Technocratic Calculation: Economy, Evidence and Experiments

The chapter takes up the technocratic preoccupation with quantification, measurement and scientific politics. While this is a consistent feature of technocratic governance, the proliferation of performance management, accountability and evaluation systems, evidence-based policy and experimental learning also reflect a new commitment to radical incrementalism and a ‘what works’ approach, which is significantly different from earlier and industrial technocracy. The chapter illustrates the implications of this development in the cases of experimental EU governance and nudging interventions.

Conclusions

This book has aimed to examine dialectics in modern epistemology and to compare it with critical theory, not ‘in order to’ but ‘because’ the latter can offer innovative means of dialectical theorizing. In this way, critical theory has the potential to advance twenty-first century epistemology.The book attempted to avoid old and traditional modes such as ‘biographies’ of scientific terms or historical elaboration or evaluation of epistemological arguments. I also challenged the de-scientification and pre-modern approaches that have returned to the epistemological fore. It is essential for a critical theory of the twenty-first century that it can articulate a political epistemology through the dialectical potential. The book attempted to present and ground the argument that a retreat to de-theorization for the sake of the partiality of empiricism, as well as the post-modern approach, signifies not a space of post-modernity, but rather the process of de-modernization that begins with the instrumentalization of the sciences and extends to the social and the political. In order to avoid social and scientific instrumentality and pre-modern positions, the construction of scientific politics has to be criticized under the perspective of a political epistemology.

A Social History of Suicide in Mexico City, 1900–1930

Chapter 1 presents an overview of scientific politics and the drive to collect and record moral statistics. Extrapolating from the extant suicide inquests, the chapter also analyzes suicide by gender, time of day and year committed, method, and reasons professed by the victims.

John Tyndall and the Royal Medal that was never struck

Just once in its long history has a Royal Medal been awarded but not presented. John Tyndall FRS (1820–93) was the chosen recipient in 1853 for his early work on diamagnetism but declined to accept it. The story of why Tyndall felt compelled to turn down this considerable honour sheds light on the scientific politics and personal relationships of the time, on the importance given to the study of magnetism, and on Tyndall's own character and career.