Science policy and democracy

Abstract

Vannevar Bush's Science: The Endless Frontier (1945) continues to serve as the default statement of United States science policy and has been republished with an extended defense by Rush Holt, a research physicist, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and recent executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Holt recognizes some challenges in Bush's conception of the science-democracy relationship but then makes his own case for a revised understanding of the relationship between science and the American regime. An unquestioned assumption of both Bush and Holt is that science benefits democracy, that democracy is even dependent on science. For Bush the dependency is strictly material, for Holt it is also procedural. Holt's particular appeal is to the value of science as providing evidence based knowledge that can increase rationality in democratic politics. This appeal is made, however, without acknowledging counter-evidence about the ways science can be socially destabilizing.