Book Review: The Green Salesman: reflections on the book and film, 'An inconvenient truth' by Albert Gore Jr.
The Green Salesman: reflections on the book and film, 'An inconvenient truth', by Albert Gore Jr. Emmaus, PA, Rodale Press, 2006. ISBN: 9781594865671
Learning from Lomborg: or where do anti‐environmentalists come from?
SCIENCE GOES TO MARKET Whether we think of it as a new mode of knowledge production or as a more general condition of ‘epistemic drift’, there has been a rather significant change in the social relations of science over the past 20 years. As a neo-liberal ideology has spread around the world, infusing public policy and the public sphere itself with a kind of overarching commercial mentality, a large part of the scientific enterprise has gone to market. In almost all countries of the world, scientists are now routinely expected to sell themselves and their expertise to the highest bidder, while governments, as well as intergovernmental bodies such as the European Commission, spend much of the time and energy devoted to science policy deliberations to devising ways to bring university researchers into more intimate relations with private companies. For Michael Gibbons and his co-authors (1994), traditional forms of discipline-based knowledge production (what they term ‘mode 1’) have been more or less replaced by new forms that transcend disciplinary boundaries and are directly oriented toward ‘contexts of application’. A new mode of knowledge production—socalled ‘mode 2’—has emerged which challenges the values or norms that had previously governed the scientific enterprise. Already in the 1980s, Aant Elzinga (1985) had come to view the emerging commercialization with alarm, as he noted that established epistemic criteria, that is, the ways in which scientific truth claims are justified, were being put out of operation, as scientists increasingly found themselves in a condition of what he termed ‘epistemic drift’. More recently, the notion of a ‘triple helix’ of government, industry and
PLEASURE, POWER, AND THE PURSUIT OF COMMUNISM: SOVIET YOUTH AND STATE-SPONSORED POPULAR CULTURE DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945-1968
art, with certain students accused of “showing political immaturity, failing to understand the Party’s positions on art.” This episode constituted part of a broader crackdown on abstract art by the Khrushchev administration from late 1962, precipitated the the Soviet leader’s derision of such art forms in December 1962 at the Manege exhibit. Such instances demonstrate the limitations of the top-level promotion of youth grassroots initiative, as the Khrushchev leadership reigned in youth autonomy when it threatened to go beyond the boundaries of the permissible. The dates cited above have particular resonance, since both 1957-58 and 1962-63 represent two periods when those at the top of the Party hierarchy moved away from pursuing a more pluralistic, tolerant policy course, due to anxiety inspired by both sharpening Cold War hostilities and domestic developments. In these periods, official rhetoric censured what it labeled as 639 TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 13, d. 546, ll. 56-57. This is likely related to criticism of the Party associated with the fallout from the Secret Speech and the Hungary invasion. For more, see Polly Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to De-Stalinization,” in Jones ed., The Dilemmas, 41-63. 640 TsAOPIM, f. 6083, op. 1, d. 52, ll. 166-67. 641 Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manege Affair Revisited,” Kritika 6.4 (Fall 2005): 673716. 642 On these anxieties, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 156-88.