Workshop on Knowledge and the State (Spring 2026, Session 1)

This year the Workshop on Knowledge and the State, sponsored by the Center for Political Economy at Columbia World Projects, will continue to explore the relationship between public governance and technical expertise. The goal of the workshop is to develop a better understanding of why public officials select and deploy the expert knowledge that they do, and how expert knowledge itself is shaped by shifting political demands and anxieties. While these questions are far from novel, the sense of the Workshop’s convenors is that across a range of domains – from climate science and clean energy to epidemiology and public health, from the economics of inflation, trade, and competition to computer science and the science of race and gender – the distinction between political and epistemic authority has become especially blurred. 

In particular, the workshop this year will focus on the role of philanthropy in shaping knowledge and the state. This meeting, a reading session, will discuss the following books to help advance our considerations.  Each of the texts is available electronically on Clio, and we suggest that you read the introductory materials on each.

They are:

Nicolas Guilhot, The Invention of International Relations Theory:
Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory (2011); introduced by Jeremy Kessler

Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (2012); introduced by Alma Steingart

Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (2012); introduced by Ira Katznelson

Looking forward to a bracing session,
Alma, Ira, and Jeremy