In 1512 Niccolo Machiavelli defined politics as the struggle for power. During that same era, science became defined as the quest for knowledge. For nearly five centuries now this gap between politics and science -- what C.P. Snow famously called "the two cultures"--Has steadily widened. Now Herbert E. Meyer argues that as we move into the twenty-first century our survival requires that we fuse the two cultures; that we transform politics itself from the struggle for power to the quest for knowledge about how we can best organize and manage our public affairs. - Back cover.