Technological democracy : bureaucracy and citizenry in the German energy debate /

Hager describes a West Berlin citizen initiative to protest a power plant construction in the mid-1970s, and its transformation into the Alternative List/Berlin Green Party. Based on Hager's dissertation, this is an interesting case study, eloquently told, and grounded in diligent research in the organization's records and interviews with its leaders. Yet this limited case, narrated with great admiration for the protesters, tells little about "technological democracy," "bureaucracy," "citizenry," or "the German energy debate," contrary to the title. Hager builds her own claim for broader importance of her study on Claus Offe's and J"urgen Habermas's critical theories and on Max Weber's analysis of bureaucracy. She uses these theories, slightly modified, to confirm her black-and-white view of this "post-materialist" struggle, in which the protest groups, with their seven to ten percent of the vote, represent the popular will or citizen's "lifeworld" (Habermas), while elected parliamentary majorities are reviled as servants of an "economic, bureaucratic, and technocratic system," or worse, "politicians." It is curious that a political scientist would not recognize the protestors' actions, for all their considerable merit, as intensely political struggles of a different interest group. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty. D. Prowe; Carleton College