Edinburgh Napier University

  It is safe to say that information has not hitherto been a central concept of political philosophy. Apart from occasional flashes – from ancient Greek speculations on the political significance of logos (translatable in some contexts as “information”) to journalist-philosopher Walter Lippmann's comments on information and the “good society” – information, unlike related concepts such as knowledge or education, has generally slipped under the disciplinary radar. However, today, amid the socio-technical process of “informatization” – the dramatic rise in the salience of information as object of both consciousness and technology – political philosophers as well as economists and sociologists are beginning to ask what this phenomenon might imply for perennial questions concerning justice, freedom, and the role of the state.