ABSTRACT
Thinking through the idea of going public with social-science research has much to teach us about the politics of knowledge. At one level, this book has been about little else than the association of knowledge with power. Think of Bacon’s imperial quest to house the known world, Leib-niz’s census proposals to the Prussian state, Nader’s fight to preserve the Washington archives, interest-group referenda on social policy, the search for a post-cold-war research rationale, efforts to strengthen the link between research and policy, Dewey’s public philosophy, Gandhi’s social theory. It seems important, then, to propose something of a political theory of public knowledge at this juncture.
