A BIT of my book

Maybe you’d like some food for thought, but you’ve already had lunch and it’s too early for dinner. Or maybe you’re looking for a midnight snack. You want something tasty but not filling, just a short chapter or two, a bookish treat.

You could try a bite from a bit of my book.

The culinary landscape of academic publishing is changing in all sorts of ways, and MIT Press recently expanded their menu with something called “BITS”: single-serving chapters of MIT Press titles.

A BIT doesn’t cost much ($2.99 to $4.99), and it’s readable on any screen (DRM-free). If after the BIT you want to buy the book, you get 40 percent off on the Press website.

The BIT of my book Science in Democracy includes chapters 3 and 8. The text is identical to the printed book, including footnotes, but without the original page numbers.

Chapter 3 is about the relation of democracy and expertise in eighteenth-century theories of political representation. Here’s an excerpt:

Commentators today usually portray political representation as necessary for coping with the size and complexity of modern states. The founders of representative government agreed, but they were also convinced that it offered a way of dealing with the perceived incompetence of unruly citizens. Scholars today echo this view when discussing the relation of science and democracy. They acknowledge that science incorporates both egalitarian and elitist elements (e.g., egalitarian norms of publicity and transparency on one hand, and merit-based restrictions on membership on the other). But when it comes to democracy, they equate democracy with its egalitarian elements (e.g., voting rights) and neglect its elitist elements (voting is a process for selecting representatives whom voters deem, in one respect or another, more qualified than others). Indeed, commentators generally equate calls for the “democratization” of science with efforts to increase the quantity rather than the quality of public engagement. This chapter shows that this populist view of democracy is embedded within the liberal theory of representative government. It also shows that this view of democracy stems from a time when most people believed that democracy necessarily led to majority tyranny. This historical legacy suggests that finding a place for science within representative democracy depends on rethinking the relationships among science, democracy, and representation.

Chapter 8 is about how science becomes political:

To say that science has been politicized implies that it was previously not political. And assuming that politicization is reversible, things that have become political can be depoliticized as well. But what does it mean to make something political? How does one know that a particular change or event qualifies as an instance of the larger phenomenon of politicization? . . . My aim in this chapter . . . is not to tell everyone what politics really is, nor to subvert practical efforts to shift received boundaries between science and politics. On the contrary: the purpose of asking how science becomes political is to facilitate such efforts by exploring their normative stakes and potential contribution to representative democracy.

That’s all for now. Go ahead, try it, you’ll like it.