Science, technique and ideology in the 21st century: between the weakness of democratic public opinion and the power of the new forces of destruction

Abstract

Against that image that presents the 21st century societies as reflexive-knowledge societies (Beck, Giddens y Lash, 1997), where we would have begun to enjoy a reflective and democratic control of the effects the science and technology, we witness now the reappearance of the old dilemmas of Habermas's diagnosis referred to the ideological function of science and technology.

Both the political dilemma, which encompasses the tragic dislocation of science between freedom and subjection for the subject, and the theoretical dilemma, in which science oscillates between the opening and closing of the cultural world, create a series of problems that continue to demand to us a theoretical and practical research. On this occasion I would like to think about the current situation of these political and theoretical dilemmas of the relationship between science and society, through a reflection in two steps: First, I will try to update the critical diagnosis that studied the transformations of science and technology as a new form of ideology, which especially covered the transformations of the public sphere and the development of new forms of power justified as mere forms of technique improvement; latter, I try to think, through an analysis of some limits that this approach could have in our time, which are the main challenges that science and technology raise in our contemporary social world.