More than a medium for information, knowledge is an instrument for coexistence. Its most important function is not to reflect a supposed objective truth, adapting our perceptions to the exterior reality, but to turn itself into the most powerful device when it comes time to configure a democratic space for human beings to live communally. The fact is that our main collective problems, contrary to what is normally said, are not problems of will, of lack of decision-making or of immorality; we should also consider them as cognitive failures or ones that originate in a deficient organization of knowledge from the point of view of its democratic legitimacy.

This book develops the thesis that knowledge and its surroundings (the politics of science and of innovation, government political consulting, evaluation of public policies, understanding of the current social transformation or the cognitive competence of the regulators) are areas in which not only economic prosperity but, more fundamentally, democratic quality is decided. The politics of knowledge and those that arise through knowledge have been turned into a subject of democratic citizenship in which many theoretical problems are in play, but mainly that of the quality of our public space.

Translated by Hope Doyle D´Ambrosio

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