Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.

35 (2004) 401412
www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Essay review
Technological democracy or democratic
technology?
Je Kochan
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane,
Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK

Political machines: governing a technological society

Andrew Barry; Athlone, London & New York, 2001, pp. x+305, Price 50.00
hardback, ISBN 0-485-00439-9, Price 16.99 paperback, ISBN 0-485-00634-0

From simple tools and techniques to sophisticated electro-mechanical gizmos

and complex instrumental regimes, technology is often considered a ubiquitous
presence in our private and public lives. Yet, despite such widespread use of the
term technology, we have hardly even begun to develop a rigorous intellectual
understanding of the pleasures and pains, puzzles and paradoxes of our relation to
the artefacts and operations this term names. Thus the appearance of a new book
which investigates, in a fresh and interesting way, the place of technology in our
lives is immediately welcome. Andrew Barrys book, Political machines: Governing
a technological society, is both an interesting and provocative read. It is, by turns,
instructive and aggravating. In the rst section of this essay, I provide a sketch of
Barrys book with some brief comments. In the second section, I oer a more
extended set of reections.

1.

In Chapter 1, Barry introduces the basic premiss of the book: that the European
Union forms a technological society. He claims that, in addition to their long-
standing commitment to enlightenment, science and invention, contemporary
Europeans are intensely preoccupied with the problems and potential benets of
specic technologies, as well as with the new models of social and political order

E-mail address: jwlk2@cam.ac.uk (J. Kochan).

0039-3681/$ - see front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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402 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412

which technology seems to oer. We live in a technological society, writes Barry,

to the extent that scientic technologies dominate our sense of the kinds of pro-
blems that government and politics must address, and the solutions we must adopt
(p. 2). It should be highlighted from the start that this concept of a technological
society is, for Barry, a premiss rather than a hypothesis; throughout the book he
uses the concept to interpret the data he presents, rather than using his data to test
the plausibility of the concept. Accordingly, the reader will be convinced by this
book only to the extent that she accepts Barrys assumption that the European
Union is a technological society.
Barry analyses the European preoccupation with technology from two inter-
related perspectives, and as a result the book divides into two parts. Part 1 (Chap-
ters 25) examines the central role technology plays in the reconguration of
European government. Following Foucault, Barry sees government not as an insti-
tution, but as a collection of governmental and self-governmental practices.
Government is a technical matter which operates not just within territorial bound-
aries, but also and increasingly within discontinuous technological zones opened up
by the circulation of artefacts and practices. Part 2 (Chapters 69) examines the
role of individual citizens within these technological zones of governance. There a
citizens value is measured against her level of technical literacy. Contemporary
Europeans are expected to be highly skilled and knowledgeable, and to take part in
a regime of continuous education which keeps pace with political and commercial
innovation.
In investigating the central role of technology in modern government Barry
applies three main considerations. First, he attends to the complex interplay of
political, scientic, and technical discourses, and prescribes reexivity with respect
to our analytical categories and metaphors, as well as their histories. What,
he asks, is the appropriate analytical vocabulary for the social sciences? Second,
taking a lesson from the history and sociology of science, Barry argues that scien-
tic and technical activity is remarkably messy, uncertain and social, and that tech-
nical applications are often extremely localised. Since government is a technical
matter, governmental activities share these same characteristics with scientic and
technological activities. Third, Barry investigates the relation between government
and the politics of protest. He argues that, like science and government, political
protest too is a technical matter: even the most apparently anti-technological of
protests has a certain technical dimension (p. 6). On its own, this is an obvious
and not very interesting observation. What makes it important for Barry is the
ironic fact that an apparently anti-technological protest, being itself circumscribed
within a technological society, is no less technological than the government it
protests against.
Following this, Barry goes on to introduce some key terms and to outline his
basic methodology. He makes a nice distinction between politics and the political.
[P]olitics, he tells us, is a way of coding a historically variable cluster of practices
(p. 207). The political, in contrast, is an index of [the] space of contestation and
dissensus. That which is political is that which opens the space of politics (p. 7).
This distinction allows Barry to make the illuminating point that politics, by
 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412 403

controlling against dissensus, is often anti-political in its eects. More dubious

is Barrys claim that [a] distinction can be made between a technical device, con-
ceived of as a material or immaterial artefact, and a technology, a concept which
refers not just to a device in isolation but also to the forms of knowledge, skill,
diagrams, charts, calculations and energy which makes its use possible (p. 9). This
distinction is, at most, a partwhole distinction. Essentially, Barry is claiming that
every technical device is circumscribed within a technology. But this is not self-
evident. While it is now widely accepted in technology studies that artefacts are
inherently social, it does not necessarily follow from this that they are also part of
a technology. While I nd it a convincing argument that the knowledge and skill
needed to use an artefact (as well as the knowledge and skill which might, in some
cases, be attributed to an artefact) are necessarily social, I have a hard time under-
standing how they are also necessarily technological. Barry does not help the
reader here, no doubt because his study simply presupposes the co-extension of the
social and the technological without demonstrating it. I will discuss this point at
greater length in the second section.
As for his methodology, Barry describes his intentions as, in a double sense,
empiricist (p. 22). First, following from his second main consideration, that social
life is complex, messy and irreducible, Barry introduces a number of case studies,
most of which are drawn from his own eldwork. This is an excellent move which
makes for interesting reading, and it is the strongest aspect of the book. Second,
Barrys study is meant to be empiricist in a perspectival sense (ibid.). He writes
that [i]n speaking of a technological society my ambition is not to try to sum up
an epoch, but rather to make visible a series of interconnected political preoccupa-
tions, anxieties and projects which might be otherwise obscure (ibid.). Here it
becomes more clear that the basic premiss mentioned abovethat Europe is a
technological societyis something Barry carries with him into the eld, rather
than something he brings back from the eld. Thus, the empirical virtue of Barrys
interpretive perspective will stand or fall on the plausibly of this initial assumption.
In Chapter 2, Barry develops his notion of the technological zone. Based on the
argument that technological zones cut across territorial boundaries, Barry describes
the European Union as an attempt to establish a unied, discontinuous zone
of technological government which operates across national borders. Artefacts
and practices which are described as cultural are typically restricted to specic
territories, while objects and practices that are considered scientic or technical are
precisely those which are thought to be able to escape territorial constraints
(pp. 3839).
In Chapters 3 and 4 Barry considers, respectively, the notions of harmonisation
and networking. Both terms play a central role in accounting for the recongura-
tion of Europe as a technological zone. In Chapter 3 Barry argues that, through
harmonisation, the EU government set[s] the conditions within which a limited
degree of standardisation . . . is expected to occur (p. 64). Rather than exercising
direct control over the processes of harmonisation, the EU Commission delegates
responsibility to the diverse powers of existing national professional, private and
public organisations (p. 73). Readers will be reminded here of the leading role
404 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412

metrological institutes (such as the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in

Sevres, France) play in setting the metrical conditions underpinning precision
measurement in laboratory practice. Barrys account of the EU Commissions
troubled attempt to regulate the scientic measurement of the bathing-water qual-
ity of nearly 20,000 European beaches, rivers, and lakes nicely illustrates how
exceedingly dicult it is to realise the ideal of a smooth, standardised, calculable
zone of European government. This example also allows Barry to make the plaus-
ible argument that [t]he politics of the European Union . . . are to be found in the
most detailed and technical of laboratory procedures (p. 78).
Just as metrology paves the way for scientic expansionism, so harmonisation
sets the stage for European integration. In both cases, a favoured model for such
processes is the network. In Chapter 4, Barry examines the role the network model
has played and continues to play in EU politics. Networking, writes Barry, is
reckoned to be an economic and political imperative in the face of the double
impact of new technology and globalisation (p. 86). However, just as harmonis-
ation has been a very dicult policy to implement, so it has gone too with net-
working. Europe, writes Barry, is not a network state. But the European Union
is a political institution in which the model of the network has come to provide a
dominant sense of political possibility (p. 102). As Barry shows, the EU Com-
mission typically employs the network model in two distinct ways, one social and
the other technological. In the most interesting part of the chapter, Barry draws
upon his own eldwork among EU bureaucrats to describe the self-styled intellec-
tual militants who stage interventions into the mainstream bureaucracy with the
hope (largely frustrated) of bringing the social and the technological interests of
the EU project together under an integrated model of socio-technical networks.
In Chapter 5, Barry considers the role of intellectual property rights in the
ordering and reordering of Europe as an economic and technological zone
(p. 113). He argues that, even as the EU takes shape, the very denition of intellec-
tual property is itself unsettled. Hence, [c]onicts and controversies over what
intellectual property rights are, and what they can be applied to, are also con-
troversies about what Europe should become and what form of unity it should
have (p. 107). Much of this conict is ethical in nature. As a critical feature of a
liberal capitalist economy (p. 111), intellectual property rights allow for the forma-
tion of privatised technological zones (p. 103) whose commercial interests may
conict with those of a unied European community. Barry explores this conict
with examples drawn from three areas: computer software design, genetics, and
astronomy.
With Chapter 6, the book moves on to consider the role individual citizens
might play in Europes technological society. Here Barry is concerned with the
method to produce the kind of citizen required to meet the political requirements
of a modern technological democracy (p. 128). This method, Barry proposes, is in
part captured by the concept of interactivity. He tells us that interactive and net-
worked technologies have come to be seen as a key resource in the making up of
citizens (p. 127) and that interactivity will provide part of the solution to the pro-
blems of what I have called technological citizenship (p. 151). Central among these
 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412 405

problems is that of promoting citizens involvement in the current technological

order. However, the task of the public authorities is not to direct or provide for
the citizen but to establish the conditions within which the citizen could become an
active and responsible agent in his or her own government (p. 135). Thus, pace
Foucault, [i]n an interactive model, subjects are not disciplined, they are allowed
(p. 129). But it seems the reader should not confuse this allowance with liberty, for
Barry also tells us that [a]ccording to political philosophers and sociologists to be
a citizen today entails accepting a moral demand to be active in, and informed
about, public life (p. 127).1 For a citizen embedded in the moral economy of an
interactive technological order, interaction is not merely a choice: [i]nteraction is
compulsory and compulsive (p. 145).
Barrys concept of interactivity as a political strategy is modelled on his con-
sideration of interactivity in the more modest context of the modern science and
technology museum.2 He makes the claim that, to the extent that the EU is a tech-
nological zone, the problems of educating and engaging citizens, on the one hand,
and museum visitors, on the other, are comparable. For museum managers, Barry
writes, interactive technologies are expected to enhance the agency of the visitor
and to channel it in the most productive direction (p. 142). Depending on the form
an interactive gallery might take, Barry characterises interactivity with a term
appropriated from Slavoj Zizek, interpassivity, and his own term creative pass-
ivity (p. 141). Barrys conclusion seems to be that the museum-based experience of
interactivity may serve as a model for the production of citizens congured to the
needs of a technological democracy.
In Chapter 7 Barry oers an interesting case study of the conicts which can
arise between scientists and politicians in the publication of scientic information.
Barrys eldsite was the London Borough of Southwark in the mid-1990s, where
an EU-subsidised anti-pollution project measured local levels of air pollution and
published the results in real time on electronic notice boards throughout the
borough. The interest of the local authority was both to demonstrate its partici-
pation in a wider EU project as well as to force a shift in popular environmental
consciousness. In the end, these political interests won out over scientists concern
with the accuracy of the information produced. The desire (and the availability
of funding) to be part of a European technological society displaced a scientic
concern for truth (p. 166).
Chapter 8 forms the centre of Barrys consideration of the relation between
government and the politics of protest. The chapter focuses on opposition to road
construction in southern England in the mid-1990s. In seeking to explain the
demonstrations of the anti-road protestors, Barry looks to the sociology of scien-
tic knowledge. He makes the provocative claim that there are signicant parallels

1
In a footnote on the recent moralism in talk about citizenship, Barry cites Giddenss suggested motto
for the new politics: no rights without responsibilities (p. 245 n. 1, original emphasis).
2
Specically, Barry considers the Cite des Sciences et de LIndustrie at La Villette in Paris, The
Exploratorium in San Francisco, and the London Science Museum.
406 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412

between the conduct of scientic and political demonstrations (p. 193). As an

ethnographic study of civil disobedience and non-violent direct action, the chapter
makes for interesting reading. However, as a comparative study of scientic and
political demonstration, it falls short. For such a study I would have expected
Barry to give comparable attention to a particular case of scientic demonstration.
He does not, and the plausibility of the analogy suers as a result. Indeed, his
discussion of scientic demonstration covers scarcely more than one paragraph,
and there he draws a sweeping parallel between demonstrations in the medieval
anatomy lecture theatre and in the modern university teaching laboratory. In both
cases the truths of laboratory science are proved to the novice, in part, through
demonstration (p. 177).
Based on this analogy, then, Barry concludes that the intended eect of the
[anti-road] protests was . . . to demonstrate a truth which it [had] been otherwise
impossible to demonstrate in public by other means (p. 178). Here Barry runs into
trouble. For, having argued that demonstrations demonstrate truths, he must nat-
urally identify this truth. Thus, he suggests that the truth of the anti-road demon-
strations was that the existence of humans, animals and the land were, in whatever
way, mutually implicated (p. 183). Yet this apparently ecological conclusion is at
odds with his own eld observation that, for the protestors, [t]he idea that there
should be a common political doctrine was denied or resisted (p. 184). Indeed,
Barry advises the reader that, while it might be tempting to think that the anti-
road protest movement was marked by a clear ideological programnationalist,
anarchist, feminist, ecological or otherwise . . . for many protestors if anything, the
opposite was true (ibid.). This tension between Barrys need to identify a truth and
the observed behaviour of the protestors can perhaps be resolved by highlighting
an aspect of the sociology of scientic knowledge which Barry ignores: namely,
that scientic truths are social institutions achieved through the deliberate and
painstaking building of consensus among members of a scientic community.
Thus, it would seem a disanalogy on Barrys part to argue that the lack of ideologi-
cal unity among the protestors was the consequence of the active resistance or
denial of a common doctrine. This suggests an a priori consensus which Barrys
own observations do not support. And anyway, unlike scientists, the primary goal
of protestors is surely not to demonstrate their own consensual truth claims;
rather, they are interested in challenging the truth claims of others, in this case the
public authorities who ordered the road construction. The parallels between scien-
tic and political demonstration are not nearly as strong as Barry suggests.
Chapter 9 serves as the books conclusion. Here Barry returns to the claim made
in Chapter 1 that in a technological society technical innovation serves as the
model for political invention. He concludes that inventiveness can be viewed as
an index of the degree to which an object or practice is associated with opening up
possibilities (p. 211, original emphasis). Arguing that an invention achieves its
status not independently but through its align[ment] with inventive ways of think-
ing and doing and conguring and reconguring relations with other actors, Barry
concludes that we may inhabit a world within which the concepts and technologies
of networking and interactivity have come to dominate our sense of possibility
 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412 407

(pp. 211, 214). On this basis, Barry makes the concluding observation that high
levels of information production and rapid rates of technical change are not
necessarily inventive. Indeed, by closing down certain possibilities for action, they
may actually be a way of enforcing or sustaining a kind of socio-technical or
socio-cultural stasis (p. 212). Such techniques of anti-invention can be a deliberat-
ive element of industrial or cultural strategies (ibid.). Barry suggests that such
techniques can be identied with the term defensive innovation (ibid.). However,
while Barry limits his discussion to competition in the so-called knowledge econ-
omy, these conclusions are also relevant to his discussion of technological
citizenship, as will be argued in the next section.

2.

If the reader of this essay has had diculty locating, in the above summary,
Barrys own position with respect to the political developments he sets out to
describe, then this reects my own quandary as reviewer. I should think Barrys
apparent reluctance to take a stand was motivated by his desire to present his
material in as impartial a manner as possible. Yet it is dicult to see how one
might remain objective whilst analysing the social and political circumstances of
ones own community. At the very least, I would have liked Barry to explicitly
address this methodological diculty. As it is, throughout the book, I was gnawed
by the worry that Barrys perspective is not as balanced as it might have been.
Indeed, this trouble seems directly related to the diculty I already noted in Sec-
tion 1: that Barry takes the concept technological society as a basic premiss with
which to interpret his data, rather than a hypothesis to be tested against his data.
This leads him, for example, to conclude that all technical devices are necessarily
circumscribed within a technology. More importantly, this premiss seems to lie
behind his espoused empirical perspectivalism. Barry has allowed his attention and
his interpretation to be guided by the assumption that Europe is a technological
society. Of course, any empirical investigation must rely upon some basic assump-
tions in order to interpret its data. However, the neutrality of the interpretation
rising out of that investigation will depend on the extent to which those assump-
tions are beyond doubt. And, the assumption that, in Europe, the social and the
technological are co-extensive phenomena strikes me as dubious.
The notion of a technological Europe is not, of course, without precedent.
Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger were two of the more prominent twentieth-
century writers preoccupied with this theme. Elluls inuential 1954 book, La
technique ou lenjeu du siecle, appeared in English in 1964 as The technological
society (Ellul, 1964). The English title is an unfortunate translation, for it suggests
that Elluls basic subject was technology rather than technique. But, for Ellul, tech-
nology was the result of the particular ways in which technique can be organised
into complex, co-ordinated wholes. He argued at length that it was the state which
eected such organisation. In short, Ellul claimed, contra Barry, that while tech-
nology requires technique, not all technique requires technology. On the other
408 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412

hand, Elluls analysis of the states role in co-ordinating technique recalls Barrys
analysis of the role Brussels plays in European harmonisation. Barry is surely right
in observing that the technological zone of the EU cuts across national boundaries,
but he fails to acknowledge the debt this present level of co-ordination owes to an
earlier history of co-ordination at state and regional levels. One obvious conse-
quence of ignoring the history of these developments is that Barry gives no atten-
tion to the fact that the technological threads which he identies in European
society are the contingent products of human labour, that they might have been
otherwise, and that they may yet be resisted and reformulated.3
In this, Barrys work resonates with that of Heidegger, particularly the latters
1953 lecture, The question concerning technology. There Heidegger argued that
technology is a mode of revealing (Heidegger, 1993, p. 319). He used the word
revealing to translate the ancient Greek word aletheia, which we typically trans-
late as truth. One might say, then, that when Barry characterises both scientic
and political demonstrations as demonstrations of truth, he is identifying them, in
Heideggerian terms, as modes of revealing. In this way, Barrys argument that
there are signicant parallels between these two kinds of demonstration, and that
both are circumscribed within technology, is just the argument that they both share
signicantly in a mode of revealing which is peculiar to technology. However, a
crucial argument of Heideggers paper is that technology is only one mode of
revealing, a mode which establishes itself through its own manifoldly interlocking
paths, through regulating their course (Heidegger, 1993, p. 322). Although
Heideggers focus was on technology as metaphysics, his account in this passage
recalls Barrys empirically based description of the European Commission as
adopting a network strategy to extend its regulatory inuence throughout its mem-
ber states. Indeed, on Barrys model, it should also characterise the political strat-
egy of the state authorities responsible for the road construction in southern
England. But it is questionable whether or not this model can be used to describe
the road protests. Certainly the capacity of the protestors to co-ordinate, regulate,
and extend their inuence, compared to that of the state authorities, was quite
weak. And, as we saw with Elluls work above, this dierence in organisational
capacity also marks a dierence between technique and technology. Once again,
Barrys assumption that all political action in contemporary Europe is also techno-
logical action seems to have blinded him to this dierence. In directing his atten-
tion away from governmental institutions and towards de-centred governmental
practices, Barry has attributed an undierentiated technological power to the
whole of modern European society. In so doing, he has lost eective sight of the
profoundly variegated nature of this power, its sites of intensity and weakness, of
oppression and resistance.

3
Barry is not unaware of the history of technology. In a 1996 publication, he draws a link between
nineteenth-century telegraphy and the growth of liberal political order (Barry, 1996). Otto Mayr (1986)
has made a similar argument, linking the growth of eighteenth-century liberalism to developments in
feedback engineering in that period. The correlation between interactive and self-regulative technologies,
on the one hand, and civic freedom, on the other, is a wonderful notion. If only it were true.
 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412 409

One way of trying to come to grips with the heterogeneity of technical perform-
ance might be to classify these dierences in terms of distinct modes of rationalis-
ation. If we consider the term technology etymologically, as the rational analysis
of technique, and include within this the devices and operations which facilitate,
extend, and embody (either directly or indirectly) that analysis, then perhaps we
will gain a better understanding of which technical and social operations and devi-
ces are, and which are not, technological in character. More importantly, we will
see the possibility of drawing a distinction more politically interesting than the
partwhole distinction Barry draws between technical devices and technologies:
that is, we might distinguish between the dierent modes in which technical and
social behaviour are rationalised. Andrew Feenberg proves helpful in this regard,
oering a distinction between technocratic and democratic rationalisation. By
technocracy, Feenberg means the use of technical delegations to conserve and
legitimate an expanding system of hierarchical control (Feenberg, 1999, p. 103).
Democratic rationalisation, in contrast, uses techniques and tools to undermine
the existing social hierarchy or to force it to meet needs it has ignored (Feenberg,
1999, p. 76).4
My argument, then, is that Barrys so-called technological societya society in
which scientic technologies dominate our sense of the kinds of problems that
government and politics must address and the solutions we must adoptmight
also be identied as a network of technocratic inuence which extends through,
but is not co-extensive with, European society (p. 2). This reformulation allows
those citizens whose civic consciousness is not, in fact, dominated by scientic
technologies to re-enter the political eld. Inclusion, however, does not equal
empowerment. For even the most scientically informed lay person is not an expert
scientist, and as long as techno-scientic expertise provides the standard by which
questions and solutions are socially legitimated, that person will be eectively
silenced in political debate. This is not to say, of course, that scientic experts
rule the roost in a technocracy. Technocratic government need not necessarily be
scientic. As Feenberg argues, it may simply be legitimated by reference to scien-
tic expertise rather than tradition, law, or the will of the people (Feenberg, 1999,
p. 4). Hence, it is often the rhetoric rather than the practice of technocrats which
legitimates their governmental actions. Barry gives us a ne example of this
in Chapter 7, where he describes how the public authorities of the Borough of
Southwark appropriated inaccurate scientic data in order to legitimate their own
administrative interests.5
I am trying to sketch out a picture of technocratic government to which we
might usefully apply Barrys concept of defensive innovation. In the sphere of
politics, such defensive practices may have social consequences stretching far

4
Feenbergs distinction recalls Lewis Mumfords 1963 distinction between authoritarian and demo-
cratic technics. See Mumford (1972).
5
For more examples of the way in which science and technology are abused for political ends, see
Latour (2002) and Wartofsky (1992).
410 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412

beyond the limits of Barrys knowledge economy. To the extent that we inhabit a
world in which the concepts and technologies of networking and interactivity have
come to dominate our sense of possibility, so too it may be that the concept of
scientic expertise has come to dominate our sense of what counts as a legitimate
contribution to political discourse (p. 214). If, as Barrys work suggests, network-
ing, interactivity, and expertise eectively close down certain possibilities for
popular engagement in government, then they may actually pose a danger to the
very democracy which Barry seems to suggest they will enhance.
This raises concerns about Barrys interactive model of technological citizenship.
Recall that, in Barrys perspectival account, interactivity will provide part of the
solution to the problems of . . . technological citizenship (p. 151). What concerns
me is the democratic legitimacy of a technocratic form of government which
obstructs the political agency of its citizens. In contrast, for Barrys technological
society, what is at issue is the technological legitimacy of a citizenry whose lack of
participation threatens the eciency of its government. The weight of this dier-
ence is hinged on the extent to which participation falls short of agency, and whe-
ther or not democracy is possible given an impoverishment of popular agency. To
the extent that there is a decit of agency in Barrys interactive model of cit-
izenship, we can call into doubt the democratic legitimacy of the form of govern-
ment he has identied as technological democracy. While we can reasonably
expect the administrators of a science museum to place certain inexible limits on
the actions of museum visitors, it is not at all clear that an analogous management
model is appropriate for a democratically governed society. If technological
arrangements can also be political arrangements, then clearly the technological
arrangements of a democratic society should be the product, not of technocratic
rationalisation, but of democratic rationalisation. The point is that technological
arrangements are not unquestionably neutral; they may in fact impose, not just
operational, but normative limits on actions falling under their inuence.6 Under-
standing the ways in which a technology is produced and activated can be essential
to understanding the prescriptive eects that technology exercises on our lives.
Barry would, I think, agree with this analysis. Recall that he tells us that [i]nter-
action is compulsory and compulsive (p. 145). The interactive environment of the
science museum compels visitors to act in some ways and not in others. Broad-
ening the eld to social and political associations in general, such an interactive
arrangement would enforce the interests of those responsible for maintaining its
production. For Barry, that responsibility lies in the hands of the public autho-
rities . . . [who] establish the conditions within which the citizen would become an
active and responsible agent in his or her government (p. 135). I should think, on
the contrary, that a democracy places the conditions for acceptable political behav-
iour in the hands of the citizens themselves. Granted, if the public authorities
responsible for shaping popular morality were genuinely representing the interests
of the public, then theirs would be a democratic system of government. However,

6
This point has been forcibly argued by Latour (1992) and Winner (1986).
 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412 411

to the extent that the technological enactments of public authorities are legitimated
by reference to scientic expertise rather than popular will, and to the extent that
these enactments owe more to private interests than public interests, theirs is not a
functioning democracy. In fact, it is a technocracy. Barrys notion of defensive
innovation seems an excellent tool for trying to understand the ways in which
these private interests can come to monopolise government and limit the scope of
citizens agency in public life.7
The interconnected political preoccupations, anxieties, and projects which Barry
sets out to uncover seem to owe more to a technocratic than a democratic form of
government. As a consequence, Barrys notion of technological democracy, iden-
tifying as it does a technocratic, rather than a democratic, mode of rationalisation,
seems a contradiction. I should think that, in any governmental arrangement worth
calling a democracy, it is not, in principle, technology which governs democracy,
but democracy which governs technology. A democratic society will endeavour to
produce democratic technologies. Indeed, this is one important way in which it will
demonstrate its legitimacy. It seems a fact that modern European society is neither
wholly democratic, nor wholly technocratic. This ts well with Barrys observation
that government, like science, is a remarkably messy, uncertain, and irreducible
matter. Perhaps a more sensitive attention to the role defensive innovation plays
in contemporary politics will help us to separate the threads of technocracy from
those of democracy. If so, then surely this books greatest contribution is its
impressive ethnographic work, which helps bring into sharp relief the technocratic
machinations threatening contemporary democratic practices. It is not at all clear
to me that this was the contribution Barry had hoped to make, but it is the one
which I have chosen to accent as my nal note.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Michael Bresalier, Martin Kusch, and Estheranna Stauble for

their helpful advice during the preparation of this review.

References
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7
As a rejoinder to Barrys citation of, in the context of moral talk about citizenship, Giddenss motto
no rights without responsibilities (see n. 1), one might argue that, in a democratic society, the rights of
the public authorities are legitimated only by their acceptance of the moral demand to act responsibly in
the public interest. One objective of democratic rationalisation is to protect and extend the machinery
which compels public authorities to act with the utmost regard for the commonweal. One way of doing
this is to reduce the bureaucratic insulation surrounding technological policy decision-making proce-
dures.
412 J. Kochan / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 35 (2004) 401412

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