Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008)

By Robert Proctor - 30 Q&As - Book Review and Summary

Between 1975 and 1989, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco spent $45 million on what it called its Medical Research Program. The program’s stated purpose was funding biomedical research at leading American universities. Its actual purpose, spelled out in internal documents released through litigation, was to develop “a strong body of scientific data or opinion in defense of the product” — to complicate the causal link between cigarettes and disease by emphasizing stress, genetics, personality, and any factor other than tobacco. The principal advisor running the program from 1978 onward was Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and past president of Rockefeller University. Seitz’s tobacco work ended around 1989. That same year, the George C. Marshall Institute — which Seitz had co-founded — pivoted from defending the Strategic Defense Initiative to attacking the emerging scientific position on climate change. This continuity, one of many documented in Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford University Press, 2008), is the volume’s central discovery: the same credentialed personnel, working from the same institutional networks, moved sequentially across tobacco, acid rain, ozone, secondhand smoke, and climate, selling not opinions about any particular substance but the credentialed manufacture of doubt itself.

Robert Proctor, professor of the history of science at Stanford, coined the term “agnotology” with the linguist Iain Boal in 1992 to name what mainstream epistemology had ignored — the deliberate production of ignorance as an object of study. Proctor’s earlier work on the political shaping of cancer research (Cancer Wars, 1995) and Nazi medicine (The Nazi War on Cancer, 1999) had established him as one of the few historians willing to examine how institutional power structures what science asks and what it does not. He was one of only three academic historians to testify against the tobacco industry in court, against thirty-six who testified for it. His co-editor, Londa Schiebinger, contributes original research on the eighteenth-century botanical trade drawn from her book Plants and Empire (2004). The volume gathers twelve contributors across history, philosophy, sociology, and archaeology — Peter Galison on state secrecy, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway on climate, David Michaels on manufactured uncertainty in public health, Nancy Tuana on the epistemology of the clitoris, Adrienne Mayor on the erasure of indigenous fossil knowledge, Charles Mills on structural white ignorance. The book emerged from workshops at Penn State (2003) and Stanford (2005).

The volume appeared a decade after the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement had forced tens of millions of previously secret tobacco industry documents onto the Internet. For the first time, the internal record of manufactured doubt was open to inspection. Historians could read the memos in which “doubt is our product” was explicitly named as strategy (Brown & Williamson, 1969), in which the goal was set as creating “doubt about the health charge without actually denying it” (Fred Panzer, Tobacco Institute, 1971), and in which Philip Morris identified as its number one strategic objective “to maintain doubt on the scientific front about ETS.” What had been suspected for decades was now documented in the industries’ own words. The book was written to establish that the same strategy — the same personnel, the same institutes, the same demand for false balance in journalism — had migrated from tobacco to a dozen other regulatory fights. The 2003 Frank Luntz memo to Republican strategists, “Winning the Global Warming Debate,” instructed clients that “you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.” What the tobacco archive revealed as method, the climate fight was actively using as playbook — or so the book’s contributors argue.

Agnotology stands alongside David Michaels’s later Doubt Is Their Product (2008) and Oreskes and Conway’s book-length Merchants of Doubt (2010) as foundational texts documenting how institutional science is captured, and how the epistemic environment ordinary readers inhabit has been shaped by parties whose interests depend on their not knowing. The full summary unpacks the beryllium exposure standard set in 1948 in the back seat of a taxi and defended for fifty years while workers died; the bisphenol A studies in which 94 of 104 government-funded studies found evidence of harm and 0 of 11 industry-funded studies did; the peacock flower that enslaved women in the Caribbean used to prevent their children from being born into bondage, which European naturalists documented across three colonial systems for over a century and which never crossed the Atlantic as knowledge; Cotton Mather’s 1712 use of Iroquois testimony about ancient giants to prove the biblical flood, followed by his rhetorical dismissal of Algonquian syllables that expelled Native fossil knowledge from the American scientific record for three centuries.

There is an irony worth naming, and it runs through the whole volume. The book that documents how consensus gets manufactured takes the anthropogenic climate position and the IPCC as settled fact, treats every challenge to that position as a case of Marshall-Institute-style denial, and files Thabo Mbeki’s late-night encounter with the HIV-dissident literature as a case study in Internet-fostered ignorance. The agnotological lens is turned ruthlessly outward at tobacco, ozone, and product-defense firms — and never once inward at the same institutional consensus-manufacturing machinery that produced the climate and virology positions the contributors uncritically accept. Those writing about constructed blindness have had their own blindness constructed. That the sharpest analysts of manufactured doubt cannot see this in themselves is the strongest possible evidence for the thesis they came to prove.

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