September 30, 2025 | 3 minute read
Science and the State
by Alondra Nelson, Charis Thompson, Sonja Van Wichelen, Joy Rohde, Joshua Barkan, Christo Sims and Diana Graizbord
What I read
In this paper (which is the introduction to a larger set of papers), the seven authors first describe the messy realities of how “the state” and “science” exist and work together. They then reference a specific conference seminar, where scholars met and discussed the intersection of science, technology, and governance.
The authors describe that science and the state are “inextricable and co-emergent.” This has always been true, but historic perspectives, such as that advanced by Robert K. Merton, saw this relationship as symbiotic and positively related: that “good science and democratic governance” led to openness and equitable participation. This view was largely adopted, but was not an accurate picture of that relationship, and the authors argue that while it may have been reasonable, it is certainly no longer true; technoscience is messy (or “profoundly intertwined”), and benefits of science on the state are not equally distributed.
COVID-19 is offered as an example of that inequality at play, as it theoretically made it clear to scientists and state officials that infrastructure is messy, and things like supply-chain effectiveness, advancements in vaccines, and the vague idea of freedom are all parts of a large push-and-pull system.
This is the backdrop for the special issue of which this article serves as the introduction, and is also the backdrop for a conference held at Princeton in 2020. Both focus on the nature of science, technology, and governance; a major finding from the conference is the underwhelming observation that “historical and ethnographic methods were indispensable to the task of defining the materialities of science and the state in all their granularity and specificity.”
The authors present three observations. The first is that “the state” is not one thing, but instead, is a web of agencies, citizens, lawmakers, experts, and private corporations; the second seems to nearly echo the first, but indicates that this web has changed over time (but constantly reinforces or reproduces inequities.) The third treats as a given the idea that the social sciences were historically developed to help states govern and “define and manage populations,” but now are less descriptive and more productive in collecting, generating, and applying knowledge.
The remainder of the text implies that these observations led to the curation of the essays involved in the special issue, which include a deeper investigation into pandemic mortality statistics across countries, a study of Fukushima, an examination of poverty in Mexico, and other contributions that draw similar connections between government, technology, and the lack of clear delineations of verticalized knowledge.
The introductory text, conference description, and preview of text proceedings underscore the idea that the artificial boundaries we have drawn between countries, and the artificial boundaries we have drawn between forms of applied science as technology, do not benefit a discussion of the realities of complex problems. While it is unclear what a reader is to do after knowing this, this articulation of the mess of technoscience serves as a reasonable way to organize diverse texts around a common spine.
ChatGPT's explanation of the role of Merton in this argument
Robert K. Merton’s mid-20th-century thesis is central here because it provides the baseline narrative the authors are critiquing. Merton argued that modern science and liberal democracy are mutually reinforcing: both flourish under conditions of openness, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. In his view, science and politics were separate but aligned spheres, and stable democratic states should model themselves on the universalist practices of good science. This formulation has been remarkably durable, especially among scientists and policymakers, because it frames science as apolitical and inherently supportive of democratic governance. The authors of “Science and the State” use Merton as a foil, pointing out that contemporary scholarship and current crises reveal science and state power to be deeply entangled, unevenly distributed, and shaped by technoscientific infrastructures—not the clean, symbiotic relationship Merton imagined.