July 2000

HAYEK-L SEMINAR
 
Steve Fuller on The Governance of Science

The  Governance of Science  --  An Introduction by Steve Fuller*

The Governance of Science is my attempt to make science policy interesting and important to not only students of science but also students of democratic social and political theory, especially those who regard the past as our most important resource for transforming the present into the future.[i] Despite the long and distinguished tradition of critique of abuses of science, especially as defined by its technological applications, it has been much rarer to question the very constitution of 'science' as a polity. Yet, few doubt that the character of knowledge production has radically changed since the advent of the atomic bomb. Not only have physics and biology acquired a scaled-up industrial presence previously reserved for chemistry, but even certain lines of social science research now sport the forbidding technicality, spiralling research costs and cut-throat competition of 'Big Science'. Moreover, and most regrettably, these developments are routinely seen as signs of health in the knowledge enterprise, perhaps even worthy of emulation throughout academia.

                   My main target in Governance is the normative orientation that takes Big Science as the standard against which other forms of inquiry are judged and to which they are supposed to aspire. Invariably, institutional and intellectual aspects of 'science' are intertwined in this definition. The historic success of the natural sciences in explaining and legitimating socially significant phenomena is often taken to mean that research conducted under their rubric can do no wrong. I aim to reverse this tendency by disentangling the intellectual core of science as organized inquiry from the other institutional roles it has added. However, I do this, not to preserve an impossibly idealized version of inquiry, but rather to articulate the material conditions under which the admirable features of science -- especially those relating to its critical vision -- have been both realized and perverted. In short, to adapt Harold Lasswell's famous definition of politics, I ask: In the republic of science, who should be doing what, with what means and to what ends?

                   Many of the ideas that went into composing Governance were conceived in the early 1990s, as an extension of the concept of 'knowledge policy' that I first introduced in Social Epistemology.[ii] The event that galvanized my interest in treating the governance of science in some depth was the termination of public funding for the Superconducting Supercollider, which, if built, would have been the world's largest particle accelerator. According to its proponents, this machine would have been capable of revealing the ultimate nature of matter and motion, thereby providing the key for unlocking the great mysteries of the physical universe. In its 1992-3 session, the US Congress deemed that the project failed to meet the benefit-to-cost challenge in a tight budgetary regime. The protracted and highly publicized debate over the Supercollider drew attention to factional divisions within the physics community, the historical shallowness of 'cultural' arguments for science funding, as well as the diminished political significance assigned to basic research in the post-Cold War era.

                The demise of the Supercollider also marked the first time that scientists openly declared that Science and Technology Studies (STS) -- the interdisciplinary field that studies the social production of scientific knowledge -- was instrumental in promoting public disaffection with science. Noteworthy in this vein was Steven Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory, which is also fairly regarded as one of the opening salvos in the ongoing 'Science Wars'.[iii] To be sure, one person's 'funding cut' is another's 'just re-distribution'. However, in the last ten years, the knowledge policy questions have only grown deeper, as the great welfare states of the West beat a hasty retreat behind a shrinking tax base. From exercising a comfortable monopoly over the funding of scientific research, Western governments now desperately cling to a role in regulating the distribution of research fruits. The ethical controversies and jurisdictional disputes surrounding the Human Genome Project exemplify this 'brave new world' of science policy, which Governance tackles head on. 

                   The book is divided into three parts. Part One (Chapters 1-2) presents the conceptual framework, which is drawn mostly from normative political theory. Here I explain the republican ideal of science as the 'open society' and science's failure to live up to this ideal as its scale and scope have expanded. However, in this respect, the problems of Big Science are not much different from those facing Big Democracy. In Part Two (Chapters 3-5), I focus the discussion on the most concrete site for the governance of science, the university. The coherence of this institution is increasingly challenged by multiculturalism and capitalism, which can be seen as representing the opposing pulls of communitarian and liberal ideologies introduced in Part One. Part Three (Chapters 6-8) presents the prospects for the future governance of science, which I see in terms of a continuation of the process of 'secularization' that decouples state power from the authorization of knowledge claims. I consider both historical precedents and experimental proposals for this process, which together offer the elements for renegotiating science's social contract. In the rest of this introduction, I shall elaborate the argument in a bit more detail.

                   The pursuit of knowledge, 'science' for short, has undergone significant material changes over the past century, probably more so than at any other point in its history. Yet, the political rhetoric surrounding science -- especially the ideology of the open society -- remains largely unchanged. In the first two chapters of Governance, I uncover what is masked by the continued use of this rhetoric. The discussion in chapter 1 is framed by three political theories of science: liberalism, communitarianism and republicanism. The open society is possible only in a republican regime, where unlike liberal or communitarian regimes, a clear distinction is drawn between staking an idea and staking a life. This distinction underwrites the fundamental principle of the open society: 'the right to be wrong'. Chapter 2 moves from defining this ground to showing how it has come to be eroded with the scaling-up of the scientific enterprise into what is nowadays routinely called ‘Big Science’. Today too many other things seem to be bound up with the organized pursuit of inquiry to enable it to function in the critical capacity demanded by the ideal of the open society. Chapter 2 ends with a rejection of ‘science literacy’ as a strategy for opening up science to the public: At best, it secures a receptive attitude without provision for greater public participation. However, the current popularity of science literacy campaigns reveals the extent to which the central political issues facing science are treated as a matter of remedying certain ‘cognitive’ deficits suffered by the public. 

                   The university is the institution most closely aligned with knowledge production processes in the history of the West. Indeed, many of the West's signature epistemic contributions can be traced to the fortunes of this institution. In the political terms introduced in Chapter 1, the university has tried to steer a republican course between the Scylla of communitarianism and the Charybdis of liberalism, subject to changes in the scale and scope of academic enterprises. Chapter 3 surveys the history of this tension. Scylla appears in the guild-like character of the university taken to an extreme, as in the form of self-censorship that has passed for 'academic freedom' in German and American universities since 1870. Radical versions of this tendency are seen in contemporary debates over ‘political correctness’, which are treated under the rubric of 'multiculturalism' in chapter 4. Charybdis appears in the tendency of especially laboratory scientists to treat the university as little more than a relatively efficient space for doing business, not as a concept constitutive of the scientists' own sense of identity. This attitude, which has now infected to varying degrees the practices of most disciplines, will be examined in chapter 5 as part of the ongoing 'capitalization' of academic life.

                   Nowadays it is common for scientists to treat with suspicion any attempt to understand science in terms of its social dimensions. However, this is due less to the motives of sociologists than to the peculiar social situation in which science finds itself today. After all, the features that had enabled science to function as the source of rational order in a secular world were themselves thoroughly social and staunchly defended by the classical sociologists of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. But over the past century, the social character of science has changed substantially. In Part Three, I turn to reconstitute the republican ideal of scientific inquiry, given that science has become a diversely interested, materially invested enterprise that reproduces both the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary democratic societies. 

                   In Chapter 6, I introduce the ‘secularization’ strategy that characterizes the entire argument. Like the secularization of the religion, the point here is to divest the state’s funding of scientific research, while at the same time promoting public access to alternative research programmes, each being allowed to find its own funding constituency. Secularization has many profound philosophical and political implications for the nature of inquiry, not least of which is the renewed significance assigned to teaching in academic life. Chapter 7 locates a precedent for secularization in the US New Deal and examines the obstacles that calls for ‘national competititveness’ pose to recovering that ideal in our own time. Finally, Chapter 8 lays out a dual strategy for democratizing science from ‘within’ and ‘without’. In short, to realize the republican ideal of the open society in an era of Big Science, forums must be provided so that both all professional knowledge producers can participate in determining the direction their fields take and the general public can influence the process in a manner that is commensurate to their interest in such matters.

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