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ABSTRACT
Who is speaking in the history of social thought? The question of the
authentic voice of social thought is typically posed in terms that tend
to be either ambitiously theoretical or carefully methodological. Thus
histories of social thought frequently offer either a résumé of general
ideas about society (say from Montesquieu to Parsons) or a survey
which gets bogged down in a rather tedious, nit-picking debate about
empirical methodology. This paper is something of a preview of a pro-
jected attempt on the part of the authors to capture the voice of social
thought in rather different terms. Our three theses are: (1) that those
who speak ’in the name of society’ have just as frequently been doctors
and bureaucrats as opposed to ’social philosophers’ or professional
sociologists; correlatively, (2) that the creative voice of social thought
has more often been technical, problem-centred and tied up with par-
ticular rationalities of government as opposed to being either exclu-
sively theoretical or merely responsive to ’objective problems’ in
society; and, (3) that if sociology today struggles for a voice in which
to speak this may be in some part due to the ways in which the past
Who speaks in the name of society? To ask this question is to suggest that
’society’ is not so much an idea, a concept, or a zone of reality, but a way of
giving voice to a certain set of problems and aspirations. The idea of voice,
here, signifies the ways in which society is put into discourse, and this is not
just a matter of different styles of thought but of styles of articulation. A
history of these social articulations would be a history of the ways in which
claims have been made in the name of society; grievances uttered, expla-
nations formulated, blame ascribed, cures pronounced. It would also be a
history of another sense of ’social’ articulation; of connections established,
relations assembled between issues, parts, zones, organs and persons in a
social language.
But some obviousproblems confront those who try to do the history of
this voicing society. Who are the subjects of such a history? Whilst pro-
of
fessional sociologists may try to claim a monopoly on the right to speak
truthfully in the name of society, they are certainly not the only people who
have investigated, analysed, theorized and given voice to worldly phenom-
ena from a ’social’ point of view. Perhaps our concern should be less with
THESIS ONE
Social thought owes at least as much to the machinations of people like doctors
and bureaucrats as it does to the erudite reflections of quasi-philosophers.
Who or what would be the focus of a history of the social point of view?
Michel Foucault once admitted to a certain scepticism concerning received
views on this matter: ’Countless people’, he said, ’have sought the origins of
sociology in Montesquieu and Comte. That is a very ignorant enterprise.
Sociological knowledge is formed rather in practices like those of the doctors.
For instance, at the start of the nineteenth century Gu6pin wrote a marvel-
lous study of the city of Nantes’ (Foucault, 1980: 151; cf. Rabinow, 1989:
39-46). Such a comment is, of course, polemically useful but also a little mis-
leading. Comte was certainly influenced by medicine; for example, by the
physician Broussais (Canguilhem, 1989). But Gu6pin himself was actually a
pupil of Saint-Simon, which does not do much for Foucault’s contention. It
would be better to say that the practices of the doctors were of a different
order from those of theorists of society. To be sure, there were important
theorists of society. But, aside from such theorists, there were also practical
people like doctors for whom social thinking was a matter of the difficult,
piecemeal midwifery of novel ways of construing the practical problems that
they sought to understand and ameliorate in terms of a space of action and
determination that exceeded the individual - flows of sewage and water, cir-
cuits of attitudes and opinions, practices of moulding and shaping conduct.
What sort of episodes might such a history consider? Three very brief
examples may give an illustration.
upon the individual through acting upon collective spaces, forces and flows:
bring in sewerage and drainage systems, employ ’scavengers’ to take away
refuse, create wider streets and, perhaps above all, legislate to prevent over-
crowded conditions in the lodging-houses of the poor.
After this point, there developed a whole discourse centred upon
hygiene and moral reform. But it would be wrong to attribute these debates
to sociologists as such. Perhaps the contributions that were most sociological
came from statisticians concerned with discerning laws of the moral order.
In his Treatise on Man and the Development of his Faculties, published in
1835 and translated into English in 1842, Quetelet points with something like
awe to the ’terrifying exactitude with which crimes reproduce themselves’
and to the fact that ’We know in advance how many individuals will dirty
their hands with the blood of others, how many will be forgers, how many
poisoners’, and famously proclaims ’society prepares the crime, and the guilty
are only the instruments by which it is executed’ (Quetelet, 1842: 108; quotes
are from Hacking, 1992: 105). But Quetelet was a member of a kind of infor-
mal thought-collective of statisticians which fostered and strengthened this
style of thought. In 1839, R. W. Rawson, honorary secretary to the Statisti-
cal Society of London, read a paper on the statistics of crime before the sta-
tistical section of the British Association. His concern was with ’moral
statistics’, a term that encompassed all kinds of conduct in that moral domain
surprises.... Every democrat feels in his bones that dangerous crises are
incompatible with democracy, because he knows that the inertia of the masses
is such that to act quickly a very few must decide and the rest follow rather
blindly’ (Lipmann, 1922: 271-2).
This was not simply a reiteration of an older concern with the dangers of
collective mentalities. For the collective was no group mind, no supra-
individual consciousness, but the aggregation of the opinions of all the indi-
viduals who made it up. This was to enable the philosophical concern with
the representation of the opinion of the public to be made technical and
empirical: public opinion as a kind of social fact. One exemplary date here
would be 1935, the publication of George Gallup’s Pulse of Democracy
(Gallup and Rae, 1935). Opinion, here, still related to the question of the gov-
ernability of democracy, but Gallup also took the view that democracy needs
public opinion to function; not that public opinion might undermine democ-
racy but that regular monitoring is actually constitutive of democracy. The
rather hazy idea of public opinion was made technical in the methods devised
by Gallup; public opinion polling was to force into reality a new collective
space, which could be the object of a positive knowledge - not a sociological
but a political knowledge.
Obviously neither Gallup nor any of these other opinion pollsters can be
described as a ’sociologist’ in any straightforward sense. But that is really our
point. If our model of a social thinker is Saint-Simon or Comte, then talking
about Gallup in the context of a history of social thought looks a little ridicu-
lous. But Gallup was more like one of Foucault’s doctors, engaging with
Personae
Can we say more about the characteristics of the people who have these
ideas? Were there characteristics in common amongst those who sought to
give a voice to the social perspective?
There have been some indispensable archival studies in the history of
empirical sociology in recent years (for example, Bulmer et al., 1991; Con-
verse, 1987; Platt, 1991; Oberschall, 1972). Typically, these studies are con-
cerned with the historical task of uncovering networks of particular persons
in order to illuminate affiliations, innovations and influences; that is, with
mapping the epistemology of the social sciences on to personal relationships.
This perspective undoubtedly works well for certain periods of study, for
example, the second half of the 20th century. But, as we have seen, those who
have sought to speak ’in the name of society’ have not always been sociolo-
gists in that sense. But who, then, is it that speaks?
We have already referred to Michel Foucault, and he, of course, is remem-
bered as one of those who proclaimed the unique voice of the author to be a
dead letter. But what Foucault was trying to do was to show that at each
moment a precise set of problems were the target of thought and action,
within certain specific practices, and that a given problematization was first
of all an answer given by definite individuals in specific texts, although it may
later come to be so general as to become anonymous (Foucault, 1988: 17). In
the cases we have discussed, the individuals who spoke in the name of the
social were obviously real people. The history of social thought is full of such
figures: Southwood Smith, Chadwick, Florence Nightingale, Charles Booth,
Beatrice Webb, Patrick Geddes, Paul Lazarsfeld. Their significance is that
they embody a particular style or stance towards a set of problems, articulate
them in a particular orientation, act as models or exemplars for those who
come after them. We can call these figures, adapting Deleuze and Guattari,
Government
We are suggesting merely that what is good about the early writings in
not
social thought is that they were hard-headed and ’practical’, or sensibly
related to ’policy’. That would be misleading. Such contributions were not
just reactions to particular social problems and events but involved a creation
of concepts and hence a creation or reconfiguration of problems. This
creativity and this practicality went very much together. It is not a matter of
application of theory to policy, for neither pre-exists the other. Rather, it is a
question of inventions for the ’government of conduct’; the imagination of
novel ways of regulating some kinds of conduct, and forestalling or promot-
ing others.
From the 19th century onwards the notion of society was constituted by
a tension between two ideas: society as a zone with its own laws and rights,
and society as a medium and instrument of government. One finds an
obvious example of this in the last decades of the 19th century. Thus in the
1880s, writers like Herbert Spencer in England and William Graham
Sumner in the United States polemicized against the extension of govern-
ment into the spontaneous affairs of society - the state had historically
achieved nothing for the growth of individual and collective welfare, which
had always been assured by the spontaneous activities of individuals or
groups of citizens and their interaction in the natural space of society
(Spencer, 1888; Sumner, 1881). Yet, on the other hand, Spencer and Sumner
were objecting precisely to all those zones and practices where govern-
mental thought had become social: regulation of food and drinking and
compulsory vaccination in the name of health, inspection of business
premises in the name of the safety of workers, educational activities of poor
law guardians and taxes to support libraries in the name of education and
moralization of the labouring poor, and so forth (Polanyi, 1944: 135-50).
And whilst the abstract conception of society might have been formalized
in the philosopher’s armchair, the thinkability and plausibility of society,
even in the terms understood by Spencer and Sumner, depended upon the
work that was carried out in these ’social laboratories’ - the quotidian
problem-spaces of drains and diseases, crime and punishment, madness and
security, labour unrest and factory reform, the city and the schoolroom.
And these practical and governmental social rationalities would provide the
material for their formalization in the first three decades of the 20th century,
within a different view of society linked to a different politics: that of soli-
darism in France, of social liberalism in England and of the New Deal in the
United States.
THESIS TWO
Problematization
To analyse problematizations is to investigate why certain things (behaviour,
phenomena, processes) become articulated as problems, how they are linked
up with or divided off from other phenomena, and the various ways (con-
ditions and procedures) in which this actually happens. This is, in part, a
matter of events, such as the series of cholera outbreaks that hit European
cities in the middle decades of the 19th century, events like wars or events like
particular celebrated or infamous murders, disasters, strikes and so forth.
These events are not exactly ’causes’. Obviously, one can always say that con-
cepts like civil society were conditioned by particular processes such as the
emergence of a certain kind of capitalist society in the later part of the 18th
century. We would not argue with that at all. But such processes are really
only the conditions for the articulation of particular events, they do not
determine them. No, the status of events in our account is rather different
from this; their function is focal rather than causal. The problematizations
that take shape around such foci consist, in each case, of a questioning of a
particular dimension of experience; poverty, urbanism, the family and so
forth. Styles of reasoning do not confront experience directly but through
reducing experience to, or articulating experience as, a series of problems.
Hence problematizations are not merely derivative of their subject-matter:
they are creative events in their own right.
In this context, we might be able to learn from a whole tradition of French
thought on the history of science. This tradition has taught that those activi-
ties that we know as science entail, in their very nature, a connection between
representation and intervention. Science, in the case of those practices we
have come to know as the natural sciences, is what Gaston Bachelard -
reflecting on the particular state of the sciences of his time - called a phe-
nomeno-technical activity. Such science seeks to conjure up - to make per-
ceptible - in reality the things it has conjured up in thought, and to reflect on
its errors by means of a kind of ’applied rationalism’ (Bachelard, 1949:168-9).
Like other veridical knowledges, then, should one not argue that social
knowledge is inventive when - perhaps only when - it is the moment of
reflection, formalization and abstraction in a practice on existence; when it is
oriented by a norm of truth and hence open to correction, when it celebrates
error and internalizes it in its own history? Only thus, perhaps, can social
thought be open, not closed; that is, be a normative knowledge, not a reflec-
tionist sub-branch of philosophy.
Techniques
Recent studies in the Social Studies of Science have shown, with regard to the
history of the natural sciences, the extent to which ’technical’ problems in
such sciences have social origins (Shapin and Schaffer, 1985: Shapin, 1992;
Latour, 1987). But it might equally be said that social problems have ’techni-
cal’ origins. What counts in the elaboration of a particular problematization
are certain technical procedures (such as surveys, reports, statistical method-
precisely to the place where the evil is the most rife’ (Chadwick, 1842: 343).
Since that time many practices of making a survey have been developed. Tech-
niques have to be devised to make the information thinkable. The first tech-
niques, perhaps, are the classifications and categories themselves, which
actually shape the form of the reality that is represented: dividing activities up
into trades, persons up into races, time up into years or decades, and so forth.
Perhaps the next technique for making numbers thinkable is the table, which
was much favoured by moral statisticians such as Quetelet and Rawson, and
by keepers of the census such as Farr. Everything was tabulated into rows,
columns, totals, averages, percentages and much more. But even with this sim-
plification, tables had to be accompanied by fairly large quantities of text in
order to give the lay reader instructions for use.
Hence the invention of the social map was a rather significant moment.
Bulmer et al. (1991) provide some very nice examples of these maps. Early
statisticians of disease had drawn town maps and identified the areas of inci-
dence and the rates of incidence with colours and intensities. Police statistics
charted the town into a topography of crime and marked rates of incidence
of different types of crime on the map, providing a very material visualiza-
tion of social space in a form that meets all Latour’s criteria for the ’immutable
mobiles’ that allow ’thinking with hands and eyes’: a single visual field, easily
scanned and compared, stable, two-dimensional, mobile and reproducible
(Latour, 1987; cf. Jones and Williamson, 1979). Thus habits of the population
become simultaneously placed in a social space and woven into the particu-
lar circumstances of specific localities within this topography. This form of
moral mapping continues throughout the 19th century up to the work of
Booth: the facts are ascertained by house-to-house surveys charting the moral
and physical state of each dwelling and charted on a map where they can be
overlain with, and compared with, the chartings of other moral phenomena
such as disease or crime. The eye becomes the principal organ for grasping
the social realm.
sample (Bowley, 1906; cf. Bowley, 1913 and Bowley, 1915; Desrosi~res, 1991).
This is a nice instance of a ’technical’ invention that is much more than just
a fitting of means to ends. Rather, this kind of sampling entailed the emer-
gence of a new object of intervention. People like Booth had relied for their
data not upon the direct accounts of those in poverty but upon the testimony
of those deploying a practical authority over the circumstances of poverty:
school board visitors. In contrast to this kind of investigation, the represen-
tative sample reduced the scope of the investigation and enhanced what might
be called its ’intensity’. Yet the advent of sampling techniques was sur-
rounded by debate; and its proponents treated it not as a more or less obvious
and neutral surveying device but as an imaginative discovery of some moment
in its own right. Indeed, it seemed to some as if sampling technology would
bring the social sciences finally up to date with the natural sciences (Cantril,
1944: 129).
Bowley’s plea is something of a landmark moment here. ’It is frequently
impossible’, Bowley says,
... whole area, as the census does, or as Mr Rowntree here
to cover a
way of sampling than previous methods. Yet, the representative sample was
not just a technical innovation of this sort. Rather, it opened up a new space
at two levels, a sort of molecular level of discerning individual differences,
and a molar level of a more general surveillance. New forms of visibility and
new forms of intervention were thus created. In the 19th century, social
science had been dominated by a very different kind of survey. Quetelet, for
instance, had deduced the laws of large numbers from the manipulation of
averages. Le Play similarly, though he had used qualitative methods, used
research assumptions involving essentially purposive selection. Such methods
lead to aggregations and generalizations rather than a sensitivity towards
individual differences; whereas representative selection produces difference
and distributions of the kind associated with the work of Galton or Pearson,
but with wide implications over large populations (Desrosieres, 1991: 221).
In short, the technical innovation of the representative sample was also an
advance at the level of ’government’ in that it facilitated a government of all
and - continuously - of each.
These examples could, of course, be extended. For instance, we might con-
sider the role of the attitude survey in the government of institutions and
organizations, from the US Army onwards. Or we could point to the impli-
cations of the redeployment for social ends of the techniques of confession
in the form of the research interview as a way of rendering the invisible into
a form in which it can be recorded and manipulated. Similarly, one could con-
sider the way in which the focus group is invented as a means of forcing into
existence previously ungraspable aspects of human motivation: these are
indeed phenomeno-technical moments when social researchers seek to
summon up in reality phenomena that have already been summoned up in
thought. The eye gives way to the ear as the pre-eminent technical form for
a certain kind of social investigation, and in doing so reinscribes subjectivity
into the social field in the form of an ethic of interpretation. But our point is
a very simple one: when seeking the conditions of inventiveness in the history
of social thought, one should look to the technique of the social map as much
as to Comte’s laws, to the techniques of the attitude survey as much as to the
structural functionalism of Parsons, to the focus group as much as to the
Frankfurt School.
THESIS THREE
The notions of society that solidified and were formalized at the turn of
the 19th and 20th centuries are beginning to fragment. It seems to many that
a new experience of our collective being is coming into existence; one in
which ’society’ is no longer social, or, at least, not social in quite the same
way. At the same time the discipline of sociology is questioning its very
object: for example, two of the most inventive areas of the discipline today -
tion of the given for the kinds of ethical inventiveness that we have tried to
capture in this paper. For others, it leads to a kind of sociological philosophy
that substitutes a simulation of moral philosophy for the kinds of practico-
critical experiments in applied ethics that characterized those who once spoke
in the name of the social. If, for us, there is a purpose in writing the history
of the voicing of society, it is only to suggest that the loss of self-evidence of
the social nature of society that we experience today might provoke a differ-
ent kind of attention to the work done by these technicians of ideas who
articulated their experience in social terms, and ’made knowledge-power an
agent of transformation of human life’ (Foucault, 1978: 143, quoted from
Rabinow, 1996: x). Such a history might provide a vantage point from which
we might produce an historical and critical understanding of that inventive-
ness that was central to the rationality of early social thought. For if we can
diagnose the styles of thought that made inventiveness possible, and be a little
clearer about what constituents of our troubled present they invented, we
might learn some lessons that can be turned to use in inventing our future.
We have no reason to believe that our own age is less inventive than any other
when it comes to joining practical criticism and ethical experimentation, or
that we lack those ethical technicians who can invent new practices that
reconfigure the relations that human beings have to themselves.
A history of social thought that might contribute to such a task would be
neither a history of the discipline of sociology nor a history of ideas about
society. If one writes one’s history in these ways, it appears as if the inven-
tiveness of social thought has come at the edges, in the margins, because of
the fact that practical issues of regulation and government stimulate social
theorists and equally because academic sociology can be ’applied’. We think
these cheerful diagrams of centres and margins, with their reassuring vectors
of conceptualization and application, are flawed. One learns more about the
conditions under which we have come to be able to understand our experi-
ence as ’social’ by attending to the multitude of more modest examples of a
kind of applied ethics of investigation and intervention than by narrating a
story of individual biographies and schools, or by reconstructing a theoreti-
cal canon.
Bachelard, in his writings, sought to capture a ’living thought’ that was the
product of a conquest over inert forms of thought. For him, the story of the
sciences was not the sum of everything that had happened but the story of
how, with successive breaks, living thought had broken free from dead, inert
’counter-thought’ (cf. Canguilhem, 1968: 180). Far too much of today’s soci-
ology is burdened precisely by such forms of counter-thought whether in the
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This paper arises from a project on the history of empirical social thought sponsored
by the Economic and Social Research Council. Our thanks to Patrick Joyce for his
comments on an earlier version.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES