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Jurgen Habermas on the public sphere, the state, and the private sphere
Jurgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher. He is perhaps most well known for the concept of the “public sphere.” Contrasted against this sphere are the state and the private sphere.
December 2012 / 4 min.
Deliberative democracy in the face of irrationality and distrust
Frank Fischer’s Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry argues that the public in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has increasingly gown critical and distrustful of the professions and their practices.
June 2012 / 5 min.
Nineteenth-century America was not a libertarian utopia
There is a commonly held perception that the United States in the nineteenth century lacked rules and regulations that we today commonly associate with intrusive “big government.”
May 2012 / 4 min.
Underdetermination and the balance between religion and science
The Duhem-Quine thesis, when simplified, explains how a given set of facts can produce more than one apparently true conclusion: essentially, different background assumptions lead to different outcomes.
April 2012 / 5 min.
Objectivity, science, and (a)political action
Theodore M. Porter, in Trust in Numbers, argues that the American distrust of elites – and of government itself – has led to a focus on “mechanical objectivity,” or rules to make decisions. In many ways similar to what American jurists call “procedural due process,” the idea is to diminish the necessity of personal judgement in favor of predictable, […]
April 2012 / 5 min.
David Noble on “The Religion of Technology”
In The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, David Noble investigates the Western relationship between religion and technology.
April 2012 / 6 min.
The problem of expertise in a liberal democracy
Stephen Turner’s book, Liberal Democracy 3.0, provides a useful background to the problem of expertise – especially scientific expertise – in a modern liberal democracy. What is a liberal democracy? First, of course, it’s important to define what a “liberal democracy” is. The term liberal, unfortunately, has acquired a negative connotation for many today, especially amongst conservatives in the […]
April 2012 / 5 min.
Stephen Turner describes “The Social Study of Science before Kuhn”
Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions – in many ways established the modern field of science studies. Stephen Turner provides a brief, socioligist’s version of the lead-up to Kuhn’s seminal book. Here’s a quick summary of his key points: Bacon and Comte Turner begins with Francis Bacon’s “The New Atlantis” (1627). Although Bacon’s work was more political […]
April 2012 / 5 min.
Freedom to contract at the end of the nineteenth century
In Kermit Hall’s words, the nineteenth century saw the “triumph of contract” over property, tort, and equity, as the law came “to ratify those forms of inequality that the market system produces.”
March 2012 / 3 min.
Reforming government regulations: Stephen Breyer’s technocratic solutions
In Breaking the Vicious Circle, Justice Stephen Breyer tackles the problem of regulation and risk in the American context.
March 2012 / 8 min.