<html>
<body>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><div align="center"><font size=5>
<b>Science and Democracy Lecture and Panel Discussion</b></font><br>
<font size=5><b><br>
Professor Yaron Ezrahi</b></font><br>
<font size=4>Hebrew University of Jerusalem</font><br><br>
<br>
<font size=5><b>Necessary Fictions: Imagining Democracy after
Modernity</b></font><br><br>
<font size=4>April 9, 2007, 5-7 PM</font><br><br>
Starr Auditorium<br><br>
Kennedy School of Government<br><br>
79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA<br>
</div>
<br>
This talk examines the declining power of earlier imaginaries of science,
nature and reality in sustaining modern democratic categories of civic
agency, political participation, and conceptions of apolitical
constraints. The change that concerns us is in the idea of popular
sovereignty between early to late, or post-modern, democracy. Focusing on
the role of fictions in modern political history, I ask what kinds of
experience, how many facts, or how much publicly accessible evidence, are
needed to lend such a fiction as popular sovereignty the status of
believable reality. The historical record suggests that established
political fictions are actually<br>
sustained by a very small number of facts. What contributes most heavily
to the believability of such fictions is the efficacy with which they
match or sustain the normative-epistemological frame of a particular
political world. I conclude with a brief examination of the decline of
scientific or natural reality as components of post-modern political
imaginaries of order, and the consequences of that decline for enacting
popular sovereignty in our time.<br><br>
<b>Panelists:</b><br><br>
Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe; Fellow, Shorenstein Center, KSG<br><br>
James McCarthy, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard
University<br><br>
Steven Shapin, History of Science, Harvard University<br><br>
Cass Sunstein, Chicago and Harvard Law Schools<br><br>
Yaron Ezrahi is professor of political science at Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. He is the author of T<i>he Descent of Icarus: Science and the
Transformation of Contemporary Democracy</i> (Harvard, 1990) and
<i>Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel</i> (Berkeley
1998). His forthcoming book is concerned with the contemporary crisis in
the democratic imagination.<br><br>
<a href="http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/sts/events/ezrahi-necessaryfictions.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/sts/events/ezrahi-necessaryfictions.htm</a><br>
<br>
Jessica Li-chiung Eykholt<br>
Faculty Assistant-Specialist<br>
John Kennedy School of Government<br>
Harvard University<br>
79 John F. Kennedy Street<br>
Littauer 355, Mail Box 17<br>
Cambridge, MA 02138<br><br>
Tel: 617-495-5636<br>
Fax: 617-496-5960</blockquote>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<br>
</body>
</html>