Jasanoff, S. (ed.) (2004) States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order. London and New York: Routledge.

 Jasanoff’s States of Knowledge presents co-production as a major idiom for understanding how scientific knowledge and social order are made together rather than separately. The volume argues that science is neither a pure mirror of nature nor a simple reflection of political interests; instead, facts, institutions, identities, technologies, discourses, and forms of authority are mutually constituted. This position challenges the inherited division between nature and culture, objectivity and value, reason and politics. The book’s central proposition is that societies organise the world through knowledge, while knowledge itself requires social supports, institutional legitimacy, material instruments, and normative commitments. Its chapters extend this argument across climate science, environmental agencies, biodiversity politics, genome laboratories, courtroom expertise, medical research, seventeenth-century authority, and United States science policy. The case studies show that power does not merely act after knowledge is produced; it participates in defining what counts as evidence, who may speak as an expert, which objects become visible, and how public problems are governed. Jasanoff’s introduction is especially significant because it positions science and technology studies as a bridge between sociology, anthropology, political theory, history, and law. The book therefore offers a method for analysing modernity itself: contemporary societies cannot be understood without tracing how scientific representations stabilise political arrangements and how political cultures shape scientific credibility. Its conclusion is that knowledge and governance are inseparable; every state of knowledge is also, in some measure, a state of social order.