This is the third and largest edition of The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, whose first incarnation came in 1977 as The Handbook of Science, Technology, and Society. Its thirty-eight chapters are divided into five sections: ‘Ideas and perspectives’, ‘Practices, people, and places’, ‘Politics and publics’, ‘Institutions and economics’ and ‘Emergent technosciences’. The editors point to the fact that the internal divisions of this edition do not fall neatly along the lines of the traditional disciplines that have come together in the making of science and technology studies (STS) (history, sociology, philosophy), a change from previous editions that they interpret as a sign of the field's maturing identity. Along with such familiar themes as the focus on supra-individual action, suspicion of universals and essences and attention to context, this edition of the Handbook makes the case that active social, political and ethical engagement has become central to the raison d'être of STS. It is the Barack Obama of STS handbooks, pursuing a ‘change agenda’.

This sounds like a desirable enough state of affairs: who among us would not like our work to contribute in some way to the general good? (Or ‘goods’ – we must pluralize, my sons and daughters, always pluralize.) Several of the contributions which focus on particular issues of current importance help to make the case that increased engagement is a worthwhile direction for the field to take; Steven Yearley's piece on nature and the environment in STS is case in point, as is Andrew Lakoff's on the development and circulation of pharmaceuticals. Charles Thorpe's excellent essay on political theory in STS teaches us that, in a way, the field has always been politically engaged, in that its history can be read as a series of critiques of the liberal tradition as it applies to science and technology from an array of alternative political positions.

However, this new direction may result in losses, as is borne out in certain omissions from the Handbook. As Sergio Sismondo writes in his essay on STS as an engaged programme, the ‘modest move of the engaged program is to address topics of clear political importance: nuclear energy rather than condensed matter physics, agricultural biotechnology rather than evolutionary systematics’ (p. 21). Sismondo may be right that this is the direction the field is taking, but he is wrong to claim that the move is in any way modest. To my mind, the abandonment of evolutionary systematics could only result from a regrettable erasure of what I take to be one of STS's great insights: that the engagement of science with society goes far deeper than what is commonly perceived to be ‘of clear political importance’, to make visible the political resonance of the systematic study of nature. This brings me to a far greater worry. I have always thought that history was an essential ingredient in the interdisciplinary recipe for STS, and as such that we should still be able to taste the past after everything has been added to the mix. However, despite some lip service to the enduring importance of history in the introduction, the study of the past seems to have largely been jettisoned from STS in this edition of the Handbook. I suspect that worries about academic irrelevance are responsible for the omission, but this only does a disservice to the stated intention of the volume. Did we not learn about the crypto-political character of science's ostensible impartiality through studies of seventeenth-century scientific experimentation? Have we not gained insight into how race and class became so embedded in our society through studies of nineteenth-century evolutionism, and thereby found hope that future sciences might help to loosen their hold? The absence of historical perspective will only impoverish our view of the present, and thus the ability of STS to engage it.