Knowledge into Action

In the 1970s, most Western nations began to shift the emphasis of health care provision from treatment to prevention. While originally motivated by the rise of lifestyle diseases, the emergence of the new public health policy mainly involves a new way to understand and structure the relationship between health knowledge and individual action. The book investigates what political rationality characterizes this new ambition in public health policies to put knowledge into action in the hands of individual citizens and how these policies adapt to the continuous experience that citizens often do not listen. Based on a Foucauldian framework, the genealogy demonstrates the new governmentality in Danish and American public health policy, which depends upon a specific politics of truth. Not only does public health policy build on a large amount of scientific knowledge. It also demands a change in the production and circulation of health knowledge, which attempts to replace the usual ifs, buts and maybes of medical science with an action-minded public health knowledge just telling people what to do.