Policy Sciences 28: 385-396, 1995. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Response: Toward a critical sociology of policy analysis JOHN FORESTER Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, N Y 14853 Sanford Schram's review essay, ~gainst Policy Analysis: Critical Reason and Poststructural Resistance" may be an essay, but it is not a review of my CHtical Theory, Public Policy, and Planning Practice. Quoting one sentence from my concluding paragraphs, Schram summarizes my book so abstractly that he misses altogether what's distinctive about its arguments) Presumably worried about 'epistemic privilege" Schram ironically seizes that privilege by pre- tending to review a book whose particular arguments, and whose distinctive differences, he virtually ignores. Reducing my various chapters to an attempt to 'improve policy analysis" for example, Schram fails to contrast my view of policy analysis practice with others' in the field, whether Martha Feldman's (1989), Frank Fischer's (1980), John Dryzek's (1990) or Robert Reich's (1988). As importantly, given Schram's concerns about Habermasian work, his essay misses just what distinguishes my book from so many others 'using Habermas': my empirical concerns, my focus on the practical work of questioning and organizing (and dis-organizing) public attention, my integration of micro- and macro-analysis of policy, my claims that 'ideal speech' is irrelevant to many ways of employing Habermas's work, and so on. Rather than assessing carefully my arguments about attention-organizing, agenda setting and the complex ways that policy making politically and prac- tically reproduces public belief, consent, trust and attention, Schram prefers to avoid organizational and institutional issues to dispute epistemological arguments he attributes to Habermas. But Habermas neither makes these arguments, nor is my book indebted to or dependent upon them. Schram's essay, then, is strangely ironic because it does just what it criticizes: it privi- leges epistemology over politics. Since Critical Theory, Public Policy, and Planning Practice largely views policy making as a subtle, practical, institutionally framed set of communi- cative or rhetorical activities, it is not indebted to Habermas's more philosop- hical (and quite narrow) 'discourse theory.' The book explicitly begins, in fact, by refusing to hold hostage the sociological, rhetorical and political analysis of policy analysis, contestation, and implementation to the badly misunderstood notions of 'ideal speech' (cf. Preface, second page). My book treats 'theory' as a source of research questions and leads, a set of closely argued hunches about the ways public actors make sense together and the ways policy development practically shapes public attention selectively -