whereas early accounts of deliberative democracy seemed to relegate nondeliberative forms of participation to the sidelines, most democratic theorists now acknowledge the importance of passion, conviction, solidarity, and other noncognitive modes of political expression. Michael Walzer thus offers a long list of activities central to democracy that have little to do with deliberation: organization, mobilization, demonstration, public statement, debate, bargaining, lobbying, campaigning, voting, fund raising, and “scut work” (such as stuffing envelopes, knocking on doors, setting up chairs, hanging placards, and the like).80 Deliberation may play a certain role in some of these activities, but they are not aimed at deliberation. Nor are these activities regrettable necessities that ideally should be either minimized or eliminated from democratic politics. Indeed, as Walzer puts it, “what might be called the struggle for deliberative democracy—that is, for political equality, a free press, the right of association, civic rights for minorities, and so on—has required a lot of slogan shouting.”81 Walzer thus updates Machiavelli’s argument, noted in chapter 1, that republican civic engagement includes “running wildly through the streets.”82 Latour captures a similar idea with his call for maximizing the number of participants and modes of participation involved in articulating the collective, eschewing a pregiven boundary between scientific and nonscientific modes of participation. Participation in the politics of science and technology should avoid becoming fixated on any particular institutional venue. In this respect, the recent fascination with consensus conferences, citizen juries, and other types of minipublics has generated many insights that might be employed in other participatory venues, including traditional organizations like political parties and labor unions. This is not to say that all forms of participation contribute equally to democratic representation. Many today see consumer choice as a form of political participation. When citizens respond to marketing surveys they provide information that may be incorpoated into technological designs. This is presumably the sense intended when IKEA proudly advertises the “democratic design” of its products. Market research, however, is biased toward those who can afford the products, and it provides few opportunities to consider the broad public consequences of technological design.83 Of course, when large numbers of consumers engage in coordinated boycotts or “green” consumerism, the sum total of their choices might com-

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pel engineers to promote the public interest. But politically engaged consumerism is the exception that proves the rule that, most of the time, consumer activity provides few opportunities to generate, revise, or express opinions on the public interest. Fourth, from the perspective of democratic representation, public participation is not good in itself. Where liberal rationalism reduces public participation to periodic elections and interest group competition, and its communitarian critics elevate participation to a key element of the good life, democratic representation as conceived here draws on the republican view of participation as a largely instrumental activity. Republicans do not reject the possibility that participation may have certain intrinsic benefits, such as the education in civic virtue praised by communitarians, but they argue that such indirect benefits arise only as a by-product of instrumental goals.84 Because politics involves the exercise of power in the face of conflict, it tends to challenge personal identities, upset established routines, require bitter compromises, and take time away from activities that most people find more enjoyable and fulfilling.85 A system of democratic representation thus delegates decision making to appointed or elected representatives when that helps promote citizen interests, but such delegation is not conceived on the model of contract or one-time authorization. Citizens in a representative democracy must remain in loose contact with their representatives, monitoring their activities and discussing their achievements and failures with friends, neighbors, and colleagues. In this respect, the news media play a crucial and complex role in democratic representation, perhaps even more so in questions of science policy than elsewhere. Media organizations mediate, so to speak, between and among citizens and governments, and they introduce their own sources of communicative risk into what is already a risky business of citizen participation.86 In these various respects, even if political participation is not infused with romantic notions of personal fulfillment, it remains a demanding task. It may offer some consolation to remember that just because participation is not good in itself does not mean that it is not worthwhile in itself. Even if the goals of participation remain instrumental, the value of pursuing those goals does not depend on success. Finally, as indicated at the end of chapter 8, democratic representation depends on a creative tension between public participation and state institutions. This notion rests on the republican belief, going back to Machiavelli, that freedom depends on institutionalized channels for public

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contestation of government decisions. Where liberals focus on the “negative liberty” of noninterference with citizens’ private lives, and communitarians praise the “positive liberty” of self-mastery and civic virtue, modern republicans see freedom in nondomination, that is, not being subject to arbitrary authority. For republicans, Philip Pettit argues, regardless of whether an act or decision constitutes interference with someone, it is considered arbitrary whenever “it is chosen or rejected without reference to the interests, or the opinions, of those affected.”87 Republicanism thus highlights the importance of institutions—provisionally established rules, procedures, and modes of practice—that facilitate the contestation of both public and private power. The primary way that republican institutions facilitate public contestation is by distributing power as widely and equally as possible, thus helping to ensure that conflicts cannot be suppressed by those with more power than others. Liberals also seek to limit the exercise of governmental power, of course, but rather than equalizing power, they disperse it, displacing governmental power onto market mechanisms and private organizations.88 Given the republican concern with facilitating public contestation by equalizing power, republicans are loath to establish any source of epistemic power, including technical expertise, not subject to institutional constraints and procedures for public contestation.89 Building on this aspect of Machiavellian republicanism, democratic representation depends on diverse institutional venues that both enable and constrain public participation in the politics of science. Deliberation The liberal-rationalist model of representative government restricted deliberation and the competence it both displays and generates to an elected elite. In this respect, the emphasis on deliberation in recent democratic theory highlights the epistemic dimension of democracy. Concern with deliberation is not merely an intellectual fashion, and recent cultural developments reinforce scholarly interest in deliberative institutions. The so-called postmodern individualization of lifestyles and trajectories, for example, and the increasing importance of self-realization place a premium on talk as a mechanism of social cohesion. Similarly, growing social and technical complexity make hierarchical forms of organization less effective, fostering the rise of decentered network forms of governance that require deliberation to hold them together.90 Social studies of

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science and technology have responded to similar developments, highlighting the close linkages between knowledge and citizenship.91 In this respect, democratic theory and STS have long been traveling parallel roads. Deliberative democratic theory and STS part company, however, when the former adopts a rationalist view of deliberative legitimacy. Many early formulations of deliberative democracy suggested that political institutions and decisions are legitimate only to the extent that they are deliberative.92 Such rationalism was tempered by those who insisted that the rightness of deliberative conclusions must be manifest to citizens as such and not imposed upon them as expert knowledge.93 And yet by privileging deliberation over participation, deliberative democrats often failed to provide much guidance for either evaluating the legitimacy of current decisions or making them more legitimate. A political system or political decision becomes more legitimate the more it enjoys the justified approval of citizens.94 But as Mill argued, citizens cannot first learn to participate wisely in politics and then participate, because they become wise only through participation. More recent approaches to deliberation recognize this, and it is now widely acknowledged that many different sorts of speech need to find a place within an institutionally differentiated “deliberative system.” Even strategic or manipulative speech should receive a hearing, because such speech cannot be made more reasonable through deliberation if it is excluded from deliberation at the outset. Moreover, strategic goals are often what motivate people to enter politics in the first place.95 According to the liberal-rationalist view of representation discussed in chapter 3, deliberation is reserved to the assembled representatives, conceived as competent trustees. Taken by itself, this view of representation is incompatible with democracy, but it contains features that play a key role in democratic representation. For example, the liberal commitment to deliberative competence rests on the notion that democratic governments should serve the best interests of their constituents, coupled with the idea that people are not always immediately aware of their own best interests. Although the pluralism of modern democracies makes untenable any overarching vision of the good life, without some sort of distinction between citizens’ impulsive desires and their reflective interests, it becomes impossible to criticize radical forms of populism and majoritarianism that pander to citizens’ worst impulses. Arguments for deliberation thus usually include some version of the view that there are right

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answers to political conflicts. The answers found through deliberation may well be right only for the relevant representatives and their constituents, and thus not in any sense universally true. And the results of deliberation are probably best understood as bearing upon what it is right to do, and thus on action, rather than on what it is right to think or believe.96 Nonetheless, there is nothing antidemocratic about attempting to discern through deliberation what actions best serve public interests. Moreover, in a technically complex world, one feature of reflective interests is that they are at least minimally informed with available expertise. Although political decisions are often justified by expertise without being informed by it, if decisions consistently ignore expert consensus on relevant matters (insofar as it exists), their instrumental effectiveness is likely to suffer sooner or later. Democratic representation requires the equal counting of all votes and not that all opinions count equally. Some scholars draw on the Condorcet jury theorem to argue that, as long as citizens have a greater than 50 percent chance of getting the facts right, a majority vote on the facts is likely to be correct. This suggests that it actually makes little sense for majorities to defer to experts on matters of fact, as it is precisely with regard to matters of fact that majorities are most likely to be correct.97 Unfortunately, in many contemporary policy areas, without expert advice, citizens will be insufficiently competent for the Condorcet theorem to hold. Many areas of politics today revolve around risks that remain imperceptible to the human senses. Laypeople not only depend on technical experts for addressing such problems but for becoming aware of them at all. Theorists of deliberative democracy have tended to conceive lay deliberation in opposition to expert knowledge.98 Although they sometimes acknowledge that lay deliberation should take established technical knowledge into account, they have done little to consider how lay and expert deliberation might shape each other.99 This is odd, because there is a long tradition of efforts to inform lay deliberation with both moral and technical knowledge. For example, as noted in chapter 6, Dewey argued repeatedly that public education in the natural and social sciences should inform moral and political reasoning. Without some understanding of the material conditions within which moral ideals manifest themselves, moral reasoning becomes a purely intellectual exercise. And without some sense of the empirical consequences of moral choices, people are likely to select their goals according to impulse or habit.100 Isolating moral and scientific inquiry from each other makes morality

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abstract and irrelevant to concrete affairs, and it directs science toward the narrowly instrumental purposes of commerce and war. It is worth emphasizing, however, that Dewey was less concerned about citizens’ substantive scientific knowledge than their ability to adopt an experimental mode of thought, what he called the method of “intelligence.” Intelligence, he argued, is a “way of knowing in a world without certainty.” It is “associated with judgment; that is, with selection and arrangement of means to effect consequences and with choice of what we take as our ends.”101 Dewey thus criticized educational programs in which “pupils learn a ‘science’ instead of learning the scientific way of treating the familiar material of ordinary experience.”102 In addition to what they learn in school, of course, citizens today acquire scientific knowledge (and misinformation) through many other avenues, including science journalism, science museums, the popular media, government programs, and industry-sponsored public information campaigns.103 Despite the enormous diversity of science education efforts, most tend to follow a conveyor belt model of one-way information transfer, usually aimed in part at counteracting public skepticism toward science. More promising approaches to science education focus less on isolated technical facts and more on the dynamics of technical controversies, cultivating the knowledge and skills needed for intelligent deliberation on technically complex public issues.104 Although deliberation has long been associated with elitist models of political representation, it has a key role to play in representative democracy. Informed by technical expertise and facilitated by appropriate institutions, deliberation extends representation over time and through space; it facilitates symbolic linkages between representatives and constituents. In this respect, deliberation underlies the final element of democratic representation to be considered here. Resemblance The resemblance element of democratic representation consists of some sort of likeness or similarity that constituents perceive between themselves and their representatives. It conveys the idea that constituents in some respect identify with their representatives or representative institutions. Contemporary democratic theorists have conceived resemblance in various ways under various headings, including descriptive representation, politics of presence, representativeness, and representivity.105 A

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much earlier version appears in the eighteenth-century doctrine of virtual representation, discussed briefly in chapter 3, which located the authority for governance by a virtuous elite in the interests and sentiments they presumed to share with their constituents.106 In everyday politics, the idea of resemblance appears most commonly in the widespread notion that public officials should possess demographic characteristics (e.g., race, gender, class, sexual preference) either similar to or admired by those they claim to represent. But as I explain in what follows, demographic similarity is neither necessary nor sufficient for the resemblance component of democratic representation. At the most basic level, resemblance is required to ensure that those who persistently find themselves in the minority remain tied into the political system. Those whose will is consistently denied through elections must be able to reach a collective judgment that affirms the basic justice of the system. In this respect, Urbinati argues, representivity does not require demographic similarity or some other preexisting foundation, because it is generated through public deliberation and judgment. Through public deliberation and judgment, people develop a “reflective adhesion” to their representatives; they come to identify with government decisions, even though they may disagree with those decisions. The “informal sovereignty” of representivity thus both underlies and animates the “formal sovereignty” expressed in public decisions.107 One of the most common ways of attempting to establish resemblance, or to document its demise, relies on technical claims of statistical representativeness or lack thereof. On one hand, such efforts seem to promise a technical shortcut to the laborious process of generating representivity through public deliberation. On the other hand, they often serve merely to displace political conflicts over representivity onto questions regarding the adequacy of statistical claims. Debates around affirmative action, for example, have often revolved around diverging statistical assessments of how well women and minorities are “represented” in the workplace and higher education. Contemporary electoral politics also frequently includes public discussion of a “gender gap” in support for particular candidates or policies. Similarly, Steven Epstein has shown how challenges to mainstream medical research have garnered support from studies documenting the numerical underrepresentation of women and minorities in clinical studies. Public health and patient advocacy groups have used these scientific representations not only to document a public health problem, but

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also to establish themselves as both political representatives and cultural representations of excluded social groups. That is to say, claims regarding statistical representativness have reinforced efforts to both promote the interests of excluded groups and increase their social visibility.108 Such efforts often become entangled in two difficult problems. First, like scientific claims more generally, statistical representations easily become decoupled from the people and contexts of which they provide a representation. The ostensible constituents may then lose all contact with and control over their representatives. When this happens, what began as political advocacy becomes mere trusteeship. The second problem has to do with familiar difficulties in identifying the social groups that representatives aspire to resemble. In technology studies, the idea of resemblance featured in the argument, prevalent during the 1980s, that a technology based on “women’s values” would be more attuned to social relationships and basic human needs than technologies based on patriarchal modes of thought. In recent years this argument has been revised to avoid an essentialist view of women that neglects both the diversity among women and the historical contingency of women’s traditional association with so-called feminine values.109 Indeed, it is now widely acknowledged that every person belongs to multiple statistical categories, and it is impossible to know in advance how particular individuals rank their various identities. One can always find people who experience themselves as members of a particular social group but lack at least some of the allegedly group-defining attributes, and vice versa. Moreover, many people are quite capable of representing interests beyond those of their presumed social group. Finally, assuming that people have fixed interests associated with particular social categories forecloses the process of informing and transforming interests that deliberation aims to foster. In short, not all identity groups are interest groups, and group identity often exists prior to and conflicts with any sense of shared interest.110 Rather than employing resemblance as a means of interest representation, democratic representation conceives it in terms of what Young calls “social perspectives.”111 Unlike an opinion or an interest, a social perspective does not have a determinate substantive content. It consists rather in a set of shared experiences (e.g., racial discrimination, pregnancy, homelessness), which may provide a basis for shared questions and concerns, without necessarily generating shared interests or preferences. Because social groups are internally diverse, members of a group may share a

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perspective in some contexts but not others. Attributions of social perspective, therefore, and of the relevance of any perspective to a particular political context, should always remain open to challenge.112 Moreover, common experiences rarely become shared experiences—that is, actively recognized as politically relevant and similar to others—in the absence of political mobilization, deliberation, and judgment. Social perspectives are not prior to politics. The common experiences most relevant for political representation are those involving people’s social position with reference to structural relations of power. Such experiences often correlate with demographic categories, but they need not. Membership in any particular social group is best understood as emerging through political activities that mediate between objective relations of power and the subjective selfconceptions of individuals.113 Because social perspectives are not tied to specific goals, representing social perspectives allows people greater freedom to adjust their perspectives through deliberation. Indeed, genuinely inclusive deliberation depends on a capacity to imagine other people’s perspectives, as well as their opinions and interests.114 Social perspectives provide a starting point for deliberation, but the most fruitful deliberation takes participants beyond the perspectives with which they began. The representation of social perspectives is especially well suited to emerging issue areas where problems are complex, knowledge is uncertain, and interests have not yet crystallized. This is often the case with regard to cutting-edge scientific research and emerging technologies. In these situations constituents may not be willing or able to formulate claims of either individual or group interest that anyone could represent.115 Indeed, complex and uncertain conditions have long provided occasion for what Mansbridge calls “introspective” or “gyrocentric” representation in mainstream political institutions.116 Introspective representatives are driven not by external considerations of electoral success or constituent interests, but by their own internal principles and goals, which their constituents share or admire. This sort of descriptive resemblance has a number of potential benefits for navigating the politics of science and technology in general, and expert advisory committees in particular. First, to the extent that increasing the number of alternative perspectives on a problem improves understanding of the problem, resemblance contributes to the deliberative validity of an advisory committee’s work. The more perspectives involved, the more likely that errors and biases will be identified and cor-

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rected. Second, resemblance may increase the public credibility and acceptance of expert advisory committees, insofar as it increases the likelihood that committee recommendations will be responsive to the concerns of every social group relevant to the committee’s topic. Third, if the members of an expert advisory committee are publicly associated with particular social or political groups, they may evoke a symbolic form of representation—that is, a feeling of being represented—among other members of those groups. Although symbolic political representation is easily misused for ideological purposes, it can also foster a sense of membership and help decrease the alienation of excluded groups from political life. It is important to realize, however, that any such sense of membership is not an automatic outcome of increasing the social diversity of expert advisory committees. A sense of resemblance may be intimated by shared group identity, or by statistical representativeness, but it is animated by ideas. It can be sustained only through deliberation and participation by the represented. The concept of resemblance also offers a promising avenue for thinking about the role of lay citizens in the politics of science. Efforts to engage lay citizens in sociotechnical controversies often present themselves as introducing a distinctive “lay perspective.” The precise meaning of “lay perspective” often remains unclear, but it seems to have two contradictory components. First, the lay perspective is sometimes associated with a particular worldview that differs substantively from the basic orientation of mainstream political actors such as experts, politicians, and interest groups. According to one account, for example, a lay citizen panel is “particularly selected for introducing common sense, non-professional knowledge, experiences, values and opinions into the debate.”117 In a similar vein, others have called lay participants in such venues “value consultants.”118 Taken in this sense, a lay perspective introduces a unique and otherwise neglected voice into public deliberation and decision making. Second, in contrast to this image of the layperson as embodying a particular set of deliberative resources, advocates of public engagement sometimes define a lay perspective by a certain absence or lack. They suggest that lay citizens are those who lack relevant technical expertise, professional experience, political interests, and in some cases, any experience with the topic at hand. According to one account of a Danish consensus conference, for example, candidates were “screened so as to ensure that they had no previous close involvement with biotechnology, since it was judged that this would compromise their ability to

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participate in a genuinely open-ended and collaborative exploration of the issues.”119 Another such forum was made up of “a group of citizens who are genuinely lay people in the sense that they do not have any special knowledge of, or interest in, the subject.”120 In these and many similar accounts, what qualifies a person as lay is not the particular resources they bring to deliberation but their lack of certain resources— chiefly expert knowledge and political interest, but also, in some accounts, any experience with or knowledge of the topic of the panel. Alan Irwin thus notes that discussion of public engagement efforts in the United Kingdom “prioritizes the ‘open-minded’ (or ‘innocent’) citizen over those with existing views (the ‘activists’).”121 This conception of the lay citizen is an ideal, of course, and during collective deliberation participants inevitably bring their previous knowledge and experience to bear on the topic at hand. They also acquire new knowledge and experience through the process itself. But it seems likely that conceiving lay citizens in terms of their lack of knowledge shapes not only who participates but also the character of the ensuing deliberation. Conceived in this second sense, lay citizens have neither formal nor substantive authority, as described previously. They are neither in authority nor an authority. Their authority, such as it is, is constituted by an absence: absence of both substantive knowledge and formal certification. Some commentators and organizers apparently associate these absences with an absence of bias and an openness to new views and perspectives on the topic at hand. Absence of bias, in turn, confers a certain kind of discursive power to persuade. Lay citizens have discursive power, because unlike the politicians and experts who dominate public debate, they have no personal or political agendas. They have a certain “wisdom from the mouths of babes,” or what one might call the power of innocence. But the price for this power is adopting an ethic of immediacy like that of Rousseau’s First Discourse. Remember that for Rousseau, scientific knowledge hinders genuine understanding (at least for the masses), because understanding rests on introspection and common sense. In this respect, conceiving lay citizens as those who lack relevant knowledge or experience defines them in opposition to experts. This conception of lay citizens thus reinforces the dualism of will and knowledge that underlies the liberal-rationalist conception of representative government. It reproduces liberalism’s categorical division between subjectivist politics and objectivist science, popular sovereignty and governmental competence.122

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It is useful to note, moreover, that defining lay citizens in terms of their lack of knowledge departs significantly from prior uses of the term lay. The English word layman originally referred simply to anyone who was not a member of the clergy. Beyond that meaning, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a layman as “an ‘outsider’ or a non-expert in relation to some particular profession, art, or branch of knowledge (esp. with reference to law and medicine).”123 According to the OED, that is, the term lay refers not to ignorance about a topic but merely to a lack of specialized training in that topic. The OED gives several examples of the adjective lay, including “lay analysis” in psychoanalysis, which is “psychoanalysis undertaken by an analyst who has not been medically trained”; “lay bishop,” which is “applied derisively to those who set up as teachers of morality”; and “lay preacher,” which is “an unordained preacher, esp. among Methodists.” Clearly, many such people may be highly qualified practitioners, despite their lack of specialized training or certification. Conceiving laypeople in terms of their utter lack of knowledge and experience poses a number of problems. First, it neglects the wide range of differences among laypeople with regard to experience, knowledge, skills, and other deliberative resources. A person’s attributes in this regard may not initially seem relevant to a particular topic of deliberation, but they may become relevant during deliberation. A registered nurse, for example, might not have any experience with debates over nuclear power but might be able to raise questions regarding the health risks of nuclear waste that would not occur to others. As Harry Collins and Robert Evans have argued, a person may well possess the knowledge required to understand technical expertise without yet being able to contribute to it.124 Second, viewing laypeople in terms of their lack of knowledge obscures the transformation in knowledge and understanding that deliberation aims to bring about. Even if participants start out completely ignorant of the topic, they may become relatively expert through deliberation. In some respects, this newly developed expertise may make them less representative of the general population than when they started participating, even if it also makes them better advocates of other people’s interests. This shift in the basis of representation is a key feature of Epstein’s account of AIDS activists who advocated changes in research protocols for clinical trials of AIDS drugs, aiming to maximize early distribution of potentially life-saving remedies.125 Largely self-educated in

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the science of AIDS and lacking formal scientific credentials, a persistent group of activists successfully challenged the extensive use of placebos, requirements that participants have no history of participation in previous trials, and restrictions on the number of participants. They not only attained credibility within existing arenas of biomedical expertise; they succeeded in changing the very definition of what counts as scientific credibility in the first place. A crucial element in the activists’ strategy was to present themselves as representative of people with AIDS or HIV. This claim to representativeness allowed them to pressure scientists with the threat of public demonstrations and to exploit the scientists’ need for sufficient numbers of patients to enroll in clinical trials. Over time, however, the activists’ claims to representative status became increasingly problematic, as their intense involvement with the science of AIDS gradually created an epistemic boundary between them and the broader community of people involved with HIV/AIDS. Although few laypeople become as knowledgable as the activists portrayed in Epstein’s study, the case highlights the need to link resemblance with other elements of representation. Finally, defining lay citizens by their lack of knowledge ironically models the lay citizen on the view from nowhere promised by the traditional image of expertise. It suggests that a distinctive “lay perspective” lacks any particular perspective at all; that laypeople are free of interests, biases, or preconceptions—in short, that they approximate the standard image of an ideal scientist. In this sense, widespread ambivalence about the idea of “the lay citizen” suggests a similar ambivalence about technical expertise. Technical expertise provides a model for the lay citizen— open-minded (or empty-minded), reasonable, deliberative—and it also offers a counterimage, against which people conceive the layperson. One potential way of counteracting this ambivalent conception of both technical experts and lay citizens would be to integrate lay and expert perspectives in deliberative forums. Social perspectives, as described previously, emerge through interaction between structural relations of power (such as class, race, or gender) and the individual experiences and self-conceptions of individuals.126 Similarly, one might say that professional perspectives are shaped by interactions between professional standards and cultures on one hand, and individual ideas and goals on the other. In either case, perspectives encompass the questions, concerns, knowledge, and worldviews of particular social and professional groups.

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It might seem odd to lump together the experiential perspectives of laypeople with the professional perspectives of experts, and it is important to remain aware of their differences. Efforts to increase the diversity of social perspectives in public deliberation aim in part to remedy long histories of systemic discrimination against socially disadvantaged groups. They also seek to provide symbolic representation of these groups, in part to encourage political engagement by group members. These justifications for the representation of diverse social perspectives do not apply to scientific disciplines. Moreover, the structural relations of power that shape social perspectives usually play a less direct role in the creation of disciplinary perspectives (although the history of science certainly reveals power relations within disciplines as well). Nonetheless, placing lay and expert perspectives in the same category has the advantage of emphasizing their shared deliberative orientation, in contrast to the decision-making orientation of interest representation.127 Indeed, one common justification for increasing the diversity of social perspectives in deliberation is that doing so promises to improve deliberation’s epistemic quality.128 Both technical experts and interest group representatives long involved with a particular policy area tend to develop blind spots that may be remedied by including laypeople with relevant knowledge and experience. In this respect, the inclusive representation of both professional and social perspectives fosters a more impartial—in the sense of more complete, less biased—assessment of sociotechnical problems.129 Both scientific disciplines and social perspectives are lenses on reality that condition without determining what a person sees.130 In practice, of course, social and professional perspectives often shape each other, and they are each shaped by considerations of direct or abstract interest. Indeed, different types of perspectives and interests may be represented by a single individual (e.g., a liberal female biologist employed by an environmental group). Moreover, to argue that advisory committee members should represent perspectives rather than interests does not mean that interests should not be articulated in deliberation. Critics of rationalist approaches to deliberation have often pointed out that the interests of disadvantaged groups usually diverge in part from those of the majority, so excluding the expression of interests from deliberation is biased against disadvantaged groups. Deliberation should illuminate not only commonalities but also conflicts of interest.131 As long as

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the promotion of individual or group interests is justified with reference to some public interest—for example, it may serve the public interest to promote the direct interests of disadvantaged groups—expressing interests can enrich deliberation as much as social perspectives and professional expertise. Moreover, both technical experts and interest group representatives are more likely to participate in deliberative forums, and their deliberation is likely to be more creative, when much is at stake and they see possibilities for advancing their goals.132 And yet, although representing interests is obviously an important part of any political system, modern democracies are institutionally differentiated. Different institutions make different contributions to democratic representation and thus have different normative purposes. The purpose of advisory institutions is arguably to seek consensus—or, failing that, to elaborate the reasons underlying competing positions. Another reason to put lay and expert perspectives in the same category is that the experts who sit on advisory committees are not, in that capacity, engaged in the “specialized discourses” of the sciences.133 As noted in the introduction, the procedures, problems, and audiences of policy relevant expertise differ considerably from those of basic science, even if the differences are matters of degree rather than kind. Among other things, expert deliberation aimed at providing advice is less formalized, and usually more interdisciplinary, than the deliberation involved in basic science. At the same time, however, advisory committee deliberations are more formalized than the “anonymous publics” theorized by deliberative democrats. One might conclude that advisory bodies are best located somewhere on a continuum between unstructured deliberation in civil society and the specialized discourses of scientific subdisciplines. It is important to mention that advisory bodies that incorporate both lay and professional perspectives do not erase the boundary between science and politics. What they do is provide a forum for constructing it in a way that facilitates deliberation and decision making. In STS and science policy studies, such institutions have been conceived as “boundary organizations,” because they provide a place where scientists and political actors can work together to reach decisions across the boundary between politics and science, while preserving the legitimating functions still served by that boundary. Boundary organizations facilitate agreements on which elements of a controversial decision will be left to experts and which to politicians and lay citizens.134 Moreover, integrating laypeople and experts in deliberation should not imply that they are equally qualified with

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regard to any particular set of concerns. Understanding the experience of a cancer patient, for example, requires a layperson’s perspective, while understanding how to treat cancer requires technical expertise. But integrating lay and expert participants in deliberation conveys the idea that expert and lay perspectives deserve equal respect. And it offers an institutional bulwark against the problematic dichotomy associated with romantic conceptions of “the lay citizen.” In sum, boundary organizations offer a way of addressing some of the challenges associated with the resemblance element of democratic representation. Conclusion The elements of representation discussed here require different types of institutions to facilitate them. Just as the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government emphasize different modes of representation, so too do different kinds of civic organizations, interest groups, advisory bodies, and transnational institutions. The degree to which citizens enjoy democratic representation, therefore, should be judged with respect to the ecology of institutions to which they have access, rather than with regard to any single institution. Deliberative forums such as consensus conferences and citizen juries, for example, are well positioned to increase the descriptive representation or resemblance of diverse perspectives in the politics of science. Increasing the range of perspectives promises to improve deliberation, and it may also evoke a sense of being symbolically represented among citizens who imaginatively identify with those perspectives. Deliberative forums, however, are usually not directly authorized by their publics. Similarly, deliberative forums may be asked to provide a public account of the reasons for their recommendations, but their performance is not subject to legally binding judgments by their constituents. The reverse is true for elected representatives, who are authorized and held accountable through elections, but who as a group are usually not descriptively representative of their constituents. Interest groups, for their part, often succeed quite well at mobilizing citizens and facilitating nondeliberative modes of public participation, but they often lack the reflective perspective fostered in both governmental and nongovernmental deliberative forums. Not all institutions need to represent their constituents in the same way, but citizens in a representative democracy should have access to several modes of representation.

10 Institutionalizing Democratic Representation

The people who have accused our Council of politicizing science and bioethics have been right, but not in the way they meant. —Leon Kass, “Reflections on Public Bioethics”

Previous chapters showed how both Machiavelli and Hobbes emphasized the role of established institutions in shaping the political use of expertise. The chapters on Dewey and Latour highlighted the paradox of specifically democratic institutions. How is it possible for democracies to promote, protect, and benefit from innovative practices without stifling them? How can democracies generate a political framework for science that enhances both its epistemic and social potential? Arendt argued that the American Revolution expressed a genuine spirit of creative political action, but its protagonists failed to institutionalize their achievement. They failed to “assure the survival of the spirit out of which the act of foundation sprang.”1 Arendt saw their best effort in Jefferson’s frustrated proposals for dividing up counties into self-governing wards. Deliberative democrats have in recent years turned to a similar concern, moving beyond idealized theories of deliberation to address practical questions of institutional design.2 None of them has resolved the paradox, but their efforts deserve further development. It may be that democracy “describes an ideal, not a method for achieving it,” as Douglas Lummis writes, and so it cannot be identified with any particular set of institutions. But democracy requires institutions that manifest its ideals in people’s everyday lives. Part of what motivates this book is the idea that institutions of representative democracy hold more promise for realizing democratic ideals than the direct-democratic procedures idealized by many democratic theorists.

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The understanding of democratic representation developed here opens up the task of exploring empirical, conceptual, and normative aspects of how particular institutions might facilitate the elements of democratic representation discussed in the previous chapter. Especially interesting in this regard are expert advisory bodies, which democratic theorists have usually seen as threats to rather than resources for democracy. This chapter first briefly returns to FACA, discussed in chapter 4, showing how it might be interpreted in a way more conductive to democratic representation. The subsequent two sections briefly consider bioethics councils and citizen panels or minipublics in terms of their potential for democratizing representation in both science and politics. Balancing Perspectives on Government Advisory Committees Chapter 4 showed how FACA’s implementation has reflected a liberalrationalist view of representation. I argued that the dominant discourse on advisory committee balance both assumes an implausible view of value-free science and neglects the fact that many interest group representatives are themselves competent experts, even if their expertise is not professionally certified. Having explored various alternative conceptions of science and politics, we can now reconsider FACA’s balance provision. To begin recall that the law requires the membership of federal government advisory committees to be “fairly balanced.”3 The word “fairly” is meant here not in the sense of “moderately” or “tolerably” balanced, but balanced in a fair manner—that is, “impartially” or “legitimately” balanced—which suggests that FACA calls for a fair process of balancing rather than a substantive standard of fair balance. Such processes might be facilitated by conceiving both experts and laypeople (with the latter including both interest group representatives and those appointed to represent the public interest) in terms of a single category—as representing various perspectives, as discussed in the previous chapter. FACA itself employs the phrase “points of view” without distinguishing between experts and laypeople. The notion of a social or professional “perspective” is not an inherently better synonym for “points of view” than the term “interest.” But if one wants to avoid a double standard, the concept of “perspective” works better that “interest,” because it avoids reducing expertise to political interest. Part of the reason why most commentators have conceived advisory committee balance in terms of direct interests is that they see interest as a

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more manageable, objective concept than the apparently amorphous and subjective notion of a “point of view.”4 Several federal judges, for example, as noted previously, have argued that FACA’s balance provision is nonjusticiable because, they say, assessments of committee balance are inherently subjective. But perspectives are not subjective states of mind or opinion, as indicated in the previous chapter. Of course, given the diversity of views and experiences within any social or professional group, any attribution of a particular perspective must remain publicly accountable and open to challenge. The idea that all advisory committee members have the task of representing social and/or professional perspectives arguably goes back to the early stages of legislative efforts to regulate federal advisory committees. In December 1970, a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives published a comprehensive report on advisory committees, which argued that “when a particular region, university, industry, company or discipline are [sic] regularly overrepresented . . . the advisory system is open to the charge of favoritism. Individuals with ideas, knowledgeable people, affected individuals, should also be considered for appointment to advisory bodies rather than relying upon personal acquaintance or closeness to an agency or its clientele.”5 The report here draws a contrast not between experts and nonexperts but between the narrow perspective that results from patronage appointments and the broader insight acquired by seeking out a wide range of people—both “knowledgeable” and “affected”—who have relevant insights. The report goes on to state that agencies should seek “to include a greater number of ‘non-expert’ interested and knowledgeable individuals on each advisory group. . . . Inclusion of environmentalists, consumers, geographic representatives, noninvolved persons and others would be helpful in providing a balance to a group.”6 In making these recommendations, the report makes no distinction between committees primarily concerned with technical matters and those charged with balancing interests. More recent examples of this view of committee balance are implicit in certain agency guidelines and practices. Despite the widespread emphasis on distinguishing between representatives and Special Government Employees, as discussed in chapter 4, the General Services Administration (GSA) guidelines for committee balance include a broad mix of technical and nontechnical factors, including the “geographic, ethnic, social, economic, or scientific impact” of the committee’s recommendations, the “types of scientific perspectives required, for example, such as those of

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consumers, technical experts, the public-at-large, academia, business, or other sectors,” and the “need to obtain divergent points of view.”7 The GSA notes that these factors are “not comprehensive or universally applicable,” but it does not specify which factors apply to which types of committees.8 Apparently following this advice, a wide range of federal agencies have tried to assess the social and professional perspectives of potential committee members by collecting demographic information for both expert and nonexpert nominees.9 The aim of representing diverse social and professional perspectives is also implicit in the advisory committee guidelines of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Most important, the NAS emphasizes the epistemic rather than partisan reasons for including lay perspectives: For some studies, for example, it may be important to have an “industrial” perspective or an “environmental” perspective. This is not because such individuals are “representatives” of industrial or environmental interests, because no one is appointed by the institution to a study committee to represent a particular point of view or special interest. Rather it is because such individuals, through their particular knowledge and experience, are often vital to achieving an informed, comprehensive, and authoritative understanding and analysis of the specific problems and potential solutions to be considered by the committee.10

Unlike the agency guidelines discussed in chapter 4, the NAS here suggests that advisory committee members should never be understood as speaking for particular constituencies, and it expects all members— including those with an “environmental” or “industrial” perspective—to exercise independent judgment. The NAS thus casts the inclusion of diverse perspectives as a matter of enriching deliberation rather than ensuring the fair representation of interests. A more recent and widely cited NAS report states that potential committee members should not be asked about their voting records, party affiliations, or political views, because such matters are no more relevant than “other personal and immaterial information, such as hair color or height.”11 Nonetheless, the same NAS report goes on to state that once members are appointed, the political opinions of nominees should be “disclosed to staff and other committee members in closed session,” because this “provides an opportunity to balance strong opinions or perspectives through the appointment of additional committee members.”12 The NAS thus again suggests that the political views of committee members should be evaluated, not in terms of their capacity to represent the direct interests of particular groups, but in terms of their contribution to the epistemic quality of deliberation.

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This is not to say that the NAS has always succeeded in appointing balanced committees.13 But the NAS guidelines rightly emphasize deliberation over the representation of interests. Indeed, if committee balance were a matter of balancing political interests, fairness would require that the number of representatives for each group be proportionate to the group’s numerical percentage of the population, which would be impossible on committees small enough to facilitate serious deliberation.14 Moreover, ensuring that an advisory committee as a whole is not biased with regard to any particular view requires finding out what the individual members’ views are in the first place.15 It is thus useful to distinguish politicizing advisory committees in a broad sense—that is, making explicit the presence of different social and political perspectives and interests with the aim of enhancing deliberation—from a partisan form of politicization that reduces advisory committees to arenas of interest group competition and party politics. Soliciting the political views of potential committee members does create a risk of partisan politicization, but this can be mitigated by increasing the transparency of the selection process. The EPA, for example, provides public notice when creating a new advisory committee, and it solicits nominations for, and comments on, advisory committee membership from the general public.16 This practice is implicitly supported by the GSA guidelines, which note that although “FACA is not a public participation statute,” federal advisory committees are “a major means of obtaining public involvement” in executive branch decision making.17 The GAO recommends that all agencies publicize how they assess committee balance, whether committees operate by voting or consensus, and whether committee members have any potential conflicts of interest.18 Such measures effectively link FACA’s participation and representation provisions, allowing public input on advisory committee efforts to represent diverse perspectives. The conception of democratic representation outlined in this book suggests that an approach based on assessing social and professional perspectives would be more effective than the prevailing double standard for assessing advisory committee balance. Implementing any such approach, however, requires attention to the specific purpose of particular advisory committees. Government advisory committees address a wide range of issues and are charged with a variety of tasks: provide policy recommendations, review grant proposals, explore long-range problems, and facilitate public deliberation and debate, among other things. Any approach to

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advisory committee balance, therefore, must be flexible enough to allow administrators sufficient discretion to pursue the goals of the committee, while remaining responsive to public challenge. The proposed approach meets that criterion, as it allows administrators to choose whether to emphasize social or professional perspectives, depending on the committee’s purpose. More generally, conceptualizing advisory committee balance in terms of social and professional perspectives promises to help administrators avoid both naively apolitical views of expert advice on the one hand, and the partisan politicization of expertise on the other. The former takes expert advice too far away from politics, thus making it irrelevant and ineffective; the latter brings it too close, thus undermining its credibility.19 Finally, it is important to remember the limited role of advisory committees in political decision making. Political decisions should not be judged by their epistemic quality alone, and critics of liberal rationalism have rightly highlighted the coercive potential of efforts to establish consensus based on either scientific expertise or lay deliberation. One way of responding to such concerns has been to expand the range of communicative resources admissible in deliberative forums to include affective modes of communication, including personal testimony, storytelling, and the defense of marginalized interests. Another way is to emphasize the need for normative and institutional constraints on the role of deliberative forums in political decisions. Such constraints apply regardless of whether the expertise is generated through lay or expert deliberation. Critics of technocracy have long argued that the political role of expertise should vary according to the degree of consensus among experts and nonexperts, respectively, with regard to any given issue.20 It is only in those rare cases where both political values and technical knowledge are well established and generally accepted that the “linear model” of science advice applies, according to which expert knowledge should be translated directly into political decisions. In the vast majority of situations, advisory committee recommendations are merely one factor among many (including public opinion, personal convictions, campaign promises, etc.) that political decision makers should take into account. Indeed, FACA rightly makes clear that advisory committees should be “advisory only.”21 Having said that, informed judgments on complex public issues depend in part on the advice of “fairly balanced” deliberative forums. Establishing balanced advisory committees is a political process, the public

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acceptance of which depends on appointments remaining open to public challenge. Structuring the process to assess and balance the social and professional perspectives of advisory committee members, rather than according to separate standards for experts and interest group representatives, promises to help improve the effectiveness and legitimacy of government advisory committees. Republicanism, Bioethics, and Democratic Representation The preceding argument can be fleshed out a bit with a brief look at bioethics advisory councils in the United States.22 The President’s Council on Bioethics, which will be my focus, is regulated by FACA, and its members are all appointed as Special Government Employees (SGEs). Ever since American bioethics became established as a professional field in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it has been closely allied with the liberal conception of representative government outlined in chapter 3. The primary role of government bioethics councils has been to meet the needs of decision makers for both objective advice and the authority of ethical expertise. The advice helps decision makers act rightly, and the expert authority helps them ensure others that they have. Liberal bioethics models itself on a rationalist and decisionist view of expertise, according to which experts provide value-neutral knowledge that allows nonexperts to effectively pursue their subjective preferences.23 Mainstream bioethics thus long devoted little effort to designing bioethics councils in a way that facilitates public deliberation. Moreover, the prevailing view of bioethical expertise tends to discount the many noncognitive resources that potentially enrich public deliberation, including accounts of personal experience. Liberal bioethics echoes the liberal theory of representative government by casting the role of government bioethics councils in opposition to that of lay citizens. The leading alternative to liberalism within American bioethics has been communitarianism.24 Where liberal bioethicists tend to view science and technology as morally neutral tools of inevitable social progress, the communitarian emphasis on shared values often fosters a greater appreciation for the need to assert some degree of political control over technological change.25 Similarly, given their concern with the moral and affective underpinnings of community, communitarians tend to be appropriately skeptical toward the liberal confidence in analytic reason. Leon Kass has thus argued for a “richer bioethics” that examines

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the ends as well as means of biomedicine, and which draws upon diverse cultural resources, including religion, literature, experiential testimony, and (presumed) basic intuitions such as the “wisdom of repugnance.”26 Given Kass’s conservative credentials, it is noteworthy that he shares this interest in noncognitive deliberative resources with some postmodern and feminist political theorists. The latter have sought to generate ethical insights by attending to the various “given” elements of human experience, such as those associated with human mortality and corporeality.27 Despite the richness of its approach, the goal of communitarian bioethics often seems to be a rather narrow matter of producing decisive answers to bioethical questions. To oversimplify: where liberals seek objective procedural knowledge, communitarians aim for objective substantive knowledge. Daniel Callahan thus argues that bioethics “has as its main task the determination, so far as that is possible, of what is right and wrong, good and bad” about biomedical developments.28 As one assessment puts it, “Value pluralism as manifest in dissent is approached as a problem to be overcome.”29 In this respect, communitarian bioethics conveys a certain anxiety toward robust and persistent social conflict, and it discounts the way deliberative consensus often conceals and suppresses relations of power.30 Moreover, by steering conflict resolution toward a single best conception of the common good, communitarian bioethics offers little guidance for the many cases where the best possible resolution is to take a vote. In sum, although liberals eviscerate the politics of bioethics by reducing it to interest group competition, communitarians implicitly seek to render it unnecessary. Both liberals and communitarians look beyond politics for principles of social order: natural rights and community identity, respectively. Machiavellian republicanism, in contrast, as outlined in chapter 1, insists that social order is best established through political institutions.31 Similarly, as I argued in chapters 8 and 9, democracy requires embedding the politics of science within a framework of institutions that mobilize different elements of representation. This concern has several distinct implications for the design of bioethics councils and their role within public bioethics. First, bioethics councils can best serve democratic representation when they structure bioethical deliberation and expertise with reference to the issues at hand, rather than a narrow set of professional disciplines. At the first meeting of the President’s Council, Kass made a point of distinguishing the Council from mainstream bioethics and its commitment to

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professional expertise: “This is a council on bioethics, not a council of bioethicists.”32 The Council may contribute an expert perspective to public deliberation, he suggested, but its expertise resides not primarily in the professional capacities of individuals but in institutional mechanisms that mobilize a wide range of epistemic resources. In this respect, the Council supports recent efforts to expand the range of disciplines involved in bioethics beyond academic philosophy and medicine to include the social sciences, humanities, law, and other fields. Some of these efforts endorse the idea of interdisciplinary bioethics but argue that philosophy should remain at the center.33 That effectively makes philosophers into ethical decision makers and members of other disciplines their advisors, a setup that seems unlikely to facilitate cooperative deliberation. It seems more promising to conceive bioethics as what one scholar calls a “second-order discipline” of a “fundamentally interdisciplinary nature.”34 From this perspective, bioethics advisory councils will best contribute to the deliberative element of democratic representation when they bring together the various professional and social perspectives and interests relevant to any given issue. A bioethics council is not a “moral legislature,” and it represents “in a deliberative rather than in a legislative sense.”35 To be sure, a bioethics council, like any deliberative body, can never capture the full diversity of a pluralist society. But by including multiple perspectives, it can remind people of what Robert Goodin calls the “sheer fact” of diversity, thus alerting people to the possibility that biomedical developments may have very different implications for different social groups.36 Members of the President’s Council have frequently echoed this view of bioethics in Council discussions. Individual members have generally not portrayed themselves as representatives of particular social groups or perspectives, but they have presented the Council as a whole in such terms. In summarizing the Council’s report on human cloning, for example, Kass stated that the Council was “reflecting the differences of opinion in American society,” and thus was “deeply divided regarding the ethics of research involving cloned embryos.”37 And indeed, although the report offered a majority recommendation (to ban cloning to produce children and impose a four-year moratorium on research cloning), it did not present a consensus position. The report instead outlined several different sets of arguments, ranging from an outright ban on both reproductive and research cloning to no government restrictions on either.

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At the same time, however, Council members have frequently expressed ambivalence about their capacity to represent a sufficiently wide range of perspectives. At one meeting, Carl Schneider noted that “a very large number of people live within 25 miles of where they grow up, even in the United States today,” and hence, “I always worry about this fabulously unrepresentative group trying to imagine how the world works by thinking about their own lives.”38 Schneider thus suggested that members of the professional class, as noted previously, may hold a particular social perspective that cuts across other lines of difference. A second way for bioethics councils to foster democratic representation is to emphasize public deliberation over policy recommendations. Most government bioethics councils in the United States have been formally charged with providing specific policy recommendations. The actual practice of bioethics councils, however, has often involved efforts to shape the public agenda and foster public deliberation.39 Such efforts received formal sanction with the creation of the President’s Council, which has an unusually diverse presidential mandate: “advise the President,” “undertake fundamental inquiry,” “explore specific ethical and policy questions,” “provide a forum for a national discussion,” “facilitate a greater understanding,” and “explore possibilities for useful international collaboration.” Additionally, the Council is asked to “articulate fully the complex and often competing moral positions on any given issue, rather than . . . to find consensus.”40 A republican conception of democratic representation is not incompatible with any of these goals, and the appropriate approach depends in large measure on the particular issue at hand. Nonetheless, by fostering informed public deliberation, bioethics councils facilitate the deliberation, participation, and accountability elements of democratic representation. Providing a single consensus recommendation, in contrast, creates an incentive for politicians to shift responsibility for their decisions onto the council, thus evading accountability. In addition, the closer that bioethics councils are to government decision making, the more pressure they face to tailor their deliberations to existing constellations of interests, which may hinder inclusion of a wide range of issues and perspectives.41 And when a bioethics council offers a single policy recommendation on a controversial moral issue, it risks undermining people’s confidence in their everyday moral sensibilities.42 Although recognizing its mandate to advise the president, the President’s Council has tended to emphasize its contribution to broader pro-

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cesses of public deliberation. For example, at the Council’s first meeting, council member Rebecca Dresser stated that “commissions really make more of a difference when they deliberate in a balanced way that speaks to people with a lot of different viewpoints [and] communicate clearly and make our positions accessible to ordinary people.”43 Similarly, among the various justifications offered for the Council’s majority recommendation on cloning, Kass noted that “the most important . . . is a need for ongoing public moral debate before one decides to cross this grave moral threshold.”44 In a session dedicated to reflecting on the first four years of the Council, council member Robert George noted that “it is very valuable to lay before the American public . . . the best arguments to be made on the competing sides of the question and the best available information as to what the plain facts of the matter are.”45 Such statements suggest, contrary to the standard liberal view, that bioethics councils should not be asked to determine the true or correct answer to bioethical dilemmas. It may be that moral truths exist, and that some people understand these truths better than others. But in contrast to scientific truth, there is no reliable method or institutional framework for establishing societal consensus on moral truth. Whatever one’s position on the ontology of moral truth, without a socially established epistemology for discerning it, moral truth is largely irrelevant to politics.46 Consensus on a bioethics council might well suggest a promising hypothesis for further deliberation in civil society, but by itself it cannot secure the validity of normative claims. Although bioethics has arguably helped create societal consensus on some issues—for example, human subjects research, organ distribution, end-of-life decision making—on many current issues, societal consensus is not likely anytime soon. The legitimacy of policy decisions on such issues, therefore, cannot rest solely on their normative validity, no matter how strong the consensus within a bioethics council or among bioethicists. A third way for bioethics councils to contribute to democratic representation is to articulate a distinctly moral perspective on bioethical issues. Despite its emphasis on public deliberation, the President’s Council has been at pains to offer a contribution to such deliberation distinct from other types of institutions. What it means to articulate a moral perspective, and what sort of expertise it requires, is a difficult question, and the President’s Council cannot be said to have devoted much time to considering it. However, Council members have often sought to distinguish their contribution to the politics of bioethics from institutions more

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directly concerned with balancing interests or crafting policies. At the Council’s first meeting, for example, Stephen Carter warned against “the trap of so many policy discussions today of thinking that every position that is expressed is expressed as a basis for a proposed regulation.”47 He urged council members “to distinguish between our comments that are intended to go to morality, desirability, undesirability and . . . comments that are meant to go to the issue of what our public policy actually ought to be.”48 Or, as Kass put it at a later meeting, “This is, to begin with, an ethics council, and our first questions will not be simply will it work, is it safe, and how much does it cost. But is it good, right, just, noble, wise, and prudent?”49 For council member Francis Fukuyama, in contrast, the Council’s task was to link moral deliberations to the design of institutions, in particular a new regulatory agency for biotechnology. His suggestion never became a centerpiece of the Council’s work, and he eventually pursued it independently of the Council. Nonetheless, he continued to urge the council “to think . . . more concretely about not just legislative acts, but institutions that will . . . help guide us and . . . structure political decision making in this area.”50 Despite such differences over what it means to articulate a moral perspective, council members seemed agreed that their task differs from deliberative institutions not explicitly concerned with moral issues. Indeed, insofar as bioethics councils are institutionally structured to produce well reasoned, scientifically informed, socially inclusive arguments, they are more likely to produce such arguments than either civil society organizations or legislative bodies. The latter may include deliberation as part of their activities, but they also have many other tasks, including advocacy and decision making, which may conflict with deliberation. If citizens and their representatives are to justify decisions in ways that avoid both pandering and demagoguery, seeking instead to build acceptance through argument and persuasion, then representative democracy depends on some conception of moral expertise.51 From the perspective developed here, moral expertise resides in the knowledge, skills, and institutional capacities required to inform and analyze normative disagreements over questions of public concern.52 Bioethics councils contribute a distinctly moral perspective to public discourse in part by showing how to adopt other people’s points of view, which usually requires attending to their own assessments of their values, needs, and interests.53 Although moral expertise is far less formalized than technical expertise, they are both part of the deliberative component of democratic representation.

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Minipublics In recent years, many scholars and practitioners have directed enormous energy into the design, implementation, and evaluation of deliberative polls, consensus conferences, citizen juries, planning cells, and similar deliberative forums, known among democratic theorists as minipublics.54 Minipublics have been designed in many different ways, and design choices have key implications for how well they fulfill particular purposes.55 Generally speaking, organizers of minipublics randomly select a group of anywhere from a dozen to several hundred participants, provide balanced information materials on a particular controversial issue, facilitate one or more deliberative sessions among the participants, and (except for deliberative polls) ask participants to prepare recommendations for policymakers and the general public. Minipublics raise intriguing questions, very few of which I consider here, about each of the elements of democratic representation discussed in the previous chapter. Because the participants are randomly selected, most minipublics are not directly authorized by the general public, nor are the participants held formally accountable to anyone but the organizers and sponsors. Nonetheless, as deliberative forums, minipublics may provide focal points for public deliberation on elections and other formal procedures of authorization and accountability. In the following discussion, I briefly consider how minipublics institutionalize the participation, deliberation, and resemblance elements of democratic representation discussed in the previous chapter. Organizers and advocates have often conceived minipublics as a vehicle of public participation, especially in Europe, where they were introduced as approaches to participatory technology assessment. The founder of planning cells in Germany, for example, intended them to serve as functional equivalents of the eighteenth-century bourgeois salons, coffee houses, and political clubs idealized by Habermas.56 In a similar vein, James Fishkin has argued that deliberative polls recreate the ancient Athenian practice of using selection by lot to fill many government posts.57 Indeed, in some respects, minipublics capture the Athenian conviction that all citizens are fundamentally capable of participating in politics. Minipublics are far less participatory, however, than comparisons to ancient Athens might suggest. The key difference is that Athenian citizens had to volunteer to participate in the selection process.58 For most

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minipublics, in contrast, the initiative comes from the organizers rather than from citizens themselves. Despite misleading formulations by some proponents, random selection does not provide an equal opportunity for everyone to participate in addressing a given political issue. It provides merely an equal probability of being chosen to participate. Those chosen must of course accept the invitation, and some organizers rely on citizens responding to advertisements to assemble an initial selection pool. But in the end, those not chosen have no option of becoming involved.59 Looking beyond the deliberative bodies themselves, however, it seems that minipublics may be able to shape prevailing conceptions of participation itself. According to much anecdotal evidence and a few surveys, participants report an increased interest in politics well after the conclusion of the exercise.60 Indeed, one of the most significant features of minipublics is their implicit claim that lay citizens, given appropriate institutions, are capable of making worthwhile contributions to political deliberation on complex topics. This claim is supported by studies showing that lay knowledge often provides perspectives either neglected by or inaccessible to those who approach matters from within a particular professional framework.61 To be sure, many civic organizations, political parties, and interest groups are better situated than minipublics to mobilize citizens and increase their sense of political efficacy. But minipublics are unusual in offering a public demonstration of the capacity of laypeople to engage productively with complex political questions. With regard to the resemblance component of democratic representation, commentators and organizers all seem to agree that minipublics should include socially diverse participants. It is often unclear, however, whether the aim is to assemble a statistically representative sample or a demographic cross section of the population.62 As Simon Joss notes, organizers often suggest that the participants represent “public opinion” in some undefined sense.63 In a statistically representative sample, the number of people representing each relevant social group is proportionate to the numerical strength of that group in the general population. A societal cross section, in contrast, includes at least one person from each social group relevant to the topic at hand. A cross section thus provides no information about the relative numerical strength of different groups, but in a small or medium-sized forum a cross section includes a wider range of social perspectives than an approximation of a statistically representative sample. Only minipublics involving very large numbers of participants, like deliberative polls and planning cells, are actually designed to

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select a statistically representative sample. Nonetheless, commentators often present the lack of statistical representativeness as a shortcoming of other types of minipublics like citizen juries and consensus conferences.64 The reason commonly given for favoring a statistically representative sample over a societal cross section is that the former provides each individual in the population an equal probability of being selected, whereas the latter oversamples politically significant but numerically small social groups. But if the purpose of minipublics is to represent diverse social perspectives rather than political interests, then it seems that the injustice of oversampling minority groups is outweighed by the benefits of assembling a more socially diverse forum. With regard to deliberation, most minipublics adopt a division between lay and expert deliberation. In contrast to the intermingling of experts and nonexperts on many government advisory committees, minipublics usually exclude experts from the lay forum, restricting them to a special session during which lay participants ask the experts specific questions. The understandable aim is to prevent experts from dominating the lay participants, and to introduce a distinctive lay perspective into public discourses dominated by experts, politicians, and interest groups. The risk of this approach, however, as discussed in the previous chapter, is that it fosters a romantic conception of “the citizen” as possessed of a uniquely candid and authentic, guileless form of “lay knowledge.” It also suggests that laypeople need to be protected from intimidation by experts, a problem that certainly occurs but probably no more often than the problem of headstrong laypeople dominating those less outgoing. The solution commonly applied to the second problem, a skilled facilitator, would probably also work for the first. Moreover, as noted previously, the knowledge of most experts is so specialized that they are effectively laypeople with regard to issues beyond their immediate area of expertise. As members of the professional class, all experts may share a certain social perspective, but there is no lingua franca among experts. Experts on interdisciplinary advisory committees, therefore, must frame their statements in terms that experts from other disciplines—and hence, for the most part, laypeople as well— can understand.65 Viewed as representative institutions in their own right, more socially diverse minipublics have a greater potential to give nonparticipants the sense that their perspectives have been publicly articulated. If participants are publicly associated with particular social groups, they may

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evoke a symbolic form of representation—that is, a feeling of being represented—among people who identify with those groups. Even if nonparticipants do not identify with any particular member of the forum, those who identify with the value of diversity itself may see themselves as symbolically represented by the minipublic as a whole. With regard to the impact of minipublics on other institutions, descriptive representation on minipublics can help make both the overall political agenda and particular decisions more sensitive to the concerns of previously excluded groups. This effect may occur either directly or indirectly. Minipublics can provide increased publicity for the specific concerns associated with particular social groups, and they can highlight the general benefits of social diversity for political deliberation. Seen as representative institutions in themselves, the potential contribution of minipublics to representative democracy resides primarily in the deliberation and resemblance elements of democratic representation, and to a lesser extent, in the participation and accountability elements. By developing technically and ethically informed judgments of the public interest, minipublics promise to enrich public deliberation. By articulating the perspectives of diverse social groups, minipublics may foster a symbolic sense of being represented among people who identify with those groups. Although participation on minipublics is limited by the constraints of the random selection process, those who do participate can shape the representations of the public interest generated by the process. Finally, if accountability is conceived as a matter of giving an account of one’s reasoning rather than being held to account for one’s actions, minipublics may improve the capacities of participants to represent both their own experiential perspectives and their conceptions of the public interest during the meetings of the forum. Because minipublics are neither publicly authorized nor held publicly accountable, they lack two key elements of democratic representation. Nonetheless, they can enhance all the elements of democratic representation, as they appear in other political institutions and in civil society. They can enrich deliberation and debate among voters and public officials, provide a model of deliberative accountability, facilitate the public appropriation of expert knowledge and moral arguments, and enhance the public understanding of diverse experiential perspectives. In these various respects, minipublics have a limited but significant role to play in representative democracy. Their role, like that of other institutions, is

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shaped by the relationship between their particular institutional features and the different elements of democratic representation. Conclusion Within the framework of democratic representation developed in this book, advisory bodies have the task of assessing, producing, and distributing both empirical and moral knowledge regarding matters of public concern. This task depends on enlisting a wide range of perspectives and interests. They also have the task of fostering public deliberation, thereby helping citizens create imaginative links among the different elements of representation. Not all institutions need to represent their constituents in the same way, and the institutions considered here are only a few of the many possibilities. What is important is that citizens in a representative democracy have access to diverse modes of representation, such that their respective attributes balance each other out.

Conclusion

Despite the exhaustiveness of her study on the concept of representation, Pitkin said very little about representation in science. She suggested, however, that it would be something of a category mistake to view scientific representation as intertwined with political representation. “The expert scientist solving a technical problem is not representative at all, is not deciding anything, is not pursuing anybody’s interest.”1 Pitkin briefly considered the argument that experts such as doctors and engineers are representatives because they promote other people’s best interests. She concluded that promoting a person’s best interest does not make an expert into a representative, because the actions of the expert cannot be attributed to the person.2 Pitkin also suggested that experts are not representatives because representation requires “a relative equivalence between the representative and the represented,” and the beneficiaries of expertise usually remain relatively passive.3 Similarly, Pitkin argued that trustees are not representatives of their wards. “He does not take orders from or consult with the beneficiary. Nor does he legally bind the beneficiary; a contract made by a trustee binds him, not the beneficiary.”4 Pitkin later defined political representation in explicit contrast to representation in science. “For representation is not needed where we expect scientifically true answers, where no value commitments, no decisions, no judgment are involved.”5 This book has followed Pitkin in conceiving representation as a relationship between and among representatives and constituents. But the preceding chapters suggest that Pitkin’s sharp split between representation in science and politics is no longer tenable. Making representations of nonhuman nature often requires representing humans as well. Discovering “scientifically true answers” does require value commitments, decisions, and judgments. And those who enjoy the benefits and suffer the

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burdens of expertise do not always remain passive; they sometimes demand opportunities to shape how expertise is developed and employed. Experts can be representatives rather than paternalist technocrats in contexts where either laypeople or other experts are empowered to publicly object to their representatives’ claims.6 For one last example we return briefly to the Plan B case discussed in the introduction. A few days after Susan Wood resigned, another committee member also resigned in protest: Frank Davidoff, a professor of medicine and supporter of over-the-counter status for Plan B. Though highly critical of the FDA’s decision, in an article about the incident he did not cast it as a simple matter of science versus politics. He explained that “many of the issues raised in connection with the proposed over-thecounter switch of Plan B differed, both quantitatively and qualitatively, from the usual biological and clinical concerns.” The proposed benefits “were as much social, behavioral, and ethical as they were clinical.” Although the vast majority of committee members felt that the social concerns were adequately addressed by the available research, he suggested that reaching this conclusion required value judgments, not just scientific evidence: “The increased control that easier availability would give women over their reproductive lives appeared to most committee members to outweigh concerns about women bypassing doctor visits.” Similarly, Davidoff argued that at the most fundamental level the Plan B controversy was about the “commingling of sex with politics and morality.” The FDA decision, he wrote, reflected the values of a patriarchal society “controlling the sexual and reproductive lives of women.”7 Given that the FDA’s decision was intertwined with these patriarchal values, protests against it would have been well advised to make explicit their egalitarian values, rather than simply trying to get the politics out of science advice. One possibility would have been for advisory committee members to explicitly take on the role of public representatives, fostering an open public debate about patriarchy, reproductive rights, and related issues, rather than restricting themselves to the science. Taking on such a role need not obscure the distinction between scientific knowledge and political argument, and advisory committee statements and reports could help citizens understand the difference. Alternatively, even if the advisory committee were to restrict itself to the science, both opponents and proponents of the decision could have made their value commitments explicit, rather than pretending that their claims follow directly from the science.

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When scientists, engineers, doctors, and other experts engage with laypeople’s demands, they become those people’s representatives. When they engage the broader public in ongoing processes of deliberation and judgment, they become involved in democratic representation. Political representation by experts does risk the partisan forms of politicization apparent in recent debates over the misuse of science advisory committees. But a democratic response to such politicization would seek not to eliminate the politics of expertise but to embed it within a political framework. The framework sketched in this book includes multiple sites and modes of representation, thus facilitating different modes of public engagement with expert claims. A political framework of this sort is not a method for reconciling science and democracy, but a set of conceptual resources for addressing emerging dilemmas. One key dilemma, barely touched upon in this book, lies in the power of science and technology to shape the identities of citizens. By shaping the citizens whose representation they facilitate, science and technology potentially narrow the critical distance upon which democratic representation depends. The technologies of contemporary politics—advertising-driven political campaigns, poll-driven governance, entertainment-driven news, speed-driven internet blogs, and so on—tend to compress political space and time. They reduce or destroy the distance required for reflective communication among and between constituents and public officials. Whereas direct democracy collapses the distance between citizens and their government, representative democracy depends on maintaining a tension between them.8 In a technology-driven culture, such critical distance may be difficult to maintain. Winner thus suggested long ago that far from technology representing human needs and interests, human beings represent the actual or perceived imperatives of their technologies. “As they become woven into the texture of everyday existence, the devices, techniques, and systems we adopt shed their tool-like qualities to become part of our very humanity.”9 Similarly, emerging genetic technologies suggest new possibilities for radically reducing the gap between scientific knowledge and personal identity. If science and technology not only enable and constrain but fundamentally constitute prevailing modes of thinking and acting, citizens may have difficulty engaging in the critical reflection upon which democratic representation depends. Another dilemma for locating science in representative democracy lies in the character of the publics that require representation. As Dewey and

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Lippmann agreed, modern science and technology tend to fragment the local publics traditionally assumed by liberal theories of representation. Whether Feenberg’s translocal “technically mediated subgroups” provide a viable alternative is an open question. In any case, the spatial dislocation of democratic constituencies means that if science and technology are to facilitate democratic representation, the typical fixation on the territorial state as the locus of representation must be reconfigured to include humans and nonhumans around the globe. A difficult task, to put it mildly. Efforts to respond to these and related dilemmas for democratic representation need not attempt to involve every citizen in every sociotechnical issue. Not everything should be made political, at least not at once. Representative democracy requires a division of labor between experts and laypeople. The division of labor depends in part on self-consciously reflective trust in experts, and such trust can be strengthened by an institutionalized culture of public scrutiny and engagement. Public engagement is required not only in cases of obvious technical failure or public controversy. It is needed on an ongoing basis to ensure that unjust power relations do not become embedded within an expert consensus. Contesting such power relations—that is, politicizing science—need not reduce expert advice to partisan competition, provided that institutions are available that equalize power and facilitate mediation among diverse perspectives and interests. Aspects of this conception of democratic representation are apparent in the politics of science today. Rather than trying to purify science of power, efforts have been made to distribute the power of science among diverse institutions and social groups. Rather than excluding nonexperts and concealing the social perspectives of experts, some advisory bodies have enlisted the representation of more diverse social and professional groups than in the past. Most important, scholars, activists, and public officials have established multiple kinds of advisory bodies that make different contributions to representative democracy. Such efforts help ensure that scientists, politicians, interest groups, and ordinary citizens have access to multiple sites and modes of representation. This emerging political framework promises more legitimate and effective efforts to bring science into representative democracy.

Notes

In citations of historical works, periods separate book, chapter, and section, as relevant. When page numbers are given, they are preceded by a comma and refer to the editions cited in the bibliography. Unless otherwise noted, all emphases in quoted passages are the original.

Preface 1. See Farr, “Understanding Conceptual Change Politically,” esp. 40– 42; Ball, Reappraising Political Theory, 12–20, 27–29; Skinner, Visions of Politics, I: 88– 89. For Leo Strauss, in contrast, political philosophy is “the attempt to replace opinion about the nature of political things by knowledge of the nature of political things.” It is a quest for “true standards” (What Is Political Philosophy? 11, 12). 2. Among the many critiques of this view, see Skinner, Visions of Politics, I: 59– 60, 85–86; Zerilli, “Machiavelli’s Sisters.” 3. To be precise, studies using actor-network theory actually trace linkages between the local and the global (or at least translocal), but because its practitioners generally treat it as a method rather than a theory, they focus on the local production of knowledge rather than the resulting translocal knowledge. I discuss this issue more fully in chapter 7. See also the discussion in Fuller, Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies, 49–54. 4. The notion of a “tradition” in political thought is complex and controversial. Historians of ideas need not conceive traditions in fixed and essentialist terms as a set of “core ideas” that receive different articulations throughout history. “They might identify a tradition with a group of ideas widely shared by a number of individuals although no one idea was held by all of them. Or they might identify a tradition with a group of ideas passed down from generation to generation, changing a little each time, so that no single idea persisted from start to finish” (Bevir, Logic of the History of Ideas, 200–220, quotation on 202). See also Farr, “Understanding Conceptual Change Politically,” 25–30, 36– 42. Moreover, traditions of political thought do not consist solely of “ideas” in the sense

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of discrete arguments. Traditions also include more diffuse modes of thought, practice, and material culture that shape issues and identities in various ways. 5. My argument here draws on Bevir, Logic of the History of Ideas, 209–211; Pels, Intellectual as Stranger, xiii; Yack, Longing for Total Revolution, xx–xi. 6. Connolly, Terms of Political Discourse, esp. 22–35, 140–143. 7. For overviews of science and technology studies, see Biagioli, Science Studies Reader; Hackett et al., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies; Hess, Science Studies; Jasanoff et al., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies; Sismondo, Introduction to Science and Technology Studies. 8. See Smith and Marx, Does Technology Drive History. On the continuing relevance of widespread popular belief in technological determinism, despite its shortcomings as a theory, see Wyatt, “Technological Determinism Is Dead.” 9. Jasanoff, “Ordering Knowledge,” 20; Latour, “Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern!” 147; Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus; Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy, chaps. 6–7, esp. 86. 10. Fuller, Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies, 35–39. 11. For some thoughts on the reasons for political theorists’ relative lack of engagement with questions of science and technology, see Kaufman-Osborn, Creatures of Prometheus, 21–25; Brown, “Conceptions of Science in Political Theory.” 12. Kateb, “Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy”; Schwartz, Blue Guitar; Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, chap. 16; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; Plotke, “Representation Is Democracy”; Williams, Voice, Trust, and Memory; Young, Inclusion and Democracy; Mansbridge, “Rethinking Representation”; Ankersmit, Political Representation; Urbinati, Representative Democracy; Urbinati and Warren, “Concept of Representation.”

Introduction 1. Davidoff and Trussell, “Plan B and the Politics of Doubt.” Ironically, research shows that even when Plan B was only available by prescription, it accounted for 43 percent of an 11 percent decrease in abortions in the United States between 1995 and 2000. Shulman, Undermining Science, 47, 167n2. 2. Wood, “Women’s Health and the FDA,” 1651. 3. Clinton, “Senator Clinton, Colleagues Call for ‘Plan B’ Probe”; Kaufman, “Review of ‘Plan B’ Pill Is Faulted.” 4. Stein, “FDA Approves Plan B’s Over-the-Counter Sale.” 5. Mooney, Republican War on Science, 22–23, 227–235; Union of Concerned Scientists, Scientific Integrity in Policymaking; U.S. House of Representatives, Politics and Science in the Bush Administration. 6. Kennedy, “Epidemic of Politics.”

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7. See, for example, Brooks, “Scientific Advisor”; Ezrahi, “Utopian and Pragmatic Rationalism”; Jasanoff, Fifth Branch; Sarewitz, “How Science Makes Environmental Controversies Worse”; Pielke, Honest Broker. 8. Greenberg, Politics of Pure Science. 9. Sarewitz, “Scientizing Politics.” 10. Pielke, Honest Broker, 47; Weingart, “Scientific Expertise and Political Accountability.” 11. In previous such decisions, the agency had deemed it appropriate to extrapolate from data on older adolescents to younger adolescents. Moreover, out of twenty-three applications to switch from prescription to over-the-counter status considered by advisory committees between 1994 and 2004, the Plan B application was the only one not approved following a recommendation by the relevant advisory committees. Additionally, high-level personnel were more involved than usual in the process, and the “not-approval” letter was signed by the Acting Director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, rather than by the director of the office that reviewed the application. Mooney, Republican War on Science, 230–234; U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), “Food and Drug Administration Decision Process,” 29–30. 12. In German darstellen means to depict or portray, vertreten means to act for or on behalf of, and repräsentieren is used in both senses but tends to have more abstract or academic connotations. See also Pitkin, “Representation,” 132–133. 13. The relationship between political and scientific representation is a persistent theme in STS, and several scholars have commented at least briefly upon it: for example, Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, chap. 2; Fuller, Social Epistemology, 36–37; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 27–29; Latour, Politics of Nature, passim; Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 137; Jasanoff, “Ordering Knowledge,” 41; Martello, “Arctic Indigenous Peoples.” 14. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 241; Vieira and Runciman, Representation, 6–10. 15. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 140–146. 16. Lynch and Woolgar, Representation in Scientific Practice; Rheinberger, History of Epistemic Things, esp. chap. 7. 17. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 244–249; Habermas, Structural Transformation, 7–8. 18. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 38–59, 144–145, 214–215; Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 20–25, 130–135; Vieira and Runciman, Representation, 66–73. Principal-agent theory can illuminate relations between public officials and scientists within particular organizational settings, but it is not sufficient for integrating those settings into a theory of democracy. See Guston, Between Politics and Science, 14–25,150–154. 19. Lippmann, Phantom Public, 3–64; Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 269–273, 284–296; Luhmann, Political Theory in the Welfare State;

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Sartori, Theory of Democracy Revisited, 278–292; Manin, Principles, chap. 4; Zolo, Democracy and Complexity, 74–88, 177–284. 20. Fishkin, Voice of the People, 33–34; Barber, Strong Democracy, 145–147; Lummis, Radical Democracy, 25. Cf. Pitkin, “Representation,” 150; Pitkin, “Representation and Democracy,” 340. 21. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 57. 22. Macleod, “Science and Democracy”; Guston, Between Politics and Science, chaps. 2–3, esp. 66. 23. Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics, 330–347. 24. Guston, Between Politics and Science, chap. 5. 25. Kleinman, Impure Cultures. 26. Brooks, “Scientific Advisor,” 76. 27. Beck, Risk Society. 28. Turner, Liberal Democracy 3.0, 52–54; Fischer, Citizens, Experts, and the Environment, 127–129; Hardin, “Do We Want Trust in Government?” 33–35; Ezrahi, “Utopian and Pragmatic Rationalism”; Wexler, “Expert and Lay Participation.” 29. Nowotny et al., Re-Thinking Science. 30. Jasanoff, Designs on Nature. 31. Sarewitz, “How Science Makes Environmental Controversies Worse.” 32. Weingart, Stunde der Wahrheit, chap. 4; Beck, Risk Society, 156. 33. On recent surveys asking respondents about their degree of confidence in the leadership of various public institutions, the scientific community tends to hover around 40 percent, usually just below medicine and just above the military, and far above political institutions and especially the media. The credibility of scientific experts depends on their institutional affiliation: university scientists funded by government were deemed highly credible by about 45 percent of respondents; government scientists and university scientists funded by biotech companies were deemed credible by about 35 percent; and scientists who work for biotech companies by 30 percent (National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators, 7:30, 36–37). In a 2005 Eurobarometer survey, 52 percent of respondents confirmed the statement, “The benefits of science are greater than any harmful effects it may have” (European Commission, Eurobarometer, 53). On the other hand, 59 percent agreed that “Because of their knowledge, scientists have a power that makes them dangerous” (82). Seventy-three percent agreed with the statement, “Politicians should rely more on the advice of expert scientists” (89), but 58 percent rejected the view that “the public is sufficiently involved in decisions about science and technology” (98), and 41 percent disagreed with the statement, “For people like me it is not important to be involved in decisions about science and technology” (96). 34. Longino, Fate of Knowledge; Epstein, Impure Science.

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35. Price, Scientific Estate, chap. 5; Shapiro, Democracy’s Place, 113–116; Warren, “What Is Political?” 36. Warren, “Citizen Representatives.” This diversity of representative claims is intertwined with a pluralization of modes and levels of sovereignty. See Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, 199–202. 37. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 116. 38. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 97–101. 39. Foucault, Discipline and Punish; History of Sexuality. 40. Habermas, Future of Human Nature; President’s Council on Bioethics, Beyond Therapy. 41. Beck, Ecological Enlightenment, chap. 8. 42. Rouse, Knowledge and Power, 183, 245. 43. Winner, Autonomous Technology, 323. 44. Rouse, Knowledge and Power, 206; Warren, “What Is Political?” 224–225. 45. Josephson, Totalitarian Science. 46. Graham, What Have We Learned about Science and Technology, 8–28. 47. Merton, “Science and Democratic Social Structure,” esp. 552, 555–556; Hollinger, “Defense of Democracy.” 48. Guston, “Essential Tension.” 49. Science warrior attacks on constructivism include Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition; Koertge, House Built on Sand; Weinberg, Facing Up; Sokal and Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense. Among the many assessments, see Jardine and Frasca-Spada, “Splendours and Miseries”; Segestråle, Beyond the Science Wars. 50. Winner, “Upon Opening the Black Box”; Fuller, Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies, 16–17; Jasanoff, “STS and Public Policy.” 51. Sismondo, “Science and Technology Studies and an Engaged Program.” 52. Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, 237–290. 53. Krimsky, Science in the Private Interest, 52. 54. Winner, Whale and the Reactor, 39. 55. National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators, chap. 7; Fuller, Governance of Science, 45– 46; Irwin and Michael, Science, Social Theory and Public Knowledge; Wynne, “Public Understanding of Science.” 56. Renn et al., Fairness and Competence; Saretzki, “Demokratisierung von Expertise”; Kleinman, Science, Technology, and Democracy; Fischer, Citizens, Experts, and the Environment; Joss and Bellucci, Participatory Technology Assessment; Guston, “Forget Politicizing Science. Let’s Democratize Science!” 57. House of Lords, Science and Society chap. 5; Felt and Wynne, Taking European Knowledge Society Seriously.

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58. Fuller, Governance of Science, 135–147; Funtowicz and Ravetz, “Three Types of Risk Assessment”; Wilsdon and Willis, See-Through Science. 59. Brown, “Citizen Panels,” 216–217. This tendency is especially apparent in Fishkin, Voice of the People, esp. 95, 162, 171.

1

Niccolò Machiavelli and the Popular Politics of Expertise

1. Pellegrino, “Bioethics and Politics,” 572–573. 2. Latour, “The Prince for Machines”; Latour, Science in Action, 124–125, 128; Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 263. 3. Maurizio Viroli argues repeatedly that scientific modes of thought are “totally alien from Machiavelli’s style of thinking.” Viroli, Machiavelli, 2, 63, 72–74, 77, 80–83; Viroli, “Machiavelli’s Realism,” 471. By insisting on a sharp distinction between Machiavelli’s humanist rhetoric and modern science, Viroli assumes a rationalist view of science and neglects the rhetoric of science, which has become an established field of study; see Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, chap. 4. Other interpretations that seek to dissociate Machiavelli from modern science include Fleischer, “Ways of Machiavelli,” 334, 342, 355; McIntosh, “Modernity of Machiavelli,” 184; Parel, “Question of Machiavelli’s Modernity,” 339; Garver, Machiavelli, 12–22. Of course, those scholars who associate Machiavelli with modernity or modern science also tend to assume a rationalist view of science; see, for example, Olschki, Machiavelli the Scientist, 25–26; Gilbert, “Humanist Concept of the Prince,” 92; Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli; Strauss, Natural Right and History, 4, 177–179; Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 258; Greene, “End of Discourse,” 58–59. 4. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 238, 262; Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli. 5. Gilbert, “Humanist Concept of the Prince”; Skinner, Foundations, I:33– 48, 60–65; Black, Political Thought in Europe, 156–161. 6. Skinner, Foundations, I:70–73; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 62–64. 7. Skinner, Foundations, I:129, 134, 213–221. 8. Hariman, “Composing Modernity,” 9; Viroli, “Machiavelli’s Realism,” 467– 470. 9. Viroli, Machiavelli, 77–78. 10. Machiavelli, Prince, dedicatory letter, 5. On these features of the dedicatory letter, see Mousley, “Prince and Textual Politics,” 153. 11. On Machiavelli’s critique of the mirror-for-princes genre, see Skinner, Foundations, 128–138; Skinner, Machiavelli, 31– 47. 12. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 28–30; Mousley, “Prince and Textual Politics,” 154. 13. Machiavelli, Prince, dedicatory letter, 5. 14. Hariman, “Composing Modernity,” 8–10; Greene, “End of Discourse.”

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15. Machiavelli, Prince, dedicatory letter, 5–6. 16. See Hariman, “Composing Modernity,” 11; Ezrahi, “Modes of Reasoning,” 72–73. 17. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 181. 18. Mousley, “Prince and Textual Politics,” 159–160. 19. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.preface to autograph manuscript. 20. Machiavelli, “Letter to Vettori,” 69. 21. See Zerilli, “Machiavelli’s Sisters.” 22. Hariman, “Composing Modernity,” 12–13. 23. Hariman, “Composing Modernity,” 16–17; cf. Skinner, Foundations, I:129–130. 24. Arendt, Human Condition, 199–207. 25. Hariman, “Composing Modernity,” 18–19. 26. Ibid., 23–26. 27. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 15, 53. 28. Ibid. 29. Viroli (Machiavelli, 85–97) correctly argues that Machiavelli does not advocate a complete separation of truth and utility from what is deemed honorable by convention, because princes must always strive to maintain both their own honor and that of the state in the eyes of its citizens. See also Fleischer, “Ways of Machiavelli,” 335–336. 30. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.preface. 31. Machiavelli, Discourses, III.39. 32. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 30. 33. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 28, 62. See also Greene, “The End of Discourse,” 64. 34. Machiavelli, Discourses, II.29, see also I.6, I.56; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 189; Parel, Machiavellian Cosmos. 35. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 15, 54. 36. Machiavelli, Discourses, III.37. 37. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.6; Prince, chap. 21, 78. 38. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.4. Ankersmit sees in Machiavelli’s embrace of conflict between nobles and commoners an implicit “plea in favor of representative democracy” (Ankersmit, Political Representation, 190). 39. McCormick, “Machiavelli against Republicanism.” 40. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.6. See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 177–178, 184, 199. 41. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 25, 86–87.

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42. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 25, 85. 43. See Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman, 151–153. 44. Machiavelli, Discourses, II.29. 45. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 23, 82. In the Discourses (III.35), Machiavelli makes a similar point from the perspective of the advisor rather than the prince, noting that advisors always risk being blamed for the failures of those they advise. Consequently, he recommends “speaking your mind without passion . . . so that, if the city or the prince follows this advice, they follow it willingly, without it appearing that they are pulled along by your insistence.” 46. Garver, Machiavelli, 63. 47. Ibid., 40, 72. 48. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 19, 71. 49. Garver, Machiavelli, chap. 1, 151–152. 50. Machiavelli, Prince, chaps. 12–13, 42–50. 51. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 17, 58; see also chap. 21, 76–79. 52. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 22, 79–80. 53. Garver, Machiavelli, 37, 129–130. 54. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 18, 61. 55. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 18, 62. 56. Fleischer, “Ways of Machiavelli,” 355; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 212. 57. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 17, 57–58. 58. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 7, 27. 59. See Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, chap. 3; Muir, “Representations of Power”; Pavanello, “Good and Bad Government.” 60. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 18, 62. 61. Cf. Viroli, Machiavelli, 64–72. Viroli relies on a contrast between “interpretive” and “scientific” knowledge in distinguishing Machiavelli’s commitment to “a kind of knowledge which requires closeness” (67) from “general theories of political behavior” (70) that distance themselves from their subject matter. As I show in the next chapter, it is primarily the products of modern science that are distant from their subject matter; the process of scientific investigation requires many of the same interpretive capacities that Machiavelli employs in assessing past and current rulers. 62. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.3. 63. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.18. See also Rubinstein, “Italian Political Thought,” 53; Skinner, Visions of Politics, II:184–185. 64. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.8. Machiavelli goes on to argue (I.10) that once a people becomes corrupt, it is extremely difficult to establish good institutions: if one pursues only piecemeal reforms, it will be difficult to persuade corrupt citizens to accept them; but if one attempts radical change, violent means will be

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required, which requires a wicked ruler, who, precisely because he is wicked, is unlikely to promote the public good. See also Viroli, Machiavelli, 144–147. 65. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.34, I.35, I.40, I.7–8. See also Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, 244–247. 66. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.34. See Viroli, Machiavelli, 143ff. 67. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.2, II.2, III.1, III.27. See also Skinner, Foundations, I:178–179; Skinner, Visions of Politics, II:169–173. 68. McCormick, “Machiavelli against Republicanism”; “Machiavellian Democracy,” 304–305; “Contain the Wealthy.” McCormick thus rejects the term “republican” altogether, opting instead for “Machiavellian democracy.” 69. Pettit, Republicanism, 28. On these different versions of republicanism, see Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 294–302; Dagger, “Communitarianism and Republicanism”; Held, Models of Democracy, 35–37. 70. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.58. 71. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.58. 72. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.58. 73. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.47, III.34. 74. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.3. 75. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.50. McCormick, “Machiavellian Democracy,” 304–305. 76. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.5. 77. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue. 78. McCormick, “Machiavellian Democracy,” 299–300. See also Skinner, Visions of Politics, II:163–164. 79. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.4. 80. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.4. 81. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.7. McCormick, “Machiavellian Democracy,” 300–301; “Machiavelli’s Political Trials,” 389–391. 82. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.6; I.44. 83. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.47. 84. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.4, I.7, I.47. 85. McCormick, “Machiavellian Democracy,” 303.

2

Power and Publicity in Modern Science

1. Koertge, House Built on Sand; Scientific Values and Civic Virtues. 2. The English word scientist did not appear until 1833, coined by William Whewell. Like the German Wissenschaft, the French term science long meant only knowledge in a general sense. In English the equivalent term was natural philosophy, which

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remained in use until the late-nineteenth century. Moreover, what counted as science, and how different scientific disciplines were categorized, changed enormously during the early modern period. See Outram, “Science and Political Ideology,” 1012; Park and Daston, “Introduction,” 2–6. 3. Schuster, “Scientific Revolution,” 238–239. 4. See Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 14–15; Dear, Discipline and Experience, 26. 5. Aristotle, Topics, 1.1.100a. 6. Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 81–82; Dear, Discipline and Experience, 13–14, 21–25. 7. Dear, Discipline and Experience, 25–26; Molland, “Aristotelian Science.” 8. See Child, “Making and Knowing”; Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science. 9. Popkin, History of Skepticism, chaps. 1– 4. In contrast to these arguments, some Protestants and Catholics embraced the ancient skeptical doctrine of ataraxia, the rejection of all claims to knowledge as well as all political commitments. 10. Bacon, Great Instauration, 444– 445. 11. Hobbes, Elements, 2.5. 12. Voltaire, “Prejudices of the Senses,” in Philosophical Dictionary, 430. 13. Voltaire, “Common Sense,” in Philosophical Dictionary, 467. 14. Descartes, Hobbes, and Gassendi all claimed to have been the first to articulate this principle, but in fact it was Galileo in 1623 in The Assayer. See Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 274–278; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 286; Hobbes, Elements, 2.10; Locke, Essay, II.8. 15. Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 53, 93–94; Proctor, Value-Free Science? chap. 4; Latour, Politics of Nature, 47. 16. Locke, Essay, IV.20.17, IV.15.6. For Locke’s qualification of this position with regard to the knowledge used in everyday life, see Essay, IV.11.10. See also Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 5, 36–37. 17. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 164, see also chap. 14. 18. Luther, Selections, 385. Similarly, in the preface to his translation of the New Testament, Luther writes that it would be better for the text “to speak for itself.” A preface is needed only to undo the damage wrought by previous interpretations and “to free the ordinary man from his false though familiar notions, to lead him into the straight road” (Luther, Selections, 14). 19. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, chap. 14; Proctor, Value-Free Science? 54. 20. As Christopher Hill remarks in World Turned Upside Down, 43, “God had been democratized.” See also Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 78. 21. See Mulkay, “Galileo and the Embryo Debate.”

Notes to Pages 49–54

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22. Finocchiaro, “Science, Religion, and the Historiography of the Galileo Affair.” 23. Finocchiaro, “Introduction,” 7–8. 24. Finocchiaro, “Introduction,” 5–15. 25 Finocchiaro, “Science, Religion, and the Historiography of the Galileo Affair,” 122. 26. Galilei, “Letter to the Grand Duchess,” 96. 27. Biagioli, “Stress in the Book of Nature,” esp. 558–559. 28. Dear, Discipline and Experience, 85–92, 124–129, 144–150. 29. Dear, Discipline and Experience, 44. 30. Bono, Word of God, 193–198. 31. Galilei, “Letter to the Grand Duchess,” 101, see also 114. 32. Galilei, “Letter to the Grand Duchess,” 93. 33. Biagioli, “Stress in the Book of Nature,” 564–566, quotation on 564. 34. Galilei, The Assayer, in Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 238. 35. Bono, Word of God, 195. 36. Galilei, “Letter to the Grand Duchess,” 92. 37. Rowland, Galileo’s Mistake, 136–137, 145; Finocchiaro, “Science, Religion, and the Historiography of the Galileo Affair,” 119. 38. Rowland, Galileo’s Mistake, 146. 39. Galilei, “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” 93, emphasis added; see also 92, 106–107. 40. Biagioli, “Stress in the Book of Nature,” 572–576, quotation on 574. 41. Daston, “Baconian Facts,” 44. 42. See Bacon, Novum Organon, I.60. 43. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 23–24; Shapiro, Probability and Certainty; Hacking, Emergence of Probability, chaps. 3–5. 44. Bacon, Novum Organon, II.29; Dear, Discipline and Experience, 18–21. 45. Bacon, Novum Organon, I.2, 50. 46. Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 90–97. 47. Quoted in Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 87. 48. Quoted in Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 93. 49. Schaffer, “Augustan Realities,” 287. See also Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 8; Dear, Discipline and Experience, 25. 50. Dear, Discipline and Experience, 153–155. 51. Bacon, Novum Organon, I.8. See also Hobbes, De Cive, epistle dedicatory, as well as Locke’s attack on Scholastics as “the great mintmasters” of empty terms, Essay, III.9.

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Notes to Pages 54–59

52. Bacon, Novum Organon, I.73. 53. Cohen, “Introduction,” 68. 54. Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 135–140. 55. Jacob and Jacob, “Anglican Origins of Modern Science.” 56. Latour, Science in Action, 1–17. 57. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, 81–84; Shapin, “ ‘The Mind Is Its Own Place,’ ” esp. 195. 58. Popper, Open Society and Its Enemies, 2:217–218. 59. Ibid., 2:218. 60. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 25. See also Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, chap. 3. 61. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, 95–102. 62. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 77. See also Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, 137–140; Latour, Science in Action, 131–132. 63. Shapin, “House of Experiment,” 390. Dear identifies a similar emphasis on the role of multiple witnesses in constituting substantiating knowledge claims in the work of Marin Mersenne (Discipline and Experience, 133–134). 64. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 56–58. 65. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 79. 66. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 57–59; Outram, “Science and Political Ideology,” 1013; Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 94; Social History of Truth, chaps. 2–3; Dear, “Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature.” 67. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 112, 114, 310–311. See Bacon, Novum Organon, I.60. 68. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, 85; Shapin, Social History of Truth, chap. 8. 69. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, 88; Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? 12–26, 94–101. 70. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, 84. 71. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 27. 72. Broman, “Habermasian Public Sphere”; Zaret, “Religion, Science, and Printing”; Rupp, “New Science and the Public Sphere”; Stewart, Rise of Public Science. 73. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 27. 74. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 115. The ideological function of the bourgeois public sphere need not negate its value as an ideal. See 139n14. 75. See Radder, In and About the World, 39– 40. 76. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 60–69; Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, 108; Stewart, Rise of Public Science, xii.

Notes to Pages 60–66

273

77. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. 78. Collins, Changing Order; “Strong Confirmation of the Experimenters’ Regress”; Fuller, Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies, 55–56. 79. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 59. 80. Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, 82. 81. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, 145; Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 19; Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, 82; Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 82. Boyle, “Proëmial Essay,” quoted in Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 68. 83. Boyle, “Proëmial Essay,” quoted in Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 67. 84. Stewart, Rise of Public Science, 3–10. 85. Proctor, Value-Free Science? 33–34. 86. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 112–115, 320–324; Heyd, “Reaction to Enthusiasm.” 87. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump, 73–74. 88. Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 117. 89. Jacob, “Newtonianism,” 1. 90. Jacob, “Ideological Meanings of Western Science,” 346. 91. Jacob and Jacob, “Anglican Origins of Modern Science,” 265. 92. Jacob, “Ideological Meanings of Western Science,” 339. In this essay (see 333, 337, 352), a shortened version of which appears in the polemical science studies volume edited by Koertge, A House Built on Sand, Jacob mistakenly associates Bruno Latour’s reading of seventeenth-century science with an unspecified “postmodernist cause” and wrongly assumes he is “attacking ‘modernity.’ ” Jacob also ignores Latour’s criticism of the notion that “knowledge equals power” and his rejection of Shapin and Schaffer’s claim that “Hobbes was right.” 93. See Latour, Politics of Nature, 70; Pandora’s Hope, 132; Science in Action, 78.

3

Consent and Competence in Representative Government

1. For an example, see the equation of democracy with voting in Salomon, “Science, Technology and Democracy,” 33. At the end of the article Salomon argues for “citizen control” over policy decisions through consensus conferences and referenda, thus expanding the conception of democracy but continuing to frame the issue in terms of elite versus popular control. Representation depends on combining them. 2. Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, 12.

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Notes to Pages 67–72

3. Locke, Two Treatises, II.§14, see also §95. 4. Manin, Principles, 87–93; Vieira and Runciman, Representation, 10–19. 5. Ibid., 91; Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 73–74. 6. Manin, Principles, 79. 7. Locke, Two Treatises, §119. 8. Ibid., §119, §122; Vieira and Runciman, Representation, 31–32. 9. Pitkin, “Obligation and Consent,” 995–996. 10. Ibid., 999. 11. Pole, Political Representation in England, 23–24. 12. Wood, “Locke against Democracy,” 675–676. 13. Ibid., 674. 14. Quoted in Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 176. 15. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 180. 16. Ibid., 187; Manin, Principles, 184–185, 191; Held, Models of Democracy, 108. 17. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, chap. 2. 18. In French the question reads moeurs, usually translated as “morals,” which does not entirely capture the idea of “mores” or “manners” that the French word moeurs conveys. Rousseau, First Discourse, 66n7. For a summary of the circumstances surrounding Rousseau’s First Discourse, see Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 19ff. 19. Rousseau, First Discourse, 39. 20. Ibid., 43. 21. Ibid., 48. This point is emphasized in Campbell and Scott, “Rousseau’s Politic Argument.” 22. Rousseau, First Discourse, 49. 23. Ibid., 50. 24. Ibid., 49. 25. Rousseau, “Final Reply,” 125. 26. Ibid., 117, 118. Rousseau here anticipates his later critique in his Discourse on Inequality and Emile regarding the individualizing effects of reason. Science and philosophy destroy local bonds of community. “A philosopher loves the Tartars so he can be spared having to love his neighbors” (Rousseau, Emile, 39). 27. Rousseau, First Discourse, 36; “Observations,” 48. 28. Rousseau, “Final Reply,” 126. 29. Gross, “Unknown in Process.” 30. Rousseau, “Observations,” 37, 38; Emile, 182.

Notes to Pages 72–76

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31. Rousseau, First Discourse, 60, 49. 32. Ibid., 62–63. 33. Ibid., 63–64. For a somewhat different reading of these passages, see Gourevitch, “Rousseau on the Arts and Sciences,” 745–746. 34. Rousseau, First Discourse, 62. 35. Rousseau, “Observations,” 41. See also Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 24–25. 36. Rousseau, First Discourse, 47. 37. Rousseau, Second Discourse, 133. 38. Rousseau, First Discourse, 64. 39. Ibid., 37–38. See also Rousseau, “Observations,” 42, 38; Rousseau, Emile, 182. 40. Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 21. 41. Rousseau, Social Contract, IV.ii, 109. The unanimity ideal of the general will echoes the first “act by which a people becomes a people,” which Rousseau calls the “true basis of society.” This is the unanimous agreement on majority rule as the basis of obligation (Rousseau, Social Contract, I.v.52). The unanimous agreement to abide by majority rule is one of the ways that Rousseau confronts the fundamental paradox of reconciling sovereignty and liberty, that is, creating a civil association in which citizens are subject to the force of law and yet remain “as free as before” (I.vi.53). As he writes elsewhere, the social contract requires unanimous consent, because “civil association is the most voluntary act in the world” (IVii.110). On this point, see also Abizadeh, “Banishing the Particular.” 42. Rousseau, Social Contract, II.iii.61. 43. Participatory democrats have been inclined to argue, in contrast, that Rousseau merely wants to ban any deliberation that is not fully public, so as to prevent the formation of “partial societies,” which would make the general will more difficult to discern. The interpretation adopted here, however, is more consistent with Rousseau’s concern throughout his writings with the morally corrupting effects of both social customs and philosophical knowledge. Moreover, as Urbinati points out, Rousseau’s ban on deliberation echoes his rejection of representation: “In both cases prospective visions (imagination) would take the place of true/false inferences (cognition). This would infiltrate the realm of politics with deception or malicious fiction” (Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 80). In a similar vein, Abizadeh, in “Banishing the Particular,” argues that Rousseau grounds the general will on “the silent and introspective disclosure of the solitary citizen’s inner conscience” (556). 44. Waldron, Liberal Rights, 411– 412. 45. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 82; Dugan and Strong, “Music, Politics, Theater, and Representation,” 333–334.

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Notes to Pages 76–80

46. Rousseau, Social Contract, IV.ii.110–111. 47. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 89, 107–108. 48. “Rousseau grafted the norm of sovereignty onto a realist ontology that expelled all forms of symbolic construction and discursive agency from the decision-making process, all forms of as if reasoning. On this account, direct ratification entails direct correspondence between words and facts, so to speak, with no intervening of fictional reality.” Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 98. 49. Rousseau, Social Contract, III.15.102. 50. Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, 45– 46. 51. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 207; Pitkin, “Representation,” 149; Urbinati, “Representation as Advocacy,” 764, 780n28. 52. Rousseau Social Contract, III.xv.103. 53. Urbinati, “Continuity and Rupture,” 204; Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 76; Manin, Principles, 74–75. 54. Rousseau, Social Contract, III.5.86–87; Manin, Principles, 75–77. 55. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 72–74. Rousseau’s conception of sovereignty and his rejection of representation were both manifest in the French Revolution. In 1789, Rosanvallon argues, “The right to vote could no longer remain in a logic of representation. Therefore, it came to define a social status, that of the individual member of a people collectively taking the place of the king. French democracy, in other words, is not founded on a deconstruction of absolutism. On the contrary, it consists of its reappropriation” (Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, 137–138). In this respect, Rosanvallon goes on to argue, citizenship was redefined in terms of social membership rather than the exercise of political power. 56. McWilliams, “Science and Freedom.” 57. Morgan, Inventing the People, 143. 58. Quoted in Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 362. 59. Quoted in Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 363, emphasis added. 60. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 363–372. 61. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, Federalist, No. 63, 372; see also No. 10, 126; No. 52, 324. Cited hereafter as Federalist. 62. Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, in Jefferson, Writings, 1306. 63. According to Gibson, there is little evidence that the founders believed their natural rights principles would eventually lead to voting rights for women and blacks. The most one can say is that the independent logic of natural rights gradually contributed to reforms. Although the original U.S. Constitution left state restrictions on voting rights in place, it did not specify additional voting requirements for federal offices and was thus not a barrier to expanding voting rights. Gibson, Understanding the Founding, 56–57.

Notes to Pages 81–85

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64. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 191–198. 65. Federalist, No. 10, 125; No. 51, 320. 66. Gibson, “Impartial Representation,” 263–271, 296; Epstein, Political Theory of The Federalist, 93–99, 147–161; Williams, Voice, Trust, and Memory, 40– 41. 67. Federalist, No. 10, 126. 68. Federalist, No. 57, 343. 69. Federalist, No. 53, 328. 70. Federalist, No. 62, 367. 71. Federalist, No. 57, 344; see also No. 52, 323. 72. Gibson, “Impartial Representation,” 272n28. On assumptions about the intelligence of the electorate, see Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 489, 518; Morgan, Inventing the People, 286. 73. Federalist, No. 55, 337–339. 74. Federalist, No. 55, 339. 75. Federalist, No. 63, 371. 76. Gibson, “Impartial Representation,” 290n109. 77. Federalist, No. 63, 371. 78. Federalist, No. 63, 373. 79. Federalist, No. 10, 126. On Madison’s distinction between the terms republic and democracy see Sartori, Theory of Democracy Revisited, 278–288; Hanson, “Democracy,” 76–78; Dahl, On Democracy, 16–17; Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? 159–162. As Dahl points out, contrary to Sartori and most American government textbooks, Madison’s distinction had little historical basis beyond their different origins in Latin and Greek, respectively. Indeed, Madison refers not to democracy as such but to “pure democracy,” and even Madison did not consistently distinguish the terms himself. Although eighteenth-century thinkers generally frowned upon democracy, usage of the terms republic and democracy was often ambiguous and varied widely. Montesquieu, for instance, defined a democracy not in opposition to a republic, but as a kind of republic. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, I.2.1, II.9.1. 80. “Brutus,” Essay I, in Storing, The Anti-Federalist, 108–117. 81. “Brutus,” Essay III, in ibid., 124–125, emphasis added. 82. Cf. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, chap. 4. 83. Federalist, No. 58, 351. 84. Federalist, No. 35, 233–235. 85. Gibson, Understanding the Founding, 70. 86. See, for example, Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, II.2.2; Mill, Considerations, 279–284.

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Notes to Pages 85–89

87. Weber, Political Writings, 145–233, 342–352; Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 269–273, 284–296; Luhmann, Political Theory in the Welfare State; Sartori, Theory of Democracy Revisited, 278–292; Manin, Principles, chap. 4; Zolo, Democracy and Complexity, 74–88, 177–184. The general approach of realist authors is first to present a stylized account of Athenian, Rousseauean, or participatory democracy, then charge it with implausibly requiring that governments mirror the popular will, and then conclude that modern representative government requires a fundamental break with democracy. See also Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, 17–21. 88. If fifty people each speak for three minutes at a neighborhood assembly of 1,000 citizens lasting 2.5 hours, only 4 percent have spoken. It seems reasonable to conclude that there is a representative relationship of some kind between speakers and nonspeakers. Plotke, “Representation Is Democracy,” 26; Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 227. 89. Warren, “Deliberative Democracy and Authority,” 49. 90. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 205. 91. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 155–161. 92. Christiano, Rule of the Many, 169–178, quotation on 175. 93. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 156–157; Urbinati, Mill on Democracy, 47–54. Urbinati traces this distinction to Plato’s Protagoras, in which Protagorus argues that technical competence is not sufficient to found a polity, so deliberative competence must be introduced. In contrast to medicine and other technical arts, which can only be acquired by a few, all adults of ordinary intelligence are capable of téchne politiké. 94. See Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, esp. 308–311. Habermas later acknowledged the inadequacies of his early account of cognitive interests, but his later work did not offer a fundamentally different view of science. See Vogel, “New Science, New Nature,” 27–32, 40n37. 95. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, 87. 96. Ibid., 60. 97. Feenberg, Questioning Technology, xiv, see 155–157. See also Sclove, Democracy and Technology, 102. 98. Aristotle, Politics, III.11.1282a14. 99. Schattschneider, Semisovereign People, 134. 100. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 205–207; Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 67–70; Estlund, Democratic Authority, chap. 11. 101. Jasanoff, Fifth Branch. 102. Warren, “Deliberative Democracy and Authority,” 49, 55–56. 103. Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good, esp. 103–108; Schiebinger, The Minds Has No Sex? 104–112.

Notes to Pages 89–98

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104. Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics, chap. 12; Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy, 129–135, 142–145. 105. Nestle, Food Politics, 48– 49, 76–78. 106. Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, 66. 107. See Weingart, Stunde der Wahrheit, 159. 108. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 224. 109. Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, chaps. 2–3. 110. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 57. 111. President Bush made the comment during a set of remarks at the Regional Airport in Mobile, Alabama on September 2, 2005.

4

Liberal Rationalism and Government Advisory Committees

1. This chapter revises and expands Brown, “Fairly Balanced.” Many thanks to Christine Fishkin for a helpful email exchange about this material. 2. 5 U.S.C. Appendix §§ 5(b)(2). 3. Nazzaro, Testimony, 1. 4. U.S. Congressional Research Service, FACA Source Book, 116. 5. H Rep 1017, 92nd Cong., 2nd Ses. (1972). 6. U.S. Congressional Research Service, FACA Source Book, 135. 7. Ibid., 141. 8. Ibid., 147. 9. Ibid., 12. 10. S 3529, Sec.5 (b)(2), April 25, 1972, quoted in FACA Source Book, 177. 11. S Rep 92–1098, quoted in FACA Source Book, 166. 12. S Rep No. 1098, 92nd Cong., 2nd, Ses. (1972). 13. Glitzenstein and Goldman, FACA at the Crossroads, 33. 14. National Anti-Hunger Coalition v. Executive Committee of the President’s Sector Survey on Cost Control, 557 F. Supp. 524, 530 (D.D.C. Feb. 24, 1983). 15. National Anti-Hunger Coalition, 711 F.2d 1071, 1074 (D.C. Cir. June 14, 1983), emphasis added. 16. Spielman, “Should Consensus Be ‘The Commission Method’ in the U.S.?” 350–352. 17. Public Citizen v. National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, 886 F.2d 419 (D.C. Cir. 1989). 18. Stark, “What Is a Balanced Committee?” 389–393. 19. Public Citizen v. National Advisory Committee, 427.

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20. Ibid., 429. 21. Public Citizen vs. Department of Health and Human Services, 795 Supp. 1212, 1222 (D.D.C. 1992); Fertilizer Institute v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, 938 F. Supp. 52, 54 (D.D.C. 1996). 22. Stark, “What Is a Balanced Committee?” 23. Jasanoff, Fifth Branch. 24. Stine, “Federal Advisory Committees.” 25. Ibid., 142– 43. 26. U.S. Office of Government Ethics, “Memorandum 82 × 22,” 2. 27. Ibid., 3. See also Price, Scientific Estate, 51. 28. U.S. Office of Government Ethics, “To Serve with Honor,” 4. 29. U.S. Office of Government Ethics, “Memorandum 82 × 22,” 15. 30. U.S. Office of Government Ethics, “Memorandum: Federal Advisory Committee Appointments,” 42. 31. Nazzaro, Testimony, 6. My thanks to Christine Fishkin for help in clarifying the GAO’s position on this issue. 32. U.S. Office of Government Ethics, “Memorandum 82 × 22,” 3, emphasis added. 33. Public Citizen had noted fifteen years before that administrative convenience led most agencies to “lump all of their advisers into one category or another,” regardless of the OGE guidelines. Glitzenstein and Goldman, FACA at the Crossroads, 11. 34. U.S. General Accounting Office, Federal Advisory Committees, 24. 35. Ibid., 102. 36. Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics, chap. 12. 37. Brooks, “Scientific Advisor,” 82. 38. U.S. General Accounting Office, Federal Advisory Committees, 132–133, 109. 39. Anderson, “Improving Scientific Advice to Government,” 36; Smith, The Advisers, 199. 40. Glitzenstein and Goldman, FACA at the Crossroads, 6. 41. Ibid., 31. 42. U.S. Office of Government Ethics, “Memorandum: Federal Advisory Committee Appointments,” 9. 43. U.S. General Accounting Office, Federal Advisory Committees, 26–27. 44. Ibid., 39.

Notes to Pages 107–111

5

281

Thomas Hobbes and the Authorization of Science

1. Meyer, Political Nature, chap. 4, helpfully distinguishes between “dualist” interpretations that assume a dichotomy between Hobbes’s political theory and his natural philosophy, and “derivative” accounts that subordinate the former to the latter. Meyer finds in Hobbes a dialectical relationship between nature and politics. A parallel distinction between “unsystematic” and “systematic” interpretations is outlined in Finn, Thomas Hobbes, 10–15. 2. Taylor, Thomas Hobbes; Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes, ix–xi, 5; Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? 178–179; Warrender, Political Philosophy of Hobbes; Brandt, Hobbes’ Mechanical Conception of Nature. 3. Peters, Hobbes; Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics; Wolin, Politics and Vision, chap. 8. A different version of this approach, suggesting that Hobbes’s political philosophy is implied in but not deduced from his natural philosophy, appears in Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas, 1–5. 4. Jacobson, Pride and Solace, chap. 3; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 214–218. 5. Johnston, Rhetoric of Leviathan; Flathman, Thomas Hobbes, esp. 6, 32; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric; Pettit, Made with Words. In a footnote, Skinner remarks that Hobbes only “professes” to reject rhetoric in natural philosophy; Hobbes’s actual natural philosophical writings are highly rhetorical (Reason and Rhetoric, 354–355n123). Indeed, as Skinner later notes (361–362), some of Hobbes’s later views on rhetoric parallel the rhetoric of natural philosophy promulgated by the Royal Society. 6. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 341. Cf. Lynch, “Politics in Hobbes’ Mechanics.” Lynch argues that Hobbes’s “political agenda” of reducing threats to social stability “enables” both his political theory and his philosophy of natural science. 7. Shapin and Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 344, see also 15. 8. Latour, “Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern!”; We Have Never Been Modern, 25–26; Pels, Unhastening Science, 138–139; Zammito, Nice Derangement of Epistemes, 176–180. 9. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 36–37, 166; Yearley, Making Sense of Science, chap. 2. 10. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 26. 11. Ibid., 27. 12. Ibid., 31. 13. Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” 51. 14. Hacking, Social Construction of What? 80–84. 15. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics, 243, see also 236. 16. Peters, Hobbes, 57. 17. Wolin, “Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism,” 22.

282

Notes to Pages 111–114

18. Dear, “Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature,” 217. Similar assessments appear in Popkin, History of Skepticism, 206–207; Pels, Unhastening Science, 141. 19. A distinction between “private” and “public” nominalism in Hobbes is made in Sacksteder, “Some Ways of Doing Language Philosophy.” For the view that Hobbes holds a positivist version of nominalism, see Krook, “Hobbes’s Doctrine of Meaning and Truth.” For the similarities between Hobbes’s nominalism and ordinary language philosophy, see Ball, Reappraising Political Theory, chap. 4. 20. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 5, 34–35. 21. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4, 26; Hobbes, Elements, 5.7. 22. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4, 27. 23. Hobbes, De Corpore, 2.4; Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4, 24–25. 24. For a discussion of various arguments for and against the charge that Hobbes’s was inconsistent in his nominalism, see Finn, Thomas Hobbes, chap. 6. 25. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 46, 465. In his early works, Hobbes articulated a fideist position, according to which Christians could believe in spirits or angels, as long as such beliefs were taken on faith rather than asserted as propositions of knowledge. In Leviathan, in contrast, he rejects this position as incompatible with materialism. See Hobbes, Elements, 11.5; Hobbes, De Cive, 17.28; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 330. 26. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 92–109. 27. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 46, 463. 28. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 289, 300–301. 29. Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker. 30. Ibid., 6–7, 20–23. 31. Hobbes, De Corpore, 6.5; Hobbes, Elements, 2.10. 32. Hobbes, De Corpore, 25.3. See also Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 152; Johnston, Rhetoric of Leviathan, 47– 48. 33. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 29, 170. This is also pointed out in Pels, Unhastening Science, 141. 34. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 10, 63. 35. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 3, 23; chap. 4, 24–25; Hobbes, Elements, 9.18; Hobbes, De Homine, 10.3. 36. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4, 27; Hobbes, De Corpore, 6.11; Pettit, Made with Words, chap. 2; Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 30–31. 37. See Watkins, Hobbes’s System, 101–102, 143–160; McNeilly, Anatomy of Leviathan, 33; Krook, “Hobbes’s Doctrine of Meaning and Truth”; Whelan, “Language and Its Abuses,” 62; Flathman, Thomas Hobbes, 32, but see 38– 41. Finn (Thomas Hobbes, 133) argues that Hobbes is inconsistent in his terminology, because he sometimes uses “denoting” and “signifying” interchangeably.

Notes to Pages 114–116

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38. See Hungerland and Vick, 43– 45; Hanson, “Reconsidering Hobbes’s Conventionalism,” 645; Biletzki, Talking Wolves, 28–29, 43. According to Martinich, in contrast, “Hobbes’s view is a paradigmatic case of the private-language theory, the view that the meaning of a word or sentence is an entity possessed only by the speaker” (Martinich, Hobbes, 129). 39. Hobbes, De Cive, 18.4; Hobbes, Elements, 27.13; Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4, 30; chap. 31, 253. 40. Hobbes, De Cive, 18.4. Contrary to my reading, Finn (Thomas Hobbes, 136–137) takes Hobbes’s reference to will and consent to imply a view of truth as “arbitrary” choice. 41. Hobbes, De Homine, 10.2. 42. Hobbes, De Corpore, 6.13; Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 4, 30–31. See also McNeilly, Anatomy of Leviathan, 62; Boonin-Vail, Thomas Hobbes, 31–32; Hanson, “Reconsidering Hobbes’s Conventionalism,” 641; Sorell, Hobbes, 48–49; Flathman, Thomas Hobbes, 38– 40; Pettit, Made with Words, 40– 41; Johnston, Rhetoric of Leviathan, 52–53. 43. James, Pragmatism, 97. 44. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty. 45. Finn (Thomas Hobbes, 145–147) asserts a close connection between Hobbes’s “conventional view of truth” and his political absolutism. 46. Tuck, Hobbes, 6–11, 13–18; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 8–16, 299–303. 47. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 5, 36; Hobbes, De Corpore, 2.11. 48. For a different view, see Wolin, Politics and Vision, 256–257. 49. Hobbes, De Corpore, 6.14. 50. Hobbes, De Corpore, 2.12. For a comprehensive assessment of all the ways Hobbes thinks language can be misused, see Whelan, “Language and Its Abuses,” 61–67. 51. Hobbes, De Corpore, 25.1; Hobbes, Leviathan, intro., 11. 52. Skinner documents Hobbes’s indebtedness to the Ciceronian ideal of his humanist education, which eventually leads Hobbes to the view that civil science requires a union of reason and eloquence. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, chap. 9; Skinner, Visions of Politics, II:66–72. See also Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 152–54; Missner, “Skepticism and Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” esp. 419– 421. 53. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 5, 32. 54. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 5, 33; chap. 11, 73; chap. 42, 354; Hobbes, Elements, 10.8. 55. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 6, 37. 56. Arendt, Human Condition, 181–166; Latour, Science in Action, 104. 57. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 42, 354–355.

284

Notes to Pages 116–122

58. Collins and Evans, Rethinking Expertise, 2–3. 59. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 10, 63. On Hobbes’s view that science, even his own political science, has little chance of persuading noblemen, religious enthusiasts, or sovereign powers to change their ways, see Herzog, Happy Slaves, 95–96, 97–98. 60. Hartz, Liberal Tradition in America, 129. 61. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 5, 33. 62. Cf. Pettit, Made with Words, 115; Flathman, Thomas Hobbes, 144. Flathman considers the Hobbesian sovereign’s regulation of religious, political, and moral doctrine, sexual behavior, marriage, divorce, child-raising, and diet, but not natural science. In contrast, Popkin argues that Hobbes’s “bizarre and authoritarian theory of truth spills over into scientific, mathematical, and logical questions as long as there are disagreements and social consequences of views in these areas” (Popkin, History of Skepticism, 205). 63. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 11, 74; De Cive, 17.12. See also Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 153. Cf. Dear, “Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature,” 217–218, 224n47. 64. Hobbes, De Cive, 6.11; Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 18, 121–129; Flathman, Thomas Hobbes, 58–59. 65. Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation.” 66. Dear, “Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature,” 214. 67. Skinner, “Hobbes on Representation,” 156, 157. 68. Ibid., 164. 69. Ibid., 166. 70. Ibid., 172–173. See also Vieira and Runciman, Representation, 20–24. 71. Hobbes, Elements, 19.7; Hobbes, De Cive, 5.6–7. Radical critiques of Parliament, charging it with failing to represent the people, may have led Hobbes to be more willing to use the term representative in 1651 than before, because it had become less likely that he would be construed as endorsing Parliamentary sovereignty. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 328. 72. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 15, 107; chap. 18, 120. 73. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 17, 120; chap. 18, 121. 74. Hobbes, De Cive, 7.7. 75. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 6, 36; chap. 13, 87. 76. Fuller, Governance of Science, 135–136; Plato, Apology, 21e–22e. 77. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 13, 87; chap. 30, 233. 78. Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 197–199. 79. Pettit, Made with Words, 96–97. 80. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 21–22, 71–72, 235n25. As Urbinati notes, this view of representation received its most virulent formluation in Carl

Notes to Pages 122–125

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Schmitt, who drew on Hobbes to assert an organic unity of the Volk, personified by the Führer, above and against all paricular social interests that comprised parliamentary “government by discussion.” 81. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 14, 92. 82. A lack of substantive standards is emphasized by Pitkin, Concept of Representation, chap. 2. See also Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 234–235n22; Tuck, Hobbes, 70; Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, 117– 125. 83. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 17, 117–119; chap. 30, 231; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 320, 341–342. 84. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 30, 231; chap. 46, 461; Hobbes, De Cive, epistle dedicatory. 85. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 21, 151; chap. 30, 232; Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 158–159. 86. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 31, 253–254. 87. Hoekstra, “Lion in the House,” 217. 88. Hobbes, Elements, 27.7, 19.8; De Cive, 5.4; Leviathan, chap. 17, 120; chap. 18, 127; chap. 29, 228; chap. 29, 230. See also Pettit, Made with Words, 119– 120. 89. Hobbes, De Cive, 5.5, 7.1. 90. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 14, 91; chap. 21, 145. See Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty. 91. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 21, 147, 152. 92. Tuck, “Hobbes and Democracy,” 176–177, 183–184; Aristotle, Politics, 1292a5–20, 1296a1. 93. For a challenge to Tuck’s argument, see Hoekstra, “Lion in the House.” 94. Hobbes, Elements, 21.1; Hobbes, De Cive, 7.5; Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 18, 121, 123. See the clarification of this point in Hoekstra, “Lion in the House,” 208–209. 95. Hobbes, Elements, 21.5. 96. Hoekstra, “Lion in the House,” 195. 97. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 16, 111. 98. See Runciman, “What Kind of Person Is Hobbes’s State?” 269–270; Pluralism, 7; Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person.” Skinner (11–12) argues that Hobbes is best read as saying that not representatives (the sovereign) but the represented (the state) are “artificial persons.” However, in a more recent article (“Hobbes on Representation”), Skinner seems to accept Runciman’s use of terms. 99. Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State?” 271. Cf. Copp, “Hobbes on Artificial Persons,” 584n9. Copp reads Hobbes’s statement that inanimate things are represented by fiction to mean that such things are “not actually represented.”

286

Notes to Pages 125–130

100. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 18, 121. 101. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 16, 114. See Runciman, “What Kind of Person,” 272–273. 102. Leviathan, chap. 26, 184; dedication, 3. 103. Leviathan, chap. 16, 113–114; De Homine, 15.4. 104. This is why Skinner calls the state a “purely artificial person” to distinguish the state from an impure artificial person who may also act independently as a natural person (Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person,” 22). But see previous note on Runciman’s objection to calling the state, rather than the sovereign that represents it, an artificial person. 105. Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person,” 22; Runciman, “What Kind of Person,” 273. 106. Runciman, Pluralism, 9–10. 107. Runciman, “What Kind of Person,” 273; Runciman, Pluralism, 31. 108. Dumouchel, “Persona,” 62. 109. Ibid., 62–64. 110. Ibid., 58–59. 111. Trainor, “Hobbes, Skinner and the Person of the State.” 112. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, chap. 4. 113. Thompson, “Democratic Theory and Global Society,” 121–122. 114. Goodin, “Enfranchising the Earth,” 839; O’Neill, “Representing People,” 494– 495; Eckersley, Green State, 121. Eckersley first seems to discount the role of scientists in representing nature, but she goes on to advocate assessing nature’s interests on the basis of both lay and expert knowledge, the latter in the form of environmental impact assessments. On the problematic role of science in representing nature, see also O’Neill, “Representing People,” 496– 497. 115. Saward, “Representation.” See also Saward, “Authorisation and Authenticity.” 116. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, 149. 117. Dumouchel, “Persona,” 58. 118. See Runciman, Pluralism, 8–9; Skinner, “Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person,” 16–17; Skinner, “Hobbes on Persons, Authors and Representatives,” 158–159; Dumouchel, “Persona,” 57–58. 119. Vieira and Runciman, Representation, 96–103. 120. Hobbes’s antipathy toward divided sovereignty leads him to insist that the sovereign is “the absolute Representative of all the subjects.” The only legally sanctioned associations are either “political bodies,” which are authorized by the sovereign power, or private bodies, which are not expressly authorized but merely “allowed by the Common-wealth.” If scientists join together in a corporate identity, such as a university or scientific association, they would presumably

Notes to Pages 131–138

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have to be either authorized or allowed by the sovereign. Scientists engaged in loosely organized cooperation, in contrast, without a person or collective body to serve as “Representative of the whole number,” would presumably fall into Hobbes’s category of irregular systems. In this case their liberty, like that of all other subjects, would extend wherever the law is silent (Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 22, 155–156; Hobbes, De Cive, 5.10). 121. Hobbes, De Corpore, 25.1; Hobbes, Leviathan, intro, 9. 122. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 13, 89. 123. Runciman, “What Kind of Person,” 271.

6

John Dewey and the Reconstruction of Representation

1. Gouinlock, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value, xi, quoted in Westbrook, John Dewey, 538. See also Siegfried, Pragmatism and Feminism, 180–182; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 503–504. 2. Bernstein, “Resurgence of Pragmatism.” 3. Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 2, see also 1, 37–39, 60–62. 4. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, 165. 5. On Dewey’s realism, as compared to Rorty and the “linguistic turn” of analytic philosophy, see Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 63. Among the many comparisons of Dewey and Rorty, see Westbrook, John Dewey, 539–542; Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory, esp. 140–144. 6. James, Pragmatism. In Peirce’s well-known formulation, “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real” (“How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 139). On their differences, see Sleeper, Necessity of Pragmatism, chap. 3; Westbrook, John Dewey, 131–132; Lustig, Corporate Liberalism, 162–164. 7. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 175–176; Liberalism and Social Action, 51–52. On this point, see also Westbrook, John Dewey, 436– 437; Diggins, Promise of Pragmatism, 190–204. 8. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 42–55; Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols”; Lustig, Corporate Liberalism, 164–175. 9. James, Pragmatism, 31, 92. 10. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 157. 11. See Habermas, “Three Normative Models of Democracy.” For MacGilvray, in contrast, Dewey’s thought remains deeply indebted to Hegel and thereby to a communitarian view of society (Reconstructing Public Reason, chap. 5). 12. For an overview of Dewey’s response to democratic realism, see Westbrook, John Dewey, 280–286. 13. Lippmann, Phantom Public, 4–5. 14. Ibid., 3– 4.

288

Notes to Pages 138–145

15. Ibid., 10–11. See also Dewey’s endorsement of Lippmann’s concerns in Public and Its Problems, 158. 16. Dewey, “Practical Democracy,” 217. See also Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 144, and Dewey’s acknowledgment of his “indebtedness” to Lippmann in Public and Its Problems, 116n. 17. Dewey, “Practical Democracy,” 218. 18. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 131, 142. 19. Ibid., 110, 125. See also Ezrahi, “Dewey’s Critique of Democratic Visual Culture,” esp. 321. 20. Beck, Ecological Enlightenment, 15. 21. Arendt, Human Condition, 257–325. 22. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 3, 6. 23. Ibid., 9, 144–145. 24. Ibid., 12. 25. Dewey, “Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” 15. 26. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 15–16, see 64, 126. 27. Ibid., 16, 18, emphasis added. 28. Ibid., 77. 29. Ibid., 67. 30. Ibid., 76. For an attempt to develop a non-normative concept of political representation, see Rehfeld, “Towards a General Theory of Political Representation.” 31. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 76, 93. 32. Ibid., 13. 33. Ibid., 66–67n7, 75. 34. Ibid., 19, 27–28, 35. 35. Stephan, “Citizens as Representatives”; Warren, “Citizen Representatives.” 36. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 29–30, 64. 37. Ibid., 64–65. 38. Ibid., 46. 39. Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 28, 37. See also Barber, “Foundationalism and Democracy,” esp. 356; MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason, 124–125. 40. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 26–27, 39. 41. Ibid., 28, 74, 33, 48–51. 42. Ibid., 72–73. 43. Ibid., 51–52, 63. 44. Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 105, 221–122. 45. Ibid., 135, 139.

Notes to Pages 145–150

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46. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 30, 44. 47. Ibid., 31–32, 169–70. 48. Ibid., 53. 49. Ibid., 54. 50. Ibid., 207. 51. See Chambers, “Critical Theory of Civil Society.” 52. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 69, 146. 53. Dewey to Hu Shih, 27 October 1939, Ratner/Dewey Papers, quoted in Walsh, “Textual Commentary,” 430. 54. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 143. 55. Ibid., 147. As Dewey states elsewhere, “The real difficulty is that the individual is regarded as something given, as something already there.” Social institutions are not made to merely cater to individuals. “They are means of creating individuals” (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 190–191). 56. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 149. 57. Ibid., 147. A robber band, for instance, may allow individuals a certain degree of fulfillment, but because it cannot interact flexibly with other groups, it inevitably restricts the potentialities of its members. Dewey thus defines community as “conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it” (ibid., 149). 58. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 93; Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 196–198. 59. Bohman, “Democracy as Inquiry,” 591. 60. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 152, 153. 61. This point is emphasized by Honneth, “Democracy as Reflexive Cooperation.” 62. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 16. 63. Marres, “Issues Deserve More Credit”; Latour and Weibel, Making Things Public. 64. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 176. 65. Dewey, Freedom and Culture, 168. 66. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 505, 518. 67. Dewey, Freedom and Culture, 171 68. This criticism is discussed in the largely sympathetic account of Bohman, “Democracy as Inquiry,” 594–595. 69. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 205–208. 70. Ibid., 208–210, 181.

290

Notes to Pages 150–155

71. Ibid., 183–184. 72. Dewey, Freedom and Culture, 169. 73. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 211. 74. McMullin, “Development of Philosophy of Science.” Thanks to Justin Biddle for helpful comments on Dewey’s relationship to logical positivism. 75. Dewey, Logic, 511; Dewey, Theory of Valuation, 241. 76. Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 160, see also 138–141; Dewey, Logic, 489. 77. Dewey, Logic, 389. 78. Dewey, How We Think, 232, see also chaps. 6, 10–11. See also Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 163, 174–176, 202–203. 79. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 175–176. 80. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 11. On this point, see Nagel, “Dewey’s Theory of Natural Science,” 234–238; Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 131. 81. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 342. 82. Ibid., 343. 83. Ibid., 345. 84. Dewey, Logic, 109; Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 80–84. 85. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 164. On the role of purpose in inquiry, see also Dewey, Experience and Nature, 30–34. 86. Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy, 81, 86. Although Kitcher seems to agree with Dewey on this point, the Rawlsian approach to the politics of science policy that Kitcher adopts in this book shares little with Deweyan pragmatism; see Brown, “Political Philosophy of Science Policy.” 87. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 177; Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 83. 88. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 204–205. 89. Manicas, “Pragmatic Philosophy of Science.” 90. Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 218–219. 91. Dewey, “Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” 45. 92. Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 67. 93. Ibid., 171; Dewey, Experience and Nature, 181. 94. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 189; Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 146. 95. Diggins, Promise of Pragmatism, 224. 96. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 121, emphasis added. 97. Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 213. 98. Ibid., 152. See also Dewey, Democracy and Education, chap. 16; Dewey, Experience and Nature, 308.

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99. Wynne, “May the Sheep Safely Graze?” 60. 100. Haraway, “Cyborg Manifesto,” 181. 101. Dewey, “Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” 39, 35–36. On Dewey’s constructivism and the charge of idealism, see Hickman, Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology, 48–50. 102. Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 157. See also James, Pragmatism, 30. 103. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 146. 104. Dewey, “Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” 42. 105. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 319. 106. Dewey, “Philosophy and Democracy,” 48– 49, emphasis added. For a discussion of this point, see Sleeper, Necessity of Pragmatism, 113–116. 107. Dewey, “Experience, Knowledge, and Value,” 542. Dewey goes on to suggest the substitution of the terms “subjective” and “objective” with “personal” and “impersonal” (543). See also Thayer, “Objects of Knowledge,” 191–192; Sleeper, Necessity of Pragmatism, 113–116, 120–127. 108. Dewey, Logic, 122; Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 17–19; Dewey, Experience and Nature, 125. 109. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”; Latour, Reassembling the Social, 114–120. 110. Russell, “Dewey’s New Logic,” 154. 111. Dewey, “Experience, Knowledge, and Value,” 544–549; Dewey, “Brief Studies in Realism,” 105–107, 117–122. Dewey further explains that “it is not just the thing as perceived, but the thing as and when it is placed in an extensive ideational or theoretical context within which it exercises a special office that constitutes a distinctively physical scientific object” (“Experience, Knowledge, and Value,” 538). Elsewhere, Dewey asserts that using instruments to change the human capacity for observation is “the same thing in principle of logical procedure” as changes introduced in objects themselves. In either case, “The progress of inquiry is identical with advance in the invention and construction of physical instrumentalities for producing, registering and measuring changes” (Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 68). 112. On epistemological individualism, see Longino, Science as Social Knowledge, 66–67, 74–75, 220–221. 113. Dewey, Logic, 482, 496. 114. Ibid., 482– 483. Similar points are made in Longino, Science as Social Knowledge, 95–97. 115. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 170. 116. Dewey, Logic, 26–28. 117. Ibid., 484. See also Nowotny et al., Re-Thinking Science, chap. 11. 118. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 174. 119. Dewey, Logic, 483.

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Notes to Pages 160–167

120. See Ryan, John Dewey, 232. 121. Bohman, “Democracy as Inquiry,” 598.

7

Bruno Latour and the Symmetries of Science and Politics

1. Latour, Science in Action, 258; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 94–103. 2. Among many others, see Zammito, Nice Derangement of Epistemes, chap. 7; Sismondo, Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, chap. 7; Yearley, Making Sense of Science, chap. 4. 3. Latour, Science in Action, 70–79; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 27– 29; Latour, Politics of Nature, 55, passim. See also Disch, “Representation as ‘Spokespersonship.’ ” 4. Latour, Politics of Nature, 70. 5. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 5–8, 175–179; Barnes, Bloor, and Henry, Scientific Knowledge. 6. For the debate between actor-network theorists and advocates of the strong program, see Bloor, “Anti-Latour”; Latour, “For David Bloor . . . and Beyond”; Callon and Latour, “Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School!”; Seguin, “Bloor, Latour, and the Field.” Seguin rightly argues that much of the debate between these approaches rests on their different aims: where the strong program focuses on the role of social factors in science, Latour is also concerned with broader questions about the role of science in society. 7. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 23, but see 256–258. 8. Latour, Politics of Nature, 17, 83, 221–228. 9. Warren, “What Is Political?” 209; Warren, “What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today?” 10. Laudan, “Demise of the Demarcation Problem.” 11. Fuller, Social Epistemology, chap. 7. 12. Power is one of the more commonly suggested demarcation criteria between science and politics. It is true that peer review, hiring, and promotion committees are not authorized to put anyone in jail, but they exercise economic power in their capacity to deprive scientists of funding, and they exercise cultural power in their control over professional and societal recognition. 13. Latour, Science in Action, 258. For a discussion of some of the problems raised by an overreliance on actors’ accounts, see Wyatt, “Technological Determinism Is Dead,” 169–171. 14. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 87; Latour, Reassembling the Social, 74–78. 15. Shapin, “Here and Everywhere,” 302. 16. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 182. 17. For the charge that Latour anthropomorphizes nature, see Schaffer, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour.” For a defense, see Callon and Latour,

Notes to Pages 167–172

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“Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School!,” 356. For a discussion of this issue more sympathetic to Latour, see Fuller, New Frontiers, 97–98, 102– 103. As Fuller points out, Latour does not attribute the standard liberal conception of agency to things but replaces it with a “thin” conception of agency. Moreover, the effect of rejecting the familiar categorical distinction between humans and nonhumans is not so much to assert the possibility of communication between them as to illuminate the barriers to communication among humans. Nonetheless, Fuller sides with classical sociologists, who believed that “what distinguishes human beings is the ability to organize resistance to—to establish collective identities in spite of—such natural forces.” Barron, “Strong Distinction,” 83. 18. Latour, Pasteurization of France. 19. Hacking, “Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” 59; Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 182–183; Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory.” 20. On the relationship between Foucault’s notion of power and natural scientific practice, see Rouse, Knowledge and Power, chap. 7. 21. Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 175–177; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10–11, 39– 43. 22. Latour, Politics of Nature, 64–70; Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 132; Latour, Science in Action, 78. 23. Latour, Politics of Nature, 68. A similar point is made in Pels, Intellectual as Stranger, 3. 24. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 214–215. 25. Latour, Politics of Nature, 71. 26. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 7, see also 12–13. 27. Ibid., 217. 28. Latour, Politics of Nature, 51. 29. Ibid. 30. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 261. 31. Latour, Politics of Nature, 35. 32. “Yes, there is indeed an objective external reality, but this particular externality is not definitive: it simply indicates that new nonhumans, entities that have never before been included in the work of the collective, find themselves mobilized, recruited, socialized, domesticated” (Latour, Politics of Nature, 38). 33. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. 34. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 214. For a discussion of this point, see Harris, “Ordering of Things,” 170. 35. White, Sustaining Affirmation; Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization; Bennett, Enchantment of Modern Life; Bennett, “In Parliament with Things.” 36. Latour, Science in Action, 72. 37. Ibid., 73.

294

Notes to Pages 172–177

38. Callon and Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan,” 279. 39. Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses?” The discussion here draws on Brown, “Can Technologies Represent.” 40. Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses?” 229. 41. Ibid., 231. 42. Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 103. 43. Oudshoorn and Pinch, How Users Matter. 44. Winner, Autonomous Technology, 104–105. 45. Latour, Science in Action, chap. 6; Latour, “Politics of Explanation,” 163. For a discussion, see Fuller, New Frontiers, 99–101. 46. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 73. See also Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 104–105, 232. As Steve Woolgar puts it, “Once the object is construed as pre-given, fixed, and antecedent, the involvement of the agent of representation appears merely peripheral and transitory. It is as if observers merely stumble upon a pre-existing scene” (Science, 68–69). 47. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 97. 48. Kuhn, Structure, esp. 10, 46–47; Hacking, Representing and Intervening, chap. 13. 49. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 70–71; Latour, Science in Action, chap. 6. See also Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy, chap. 5. 50. Latour, Politics of Nature, 187. 51. Ibid., 89. 52. Ibid., 149. 53. Ibid., 8, 41. 54. Wainwright, “Politics of Nature.” 55. Latour, Politics of Nature, 168, 202. Latour thus argues that the old fact/ value distinction concealed an important difference within each of the fact/value “packets”: the notion of facts included both the perplexities associated with newly detected nonhumans and the certainties provided by established scientific knowledge; the notion of values included both the consultation required to fulfill ideals of inclusion and equality and the exclusions required to respect the established values of particular communities. 56. Latour, Politics of Nature, 41. 57. Ibid., 64. 58. Ibid., 73. 59. Ibid., 67; Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” 29–30. 60. Latour, Politics of Nature, 68. 61. Ibid., 70. 62. Ibid., 148.

Notes to Pages 178–181

295

63. Ibid., 149. 64. Fuller makes a similar point about Latour’s view of representation in Fuller, “Talking Metaphysical Turkey,” 177–179; Fuller, New Frontiers, 98– 101. 65. Latour, “What If We Talked Politics,” 156. 66. Ibid., 152. 67. Ibid., 150. 68. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 20–25. A similar point is made in de Vries, “What Is Political in Sub-Politics?” 804. 69. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 131–133. 70. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 20. See also Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 126. 71. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 130–131. Disch, “Responsiveness in Reverse.” 72. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 23. See also Lynch and Woolgar, Representation in Scientific Practice, 11. 73. “ANT is not, I repeat is not, the establishment of some absurd ‘symmetry between humans and non-humans.’ To be symmetric, for us, simply means not to impose a priori some spurious asymmetry among human intentional action and a material world of causal relations” (Latour, Reassembling the Social, 76). “It is not a question of asserting that there is no perceptible difference. The point is methodological.” Callon and Latour, “Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bath School!,” 356. In this respect, Kerry Whiteside seems to be mistaken when he writes that for Latour “the distinction between subjective agents and natural objects breaks down” (Whiteside, Divided Natures, 128). Whiteside later rightly notes that Latour’s concept of a parliament of things is “best understood . . . not as a particular legislative chamber but as a multiplication of sites throughout a society where citizens can challenge every stage in the process by which ‘hybrids’ are created and disseminated” (285–286). See also Disch, “Representation as ‘Spokespersonship,’ ” 92. 74. Latour, “Anthropology of the Iconoclastic Gesture.” 75. Latour, “What If We Talked Politics,” 155–156; Latour, Reassembling the Social, 8. 76. Latour, “What If We Talked Politics,” 159. “I want this common world to be achieved after the new Constitution has been drafted, not before” (Latour, Politics of Nature, 60). 77. Latour, “What If We Talked Politics,” 159. 78. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 20; Latour, “From the World of Science.” 79. Latour, Politics of Nature, 93. The impossibility of starting from scratch has been noted by several commentators, including Latour himself; see Zammito, Nice Derangement of Epistemes, 200–202.

296

Notes to Pages 182–188

80. Kleinman, Impure Cultures, 59–60. See also Pels, Unhastening, 141; Whiteside, Divided Natures, 139, and for a similar point in a different context, Bohman, Public Deliberation, 163. 81. Fuller, Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies, 38–39, 64–67. 82. Latour, Science in Action, 100. See also Callon and Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan,” 280. 83. Shapin, “Here and Everywhere,” 308. 84. Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” 31–34. 85. Ibid., 35. 86. Ibid., 35. 87. Ibid., 37. 88. See Chambers, “Democracy, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Legitimacy.”

8

How Science Becomes Political

1. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 332; Gomart and Hajer, “Is That Politics?”; Jasanoff, “Ordering Knowledge”; Bijker, “Why and How Technology Matters”; Latour, “Turning around Politics.” 2. Skinner, Visions of Politics, I:58; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 12–17. 3. Connolly, Terms of Political Discourse, chap. 1. 4. For Pierre Bourdieu, for example, “epistemological conflicts are always, inseparably, political conflicts” (“The Specificity of the Scientific Field,” 32). In a more ambivalent treatment, Wiebe Bijker first writes, “it only makes sense . . . to discuss the relation between technology and politics in a contextual way, related to specific circumstances. General statements, such as ‘all technology is political’ or ‘politics is technological’ may be true, but not very helpful.” But then he notes that despite the “contingent and variable” boundaries between technology and politics, “we have to start somewhere,” and he proceeds to offer more general reflections under the headings “What is Technology?” and “What is Politics?” See Bijker, “Why and How Technology Matters,” 682. 5. Latour, “Turning around Politics,” 819. 6. Warren, “What Should We Expect from More Democracy?”; Warren, “What Is Political?”; Shapiro, Democracy’s Place, 113–116. 7. Latour, “Turning around Politics,” 816. 8. Ibid., 818. Cf. Latour, Politics of Nature, 53. 9. Warren, “What Is Political?” 217–218. 10. Ibid., 214. 11. Ibid., 223; Shapiro, Democracy’s Place, 116.

Notes to Pages 189–198

297

12. Warren, “What Is Political?” 209–210. 13. Warren, “What Is Political?” 216, 221. 14. See Ball, Reappraising Political Theory, 23–24. 15. Warren, “What Is Political?” 224–225; Schattschneider, Semisovereign People, 7–18. 16. See Guston, “On Consensus and Voting in Science.” 17. Warren, “What Should We Expect from More Democracy?” 18. Ibid., 243–244. 19. Polanyi, “Republic of Science.” 20. Warren, “What Is Political?” 225. 21. Gieryn, “Boundaries of Science,” 405– 406. Gieryn goes on to explain that he means “empty” merely in the sense of not entirely determined by the past, and he rightly notes that his argument “could easily be exaggerated into a silly conclusion that every episode of boundary-work occurs de novo.” Gieryn’s use here of the word empty is misleading at best. 22. Pels, Unhastening Science, 147. 23. Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory,” 160–161, 165; Latour, Science in Action, chap. 6; Latour, Pasteurization of France, 72–75, 224–225. 24. Pels, Unhastening Science, 152. 25. Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 139. 26. Ibid. 27. Latour, Politics of Nature, 126. 28. Porter, Trust in Numbers, chaps. 5–7; Scott, Seeing Like a State; Warren, “Democracy and the State.” 29. I discuss this issue in Brown, “Civic Shaping of Technology.” 30. Warren, “What Should We Expect from More Democracy?” 243–246. 31. Schmitt, Concept, 26–27, 30–32; Wolin, Politics and Vision, 4–11. See also Barry, Political Machines, 7, 194, 207. Wolin’s more recent writings, in contrast, characterize “the political” as an episodic and ephemeral experience, thus departing from his early association of the political with established institutions that facilitate collective action. See Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 31; Hauptman, “A Local History of ‘The Political.’ ” 32. Brown, “At the Edge,” 117. 33. Ibid. She goes on to explain that political theory has a “constitutive orientation to the problem of how collectivities are conceived and ordered in the contemporary world, a world that poses as a most urgent and open question what kinds of collectivities currently or will next order and contain humanity” (ibid., 118). 34. Latour, Politics of Nature, chap. 3. 35. See Brown and Guston, “Science, Democracy, and the Right to Research.”

298

Notes to Pages 198–205

36. “There is hereby established a right to conduct stem cell research which includes research involving adult stem cells, cord blood stem cells, pluripotent stem cells, and/or progenitor cells” (California Constitution, Art. 35, sec. 5). http:// www.leginfo.ca.gov/.const/.article_35. 37. Waldron, Liberal Rights, 72–73, 85. 38. Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy, chap. 8. 39. Mill, On Liberty, 19; Waldron, Liberal Rights, 404– 405; Barber, Passion for Democracy, 60–92.

9

Elements of Democratic Representation

1. Ezrahi, Descent of Icarus, 274, 283–290. 2. Plotke, “Representation Is Democracy,” 24; Bartlett, “ ‘Starve the Beast.’ ” 3. Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition, 18–23, 248–252; Sokal and Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense, chap. 12. 4. Marshall, “Post-Modern President,” 26. 5. See Merelman, “Technological Cultures,” 190. 6. See, for example, Barber, Conquest of Politics, esp. chap. 8; Mouffe, Return of the Political, chap. 1; Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization. 7. Polanyi, “Republic of Science.” 8. Fuller, Governance of Science, 7, 13. 9. Ibid., 135, 146–151. 10. Radder, “Review of The Governance of Science,” 523. 11. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 40–43, 146n13; Rosenblum, Membership and Morals, 56. 12. Kohn, “Panacea or Privilege?” 291; Shapiro, Democratic Justice, 25. 13. Warren, Democracy and Association, 60–93, 142–205. 14. Ibid., 120, 169–170. 15. For a similar argument about deliberation, see Hardin, “Deliberation.” 16. Tullis, “Deliberation between Institutions,” 209. 17. Leib, Deliberative Democracy in America, 45. 18. See Brown, Lentsch, and Weingart, “Representation, Expertise, and the German Parliament”; Brown, Lentsch, and Weingart, Politikberatung und Parlament. 19. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 8–9, 10–11, see also 254n14, 225n20; Pitkin, “Representation and Democracy,” 336. 20. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 222. 21. In this respect, Michael Saward (“Representative Claim,” 300–301) seems to be mistaken in arguing that Pitkin conceived representation as a unidirectional

Notes to Pages 205–210

299

matter of representatives acting on behalf of static and pregiven constituent interests. Although Pitkin’s emphasis on the etymology of “re-presentation” does suggest an original that exists prior to representation, she also notes that constituent identities must be continually recreated as part of the work of representation, and she argues that representation requires a condition of “responsiveness,” which in turn depends in part on educating constituents and thus transforming them. See Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 218, 232–233; Disch, “Responsiveness in Reverse.” 22. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 126–127; Urbinati, “Politics as Deferred Presence”; Urbinati, Representative Democracy. For a recent account that focuses not on institutions or relationships but on the ethics of individual representatives, while sharing many of the concerns explored here, see Dovi, Good Representative. 23. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 133. In a similar vein, Parkinson argues for attending to “the contribution that many different micro moments can make to a deliberative system” (Deliberating in the Real World, 19, and chap. 4). 24. Flathman, Practice of Political Authority. 25. Connolly, “Modern Authority and Ambiguity”; Arendt, “What Is Authority?” 26. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, chaps. 2–3. 27. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 232; see also 224, 229. I owe this point to Elster, “Market and the Forum,” 20–25. On justifications for expanding the suffrage, see also Keyssar, Right to Vote. 28. Walzer, “Deliberation, and What Else?” 64. 29. Shklar, American Citizenship, 25–62. 30. Warren, “What Should We Expect from More Democracy?” 252. 31. Mill, On Liberty, 75. Mill himself did not consistently interpret his principle this way, arguing that those of superior competence should have more votes than other citizens. 32. Barber Strong Democracy, 166–167. 33. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 21, emphasis added. Cf. Mansbridge, “ ‘Deliberative Democracy,’ ” 252–253. 34. See Guston, “Evaluating the First U.S. Consensus Conference”; Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 363. 35. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 475. See also Rawls, Political Liberalism, 240–243. 36. See Manin, Principles, 190; Thompson, “Democracy in Time.” 37. Dryzek makes an analogous point about the need to include poor people in deliberative institutions even though poverty may make them less capable than those with more resources (Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, 192). 38. Bogner and Menz, “Bioethical Controversies.” 39. Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, 49.

300

Notes to Pages 211–216

40. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 129. 41. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 27, 31, 197–198. As Bonnie Honig argues, in the context of the paradoxes posed by Rousseau’s figure of the lawgiver, any and every claim to epistemic authority may, and probably will, be contested by the people or some group of people. “There is no getting away from the need in a democracy for the people to decide” (Honig, “Between Decision and Deliberation,” 7). 42. Richardson, Democratic Autonomy, chap. 8. 43. See Haskell, Authority of Experts; Selinger and Crease, Philosophy of Expertise; Thorpe, “Disciplining Experts.” 44. Jasanoff, Fifth Branch, chap. 11; Jasanoff, “Science, Politics, and the Renegotiation of Expertise at EPA.” 45. Jasanoff, Designs on Nature, chap. 10. 46. Cf. Arendt’s classic account of authority as distinct from both coercion and persuasion (“What Is Authority?” 93). 47. Guston, “On Consensus and Voting in Science.” 48. Brown, “Citizen Panels”; Brown, Lentsch, and Weingart, “Representation, Expertise, and the German Parliament”; Brown, Lentsch, and Weingart, Politikberatung und Parlament. 49. Manin, Principles, chap. 2. 50. Ibid., 52–53. On the political authority of numerical calculation, see Porter, Trust in Numbers. 51. Abramson, We, the Jury. 52. Mansbridge, “Rethinking Representation,” 518; Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 55–59. 53. Dunn, “Situating Democratic Political Accountability,” 335. 54. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, chap. 4. 55. Chambers, “Deliberative Democratic Theory,” 308. The formal quality of accountability pushes the evaluation of representation away from the personal qualities of the representative and toward the reasons for the representative’s actions. Anne Phillips thus associates accountability with what she calls the “politics of ideas,” as opposed to the “politics of presence.” The latter, which I discuss at the end of this chapter, emphasizes symbolic identification between representatives and constituents (Phillips, Politics of Presence, 79, 156). 56. Vieira and Runciman, Representation, 102; Saward, “Representative Claim.” 57. Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons, Re-Thinking Science, 24–25; Slaughter and Rhoades, Academic Capitalism; Smith, “The Accountability of Science.” 58. Jasanoff, “(No?) Accounting for Expertise,” 158. 59. Jasanoff, “Technologies of Humility,” 226. 60. Fortun and Bernstein, Muddling Through, 112–113; Jasanoff, “(No?) Accounting for Expertise.”

Notes to Pages 216–223

301

61. Fuller, Governance of Science, 146–147. 62. Holbrook, “Assessing the Science-Society Relation,” 442– 443; Frodeman and Holbrook, “Science’s Social Effects.” 63. Warren, “Deliberative Democracy and Authority,” 55–56. 64. Irwin, “Politics of Talk,” 309–314; Horlick-Jones et al., GM Debate. 65. Turner, Liberal Democracy 3.0, 49–52. 66. Goldman, “Experts.” 67. Turner, Liberal Democracy 3.0, 52–57. For a range of perspectives on objectivity, see Douglas, “Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity.” 68. Bohman, Public Deliberation, 9. 69. For different treatments of this issue, see Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 122, 305; Hauptmann, “Can Less Be More?” 414; Bohman, “Realizing Deliberative Democracy,” 26–27. An early effort to apply “discursive democracy” to technical complexity appears in Dryzek, Discursive Democracy, chap. 3. 70. For a brief historical overview, see Lengwiler, “Participatory Approaches.” 71. Winner, Autonomous Technology, 326. 72. Oudshoorn and Pinch, How Users Matter, chaps. 5–8. 73. Epstein, Inclusion. 74. Winner, Whale and the Reactor; Sclove, Democracy and Technology; Renn, Webler, and Wiedeman, Fairness and Competence; Kleinman, Science, Technology, and Democracy; Joss and Bellucci, Participatory Technology Assessment; Joss, “Public Participation in Science and Technology.” 75. Irwin, “Politics of Talk”; Wynne, “Risk and Environment as Legitimatory Discourses.” 76. Bora and Hausendorf, “Participatory Science Governance Revisited.” 77. Jasanoff and Martello, Earthly Politics. 78. Martello, “Arctic Indigenous Peoples,” 370. 79. Hagendijk and Irwin, “Public Deliberation and Governance.” 80. Walzer, “Deliberation, and What Else?” 81. Ibid., 60. 82. Machiavelli, Discourses, I.4. 83. Sclove, Democracy and Technology, 181. 84. Elster, “Market and the Forum,” 20–25. 85. Shapiro, Democracy’s Place, 111–112, 134–136; Shapiro, State of Democratic Theory, 26–30, 50–55; Warren, “What Should We Expect from More Democracy?” 244–248. 86. Weingart, “Science and the Media”; Weingart et al., “Risks of Communication.”

302

Notes to Pages 224–229

87. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty”; Pettit, Republicanism, 55, 63–66. 88. Warren, “What Is Political?” 224. 89. Shapiro, Democracy’s Place, 130. 90. Warren, “Institutionalizing Deliberative Democracy,” 274–275. 91. Jasanoff, “Science and Citizenship.” 92. Manin, “On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation,” 360. 93. Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 18, 21. 94. See Rehfeld, Concept of Constituency, 13–16; Parkinson, Deliberating in the Real World. 95. Mansbridge, “Everyday Talk in the Deliberative System”; Hendriks, “When the Forum Meets Interest Politics”; Warren, “Institutionalizing Deliberative Democracy,” 278. 96. See Goodin, Reflective Democracy, 133–136; Bohman, Public Deliberation, 27. 97. Goodin, Reflective Democracy, 145n53. 98. Manin, Principles, 355; Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 56–62; Fung, “Recipes for Public Spheres,” 343. There are exceptions, of course, including Bohman, Public Deliberation, 164–171, 187–191; Warren, “Deliberative Democracy and Authority,” 55–56. 99. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56, 139; Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 14–15, 56. 100. Dewey, “Science as Subject-Matter and as Method,” 78–79. 101. Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 170. 102. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 228, see also chap. 16. 103. National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators, chap. 7. 104. Laird, “Participatory Analysis,” 353–354; Fuller, Governance of Science, 45– 46; Irwin and Michael, Science, Social Theory and Public Knowledge, chap. 2. 105. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, chap. 3; Williams, Voice, Trust, and Memory; Phillips, Politics of Presence; Pitkin, Concept of Representation, chap. 4; Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 49–52. Note that I do not use the term resemblance with reference to Foucault. For Foucault, resemblance designated the relationship between an object and a copy of the object; the copy resembles but cannot entirely recapture the original. A portrait resembles the painter’s model. Foucault used similitude, in contrast, to designate a process of equation, in which neither of the two items in question is prior to the other. See Foucault, Order of Things, chap. 3. 106. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, chap. 8. 107. Urbinati, Representative Democracy, 37, 49–52, 118, 136–137. 108. Epstein, Inclusion, 59–62, 88–90.

Notes to Pages 229–235

303

109. Wajcman, “Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies.” See also Alcoff, “Problem of Speaking for Others,” esp. 16–17, 26–27. 110. Gutmann, Identity in Democracy, chap. 1. For a telling illustration of these dilemmas in the case of criminal juries in the United States, see Abramson, We, the Jury, esp. 117–118. 111. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 136–141; Williams, Voice, Trust, and Memory, 116–148. 112. Wilsdon and Willis, See-Through Science, 55–56; Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 138–139. 113. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 92–102. 114. Goodin, Reflective Democracy, 169–193. 115. Mansbridge, “Should Blacks Represent Blacks,” 643–648. 116. Mansbridge, “Rethinking Representation,” 520–522. 117. Cronberg, “Technology Assessment,” 125. 118. Dienel and Renn, “Planning Cells,” 121. 119. Durant, “Experiment in Democracy,” 76. 120. Joss, “Evaluating Consensus Conferences,” 101–102. 121. Irwin, “Politics of Talk,” 315. 122. Note that in other contexts, a lack of knowledge may confer power by providing an alibi for avoiding responsibility or refusing to act. Those who wish to avoid taking action with regard to a problem such as global warming simply claim that existing knowledge is not sufficient to justify action. They call for “further studies” on the problem. And because further studies inevitably produce not only answers to old questions but also new questions, they may be able to defer action endlessly. 123. Oxford English Dictionary Online. http://dictionary.oed.com. 124. Collins and Evans, Rethinking Expertise. 125. Epstein, Impure Science, 287–294, 350–353. 126. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 92–102. 127. Mansbridge, “Rethinking Representation”; Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 136–141. 128. Bohman, Public Deliberation, 27. 129. Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 112–115; Hardin, “Deliberation,” 104. 130. See Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 139. 131. Mansbridge, “Deliberative Theory of Interest,” 36; Phillips, Politics of Presence, 147; Williams, “Uneasy Alliance,” 134–135; Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, chap. 3; Young, “Activist Challenges”; Cohen and Rogers, “Power and Reason,” 247.

304

Notes to Pages 236–243

132. Fung, “Recipes for Public Spheres,” 345; Hendriks, “When the Forum Meets Interest Politics.” 133. Bohman, Public Deliberation, 44, 57. 134. Guston, Between Politics and Science, esp. 30–32; Guston, “Boundary Organizations in Environmental Policy and Science”; Gieryn, “Boundaries of Science,” esp. 436.

10

Institutionalizing Democratic Representation

1. Arendt, On Revolution, 126. 2. Bohman, “Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy.” On the significance of institutions for political theory, see also Wolin, Politics and Vision, 7–8. 3. 5 U.S.C. Appendix §§ 5(b)(2). 4. Stark, “What Is a Balanced Committee?” 387–388. 5. U.S. Congressional Research Service, FACA Source Book, 232. 6. Ibid., 236, emphasis added. 7. U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Advisory Committee Management, 37740. 8. Ibid., 37731. 9. U.S. General Accounting Office, Federal Advisory Committees, 39. 10. National Academy of Sciences, “Policy on Committee Composition.” 11. National Academy of Sciences et al., Science and Technology in the National Interest, 6. 12. Ibid., 42. 13. One recent study found that during the past three years, out of 320 committee members, at least 66 had a long history of taking a proindustry stance. Only 9 of the 320 were closely identified with environmental or public interest groups. Center for Science in the Public Interest, Ensuring Independence and Objectivity. 14. Stark, “What Is a Balanced Committee?” 383–384. Given that a single committee member may not be able to convey the internal diversity of a particular perspective, some have argued that committees should strive to include a “critical mass” of each perspective. Phillips, Politics of Presence, 67; Mansbridge, “Should Blacks Represent Blacks,” 636; Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 148. 15. Pielke, Honest Broker, 147–149. 16. Center for Science in the Public Interest, Ensuring Independence and Objectivity, 5–7. 17. U.S. General Services Administration, Federal Advisory Committee Management, 37730.

Notes to Pages 243–249

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18. U.S. General Accounting Office, Federal Advisory Committees. 19. Weingart, “Scientific Expertise and Political Accountability.” 20. Ezrahi, “Utopian and Pragmatic Rationalism”; Pielke, Honest Broker. 21. 5 U.S.C. Appendix §§ 2(6). 22. This section draws and expands on Brown, “Three Ways to Politicize Bioethics.” 23. Fox and Swazey, “Examining American Bioethics”; Jasanoff, Designs on Nature, 175–180; Dzur and Levin, “ ‘Nation’s Conscience,’ ” 336–337; Evans, Playing God? 37– 42. Evans, “Between Technocracy and Democratic Legitimation,” 220–221. 24. Kuczewski, “The Epistemology of Communitarian Bioethics: Traditions in the Public Debates”; Callahan, “Individual Good and Common Good.” 25. Callahan, “Individual Good and Common Good,” 500. 26. Kass, “Reflections on Public Bioethics”; President’s Council on Bioethics, Beyond Therapy, 287ff; Sandel, Case against Perfection, 85–100. 27. White, Sustaining Affirmation. 28. Callahan, “Social Sciences and the Task of Bioethics,” 276. 29. Kelly, “Public Bioethics and Publics,” 348. 30. Shapiro, Democracy’s Place, 121; Warren, “What Is Political?” 216–217; Moreno, Deciding Together, 12–14. 31. Held, Models of Democracy, 34, 41. 32. President’s Council, meeting transcript, January 17, 2002. 33. Fox and Swazey, “Examining American Bioethics,” 366–368; Rasmussen, “Engineering, Gerrymandering and Expertise,” 129. 34. Kopelman, “Bioethics as a Second-Order Discipline,” 624. 35. Moreno, Deciding Together, 66; Dzur and Levin, “ ‘Nation’s Conscience,’ ” 349–352. 36. Goodin, Innovating Democracy, chap. 12. 37. President’s Council meeting transcript, July 11, 2002. 38. President’s Council meeting transcript, February 15, 2007. 39. Dzur and Levin, “Primacy of the Public.” 40. Bush, Executive Order 13237. 41. Engelhardt, “Bioethics as Politics,” 124; Rasmussen, “Engineering, Gerrymandering and Expertise,” 129; Dodds and Thomson, “Bioethics and Democracy,” 330–332; Elliott, “Soul of a New Machine”; Burgess, “Public Consultation in Ethics,” 10. 42. Elliott, “The Tyranny of Expertise,” 46; Kymlicka, “Moral Philosophy and Public Policy,” 261–262. 43. President’s Council meeting transcript, January 17, 2002.

306

Notes to Pages 249–253

44. President’s Council meeting transcript, June 11, 2002. 45. President’s Council meeting transcript, September 9, 2005. 46. Waldron, Law and Disagreement, 164–187, esp. 185. 47. President’s Council meeting transcript, January 17, 2002. 48. President’s Council meeting transcript, January 17, 2002. 49. President’s Council meeting transcript, July 11, 2002. 50. President’s Council meeting transcript, September 9, 2005. 51. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 44. 52. Dzur and Levin, “ ‘Nation’s Conscience,’ ” 349; Rasmussen, “Engineering, Gerrymandering and Expertise,” 129–130; see also Rasmussen, Ethics Expertise. 53. Kymlicka, “Moral Philosophy and Public Policy,” 251. 54. See Brown, “Citizen Panels”; Goodin, Innovating Democracy, chap. 2. 55. Fung, “Recipes for Public Spheres.” 56. Dienel, Die Planungszelle, 75. Dienel and Renn, “Planning Cells,” 121. 57. Fishkin, Voice of the People, 169; Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation, 89. Athenian selection by lot was closely tied to the principle of rotation in office, and the two combined embodied the key Athenian principle of isegoria or equality of public speech. In this respect, the Athenians used selection by lot less as a way of choosing some to speak for others than as way of promoting participation in self-government. See Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 183–186, 150, 197, 267, 336; Manin, Principles, 32. 58. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, 197–199. 59. Manin makes the same point with regard to selection by lot in ancient Athens: whereas isegoria distributed power equally to all who wanted it, selection by lot, taken by itself, only distributed an equal probability of having power. Manin, Principles, 39– 41. Barber addresses this concern by suggesting that one could require that citizens volunteer to join the pool from which participants are chosen by lot. Barber, Strong Democracy, 292. 60. Smith and Wales, “Citizens’ Juries and Deliberative Democracy,” 60–61; Guston, “Evaluating the First U.S. Consensus Conference,” 469– 470; Andersen and Jæger, “Scenario Workshops and Consensus Conferences,” 335. 61. Wynne, “May the Sheep Safely Graze?” 62. For a brief discussion of this issue, see Parkinson, Deliberating in the Real World, 74–84. 63. Joss, “Lost in Translation?” 212–213. 64. Rowe and Frewer, “Public Participation Methods,” 13. 65. Bohman, Public Deliberation, 64.

Notes to Pages 257–259

307

Conclusion 1. Pitkin, Concept of Representation, 211. 2. Ibid., 135–139. 3. Ibid., 140. 4. Ibid., 130. 5. Ibid., 212. 6. See also the discussion of this point in Vieira and Runciman, Representation, 71–79. 7. Davidoff, “Sex, Politics, and Morality at the FDA,” 20–21. 8. Manin, Principles, 174–175; Urbinati, “Representation as Advocacy,” 761. 9. Winner, Autonomous Technology, 190.

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Index

Abramson, Jeffrey, 303n110 Accountability, 215–219 deliberative, 215–216 electoral, 215 Hobbes on, 133 managerial, 216 and National Science Foundation, 216–217 Advisory committees. See Expertise; Federal Advisory Committee Act Ankersmit, F. R., 267n38 Anti-Federalists, 83–84, 86 Arendt, Hannah on action, 116 on authority, 300n46 on institutions, 239 on ordinary experience, 139 on power, 29 Aristotle, 135 and Galileo, 50–52 and Hobbes, 112, 123 and institutions, 38 on judging experts, 87 on natural philosophy, 45–46 on politics, 144, 196 and republicanism, 39 Authority and coercion, 213 of experts, 11–12, 34–35, 42, 88, 212–213, 217 of laypeople, 214, 232 procedural versus substantive, 206–207, 212 scientific versus political, 212–213

Authorization, 206–215 by appointment, 212 versus authoritative, 206–207, 212 by popular election, 207–211 by random selection, 213–215 Bacon, Francis, 47, 48, 53, 54 Barber, Benjamin R., 209, 306n59 Bayh-Dole Act, 10 Beck, Ulrich, 139 Berlin, Isaiah, 32 Bernal, J. D., 220 Bevir, Mark, 261n4 Bioethics advisory councils, 245–250 clinical, 189 Bismarck, Otto von, 13 Bohman, James, 148, 219, 289n68 Bono, James, 51 Boundary organizations, 236–237 Boundary work, 90, 166, 193, 297n21 Bourdieu, Pierre, 296n4 Boyle, Robert, 52, 55, 57–62, 168. See also Hobbes, Thomas Brooks, Harvey, 102 Brown, Michael D., 91 Brown, Wendy, 197, 297n33 Burke, Edmund, 65, 70, 79, 81, 84, 205 Bush, George W., 2, 3, 16, 17, 65, 91, 109, 185, 198, 202

346

Index

Callahan, Daniel, 246 Callon, Michel, 172 Carter, Stephen, 250 Center for Science in the Public Interest, 304n13 Chambers, Simone, 215 Christiano, Thomas, 86 Citizen juries. See Minipublics Citizens. See Laypeople Collins, Harry, 116, 233 Commercialization, 10, 11, 195, 216 Common sense. See Dewey, John; Laypeople; Science Communitarianism, 171, 245–246 Competence. See Laypeople; Representatives Conciliar movement, 67 Consensus conferences. See Minipublics Consent, 5, 44, 66–69, 90, 214, 215. See also Hobbes, Thomas hypothetical, 7, 18, 69, 91, 146, 207 Constructivism, xi, 16, 170, 202. See also Science and technology studies Dahl, Robert A., 277n79 Davidoff, Frank, 258 Dear, Peter, 50, 111, 272n63 Deliberation, 224–227 and decision making, 210 and interests, 103–104, 214, 229, 230, 235–236 and legitimacy, 225 in liberal representation, 6, 90, 224 and noncognitive speech, 244, 245–246 and nondeliberative politics, 210, 222, 225 Deliberative polls. See Minipublics Democracy. See also Institutions; Participatory democracy; Representative democracy as institutionally differentiated, xiii, 147–148, 193–196, 199, 203–205, 236

realist theories of, 7, 85, 137, 278n87, 287n12 versus representation, 66, 83 versus republic, 83, 277n79 as response to politics, 193 and science, 15–16, 65, 66 Democratic theory, 6–7, 132–133, 137, 147, 219–220, 222, 225–226, 239 instrumental view of expertise in, 86–87, 92 Democratization of science, 18, 148, 203 as response to politicization, viii, xiii, 165, 191–193, 259 Descartes, René, 112 De Vries, Gerald, 295n68 Dewey, John, 135–161 antifoundationalism of, 144 on common sense, 151–152, 160 constructivism of, 137, 142, 157–158, 291n101 on democracy, 147 inquiry, theory of, 153–154 on institutions, 146, 289n55 (see also Institutions) and instrumentalism, 140–141, 152–155 interpretations of, 135–136 on liberalism and communitarianism, 137, 140 and Lippmann, 137–139, 140, 150, 260, 288nn15–16 and material aspects of politics, 148–149 on nonpolitical associations, 144–145 (see also Politicization) on participation, 147–148, 160 on publics, 141–146 on public understanding of science, 149–150, 227 on quest for certainty, 32 on representation, 141–143, 153 on science as intervention, 156–158 as meaningful, 155

Index as practical activity, 151 as social, 150, 158–160 and values, 149, 153–154 on spectator theory of knowledge, 60, 156 state, theory of the, 140, 141–146 on technocracy, 149–150, 154 Diderot, Denis, 60 Diggins, John Patrick, 154 Disch, Lisa, 298n21 Douglas, Heather, 301n67 Dovi, Suzanne, 299n22 Dresser, Rebecca, 249 Dryzek, John S., 129, 299n37, 301n69 Dumouchel, Paul, 127, 128 Dunn, John, 215 Eckersley, Robyn, 286n114 Elections. See Voting Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S., 104, 243 Epistemic division of labor, 85–92, 150, 176, 260 Epistemic individualism, 48, 56, 61, 115, 137, 158–159, 202, 291n112 Epstein, Steven, 228, 233–234 Eugenics, 14 Evans, Robert, 116, 233 Evolution, Darwinian theory of, 2, 72–73, 159 Expertise, 10–12. See also Authority; Laypeople; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Politicization; Science and bioethics, 247, 249, 250 democratization of, 18 importance for democracy, 91–92, 226 increased demand for, 10–12 instrumental theory of, 86–87 intertwined with values and interests, 88–89, 102–104, 226–227 linear model, 244 pragmatist theory of, 90 uncertainty of, 11 Ezrahi, Yaron, 66, 90, 201

347

Facts as established, 178, 182, 187 as social, x-xi, 56, 139–140, 164, 202 as speaking for themselves, 4, 27, 61, 63, 168 and values, 101, 149, 163, 294n55 Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), 93–104, 240–245 administrative interpretations, 99–104 judicial interpretations, 97–99 legislative history, 94–96 Federalist, The, 41, 79–85 interpretations of, 81 opposed to popular democracy, 82, 85 Feenberg, Andrew, 87, 145, 194, 260 Filmer, Robert, 70, 78, 118 Finn, Stephen J., 281n1, 282n37, 283n40, 283n45 Fischer, Frank, 264n28 Fishkin, James S., 251, 266n59 Flathman, Richard E., 284n62 Foucault, Michel, 14, 168, 188, 293n20, 302n105 Fraser, Nancy, 59 Friedman, Milton, 202 Frost, Samantha, 112 Fukuyama, Francis, 250 Fuller, Steve, 121, 182, 202–203, 216, 261n3, 292–293n17, 295n64 Galileo, ix, 43, 47, 49–52, 53, 54, 57, 60, 62, 270n14 Garver, Eugene, 34, 35 General Services Administration (GSA), U.S., 241–242, 243 George, Robert, 249 Gibson, Alan, 82, 85, 276n63 Gieryn, Thomas, 193, 297n21 Golinski, Jan, 58, 60 Goodin, Robert E., 129, 247 Government Accountability Office (GAO), U.S., 101–104, 243, 263n11

348

Index

Greenberg, Daniel S., 2 Guston, David H., 10, 263n18, 297n35 Gutmann, Amy, 129

Hoekstra, Kinch, 123 Honig, Bonnie, 300n41 Hume, David, 110 Hurricane Katrina, 91

Habermas, Jürgen, 219 on deliberation and voting, 209–210 on public sphere, 57, 251 on science and technology, 87, 90, 278n94 Hacking, Ian, 111, 156, 168 Hager, David D., 4 Hamilton, Alexander. See Federalist, The Haraway, Donna J., 155 Hariman, Robert, 26, 29 Hartz, Louis, 117 Herzog, Don, 284n59 Hickman, Larry A., 291n101 Hill, Christopher, 270n20 Hobbes, Thomas, 107–133 and aesthetic dimension of representation, 127 on authorization of science, 131–132, 286n120 on authorization of sovereign, 119–120 and Boyle, 58, 108–109, 112 on consent, 114, 118–120, 125 constructivism of, 108, 110–115, 120 epistemic egalitarianism of, 121, 207–208 interpretations of, 107–109 juridical model of representation critique of, 125, 127–128 defense of, 122–124 on language, 113–114 materialism of, 112–113, 123 nominalism of, 110–115, 117–118, 125, 141, 282n19, 282n24 on politicization of science, 117 on representation by fiction, 124–128 on representing nonauthorizing constituents, 128–132 and republicanism, 115, 123

Ill-formed problems, 11 Immediacy, ethic of, 18, 35, 42, 46, 48–49, 129, 195, 210, 232. See also Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Institutions, xi, 8, 146, 182–183, 187, 192–193. See also Democracy; Machiavelli, Niccolò; Representation distinctive purposes of, 203–204 paradoxical role in democracy, 183, 239 and republicanism, 224 as resource for powerless, 182 Instrumentalism, 9, 54–55, 79, 87, 91, 202, 209, 223. See also Dewey, John; Machiavelli, Niccolò Interest groups, 11, 18, 81, 131, 235–237, 252, 304n13 advisory committee representation of, 95–98, 100, 103, 178, 212, 240–245 and identity groups, 229 Interests, conceptions of, 98–99 Irwin, Alan, 232 Jacob, Margaret C., 63, 273n92 James, William, 114, 136, 157, 163, 170 Jasanoff, Sheila, 212, 216 Jefferson, Thomas, 80, 239 Joss, Simon, 252 Kass, Leon, 239, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250 Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy, 262n11 Kelly, Susan E., 305n29 Kennedy, John F., advisory committee memorandum, 100–102 Kitcher, Philip, 153, 290n86 Kleinman, Daniel Lee, 182 Kuhn, Thomas, xi, 159, 175

Index Latour, Bruno, 13, 116, 157, 163–184 on actants, 167, 292n17, 295n73 on associations, 167, 170 on constructivism, 170, 273n92, 293n32 on coproduction of subjects and objects, 169, 170–171 on established categories, 181–183 on explanatory power, 170, 174, 176, 180–181 and Hobbes, 108–110, 113, 117, 170, 172, 179, 181 on Janus face of science, 55 and juridical model of representation, 172, 174, 178–179 on laboratories, 193–194 on Machiavelli, 23 methodology versus cosmology, 181–183 on Pasteur, Louis, 167–168 on politics, 164–165, 169, 186–187, 191, 198, 222 on purification and mediation, 166–169 on representation as circulating reference, 174–176, 211 on representation as practical activity, 177 on science versus research, 181 on scientific and political representation as linked, 163, 176, 178 spokesperson, concept of, 177 strong program, critique of, 108, 164, 273n92, 292n6 on symmetry principle, 163–164, 180, 295n73 on technologies as delegates, 172–174 Laypeople authority of, 214, 232 competence of, 82, 86, 226–227 conceptions of, 231–234 evaluating experts, 86–87, 218 origins of word, 233 Legitimacy, 33, 52, 68–69, 215, 225, 249

349

Leib, Ethan, 204 Levellers, 68, 119, 120, 127 Liberal democracy, 6, 17, 37, 44, 138. See also Representative government, liberal theory of Liberal rationalism, xii, 79, 115, 201–202, 221, 232 and advisory committees, 93–104 in democratic theory, 92 Liberal subject, critiques of, 171. See also Latour, Bruno; Representative government, liberal theory of Lippmann, Walter. See Dewey, John Locke, John, 47, 67, 68, 69 Logical positivism, 111, 136, 151, 282n19 Longino, Helen E., 291n112, 291n114 Luhmann, Niklas, 85 Lummis, C. Douglas, 239 Luther, Martin, 48, 270n18 Lynch, William T., 281n6 Lysenkoism, 15, 111, 164 MacGilvray, Eric A., 287n11 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 23–42, 43–44 on citizen competence, 40 on contingency of politics, 31–33, 183 on elections, 41 as expert advisor, 34–35, 168 and expert rhetoric, 24–31, 37, 41–42, 93, 168 and Galileo, 51 and Hobbes, 107, 120, 123 on institutions, 37–40, 146, 181, 192, 239, 246, 268n64 and instrumentalism, 35–37 interpretations of, 24 on participation, 39–42, 222–224 on power, 29–30 and republicanism, 24, 38, 39, 222–224 against technocracy, 34, 268n45 on virtú, 33 and visual politics, 35–37, 60, 139

350

Index

Madison, James. See Federalist, The Manin, Bernard, 68, 306n59 Mansbridge, Jane, 219, 230 Marres, Noortje, 289n63 Marshall, Joshua Micah, 202 Martello, Marybeth Long, 221 Martinich, A.P., 283n38 McCormick, John P., 32, 39, 40, 42, 269n68 Media, mass, 223, 227 Merton, Robert K., 15 Meyer, John M., 281n1 Mill, John Stuart, 85, 198, 209, 225, 299n31 Minipublics, 18, 129, 214–215, 237, 251–255 and Athenian democracy, 251–252, 306n57, 306n59 and lay perspectives, 231–234 and statistical representativeness, 252–253 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 79, 85, 277n79 Mooney, Chris, 263n11 National Academy of Sciences (NAS), 97, 242–243 National Institutes of Health (NIH), 99, 178 National Science Foundation (NSF), 216–217 Natural aristocracy, 7, 80, 82, 83, 85 Nestle, Marion, 89 Newton, Isaac, 55, 62–63 Nonknowledge, 72, 303n122 Oakeshott, Michael, 26, 31, 111 Office of Government Ethics (OGE), U.S., 101–103 O’Neill, John, 286n114 Parkinson, John, 299n23 Participation, vii, 8, 18, 90, 147, 160, 219–224 as consumer activism, 222–223 GM Nation, 217–218, 221

instrumental view of, 41, 191, 197, 223 as legitimation strategy, 44, 220 and minipublics, 251–252 and right to research, 198–199 Participatory democracy, 7, 179–180, 197, 209, 219, 278n87 and citizen competence, 207 and Dewey, 135, 140 and Hobbes, 132 and Machiavelli, 41 and Rousseau, 70, 76, 275n43 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 136, 287n6 Pellegrino, Edmund D., 23 Pels, Dick, 193, 194 Peters, Richard, 111 Pettit, Philip, 224 Phillips, Anne, 300n55 Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel, 69, 70, 180, 201, 204–205, 257, 285n82, 298n21 Plan B (contraceptive), 1–4, 8, 16, 59, 93, 258, 262n1, 263n11 Plato, 9, 45, 74, 121, 169, 278n93 Polanyi, Michael, 60, 202 Politicization, 2–4, 9–16, 185–186, 197 in Dewey, 144–145 and epistemic norms, 192 in Hobbes, 117 kinds of, 16, 17–18, 23, 243, 244, 260 responses to, vii, 16–19, 192–193 as response to injustice, 190, 191 stakes of, 188–189, 191 against totalizing conceptions of, xii, 14, 186, 188, 202, 260 Politics as essentially contestable concept, x, 185 foundationalist conceptions of, 120, 144, 171, 180, 189, 192, 195, 246 free-market conceptions of, 182, 192, 201–202, 224 generic conceptions of, 185–188 as institutionally unbound, 165, 186

Index instrumental view of, 41, 191, 197, 223 versus the political, 188, 197–198, 199, 297n31 suppressed, 190 temporal dimensions of, 15, 194–195, 210, 211 Popper, Karl, 15, 56, 203 Porter, Theodore M., 297n28, 300n50 Power Arendt on, 29 democratized, 191 disciplinary (Foucauldian), 14, 168, 188, 221 equalized through formal institutions, 182, 208–209 kinds of, 188 and knowledge, 174 Machiavelli on, 29–30 not coextensive with politics, 188–190 President’s Council on Bioethics, 245–250 President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), 102 Price, Don K., 12, 201 Proposition 71 (California), 198, 297n36 Public Citizen (advocacy group), 103, 280n33 Public engagement. See Participation Public funding for science, 10, 89, 216–217 Public interest in science, 17 Public understanding of science, 17, 149–150, 227, 264n33 Random selection, 68, 78, 213–215, 251, 306n57, 306n59 Rationalism, 7, 88 Realism and relativism, xi, 136, 156–158, 287n5 Rehfeld, Andrew, 288n30 Representation as acting for, 4–5, 102, 263n12

351

anticipatory, 215 audience of, 6, 52, 116, 126, 130 as composed of multiple elements, viii, 8, 203, 204–206 correspondence model (mirror of reality), vii, 4, 5, 6, 7, 17, 18, 49 in Anti-Federalists, 84 and Dewey, 142, 158 and Hobbes, 128, 132 and Latour, 174 in participatory democracy, 18, 179 in Rousseau, 77 history of, 4, 67 as institutionally differentiated, 8, 179–180, 183–184, 199, 203–205, 236 (see also Democracy; Institutions) juridical model, 6–7, 80, 110, 118, 207, 216 (see also Hobbes, Thomas; Latour, Bruno) locus of, 142, 145, 205, 260 in Machiavelli, 27 meaning of word, 4, 101–102, 263n12 as mediation, viii, 7–8, 129, 167–168, 170, 176–180, 210 (see also Immediacy, ethic of) of nature’s interests, 12–13, 129–131, 286n114 as nonpolitical, 14 of nonvoters (children, future generations, nonhumans, nonresidents, etc.), 128–129, 179, 208, 215 opposed to democracy, 66, 83 in religion, 48, 49, 50 as standing for, 4–5, 13, 53, 84, 102 as substitution, 44, 84, 110, 122, 172, 174, 178–180, 205–206 virtual, 69, 228 Representative democracy, xi-xii as oxymoronic, 7, 91 versus participatory democracy, xi, 18–19 versus representative government, 7, 24, 278n87

352

Index

Representative government, liberal theory of, 7, 24, 37–41, 65–92, 93, 101, 207, 209 and bioethics, 245 and Dewey, 137, 138, 146 and Hobbes, 122, 132 and Latour, 169, 183 and Machiavelli, 41 as parallel to modern science, 44, 91–92, 169 Representativeness. See Resemblance Representatives competence of, 80–83, 84–85, 90–92 independence of, 8, 103–104, 179–180, 211 nonauthorized, 128–132, 143, 278n88 scientists as, 17, 101–102, 131–132, 257–258 Republicanism, 223–224 and bioethics, 246 communitarian version of, 39, 41 and Fuller, Steve, 202–203 and Machiavelli, 24, 38, 39, 222 and Madison, James, 83 and Radical Enlightenment, 55, 83 Resemblance, 227–237 Anti-Federalist argument for, 83–84 and deliberation, 233–234 and demographic similarity, 228, 230 Hobbes’s critique of, 119–120 as political, 230 and professional perspectives, 234–236, 240–245 and social perspectives, 229–230, 235, 240–245, 304n14 and sovereignty, 228 and statistical representativeness, 228–229, 252–253 and symbolic representation, 231, 237, 254 and women, 229 Rights liberal conception of, 80

to scientific research, 198–199, 297n36 as state function to protect, 196 Rorty, Richard, 136, 287n5 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 210, 265n36, 276n55 Rouse, Joseph, 14, 293n20 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques on deliberation, 76 Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, 70–75, 232 on general will, 75–77 and immediacy, 70, 72, 75–77, 210, 232 (see also Immediacy, ethic of) on inequality, 72 on popular sovereignty, 70, 75–78 on representation, 77–78 republicanism of, 39 on science in the public interest, 74 Royal Society, the, 48, 49, 55–62 Runciman, David, 125, 127 Russell, Bertrand, 15, 158 Salomon, Jean-Jacques, 273n1 Sartori, Giovanni, 85 Saward, Michael, 129, 298n21 Schaffer, Simon, 54, 56, 57, 108, 133, 292n17 Schattschneider, E. E., 87 Schmitt, Carl, 284n80, 297 Schneider, Carl, 248 Schumpeter, Joseph, 85 Science and common sense, 30, 44–49, 52, 55, 66, 75, 91, 218 (see also Dewey, John) and democracy, 15–16, 65, 66 experimental conception of, 52–55 free-market model of, 182, 192, 202 as institutionally unbound, 165–166 as instrumentally useful, 25–27, 30, 31, 54–55 (see also Instrumentalism) as legislation, 14 meaning of word, 44, 269n2

Index as model for politics, 9, 17, 66–67, 90–91, 201–202, 234 and nonscience, 165–166, 193–196, 292n12 as not political, 189–191 as practical activity, 6, 13, 66, 73, 109, 151, 152, 166–167 as political, xii, 12–16, 185–199 in the public interest, 74 as public knowledge, 27, 44, 56–62, 65, 212, 214 and religion, ix, 49–52, 54–55, 192 technology, relation to, 54, 153 temporal dimensions of, 15, 194–195, 213 as value-free, vii, 9, 15, 16–17, 149, 240 (see also Dewey, John) women in, 58 Science and technology studies (STS), ix-x, xi, 6, 13, 16, 206. See also Constructivism critics of, xii, 6, 16–17, 43, 107, 108, 110–111, 156, 202 and deliberative democracy, 224–225 on political and scientific representation, 263n13 politics, conceptions of, 185, 196, 296n4 not proscience or antiscience, 155 Science wars, 16–17, 43, 156, 202 Scientific Revolution, 45–46 Seguin, Eva, 292n6 Selection by lot. See Random selection Serres, Michel, 172 Shapin, Steven, 48, 56, 57, 108, 133, 183 Shulman, Seth, 262n1 Skepticism, 47, 53, 57, 110, 112, 181–182, 270n9 Skinner, Quentin, 115, 116, 119, 281n5, 283n52, 285n98, 286n104 Social contract liberal theory of, 69, 140, 146 for science, 9–10, 74, 220

353

Social movements, 18, 149, 219–220. See also Participation Socrates, 9, 74, 121 Sovereignty, 5, 265n36 informal, 228 parliamentary, 70, 284n71 popular, 65, 70, 75–81, 85, 92, 118 voluntarist conception of, 65, 70, 78, 92, 169, 210 State changing role of the, 195–196 Dewey, theory of the, 140, 141–146 and society, 90, 223–224 Strauss, Leo, 261n1 Strong program (sociology of science), 108, 163–164, 180, 292n6 Suskind, Ron, 281n13 Thompson, Dennis F., 129 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 208 Tuck, Richard, 123 Tullis, Jeffrey, 204 Turner, Stephen P., 264n28, 301n65, 301n67 Urbinati, Nadia, 6, 7, 78, 86, 90, 180, 205, 211, 228, 275n43, 276n48, 278n93, 284n80 Viroli, Maurizio, 266n3, 267n29, 268n61 Visual politics, 57, 60, 91. See also Machiavelli, Niccolò Vitalism (Radical Protestants), 48–49, 55, 63, 112 Voltaire, 47 Voting, 66, 68, 69, 273n1, 276n55, 276n63 and accountability, 215 and citizen competence, 208–209 and Condorcet theorem, 226 and deliberation, 209–211 Dewey on, 146 Hamilton on, 84 Rousseau on, 76, 77

354

Index

Voting (cont.) on science advisory committees, 191, 213 Walzer, Michael, 222 Warren, Mark E., 86, 88, 188, 190, 193, 205, 219 Weber, Max, 85, 87 Whiteside, Kerry H., 295n73 Wicked problems, 11 Winner, Langdon, 14, 17, 220, 259

Witnessing. See Visual politics Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 56 Wolin, Sheldon S., 111, 149, 185, 197–198, 297n31 Wood, Gordon S., 277n72 Wood, Susan F., 1, 2, 258 Woolgar, Steve, 294n46 Wyatt, Sally, 262n8, 292n13 Wynne, Brian, 155 Young, Iris Marion, 205, 206, 211, 229