When Science Meets Power

Geoff Mulgan is Professor in STEaPP (Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy) at University College London

Science and politics have collaborated throughout human history, and science is repeatedly invoked today in political debates, from pandemic management to climate change. But the relationship between the two is muddled and muddied.
 
Leading policy analyst Geoff Mulgan here calls attention to the growing frictions caused by the expanding authority of science, which sometimes helps politics but often challenges it.
 
He dissects the complex history of states' use of science for conquest, glory and economic growth and shows the challenges of governing risk - from nuclear weapons to genetic modification, artificial intelligence to synthetic biology. He shows why the governance of science has become one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century, ever more prominent in daily politics and policy.
 
Whereas science is ordered around what we know and what is, politics engages what we feel and what matters. How can we reconcile the two, so that crucial decisions are both well informed and legitimate?
 
The book proposes new ways to organize democracy and government, both within nations and at a global scale, to better shape science and technology so that we can reap more of the benefits and fewer of the harms.

Introduction: The science-politics paradox
 
PART I. How Science Meets Power
Chapter 1: Uneasy interdependence
Chapter 2: What is science and how does it connect to power?
 
PART II. How States Have Used Science
Chapter 3: The ages of techne and episteme
Chapter 4: Science bites back
Chapter 5: The scientist's view of politics as corruptor
 
PART III. The Problem of Truths and Logics
Chapter 6: Master, servant and multiple truths
Chapter 7: Clashing logics
 
PART IV. The Problem of Institutions: Solving the Science-Politics Paradox
Chapter 8: Split sovereignty, or the role of knowledge in corroding the supremacy of politics
Chapter 9: Democracy meets science
Chapter 10: The flawed reasoning of democracy and its remedies
 
PART V. The Problem of Scales: Borderless Science in a World of Borders
Chapter 11: The clash between global and national interest
Chapter 12: Governing global science and technology
 
PART VI. The Problems of Meaning: Synthesis, Wisdom and Judgement
Chapter 13: Science, synthesis and metacognition
Chapter 14: The dialectics of what is and what matters