000			01596pab a2200157 454500
008			180718b2002 xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
100			_aThorpe, Charles
245			_aDisciplining experts: scientific authority and liberal democracy in the Oppenheimer case
260			_c2002
300			_ap.525-62.
362			_aAug
520			_aIn 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had emerged from World War II as America's foremost scientific advisor to government, faced a security hearing which stripped him of his security clearance and barred him from government work. This paper provides a novel interpretation of this event and its significance by arguing that the hearing exposed fundamental and endemic tensions in the place of science in liberal democratic politics. Science's image of impersonal objectivity makes it useful to the liberal democratic state. Scientific advice helps to legitimize executive power as a neutral tool of the public will. However, as it is appropriated by the state, science is itself held accountable to bureaucratic conceptions of objectivity. Personal trust and personal authority in science become problematic in the context of state administration and the use of science for political legitimation. The Oppenheimer hearing exemplified the way in which the incorporation of science into the administrative apparatus of government has involved disciplining scientific experts and fashioning scientific authority after the bureaucratic model of the state. - Reproduced.
650			_aScience and technology
773			_aSocial Studies of Science
909			_a54852
999			_c54852 _d54852