Description: This book offers an empirically detailed, cross-nationally comparative account of the institutional logics and practices through which modern democratic governments construct public reason, that is, the forms of evidence and argument designed to persuade publics that legal and policy decisions are founded on reliable knowledge and expertise.
Review Quotes:
'This collection brings together a quarter century of writing by Sheila Jasanoff on the sources and impacts of science and technology. In showing how they permeate public life, she demonstrates also that the field of Science and Technology Studies is no arcane specialty, but a research field of sweeping significance for law, history, administration, and the social sciences. At stake in the interactions of science with democratic institutions is public reason itself.' - Theodore M. Porter, UCLA, USA
'This book fascinatingly asks: What begins where all that seems solid, all that modernity has created, melts into air, leaving no shared ground to stand on? Sheila Jasanoff's exciting answer: a new age and style of public reason that can shed surprisingly clear light on a world in turmoil.' - Ulrich Beck, University of Munich, Germany & L.S.E, U.K
'No one has contributed as much as Sheila Jasanoff to furthering our understanding of the importance of law in the complex relationships that develop between politics and technoscience. Science and Public Reason is more than a collection of her most significant articles on the subject; this seminal book opens entirely original perspectives on what, in a globalized world, a new alliance between science, techniques and democracy could and should be.' - Michel Callon, Ecole des mines de Paris, France
'Sheila Jasanoff's latest book demonstrates, once again, why she is at the very forefront of her field.' - Bruce Ackerman, Yale University, USA