Democratising Science? The People’s Science Movement and the Pandemic 15 8

Abstract

The relation between science and democracy has been articulated long ago by sociologists like Robert Merton (1973, cited in Hess, 1997:58), who had said that science and technology would thrive best in a liberal democratic order. As science became ‘the dominant guiding principle’ of democracy, its organised skepticism would provide society with a system of socio-cultural checks and balances and a critical mindset that would ‘invalidate particular dogmas of the church, economy or the state.’ Science as an institution could achieve its relative autonomy because of the support and patronage that it received from the public in Western democratic states.