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

The dean of one of America's leading school of public affairs weighs in on the relationship between academia and policy-making. Anderson reveals a deep 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. She 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.