Science in democracy: Expertise, institutions and representation

After the ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s and the ‘Republican War on Science’ of the 2000s in the United States, the fraught relationship between science and politics continues to make headlines. In conflicts over issues ranging from global warming to stem cell research, complaints about ‘politicized science’ remain familiar refrains. However, such complaints presuppose a rigid boundary that has been subjected to thorough critique: between objective, value-free science on one side and interested, power-laden politics on the other. These complaints have also accomplished little; they have not purified science from the ostensibly contaminating touch of politics, and in prominent conflicts competing interest groups remain entrenched. Mark Brown’s book constitutes an important and rigorous contribution to current efforts to move beyond these complaints. Rather than adding one more demonstration of science’s intertwinement with politics, or one more call for increased public participation in science policy, Brown proposes a rethinking of democratic institutions, grounded in a conception of scientific and political representation alternative to the prevailing ‘liberal-rationalist’ model. At the heart of this alternative – along with the theory of democracy to which it leads – is an idea that Brown derives in various ways from Hobbes, Dewey and Bruno Latour: ‘representation as practices of mediation that transform what they represent’, rather than mirroring a preexisting nature or polity (p. viii). The book develops this conception through readings of canonical and recent texts in Western political thought, interspersed with reflections on connections between scientific and political representation in current practice (p. viii). In the concluding chapters, Brown discusses implications of this alternative approach for specifying the ‘political’ in science, identifying essential elements of democratic representation (participation is only one of them), and developing institutional practices and procedures for putting representation into operation.