Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century / Edition 1

by Lisa Anderson

Overview

The conditions that shaped the rise and expansion of American social science are rapidly changing, and with them, the terms of its relationship with power and policy. As globalization has diminished the role of the state as the locus of public policy in favor of NGOs, multinational corporations and other private entities, it has raised important questions about the future of the social sciences and their universalist pretensions.

As dean of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, Lisa Anderson has a unique vantage point on the intersection of social sciences, particularly political science, and public-policy formation and implementation. How do, or should, the research and findings of the academy affect foreign or domestic policy today? Why are politicians often quick to dismiss professors as irrelevant, their undertakings purely "academic", while scholars often shrink from engagement as agents of social or political change? There is a tension at work here, and it reveals a deeper compromise that arose as the modern social sciences were born in the nursery of late nineteenth century American liberalism: social scientists would dedicate themselves to the pursuit of objective, empirically verifiable truth, while relinquishing the exercise of power to governments and their agents. Anderson argues that this compromise helped underwrite the expansion of American influence in the twentieth century, and that it needs serious reexamination at the dawn of the twenty-first.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231126076
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	08/03/2005
Series:	Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.36(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lisa Anderson is dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Understanding Intervention and the Common Good
A Science of Politics: The American History of Scientific Policy and Policymaking
A Marketplace of Ideas: Social Science and Public Policy Beyond Government
Wars and Webs: Global Public Policy and International Social Science
Concluding Thoughts: Social Science, Policymaking, and the Common Good in the Twenty-first Century
Notes
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

Craig Calhoun

Lisa Anderson does an enormous service by tracing the ambivalence of social science toward public policy over the last century-the frequent occasions when social science played crucial roles, and the ways in which it sometimes cut itself off. She also analyzes the rise of policy research cut off from independent social science inquiry, the implications of reduced centrality of states amid globalization, and the challenges to universities as they seek to adapt to changes in both the demand for knowledge and the ways in which it is produced. If you think policy should be based on scientific knowledge, you should read this book--and think hard about the questions it raises.

— Craig Calhoun, president of the Social Science Research Council

Leslie Gelb

An important dean of an important public-policy school deals here with a vitally important subject.

— Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations

President of the Council on Foreign Relations

Michael W. Doyle

A remarkable book that every practitioner practicing and every teacher teaching public policy should read. It shows the uneasy relation between truth and power that has shaped evolution of public policy. It documents the close links among social science, policymaking and conceptions of the common good. It demonstrates the tensions that have and do underlie the craft ? whether to study the particular area or the universal process, abstractly or engaged--and it relates how those tensions have been resolved, only to emerge again. This volume is an indispensable guide to the debates that have shaped what schools of public policy try to teach.

— Michael W. Doyle, Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University

Editorial Reviews

This book offers a unique perspective on the interplay of the social sciences and public policy and discusses the emerging challenges with the privatization of the public sector and globalization of social sciences.

Public Administration Review

Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power is an important, argumentative, and highly accessible book that should interest social scientists and public policy practitioners alike...It should be required reading for students of social science in general, and students of public policy in particular.

International Studies Review - Johan Eriksson

Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power is an important, argumentative, and highly accessible book that should interest social scientists and public policy practitioners alike...It should be required reading for students of social science in general, and students of public policy in particular.

— Johan Eriksson

International Studies Review