Pandora's Hope is well worth reading. I was more in agreement with the strawman he made of Socrates in the last essay than with him, but it was one of the most enjoyable philosophy books I've ever read.

Should mention that the only direct reference to science w/in the article was a paragraph or two about knowledge, and how it's really just the locus point of several environmental, social and technological interactions. Which seemed to me less denigrating and more kind of respectful of the scientific method. But again, didn't have the back story, so maybe it was a back-handed jab.

I don't think it's a jab, I don't think he's hostile in the way Foucault was hostile. He does explicitly want to make knowledge subordinate to society, seeing the alternative as authoritarian because The Man funds research so any epistemic privilege granted to science is being granted to The Man. I do not think giving equal weight to astrology as nuclear physics because lots of people believe in astrology is the kind of egalitarianism I want. Many things could stand to be democratized, but epistemology is not one of them. Society is full of shit.

I'm not even sure that I agree with it from a sociological/psychological perspective- the idea that "personhood" exists only as an effect of broader systems rankles a little bit. What about personality? Isn't that supposed to be immutable? Even if you strip a person of context, even if you subtract the meaning from their profession, social standing, etc., aren't there aspects of that person that persist in vacuum? In other words, this theory seems to do away entirely with the "nature" side of the nature vs. nurture debate. At a time when it's broadly accepted that nature and nurture work in conjunction with one another, seems like a hell of a thing to argue that identity and meaning are nothing more than functions of broader governing environmental systems.

Assuming there is no nature to be opposed to nurture has been a fashionable thing for theorists to do since the mid-20th century, since "nature" justified scientific racism, institutional sexism, eugenics programs and all sorts of things no one wanted to justify anymore. "Reactionary" is used as a synonym for "right-wing", but the right really doesn't have a monopoly on reactionaries.