Albeit as a society we prefer to paper over problems we are being forced by events to reluctantly concede that class (still) counts (a lesson from the Perot candidacy) and race (as always) counts (a lesson from the Million Man March).

We still resist recognizing, however, that technology counts, a hesitancy partially explained by the mystification of technological decision-making and our puzzlement over what to do about technological policy-making. Now that the Congress has foolishly seen fit to shut its 21-year old Office of Technology Assessment our plight is greater than ever.

All the more timely and valuable is Richard E. Sclove's highly original book, at least for readers curious about our ability to reconstruct technology along more democratic lines. Sclove writes in the hallowed and constructive tradition of Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, Lewis Mumford, E.F. Schumacher, and others intent on liberating the public from the economic and technological status quo.

Like them he contends that "insofar as (1) citizens ought to be empowered to participate in shaping their society's basic circumstances, and (2) technologies profoundly effect and partly constitute those circumstances, it follows that (3) technological design and practice should be democratized." (p.ix).

Breaking new ground, Sclove attempts to synthesize two disparate bodies of knowledge rarely conjoined - research into the social dimension of technology and also into democratic theory. He next attempts to use political philosophy to develop criteria by which we might know which technologies are or are not compatible with democracy.

He closes by arguing that his new theory of technology "qualifies as a coherent alternative to neoclassical welfare economics. Indeed, reinvigorated democratic politics should largely supersede conventional economic reasoning as a basis for technological decision-making."

Tightly-reasoned and far-ranging in examples and erudition, the book requires and rewards a close reading. Such relevant matters as community, education, energy, politics, and work earn cogent and illuminating discussion.

Sclove judges our current politics of technology as "roughly comprising the wrong people posing the wrong questions about the wrong technologies at the wrong time." (p.239).

He recognizes that his argument is contestable, but insists we have no healthy option but to struggle for a more democratic technological order. If we are soon or ever to achieve this, much credit will be owed his seminal work (and a publisher civic-minded enough to bring out an inexpensive edition).

SCLOVE, RICHARD E. Democracy and Technology. Pp. xiv, 244. New York, NY: Guilford Publications, 1995. $42.00. Paperbound, $18.95.