Book Review: Who Speaks for Nature? On the Politics of Science, by Laura Ephraim

Date01 April 2020
DOI10.1177/0090591719866410
Published date01 April 2020
AuthorMelissa A. Orlie
Subject MatterBook Reviews
250 Political Theory 48(2)
Who Speaks for Nature? On the Politics of Science, by Laura Ephraim. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, 200 pp.
Reviewed by: Melissa A. Orlie, Political Science and Philosophy, University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
DOI: 10.1177/0090591719866410
Laura Ephraim asks “Who Speaks for Nature?” and in one respect her posing
of the question is rhetorical. She grants that we humans speak for nature and,
foremost, the scientists among us know nature authoritatively. How could we
answer otherwise, with climate change deniers abounding and earthly life
hanging in the balance?
What makes Ephraim’s book important, though, is a generative conflict the
book enacts and the inquiry about our idea of nature it prompts. Today, we
should ask “Whose nature? Which science?” and Ephraim makes a significant
contribution to our possibly acknowledging this need.1
Ephraim effectively avoids subservience to scientific authority. Since she
theorizes “the politics of science in worldly terms, as constructive, creative
activity of reconfiguring material reality” (21), Ephraim is unwilling to follow
those political theorists who “look to natural scientists to lend authority to
their redescriptions of nature” because “they too often leave unquestioned
how natural scientists attained the authority to which they defer” (23). Her
introductory chapter is as refreshing as it is informative about the history of
natural science as both foil and fulcrum for political theory. Inspired by
Giambattista Vico, Ephraim redefines the politics of science as that which
“creates a tissue of affinities, habits, rhetorics, and affects that hold disparate
human and nonhuman bodies together in a common world and enable some of
them to speak for others.” This is indeed a politics because the “phenomena
for which scientists speak are rendered perceptible, speakable, and intelligible
through multigenerational popular struggles to establish a common world
from the disparate materials encountered on the earth’s surface” (142).
Ephraim’s reading of Hannah Arendt is more generative still, recovering
an Arendt who imagines the intelligibility of nature in ways different from
Vico. I will stress their difference more than Ephraim does. The well-being
of the world depends upon common sense, in this Vico and Arendt concur.
They apparently diverge, though, when it comes to their understanding of
the conditions of common sense, as exemplified by Arendt’s conviction that
all sentient creatures have two purposes—to live and to perceive (41).
Arrestingly, Ephraim leads us back to Arendt’s sobering view that modern
sciences—in tandem with modern economics, Arendt stresses—have literally

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