The Nature of Power by Barry BarnesReview by: Yaron EzrahiIsis, Vol. 81, No. 4 (Dec., 1990), pp. 732-733Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/233817 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

* General Works

Barry Barnes. The Nature of Power. xiv + 205 pp., index. Urbana/Chicago: Univer- sity of Illinois Press, 1988. $29.95.

As an object of inquiry, the nature of power has proved sufficiently complex as to elude the conceptual and observational efforts of some of the most prominent so- cial and, particularly, political scientists. Barry Barnes's daring excursion into this dangerous terrain does not seem to leave the reader less appreciative of the elusive nature of the phenomenon of power. It is, nevertheless, an immensely intelligent, un- pretentious, and lucid discussion that delin- eates the main contours of the problem and weighs the costs and benefits of the alter- native intellectual strategies devised to at- tack it.

The study of power as a sociopolitical phenomenon has traditionally been more central to the concerns of social scientists than to those of historians of science. This division of labor, which for a long time was strained by Marxist perspectives on the re- lations between politics and culture, has re- cently been questioned further by influen- tial attempts to redefine the relations between power and knowledge, like the one made by Michel Foucault. Because of such intellectual developments, it is no longer necessary to apologize for reviewing a book on the nature of power in a journal devoted to the history of science.

There are additional reasons for the rele- vance of this book to readers of Isis. The most important one is that Barnes, who has done work in the sociology of scientific knowledge, tries to enlist his special com- petence to develop a notion of social knowledge that would help account for the phenomenon of power.

Barnes regards society as consisting of "calculative activities" based on the distri- bution of knowledge. "People," he notes, "act on the basis of what they know. Their actions being perceived, recognized, learned about, thereby feed back and affect the distribution of knowledge itself' (p.

141). "In speaking of knowledge and of power," he argues further, "we are refer- ring to one and the same thing. A society by virtue of being a distribution of knowl- edge is an ordered array of powers" (p. 169).

In advancing these ideas, Barnes at- tempts to furnish an account of power that would dispense with both functionalist and positivist approaches to the subject. While Barnes's general orientation appears sug- gestive, he does not, at least in this book, go far enough to show why, and how, the employment of such terms as the "social distribution of knowledge" provides a more powerful and advantageous conceptual tool to account for the phenomena of power than other possible terms or concepts like the social distribution of beliefs, values, or interests. Neither does Barnes provide a satisfactory analytical treatment of the var- ious forms and roles of knowledge, includ- ing, for instance, the relations between knowledge as a "mirror" and as a constitu- tive building block of society.

It is not entirely clear what is embraced within the scope of the term knowledge Barnes uses and how he will handle asser- tions, for example, that ignorance is just as constitutive of power configurations as knowledge or that power may be the prod- uct of certain modes of imagining, as dis- tinct from knowing, society, or the polity. Considering the centrality to his argument of the idea of the distribution of knowledge, Barnes gives surprisingly limited attention to the literature on the various ways in which knowledge can be conceived as so- cially distributed and, in particular, to how diverse cognitive, normative, and percep- tual frames are likely to assimilate and in- terpret the "same" knowledge differently.

While Barnes's sophisticated epistemo- logical treatment of power as a social phe- nomenon brings into focus important issues such as the role of social routines in gener- ating power-which he often understands as "a general capacity to act in a society" -and their relation to shared information, he falls short of breaking new ground. Barnes no doubt would be the first to dis-

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 81: 4: 309 (1990) 733

claim such ambitions. Since, in fact, his stated aim is much more moderate-to ap- proach the subject of power as part of an ongoing tradition rather than to radically challenge or replace it-his enterprise is not unsuccessful. As a matter of fact, his wonderfully open, informal, and insightful discussion is a worthy addition to this tra- dition.

YARON EZRAHI

Diderik Batens; Jean Paul van Bendegem (Editors). Theory and Experiment: Recent Insights and New Perspectives on Their Relation. (Synthese Library, 195.) xii + 283 pp. Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: D. Reidel, 1988. Dfl 120, $43, ?59.

These are papers presented at the Sixth Joint International Conference on the His- tory and Philosophy of Science, held in Ghent and Brussels during August 1986. Apparently all papers made available were printed. There is no evidence of editing, but there is an index of proper names and the quality of proofreading is higher than in recent publications of this sort. The sixteen papers range in time from Ptolemy's optics to the conservation of parity; topics include color, decision theory, early Heisenberg, and late Freud.

The most useful pieces are by authors lo- cated quite near the site of the conference and addressing material that has not re- cently been fashionable. Robert Halleux of Liege writes on theory and experiment in the early work of J. B. van Helmont and contributes a valuable analysis of the sev- eral notions of what nowadays we perforce label indifferently as "experiment." Gerard Simon of Lille carefully reports Ptolemy's experiments on binocular vision and refrac- tion. They are from "a branch of mathe- matics dealing with sensation and the soul," anticipating neither the psychology of perception nor physics, but part of "a fossil science."

Nils-Eric Sahlins of Lund discusses the importance of experimental evidence for foundations of decision theory. Since deci- sion theory is often presented as a matter of reflective rationality, in effect a priori, it is useful to have a careful argument, supple- mented by many examples, of the way in which experiments have forced conceptual changes in rational choice theory. For a far more extensive survey and analysis of the

literature the reader should consult Alvin E. Roth, "Laboratory Experimentation in Economics: A Methodological Overview" (Economic Journal, 1988, 98:974-103 1).

Catherine Chevalley of Paris has a use- fully brief and exact note on Heisenberg's conception of reality-not new material, but excellently summarized. Christoph Meinel of Hamburg notes how slender was the empirical support for seventeenth- century corpuscular theory but does not explain why it seemed so compelling to many of the livelier minds of the age. Hul- drych M. Koelbing instructively arranges numerous quotations from Newton and Goethe on light. Erwin Hiebert makes fur- ther observations on theory and experiment in nuclear physics, while Allan Franklin re- turns to the conservation of parity. Edward Erwin follows Adolf Grunbaum's demand for empirical testing of psychoanalysis, and Risto Hilpinen applies Jaakko Hintikka's program of interrogative logic to experi- mental questions. There are methodologi- cal papers by Evandro Agazzi, Aristides Baltas, Silvana Borutti, Vicenzo Cappel- letti, Thomas Nickles, and Marcello Pera.

IAN HACKING

Ronald C. Pine. Science and the Human Prospect. xvi + 320 pp., illus., bibls., index. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1989.

Intended as a supplement to honors-level high school and lower-division college sci- ence, history of science, and philosophy of science courses, this book by a philosophi- cally trained humanist tries to relate per- spectives drawn selectively from the con- tent of the sciences and reflections on the epistemic status of scientific knowledge to the "big" questions facing humans. What- if anything-is the meaning of human life? How do we know anything? How can we hope to extend the life of our species and the universe-as-we-know-it in the face of our capacity for destruction and our innate aggressive tendencies? And so forth.

Like the writings of Carl Sagan, for whom the author expresses an admiration that verges on hero worship, this work pro- motes a "cosmic" perspective and ap- proaches science "as a romance with the universe" (p. xiii). Moreover, like Sagan's, Ronald Pine's prose fluctuates from the heights of the poetic to the depths of pro- found ponderousness. In his attempt to

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