Public policy requires public support, which in turn implies a need to enable the public not just to understand policy but also to be engaged in its development. Where complex science and technology issues are involved in policy making, this takes time, so it is important to identify emerging issues of this type and prepare engagement plans. In our horizon scanning exercise, we used a modified Delphi technique [1]. A wide group of people with interests in the science and policy interface (drawn from policy makers, policy adviser, practitioners, the private sector and academics) elicited a long list of emergent policy issues in which science and technology would feature strongly and which would also necessitate public engagement as policies are developed. This was then refined to a short list of top priorities for policy makers. Thirty issues were identified within broad areas of business and technology; energy and environment; government, politics and education; health, healthcare, population and aging; information, communication, infrastructure and transport; and public safety and national security.

ArgumentIn the late 1960s, in the midst of campus unrest, a group of young economists calling themselves "radicals" challenged the boundaries of economics. In the radicals' cultural cartography, economic science and politics were represented as overlapping. These claims were scandalous because they were voiced from Harvard University, drawing on its authority. With radicals' claims the subject of increasing media attention, the economics mainstream sought to reassert the longstanding cultural map of economic science, where objectivity and advocacy were distinguishable. The resolution of the contest of credibility came with a string of cases of dismissals and denial of tenure for radicals. The American Economic Association's investigations of these cases, imposing the conventional cultural map, concluded that personnel decisions had not been politically motivated. Radicals were forced to migrate from the elite institutions from which they had emerged to less prestigious ones. "Place" became a marker of their marginalization within the profession.

The inaugural winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1964 was Richard Hofstadter's Anti-intellectualism in American Life. In a year mourning the assassination of a vibrant and eloquent president, the book spoke to a shared sense of loss and revolt. However, the popular acclaim it received was not matched by academic applause. The DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University collected only timid approval from his peers, who discounted the work as personal and polemic (Brown 2006, 139-40). Hofstadter would not have been surprised by this judgment, since he understood the difficulty of his task. Anti-intellectualism was a troublesome subject to historicize, brought into view by assembling disjoint bodies: the evangelical priesthood rejecting contemporary culture, democratic politics celebrating innate popular wisdom, a business interest applying a narrow pecuniary metric to value social worth, and the theorists of mass education favoring vocation and pragmatism over the History of Political Economy 45 (annual suppl.

In recent years, we have witnessed in the history of economics a remark-able increase in the publication of biographies, autobiographies, biograph-ical dictionaries, collections of interviews, and oral histories (surveyed in Forget 2002 and Moggridge 2003). For the history of heterodox econom-ics,1 the trend has been the collection of brief autobiographical testimonies and biographical entries into dictionary volumes (Harcourt 1993; Arestis and Sawyer [1992] 2000; Backhouse and Middleton 2000). This literature comprises simple narratives, exclusively concerned with the professional life of individuals, typically stringing together an author’s contributions to reveal a unifying intellectual mission. History of Political Economy 39 (annual suppl.) DOI 10.1215/00182702-2006-04