Thinking About Think Tanks: Politics by Techno-Scientific Means
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2018
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71519-3_18
Abstract
The creation of think tanks has in part been motivated by the desire for an apolitical politics, a politics of facts and standards rather than a politics of interests and public ignorance, and opposed to political machines. This chapter brings out some of the features of this kind of politics in the USA through the historical example of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, which illustrates the place of the construction of a factual world by think tanks as part of policy processes. The history of this bureau also shows how think tanks become surrogates for party intellectuals—a non-category in the USA. Think tanks then proliferated elsewhere as surrogates for politics by normal means.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Thinking About Think Tanks: Politics by Techno-Scientific Means, in J. E. Castro, B. Fowler & H. Martins (Eds.), Time, Science and the Critique of Technological Reason, Palgrave Macmillan, p. 347-365
Scholar Commons Citation
Turner, Stephen, "Thinking About Think Tanks: Politics by Techno-Scientific Means" (2018). Philosophy Faculty Publications. 192.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/phi_facpub/192
