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

Leonard Hastings Schoff Lectures

by Lisa Anderson

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.

176 pages, Paperback

First published August 6, 2003

About the author

Lisa Anderson is an American political scientist and the former President of the American University in Cairo (AUC). A specialist on Middle Eastern and North African politics, Anderson served as the President of AUC from 2011 to 2016 and as Provost from 2008 to 2010. Prior to joining AUC, Anderson served as the James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations at Columbia University, the dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, the chair of the political science department and the director of the Middle East Institute]. Previously, she was an assistant professor of government and social studies at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Kelsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I may have approached this book in the wrong way: I expected a series of firm advice on how to translate or derive policy prescriptions from the latest research coming out of major political science departments. It didn't quite fill my expectations and I thought it was a bit too dry. I didn't have much of an interest in the evolution of social sciences in German Universities during the 19th century. Nonetheless, Lisa Anderson published an article with essentially the same information but throughly condensed and much more useful. Article titled: "Too much information? Public science, the University, and the Public Sphere"