The Social in Question: New Bearings

Citation preview

The Social in Question

With postmodernism has come the questioning of the very idea of ‘the social’. Thinkers from across the social sciences and humanities now agree that this once foundational concept can no longer be taken for granted as an objective or real characteristic of the world. However, their questioning has taken on many guises and The Social in Question represents an attempt to pull these diverse forms of questioning together. Drawn from sociology, English studies, history, geography, science studies and theology, an international and eminent cast of contributors look at how the idea of ‘the social’ developed from its mediaeval foundations to its consolidation in the early twentieth century. The book then charts how the concept has been brought into question by critiques form science studies, cultural studies, history and postcolonial studies before going on to look at how new frameworks are being proposed for the exploration of issues formerly seen as ‘the social’. This book makes a fascinating and novel contribution to the rethinking of contemporary academic activity. Patrick Joyce is Professor of History in the School of History and Classics at Manchester University. The contributors include Mary Poovey, Bruno Latour, Gyan Prakash, Richard Biernacki and Nigel Thrift.

The Social in Question New bearings in history and the social sciences

Edited by Patrick Joyce

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2002 selection and editorial matter Patrick Joyce individual chapters the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-99453-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–23199–X (Print Edition)

This book is dedicated by its editor to the memory of Raphael Samuel, a comrade in the history of the social

Contents

Figures List of contributors Acknowledgements 1

Introduction

ix x xiii 1

PAT R I C K J O Y C E

PART I

The old social: histories of the social

19

2

21

The mediaeval origins of civil society C AT H E R I N E P I C K S T O C K

3

The liberal civil subject and the social in eighteenth-century British moral philosophy

44

M A RY P O OV E Y

4

Repatriating modernity’s alleged debts to the Enlightenment: French Revolutionary social science and the genesis of the nation state

62

R O B E RT W O K L E R

5

The colonial genealogy of society: community and political modernity in India

81

G YA N P R A K A S H

6

Maps, blood and the city: the governance of the social in nineteenth-century Britain PAT R I C K J O Y C E

97

viii

Contents

PART II

The new social: theory, practice and disciplines

115

7

117

Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social B R U N O L AT O U R

8

The place of space in the study of the social

133

RICHARD BIERNACKI AND JENNIFER JORDAN

9

The spaces of clock times

151

PA U L G L E N N I E A N D N I G E L T H R I F T

10 History, theory, disciplinarity

175

THOMAS OSBORNE

11 Cultures of inquiry and the rethinking of disciplines

191

JOHN R. HALL

Index

211

Figures

6.1 6.2 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 11.1 11.2

Ordnance Survey map of Manchester City Centre, 1849, detail of Wood Street and surrounding area Ordnance Survey map of Manchester City Centre, 1849, detail of King Street and surrounding area Reducing human involvement in the operation of clocks Components of this research project Increasing percentage of ownership of clocks and watches in probate inventories Percentage of ‘middling sort’ inventories with selected consumer durables 1675–1725 Summary of evidence in churchwardens’ accounts for church clocks in Bristol Public clocks in English parish churches, 1500 – 1700 Time determination as a performative routine: calculation sheet establishing a longitude observations, 1782 The marine chronometer: the time-keeping network of Figure 9.1 compressed within a device, without ongoing human activity Historicism: The four forms of discourse and the research practice Generalizing and particularizing practices of inquiry

103 104 155 156 162 163 163 164 168 169 200 205

Contributors

Richard Biernacki is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently completing a book about the roles of space, time, and comparison in historical explanation after the cultural turn. Paul Glennie is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. His research interests include demography and historical geography. John R. Hall, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for History, Society, and Culture at the University of California-Davis, has written extensively on epistemology, social theory, economy and society, the sociology of religion, and the sociology of culture. His most recent books are an edited volume, Reworking Class (Cornell University Press, 1997), Cultures of Inquiry: From Epistemology to Discourse in the Methodological Practices of Sociohistorical Research (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America, Europe, and Japan, coauthored by Philip D. Schuyler and Sylvaine Trinh (Routledge, 2000). Jennifer Jordan is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is currently at work on a book about real estate, collective memory, and urban change in post-1989 Berlin. Patrick Joyce is Professor of Modern History at the University of Manchester, England. He has published extensively in the history of work, class, popular culture and politics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. He has also contributed to recent historiographical debates on history and postmodernism. His works include Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1840–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-century England (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and The Oxford Reader on Class (Oxford University Press, 1995). He is currently completing a book called The Rule of Freedom: The City and Modern Liberalism (Verso).

Contributors xi Bruno Latour is Professor at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he has collaborated on many studies in science policy and research management. His publications include Pandora’s Hope (Harvard University Press, 1999) and We Have Never Been Modern (Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). Thomas Osborne is Reader in Social Theory at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Aspects of Enlightenment: Social Theory and the Ethics of Truth (UCL Press, 1998) and numerous articles in the fields of historical epistemology and the history of the human sciences. Catherine Pickstock is Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. Her areas of research interest include the Platonic tradition; medieval theology and philosophy in historical context; analytic linguistics and theory of signs; and a theological critique of poststructuralism and the relationship between language and ontology. Her publications include After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Blackwell, 1998) and A Short Guide to Plato (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Mary Poovey is Professor of English and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. She has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, feminist theory, and the history of economics and medicine. Her most recent book is entitled A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (University of Chicago Press, 1998). Gyan Prakash is Professor of History at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of colonial India, and his current interest centres on the relationship between colonialism and science. He is the author of Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990), and editor of After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (1995). His most recent book is Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999). Nigel Thrift is a Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. His recent publications include Spatial Formations (1996), Money/Space (1997, with Andrew Leyshon), Shopping, Place and Identity (1998, with Danny Miles, Peter Jackson, Beverley Holbrook and Mike Richards), City A–Z (2000, co-edited with Steve Pile), Thinking Space (2000, co-edited with Mike Crang) and Cities for All the People Not the Few (2000, with Ash Amin and Doreen Massey). Forthcoming in 2001 are TimeSpace (co-edited with Jon May), Cities (with Ash Amin), The Rise of Soft Capitalism and The Measured Heart. Recent work has followed three main lines: the rise of a new kind of soft managerial capitalism, the forging of a non-representational theory which values performative embodied knowledges, and the changing form of cities.

xii

Contributors

Robert Wokler, formerly Reader in the History of Political Thought at the University of Manchester and currently Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, is now completing books on Rousseau’s Enlightenment and on the Enlightenment project and its critics. He is author of the Oxford University Press ‘Very short introduction’ series’ Rousseau and joint editor of Diderot’s Political Writings for the Cambridge University Press, and of The Enlightenment and Modernity for Macmillan.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who participated in the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain funded workshops on ‘Rethinking history and the social sciences’ held at Manchester University between September 1998 and April 1999. This book owes a considerable amount to these events. I also thank the ESRC for their generous funding of these international meetings, and Dr Phil Eva for his help in their organization. Rick Biernacki and John R. Hall kindly read and commented on an earlier draft of my introduction, and my warm thanks to them for this. Patrick Joyce

The publishers would like to thank Alan Godfrey Maps, Consett, for permission to reprint sections of their reproduction of the 1849 Ordnance Survey map of Manchester City Centre. Thanks also to the University of Chicago Press for allowing Mary Poovey to adapt and reprint excerpts from her book A History of the Modern Fact (University of Chicago Press, 1998) for inclusion in her contribution to this volume.

1

Introduction Patrick Joyce

What is the social and why is it in question? The tendency to think of social structures, relationships, and processes as abstractions which yet become in one sense or another real entities, relatively autonomous of other sorts of human activity, and systematic in their operation, has for some time been in question, yet it is still strikingly persistent, in many subtle ways. This persistence is reflected in the critiques of obtaining ideas of the social offered in this volume, for instance Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan’s demonstration that sociologists and others still regularly invoke the state or capitalism, as bearers of the social, to explain the creation of ‘abstract space’. They do this while at the same time, in contradictory fashion, claiming space to be a social and historical ‘construct’: the assumptions of a thing-like social are so embedded that the (still radical) argument that the epistemological institution of abstract space may more productively be seen as the cause and not the result of these supposedly social phenomena is not entertained. So, this old, solid, ontological social still seems to be around. However, even from the early days of the sociology discipline, the discipline which perhaps did most to solidify this social, the social was in question, for instance in the emphasis of Weber on process and history, or Simmel on ‘sociation’ as a relation or process, and not ‘society’ as a unified, totalized entity. And, as Bruno Latour in this volume indicates, there is in Gabriel Tarde further evidence that sociology has been a house of several, if not many, mansions: the ‘pre-history’ of sociology reveals in Tarde a radical divergence from what was to become the norm. In recent times, the emphasis on practice, the material world, and embodied being, and the employment of categories like ‘sociality’, ‘network’, ‘reflexivity’, ’movement’, and so on, alike bear witness to a new questioning and a dissatisfaction with what has gone before.1 In the form of end-of-millennium reflections,2 one recent symposium, embracing an international range of scholars in the field of sociology, witnesses the attempt to develop what is called a ‘post-societal sociology’ in terms of a ‘mobile sociology’ that will be attentive to mobility in terms of what it sets out to explain in the world, and in the character of the sorts of explanations it offers. Present here too is the characteristic conceptual emphasis on flows, contingency, and on time and space, in short aspects which express a clear opening to and awareness

2

Patrick Joyce

of history. There is in this particular account of post-societal sociology no doubting that the old, ontological social has been until fairly recently really quite dominant.3 In the historical field, particularly the field of social history, class, in many ways the defining category of this particular disciplinary version of the old social, has been put in question by a similar interrogation of the social, again only relatively recently.4 In Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt’s recent collection, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, the cultural history that has tended to displace social history has itself been criticized for its lack of attention to the social. That volume might be considered a kind of companion to this one, though in fact it attends far more to culture than to the social, and its exclusively US perspective is less broad than that of the present volume.5 In the present collection, the sort of understanding of the social that is in evidence is given expression by the geographers Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, who see societies as ‘loose formations of practices which are alignments of the human and non-human translated into particular kinds of engagement with the world’ and as a ‘A set of flickering horizons of experience in a state of continual becoming without any resolution’.6 In his contribution here, Bruno Latour develops this perspective in his argument that the micro/macro (social) distinction stifles understanding of how society is generated. So, new understandings of the social are increasingly evident, and one simple answer to the question of why the social is now in debate would be that this old social does not describe the world very well, neither the world of the present nor the world of the past. A more complex explanation would have to involve discussion of the history of different disciplines, not least in their political contexts, a task which can only be briefly entered upon here. Something of this history in its early phases will be evident in the contributions in this volume, for example the early stages of the social understood in organic, evolutionary terms, an understanding dealt a death blow in the trenches of the First World War. Organicism was superseded in the discipline of sociology by an increasing emphasis from the inter-war years on society understood as a structure, and on associated functionalist explanations. The golden age of this ontologizing of the social has been identified as the two decades from 1945, but in the form of development and modernization theory after this time the force of structure was still strong, even though a kind of neo-evolutionism was evident as well.7 To the very considerable extent that this golden age was an American one, it seems clear that this understanding of the independent reality and solidity of society was shaped by what was perceived at the time to be the strength and autonomy of US society itself. The ‘reality’ of society at home was reflected in the political ideology of ‘development’ overseas: in order to bring the benefits of a free ‘society’ to the world at large, that world had to be imagined as a series of bounded, ‘natural’, societies, pale images of a USA they might aspire to. Considering the field of social history, some international comparisons may be useful. In France, the pre-Second World War intellectual leadership of the

Introduction 3 Annales school of history was consolidated by the institutional power of Annales history after the war, so that social history became hegemonic and history itself not only understood as a social science but as indeed the ‘queen of the social sciences’.8 Given this institutional power, politically radical historians worked as insiders within academic power structures whose elasticity enabled a high degree of innovation. Innovation, because of this institutional situation, did not take the more direct Marxist forms it took in Britain, and again unlike Britain, the challenge of postmodernism in France was moderated, in that French historical writing in part developed in concert with so-called postmodernism, and where it did not it was sufficiently confident to be relatively untroubled. In the USA, social history was more subordinate to the social sciences, which themselves, particularly sociology, already had a marked political character still evident from its golden age, one far from being only politically radical. From the 1960s, as in the UK, the association of left politics and social history was strong, and the influence of Marxism in the USA was evident, including the influence of the British Marxist historians, as well as that of a strongly Marxist-influenced British cultural studies. Nonetheless, the hold of Marxism was never as strong as in Britain, and in the USA the strong, and still strong, quantitative tradition arising from sociology was perhaps more evident in US than British social history. In the 1970s and 1980s in the USA, anthropological, linguistic, philosophical and literary currents became increasingly evident, also in the UK, and in both academic cultures there was a shift to what has come to be called ‘cultural history’, social and cultural history often being ranked together as kin, though it is not usually very clear what this kinship amounts to. Richard Biernacki has indeed argued elsewhere that this kinship was closer than the cultural historians might care to admit, in their employment of the category of culture cultural history simply ontologizing the cultural, in much the same way as social historians had the social.9 Whatever the case, in the USA it was feminism in particular that propelled social towards cultural history, and feminism also that was perhaps the main avenue for the postmodernism that did so much to shape cultural history. In the British case it is possible to exaggerate the significance of Marxist thought per se, but in its particular humanist, culturalist and ethical British form (closely related, I think, to older radical political traditions, and to English Protestantism in its Nonconformist forms) Marxism probably did provide the conceptual foundations of a great deal of British social history. Whatever it did not provide was made up of a social borrowed from various sorts of sociology, which was in fact as ontological as the Marxist social. For all its culturalism, the corresponding vision of a British (social democratic) social was still recognizably of the old dispensation. Given this rootedness of older views, and given that at least in the early development of social history, before it came to be said that ‘we are all social historians now’, it was in many respects outside the institutions of academic power, when postmodernism presented itself as a new outsider on the block, the resulting questioning of older categories of the social, particularly around class, was a lot more heated than elsewhere, certainly France.10 In this

4

Patrick Joyce

volume, Thomas Osborne attempts to make a sort of peace among the social historians, with his argument that social history was always rather postmodern anyway, and that postmodernism can in fact be better understood as post-functionalism. To this I will return. Across all the social science disciplines and history, and across different national academic cultures, as well as the intellectual forces dissolving earlier versions of the social – feminism, postmodernism, indeed post-Marxism – there was of course the fundamental effect of the transformation of contemporary society itself. This transformation has been treated at length in numerous places, and it is not necessary to do so again except to signal the obvious importance of ‘globalization’, the economic restructuring of the western economies, and the consequent coming of ‘post-industrial’ and ‘information’ or ‘network’ society, also the disintegration of world communism. In short, all those forces that serve to question the social as, like the nation state, bounded, static, firm and enduring. Questioning of the social has been evident in a number of disciplines, but this has usually taken place without a great deal of interdisciplinary, or what Osborne in this volume calls paradisciplinary, engagement. So, what follows is not merely a series of contributions by people from diverse disciplines, important as this is, but also, in the chapters by Thomas Osborne and John Hall a systematic thinking through of how the conversation between different disciplines may be furthered around the concept of the social and the practice of socio-historical inquiry. Rather than dissolving disciplines, the emphasis is on seeking ways of translation between them (paradisciplinarity in short), as in the case of Thomas Osborne by a certain ascetic and ethical orientation to theory itself, and by attention to the concept of the archive across disciplines, and in the case of John Hall by thinking about how seemingly disparate socio-historical forms of inquiry often share much in common, and how correspondingly the idea of ‘cultures of inquiry’ may further transdisciplinary conversations. However, the conversation between disciplines that is just as significant in the volume is that which is actually practised by its contributors here, each of whom cannot easily be described in terms of a single or simple disciplinary lineage. This volume grew out of a series of three workshops at Manchester University in 1998–9, sponsored by the ESRC of Great Britain, on rethinking history and the social science disciplines, on the concept of the social, and on the history of civil society.11 And more particularly, it grew out of the attempt on those occasions by scholars from a very wide range of disciplines to think and talk about the social in relation to the hoped for, often unexpected, affinities between different disciplinary trajectories. This volume is the ecumenical result of those even more ecumenical occasions. All the contributors to this volume attended the Manchester discussions. The volume discloses, I think, happy affinities, rather than an interdisciplinary or any other sort of programme. These transdisciplinary affinities are one demonstration of the timeliness of the volume. Another would be the particular balance of abstraction and the practice of inquiry achieved here. Full-frontal abstraction is represented here in the form of Bruno Latour’s contribution, but it is an abstraction tied very much

Introduction 5 to the practice of inquiry. The other contributors are in no sense hostile to abstraction, and indeed practice it happily themselves, and are in fact concerned in a number of cases with the origins of how we have come to think abstractly in the first place, but they are particularly interested in new ideas about the social to the extent that they enable us, as Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift put it, following Bruno Latour, to ‘know interestingly’ through the development of rich and original articulations. These articulations involve, therefore, a close relationship between abstraction and the practice of social, historical inquiry itself, and this demonstration, or performance, of theory does I think mark out the volume. There is also a certain consonance between the practice of the volume and the ascetic, pragmatic account of theory given in its later contributions. I would continue in my justificatory vein a little longer by saying that the sensitivity to history apparent in the volume also marks it out from some other contributions in this area, a sensitivity apparent in the second part of the volume as well as the first, even though it is less directly involved with historical inquiry. The sum of these justifications is that I have permitted myself the subtitle ‘New bearings in history and the social sciences’, only too aware that there is not a lot that is new under the sun.

Part I The first group of essays, called ‘The old social: histories of the social’, offers an account of the social which is not one of social thought, social policy, sociology, politics, social practice, representations of the social, but all these and other things, and in fact perhaps a sort of ‘social history’ of its subject. Again, it is a question of emerging affinities, not a programme. One of the new bearings of inquiry is the concentrated attention given here to understanding the social in the context of the social imaginary, or imaginaries, of modernity. Indeed, the social would seem to be inscribed in the very heart of modernity. But how do we understand modernity? And what is to be understood by the term ‘social imaginary’? In her contributions on moral philosophy, the social, and the creation of liberal political subjectivities in the eighteenth century, Mary Poovey, following Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor, considers the concept as referring not to particular representations or actions, but to the foundational assumptions about what counts as an adequate representation or practice in the first place, so that the notion can be used to describe the most basic conceptual conditions of possibility for a society’s operation. The notion refers to ‘the final articulations the society in question has imposed on the world, on itself, and on its needs, the organizing patterns that are the conditions of representability of everything that the society can give to itself’.12 The human capacity to imagine order is seen to be at the foundation of society itself. In her own contribution Mary Poovey explores the role of what she calls the ‘modern fact’ and elsewhere ‘modern abstraction’, as central elements in the social imaginary of modernity.13 These elements can be understood to operate at the level of the history of epistemology, and there were of course other

6

Patrick Joyce

components and other levels of the social imaginary she describes, and many other social imaginaries that helped compose, and resist, modernity as well, so that it may be valuable to locate new approaches to the social in terms of a broad conception of modernity as the institution of society. This breadth would have to encompass a conception of the social imaginary as embedded in material life, and in processes and interactions that in embracing go beyond the semiotic alone, and which have unintended consequences (the concept of the ‘imaginary’ in Castoriadis extends beyond the usual, unfortunate, associations of the word). In epistemological terms, the place of abstraction in composing the way of thinking that has come to be called modernity, had, in Poovey’s words, ‘gained sufficient ascendency by the end of the eighteenth century to be considered the dominant or hegemonic social imaginary of Western European societies that embraced the principles of scientific, natural knowledge’. Abstraction was in turn central to the constitution of the social, which is in fact directly taken up in this volume not only by Mary Poovey but by Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan, in their study of the place of abstract space in modern thinking about the social, and the forms of power associated with this thinking. But the history of ‘modern abstraction’, at least in the guise of modern reason, is a good deal older than the eighteenth century, as the contribution of Catherine Pickstock indicates. One value of her study of the mediaeval origins of ‘civil society’ is that it fully dramatizes the epochal nature and significance of the emergence of the social. The latter is inconceivable within a religious social imaginary, or at least a religious social imaginary of the sort that she describes in terms of mediaeval belief in the necessity of actuality, as represented in a ritualized, sacralized understanding of the world. She considers the secret collaboration of ratio and myth and how the operations of reason in the sixteenth century in fact became substitutes for the real precisely because they in part drew upon the transcendence of pseudo-religion. The ‘religious’ character of these new epistemological operations, and of the social with which they became associated, is therefore apparent, and important to emphasize. However, what is striking in this account is how sixteenth century developments were not a reaction against mediaeval theology, but that it was in the late mediaeval period, in her instance of Duns Scotus, that the rejection of the necessity of actuality in favour of a more rationalized emphasis upon its possible alternatives became apparent. As Pickstock demonstrates, change was not only at an epistemological or theological level, for in terms of the place of ritual and the eucharist in mediaeval social life, for instance in monastic life, in terms of godparenting, marriage and the family, and also in terms of economic life, changes in social practice were central to this severance from the necessity of actuality. The resulting de-ritualization of peace in the early modern period involved the substitution of civil for sacred peace as a mode of power that could be extracted from social bonds and directed at strangers. Evident in the humanist protocols of civility, new, secular models of power developed that mutated into the idea and practice of civil society.

Introduction 7 The contributions of Pickstock and Poovey can be regarded therefore as contributions towards what might be called an archaeology of the epistemology of modernity, and of the social. Also towards an understanding of the long-term history of the social. This understanding has been developed by Keith Baker,14 who, following on from this picture of the early modern period, relates the development of the social to the Reformation and its severing of humanity from its ontological foundations in the divinity. As a consequence, ‘society’ became what he calls the ‘ontological horizon’ of a human life cut off from the grace of God. And the social, at least in the Enlightenment thought that Baker considers, emerged as a response to the problems created by this change, and by the widespread scepticism it eventually produced. These problems were evident across many, linked domains. In religious terms, society became the site of the Calvinist investment in human actions that made success in the world an indirect sign of grace, and in the Jansenist logic of the livable as a merely human order in which individual sinners acting out of self-love produce the same effects as if they had acted out of Christian charity. In epistemological terms, it is the understanding of everyday life as offering all the knowledge remaining to the human mind after the denial of rational access to the essence of the universe. In political terms society can be understood as the middle ground between civil war and absolute rule, an autonomous domain of individualism without anarchy, and order without arbitrary power, to follow Baker’s formulations. We pass decisively from a religious to a secular social imaginary: religion is indeed seen as a, and perhaps the, primary bond of society, but religion is now employed in the best interests of civil society (there was a new understanding of the social as a political bond). The necessity of society became the argument for the indispensability of religion. The institution of society as the conceptual frame of human collective existence ‘required (indeed, it found its ultimate logic in) the displacement and reworking of the prior claims of the divine’. The social therefore retained the deep imprint of the divine, precisely as it parted company from religion. In his other historical work,15 formations such as the ‘public opinion’ of pre-Revolutionary eighteenth-century France are seen by Baker to signal the emergence of an autonomous domain describable in terms of the social, which is now explicitly political, though this domain emerged a good deal before the sciences of the social. The governance of the social, in fact governance through the social, therefore developed as a decisive change, and with it its related modes of thought. But what is striking in Baker’s accounts, and it is echoed in Biernacki’s emphasis on the agency of abstract space itself in the creation of the modern state (in the instance of the dependence of the theory and practice of state building on the cultural techniques of single-point perspective), is that contrary to the direction of explanation in many accounts, developments in terms of thought and culture are primary, not derivative. This understanding is crucial to Poovey’s contribution as well, where her account of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy looks at the development of the social from an ethical capacity given by God to a property of a naturalized mental operation which

8

Patrick Joyce

also separated the social from ethical considerations, and ultimately from the operations of individual humans. Seen now to work through human interdependence, this once providential order operated with an increasing degree of autonomy from divine intervention. By the 1840s, these philosophical developments had created the foundations of a situation where it was possible to imagine social reform as a relatively autonomous secular project, which could be conceptualized as separable from individuals, and amenable to scientific (not theological) analysis. In Poovey’s account governmentality is located in a new emphasis on understanding human nature and relating it to how a mutually beneficial society could be attained out of the nature of individuals. In the first half of the nineteenth century the actual practice of governance and the social converged for the first time, the social increasingly becoming a central part of the social imaginaries of power. As the contribution of Robert Wokler shows, social science in France from the late 1790s was increasingly enlisted in the service of the state, and represented an attempt to govern according to a science that was autonomous of politics and legislation, in the aftermath of war and revolution politics and legislation being seen to have signally failed in their task. There was shift from the legislator to the administrator and the bureaucrat, the new science of the social receiving its most characteristic expression in the form of the technoadministrative state that began to emerge at this time, one supposedly neutral in its command of new kinds of expertise and its deployment of new sorts of experts in power and the social. This new social science became rooted in the psychology of the mind and the physiology of the body. It represented one development in a decided shift to a medicalized social (concerned with the ‘vital’ characteristics of ‘populations’) as a means of constructing the objects, and subjects, of governance. In association with this more biological imperative, starting above all with Comte in the mid-nineteenth century, and going on to shape the rest of the century, there developed organic and evolutionary notions of society and the social. Wokler refers in the French case to the early development of ‘social hygiene’. In his account the sort of state social science increasingly became the servant of was the nation state, and in this picture of the rapidity and drama of epistemological change, which complements the longue durée of other accounts here, change is given a precise date. What this contribution opens up is the question of the relationship between the social and the nation, and how social science constructed the idea of the unified state as the expression of the unified nation. And I think one way in which it did this was precisely by, as it were, naturalizing, and so unifying, the state as a ‘neutral’ techno-administrative zone, which could unproblematically function as the expression of the nation. However, there were many more direct ways in which social science might operate, for example in its mid-nineteenth-century fixation with biological and evolutionary types, and race, as keys to national identity. The contribution of Gyan Prakash makes the crucial move of understanding community, as well as society, as a key category of modernity and not as a premodern or pre-political form that the modern state confronted. Given the

Introduction 9 authoritarian character of colonial rule, the creation of civil society in India, and the circulation of the social, could only be incomplete and contradictory. Emerging out of the contradictions of colonial rule, community developed as perhaps the central element in an alternative social imaginary of power, particularly after the Mutiny of 1857 and the British perceptions of the failures of colonial rule. It was now necessary to seek the cooperation of communities and their ‘natural’ leaders, the prerequisite for which was knowledge of these communities, especially in the form of caste. Although Prakash emphasizes the centrality of community to colonial governmentality, viewing this as what he calls a dislocation of social or liberal governmentality, there was nonetheless a kind of incomplete victory of the social. Not only was a pedagogic project designed to institute civil society at least partly successful, particularly with the western-educated classes of some leading centres of power, but authoritarian versions of community permitted the functioning of ‘modernity in disguise’ in terms of colonial rule as ‘another site for the constitution of society’. The reception of community as a social imaginary of power in indigenous Indian society created not only society by the back door, in some versions and dimensions of this reception, but also, in others, the means to negotiate and resist dominant imaginaries of power. In forms that were imagined to be precolonial and pre-modern, but which at the same time domesticated European forms of modernity, indigenous appropriations of community and tradition as modern created a counter-discourse of power and a space for self-governance, which was evident in Indian nationalism. In terms of the place of the social in social imaginaries of power, what is apparent here is the complex operation of these imaginaries, their capacity for counter-meanings (in this case around the place of women in society), and their contribution to destabilizing as well as strengthening power (or, from another perspective, their capacity to show power as enabling subjects as well as disciplining them). Mary Poovey’s account of gender also takes up some of these questions, in that the complexities of any social imaginary are seen as especially apparent in the practices of those who are marginalized, in this case many eighteenth-century women. My own contribution refers to the resistance which the aspiration to order evident in early- and mid-nineteenth-century attempts to reform urban space in Britain encountered in the disorder and chaos of the unreformed city.16 My emphasis, in line with other contributions, is in the first half of my chapter on the epistemology of power; on the place of statistics and cartography in defining the concerns of government, in this case the governance of, but more exactly governance through the social, which emerged with such force in the nineteenth century. I employ the notion of governmentality, as do a number of other contributors, for instance Poovey and Prakash. The latter also uses the term ‘social imaginaries of power’, and this is also near to the sense of governmentality which I use, though my interest is in liberal governmentality. Governmentality, following those who have developed Foucault’s original formulations,17 can be understood as forms of political reason which enable objects and subjects of rule to be worked upon, but also as the political technologies that carry forward this

10

Patrick Joyce

work. ‘Liberalism’ applies to active governance through the medium of freedom (for instance through the self, the family, the economy, also the city, upon which I concentrate, and indeed ‘society’ itself as a free, self-regulating entity). I explore some of these dimensions in relation to the social, taking up the question of what I call the ‘vitalization’ of the city in the nineteenth century as part of a series of new political technologies, which increasingly instituted a political regime of the social. However, in this section on the ‘blood of the city’, I also take up the crucially significant question of the relationship between the social and the natural, and I employ anthropological work on the constitution of the social in terms of city food markets as liminal spaces in which the relationship between the natural and the social, the material and the symbolic, and the human and the non-human, were all worked out through the transaction of relationships between life and death, and what is body and not body. In fact, I want to deploy an anthropological sense of freedom in the sense of liminality to explore the operation of governmental freedom, in this way highlighting resistances to power. These anthropological and symbolic dimensions of the social would certainly be central to any idea of the imaginary institution of society. This nineteenth-century coding of the natural and the social can be contrasted with Catherine Pickstock’s account of the radically different world of mediaeval times, where the natural and the social were unified in terms of the necessity of the actuality of the world. In considering the relationship between the material and the symbolic, and the human and the non-human, in my contribution I refer to the work of Bruno Latour, where the processes I describe can also be productively understood in terms of his account of the ‘hybrid’ objects and processes of ‘purification’ in modernity which regulate the relationship of the natural and the social.18 In terms of what might be a new sort of history of the social, the contributions in the first part of the collection are simply a series of signposts, without any claim to comprehensiveness. However, they do convey some sense of developments up to the late nineteenth century, when the social becomes even more than previously an ontologically distinct and autonomous entity. In becoming such, the social also more completely than previously achieved its status as a science, now in the form of a university discipline. This returns me to my opening remarks on the ways in which the old, solid and ontological social developed within the disciplines from the late nineteenth century. However, the history of the social as pointed to in this volume is not the same as a history of the social as it has figured in various disciplines, though the disciplinary social is intimately related to this broader history. I will give a very brief account of this broader history, though one still very much truncated in terms of its concentration on thought and politics. The manifold nature of a new social history of the social can only be gestured at here, likewise the great plurality of the social imaginaries involved, at every level of the social order. In analytical terms, and concentrating on the British case – so sacrificing breadth for a little depth – the late nineteenth-century crisis of liberal individualism and the liberal state witnessed the development of idealist notions

Introduction 11 alongside the older evolutionary, biological and organic idea of a distinct society functionally adapting to its environment. The ever-present relationship between concepts of the social, politics and the state was evident, though this was no less the case earlier, given the close nineteenth-century association between the social and social reform, particularly in the meliorist tradition of British thought and action about the social.19 In the idealist tradition, heavily influenced by the German case, the state and society were seen as logically prior to the individual, and the goal of human association as the public good. The idea of society based on inexorable natural law to some extent gave way to one understood in terms of conscious will and purpose. Seen as natural and material in one view, society in the idealist tradition was seen as mental and moral in the other. In practice both traditions coalesced, organicism and voluntarism cohabiting in terms of the view of an organic society which was yet rational and purposeful, rather than simply natural and predetermined.20 The combination of these views tended to dominate intellectual circles in Britain through to the inter-war period. Developments were of course shaped by other currents too, notably socialism and Marxism, and these historicist influences compounded what in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was an extraordinary powerful and widespread questioning of the nature of social life. The state came to play a central role in this rethinking of the social. This involved the realization that the state must work through the characteristics of society in a much more direct way than hitherto, constituting loyalties, obligations and rights which were to be much more collective than previously, even though in many cases the primary aim was the reconstitution of the individual self as the driving force in the regeneration of society. In Britain, and in Europe, the major consequence was the extensive ‘social’ legislation of the time, which laid the foundations of the twentieth-century ‘welfare state’.21 For example, individual rights, and the rights of families, were in this new dispensation secured not by individual economic action but by state action, and provision of pensions and benefits, these new rights being secured as social rights, so that individual rights were connected to a web of obligations, rights and solidarities extending across the individual’s life, across the lives of all individuals in a population, and between individuals across generations, in short a network of relations in which the social was understood to inhere. In political and intellectual circles, the laws of society were now understood to be less biological or medical than peculiar to something called ‘society’ itself, a sui generis reality to be known by social science. The ‘social’ was now itself to do the explanatory work. Certain things came to be known as ‘social’ things to this science, and therefore different from anything else. In the process, the social question now became a sociological question, which, alongside the social state, it has remained until relatively recently. Something of this can be illustrated with reference to the place of the social in the governance of the city.22 In Britain a governmental diagram of the city as organic, medical and sanitary gave way to the ‘social’ city, which was to be governed in line with the inherent sociability of its inhabitants, which unlike previously was now seen as benign.

12

Patrick Joyce

The social was relocated within the patterns of association held to be intrinsic in social formations themselves. In this way a sui generis social emerged, which has I think remained widely influential until relatively recently. This social, in terms of class, status, community and a host of other concepts, was in intellectual, and governmental, terms located in homes, neighbourhoods and families themselves. City planning, for example in the case of zoning in Chicago, was now carried forward in relation to what was perceived to be the actual sociability of neighbourhoods. The end of the social in the late twentieth century has been widely signalled, from a variety of perspectives,23 including the place of the governmentalization of the social.24 In Britain, from the 1970s onwards there has been a revolution in the relationship between state and society, so that in many respects the market has come to replace ‘society’ as a model of state governance. Economic life was marketized, but also all areas of life. For example, in welfare and education a whole range of institutions was reconstituted as a series of internal markets, in line with what has been called ‘the new public management’. This change involved the transition from the idea of public service to one of private management, and parallel to this culture of accountability was the emergence of an ’audit society’ in which formal, and the professionally sanctioned, monitoring systems replaced the trust that earlier version of the relationship between state and society had invested in professional specialists of all sorts (including historians and social scientists). The social state gave way to a state that was regarded as ‘enabling’, permitting the citizen, the firm, the locality, and so on, to freely choose. This politics of choice had various expressions, in which the state was seen as more or less benign, in its benign form the state being seen as a means of articulating ‘community’ as a kind of third term, which was in fact part of a ‘third way’ in Britain, between the individual and the state. Community therefore became a sort of de-socialized social. In these circumstances the sort of rethinking of the social evident in this and other works like it has a decided political punctuality. This new relation of state and society involved the decentralization of rule upon the citizen himself or herself, with the idea that the capacity for self realization could only ultimately be a question of individual activity. The enormous proliferation of ‘self-help’ institutions and activities is testament to this. Governance now occurred through the realization and practice of an ‘inner’ self (as Nikolas Rose puts it, a ’depth within’), and of freely chosen forms of identity in everyday life (a practice of lifestyle ‘without’), in which the place of consumption and the market in this particular practice of freedom is of course central.

Part II Turning to the second part of the book, Bruno Latour’s contribution complements other recent contributions of his to the current rethinking of the social.25 The social is now seen as that which circulates within the world of things, not what things circulate within. What was once seen as the cause (society) is now

Introduction 13 seen as a consequence, the social being accounted for by the presence of ‘many other little things’ that are not social by their nature but social ‘in the sense that they are associated with one another’, to quote Latour. He emphasizes in this contribution the second of the main arguments of the theoretical perspective with which he has become associated (in addition to the questioning of the natural/social divide), namely that the micro-macro distinction is a bar to understanding the real nature of society. The present chapter is, as he says, a sort of thought experiment about what social sciences might embrace when the path of Gabriel Tarde is taken, not that of what I call here the old, ontological social. His contribution is that of someone who has never been able to decide whether he is a metaphysician or a sociologist. But perhaps he is also a historian, in the sense of being one who explores a lost history for the social sciences, but also one who invites meditation on how the thought of the past inhabits its own time and other times. The sense that Tarde, of the late nineteenth century, may need the changed world of the present to be properly understood suggests the value of the ‘untimely’ (something which Thomas Osborne also dwells on), the value of an historical consciousness that dislocates received ideas of what fits in time, and is timely. The philosophical position of Tarde provides metaphysical underpinnings for Latour’s other theoretical and practical work. His radical reduction of the social from being ‘a milieu in which humans grow and live’ to a ‘tiny set of narrow, standardized connections which occupy only one of the monads some of the time’, sets the scene for the advocacy not of the essentialized thinking of ‘being’ (an ontological obsession) but of the de-essentialized thinking of ‘having’, one centred on the properties of things and how they are acquired and ‘possessed’. The actants and the network here receive metaphysical treatment, but this metaphysics is inseparable from his own and others’ practice of inquiry, including socio-historical inquiry. This is evident in the work of Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, who explicitly employ Latour’s work. In sidestepping the epistemological quandary of seeing the world as material and non-material, as practice and representation, natural and social, they make a move that is increasingly present in the neo-empirical, pragmatic aftermath of postmodernism, a move that is to my mind a very productive one, owing much to Latour’s work itself. Things, bodies and places have centre stage in Glennie and Thrift’s account of time, which represents a putting into practice of their understanding of society and the social as ‘loose formations of practices that are alignments of human and non-human’. The material objects (‘actants’) here studied are clocks, and the spatial and temporal networks or communities of practice and skill through which they are instantiated. Time is thereby located ‘through’ these ‘clock networks’, in short through the spaces of time. Exemplifying what I earlier referred to as a particular combination of practical theory evident in this book, the contribution of Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan explores in space another key component of what it is to think practically, and ‘know interestingly’, in terms of new ideas about the social. The old social was, and is, rooted in that dimension of ‘modern abstraction’ which

14

Patrick Joyce

was so central to the social imaginary of modernity. Abstract space, however, is shown to be not just a purely analytic fiction but ‘an historically operative component of social practice’, and the account of this component given here extends the history of the social in new directions. Space is ‘real’, a product of modernity. As indicated earlier, one key move here is to identify the pervasiveness of older notions of the social, their tenacious hold even when they seem absent and new thinking about the social seems in place. Their consideration of the role of place in the constitution of knowledge and power indicates, among other things, how for example in work influenced by Foucault place is ironically enough seen to be an element in the shaping of space. Therefore, it is not a case of space or place, but historical work needs to consider both in relation to one another, one continually constituting the other. This perception of complexity is paralleled by the awareness that modernity and modern abstraction themselves are in fact the consequence of the intersection and tension of space and place. To assume that the modern era, for example in the case of seventeenthcentury science, acknowledged only abstract space completely overlooks the complexity of practice. The presence of Foucault is not only evident here but, it will be apparent, represents perhaps the single most important intellectual influence in the volume as a whole. However, in Biernacki and Jordan’s account, and equally in that of Thrift and Glennie, the material world is not seen as in turn simply subordinate to the theoretical and epistemological. In exploring the dimension of place as central to a new ‘post-social’ socio-historical practice, Biernacki indeed identifies the world of things and of practice as a foundation for new work. My own forthcoming work on the ‘civic toilette’, drawn upon for my own contribution here, also addresses how the sanitary systems of the city as material objects can be understood, in their building and in their maintenance, as both making society in a particular form and holding it together, or breaking it apart, in particular ways. For example, one might in fact speak of ‘liberal infrastructure’, in the sense that the self-maintaining aspects of urban infrastructure, designed to actively prevent human intervention, helped to secure the city as a place of free flows and movement. While certain forms of agency and subjectivity are indeed ‘engineered into’ the material world, the multiplicity and complexity involved in both the generation and reception of political materialities is obviously highly marked. Other dimensions of infrastructure, for instance electricity, had similar aspects, in that because it could be provided for all, and regardless of where it went it was exactly the same, it created a particular potential for the material constitution of society and the social imaginaries which instituted it. The significant development here is to extend the activities of history and the social sciences into the realm of what usually has been considered as beyond the ‘social’, by challenging the binary distinction between the social and natural, as one of a whole range of such dichotomies that have bedevilled social, historical inquiry. Work in this area, at the intersection of history, the social sciences and science studies, is proving to be especially fruitful,26 and indeed something like a new ‘material turn’ is increasingly apparent.

Introduction 15 Turning to the last two contributions, on the rethinking of the disciplines of history and the social sciences, the lessons that Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift draw from their study are of considerable interest for this rethinking, seeing as they do the everyday as a motor of history, and basic to the reproduction of society. If ‘everyday life’ does not as they say ‘add up’, in that it is not centred but spatially and temporally distributed, often does not ‘work’, and is often unspoken, unwritten or simply lost, then it becomes very difficult, adopting their procedure, to produce an explanation that does add up, in the sense of producing a recognizable, conventional account of social and historical change. Grasping this condition involves a recognition in the interpreter of their own need for a particular kind of skill, one considered here under the heading of ‘firasa’, seen in Arabic culture as the organ of conjectural knowledge, and also considered in the terms of the historian Carlo Ginzburg. They point towards a new sort of theory, one that does not explain (hence the frustration) but talks about a wider range of things than previously. While not working from this perspective, nor approaching theory in precisely this way, Thomas Osborne’s contribution moves in a similar direction, indicating what I earlier referred to as an ascetic, pragmatic vein in contemporary social theory, in which the contingency and complexity of theory reflects the contingency and complexity of new ideas of the social, as well as an awareness of the contingency of historical change. The emphasis on everyday life itself echoes this new theoretical modesty. In line with this view, the sort of inquiry described under the heading of governmentality, widely evident in the eminently practical historical work in this volume, is considered as ‘a modest if effectual conceptual lever’, with which I agree (it should not be seen, as it sometimes is, as a grand historical narrative). This vein of theoretical minimalism can also be seen at work in this generous foray of a sociologist into a cognate discipline in the hope of repositioning the sometimes anything-butascetic debates in social history in Britain. The picture of social history is indeed a generous one and – given, I think, the rootedness of the old social in social history – perhaps an over-generous one. However, it is very productive to point to the kinship of different positions in terms of Osborne’s identification of post-functionalism as operative across these positions. Nonetheless, a productive argument might be had here also: Thomas Osborne defends the necessity of the untimeliness of social theory, particularly in the form of Foucault, and with this I agree, but whether theoretical minimalism and asceticism is the best sort of untimeliness is open to question, rather than say Bauman’s so-called epochalism, a kind of postFrankfurt school postmodernism as it might be called. (Clearly, this collection presents several reactions to ‘postmodernism’, not all of them favourable, but it depends, of course, on what is meant by this protean term, and I for one would happily defend it.) Whatever the case, I think there is value in Osborne’s presentation of the untimely beside the role of the outsider, which as I earlier indicated has been integral to so much of the identity of social history in Britain.

16

Patrick Joyce

The untimely and the outsider relates to Osborne’s recognition that social history always had a particularly strong ethical vocation in its practice, which he wishes to see renewed in the light of post-functionalism, and in terms of a ‘happy positivism’, and a sensitivity, however ironic, to the archive. Interestingly, Osborne’s discussion of the constitution of the credibility of social history through the means of a particular disciplinary awareness of the archive, presents an opportunity for thinking about the ethical content of disciplines more broadly. The axiomatic nature of historical doubt of the historical method is understood here as a form of criticism integral to the idea of the ethical nature of disciplinary practice. Essential here also, as well as doubt, is the idea of history as obligation and debt to the past. All history in being about enlarging the scope of collective memory is at once the payment of that debt to those who have passed and a critique of what is left.27 The attention of social historians, but just as much the social sciences, to the nature and transformation of the archive is seen to be a kind of moral or civic pursuit. Essential to this pursuit, in the age of the death of a governmental social, is the reconstruction of the social in a moral and analytic sense. Although historians are increasingly aware of the politics of the archive, as he says, there has as yet among historians been relatively little reflection on how the social may be furthered, which is of course where this book makes its appearance. In a rather different sociological style, one reflecting national differences between disciplines, John Hall’s essay nonetheless contributes to the common endeavour of reconstructing the social. In line with other contributions, the emphasis on steering a path between objectivism and relativism in situating the idea of a ‘culture of inquiry’ represents a decidedly ‘post-functionalist’ tactic. In order to establish a culture of inquiry as a productive way forward for history and the social sciences, it is first necessary to look at the varying ‘cultural logics of inquiry’ across a broad field of socio-historical writing. This John Hall does by discriminating the underlying epistemological patterns of this writing. Again, there is an emphasis on practising what is preached, in that the method for looking at these patterns, a ‘hermeneutic deconstruction of discourse’, itself reflects a ‘third way’ of its own, between sometimes contending approaches. There is, as he says, a parallel between his own approach and Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. All inquiry turns out to be the outcome of different logics. Looking at ‘historicism’ as one particularly significant practice of inquiry, it is evident that what are sometimes seen as epistemological ‘others’ are in fact kin. What Hall calls a ‘web of affinities’ is seen to stretch across many practices of inquiry. This emphasis on affinities across disciplines is obviously central to the present volume, and it is here given rigorous systematic attention at a fundamental level of analysis, one which complements and extends Osborne’s account of paradisciplinarity, and of the archive, from the perspective of a transdisciplinarity founded on the excavation of logics of inquiry. Hall’s words express a good deal of the spirit of this volume, and I will close the introduction with them:

Introduction 17 Heterogeneous methodologies of research are not autonomous; they are deeply connected, and sometimes dependent upon one another. These connections are often denied by practitioners who want to assert the purity of their own methods, maintaining the boundaries that mark off some epistemological Other. But ultimate claims for the superiority of any given practice are suspect, because alternative and sometimes conflicting kinds of knowledge are culturally constructed under the discursive circumstances of impure reason shared by all practices. Realizing the impure reason of inquiry discloses webs of affinities that enable the social to be questioned, re-thought, and perhaps even re-invented.

Notes 1 In Britain and Europe some of the most influential pioneering work on the systematic sociological rethinking of the social has been that of Zygmunt Bauman. See his Intimations of Postmodernity (Routledge, London, 1991); Postmodern Ethics (Blackwell, Oxford, 1993); Postmodernity and its Discontents (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997). 2 ‘Special issue: sociology facing the next millennium’, British Journal of Sociology, 51, 1, January/March 2000. 3 Ibid., John Urry, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Conclusion’. 4 Patrick Joyce (ed.) The Oxford Reader on Class (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995). 5 Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds) Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (California University Press, London, 1999). 6 The contribution of geographers to rethinking the social has been particularly signifi cant, not least that of Nigel Thrift. See his Spatial Formations (Sage, London, 1996); ‘Afterwords’, Society and Space, 18, 2000; and with Steven Pile (eds) Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (Routledge, London, 1995), chapters 1 and 2 especially, where the account of approaches to the study of subjectivity complements that of approaches to the social. 7 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘From sociology to historical social science: prospects and obstacles’, and Goran Therborn, ‘At the birth of second century sociology: times of reflexivity, spaces of identity, and modes of knowledge’, in British Journal of Sociology, 51: 1. See also Peter Wagner, ‘ “An entirely new object of consciousness, volition, and thought”: the coming into being and (almost) passing away of “society” as a scientific object’, in Lorraine Daston (ed.) The Coming into Being and Passing Away of Scientific Objects (Chicago University Press, Chicago, forthcoming); and Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995). 8 William H. Sewell, ‘The social in the historical: a comment’, ESRC Workshops, ‘Rethinking history and the social sciences’: Workshop 1, ‘History and the social sciences: retrospect and prospect’, Manchester, September 1998. 9 Richard Biernacki, ‘Method and metaphor after the new cultural history’, in V. E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds) Beyond the Cultural Turn. 10 Patrick Joyce, ‘The end of social history?’, Social History, 20, 1, 1995; and ‘The return of history: postmodernism and the politics of academic history in Britain’, Past and Present, 158, Feb. 1998. See also Keith Jenkins (ed.) The Postmodern History Reader (Routledge, London, 1997). 11 Workshop programmes can be found at www.art.man.ac.uk/history/home.htm, entry for Patrick Joyce.

18

Patrick Joyce

12 Mary Poovey, citing Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1987), and see also pp. 3, 117–19, 124, 139–40, 141–2. 13 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago University Press, London, 1998); and Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago University Press, London, 1995). 14 Keith M. Baker, ‘Enlightenment and the institution of society: notes for a conceptual history’, in Willem Melching and Wyger Velemen (eds) Main Trends in Cultural History (Rodopi, Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1994); ‘A Foucauldian French Revolution’, in Jan Goldstein (ed.) Foucault and the Writing of History (Blackwell, London, 1994). 15 Keith M. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990). 16 For a more complete account see chapters 1 and 2 of Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: The City and Modern Liberalism (Verso, London, forthcoming 2002). 17 See especially Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999); and Nikolas Rose, Thomas Osborne and Andrew Barry (eds) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (UCL Press, London, 1996). 18 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvester Press, Hemel Hempstead, 1993); Science in Action (Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1987). 19 Philip Abrams, The Origins of British Sociology (University of Chicago Press, London, 1968). 20 Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914 (Penguin, London, 1993), chapter 8, ‘Society and social theory’. 21 Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom, chapter 2; Jacques Donzelot, L’Invention du Social (Vrin, Paris, 1984). 22 Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, chapter 4. 23 Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or, The End of the Social and Other Essays (Semiotexte, New York, 1983). 24 Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom, chapter 3. 25 Bruno Latour, ‘When things strike back: a possible contribution of ‘science studies’ to the social sciences’, British Journal of Sociology, 51, 1. 26 See for example Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997); Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War Two (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1998); and Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France 1763–1815 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1997). 27 ‘Special issue: the archive’, parts 1 and 2, History of the Human Sciences, 11, 4, November 1998, and 12, 2, May 1999. See also Mike Featherstone, ‘Archiving cultures’, British Journal of Sociology, 51, 1, 2000.

Part I

The old social Histories of the social

2

The mediaeval origins of civil society Catherine Pickstock

Let us, for argument’s sake, take hold of a simple definition of civil society, as the realm of ‘polite’, peaceful intercourse that occurs with modern society and is not wholly reducible either to political order or to economic order; this polite sphere – since it is public and open to all – can only be a secular sphere. I shall argue that as such, it is doomed to a certain thinness, and a very uncertain degree of distinction from either the political or the economic. Indeed, the realm of ‘civility’ has from its origins been rather to do with the buttressing of both the economic and the capitalistic.1 I realize that to speak of ‘secular’ society as though this marked a crucial difference is a risky business; it is now normative to imagine that anything but a secular order is unsatisfactory. Who can doubt that religions lead to violence? Who is there who would defend any attempt to base rational existence upon fantasy and myth? In what follows, however, I hope to defend the use of this term in such a way as to suggest that civil society, as we have come to know it, in fact arose as a kind of by-product of certain theoretical manoeuvres in late mediaeval scholastic metaphysics. The phenomenon of civil society, then, is not purely human in its compass; it is not a pristine ‘secular’ phenomenon, at least not in terms of the scope of its theoretical origins. But that is to leap ahead. We must first problematize the dichotomy of ratio versus myth, for this dichotomy underlies many of the assumptions which have established civil society as normative. In a recent issue of the critical theory journal Telos, Luciano Pellicani attacks Zygmunt Bauman’s and the Frankfurt school’s critiques of modernity which advance the claim that modernity is itself ‘totalitarian’.2 Unlike really totalitarian regimes, such as Nazism and Stalinism, he claims, which allegedly subdue rationality in favour of the myths of ideology, modern societies are seen as characterized by the impersonal domination of ratio. Pellicani cites Jeffrey Herf’s book Reactionary Modernism3 to support his claim that whatever rationality the Nazis appealed to in carrying out their genocidal project, it was always subverted by a freight of mythic ideology. This freight, he says, is entirely foreign to the clean and neutral architecture of modernity, whose ratio has no hidden or borrowed gnostic sedimented values. The ‘modern’ order he designates ‘civilization’ as such, a concept which Norbert Elias has traced back in

22

Catherine Pickstock

part to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French refinement of manners and delicate sensibilities of court life, held in contrast to the vulgar and superstitious mores of peasants and non-European ‘savages’.4 But as Paul Piccone and Alex Delfini assert in their ‘Reply to Pellicani’,5 there is in his critique of Bauman’s analysis, an appeal to a thoroughly mythic or ideological set of assumptions, which, at the most general level, fails to acknowledge the dialectical collaboration between the two terms, ‘mythic ideology’ and ratio. More specifically, in keeping with Quentin Lauer’s observation, they note that ‘rationalism itself has a non-rational foundation, in the sense that it must begin with an act of faith in reason (for which there is no reason)’.6 Once this leap of faith has been undertaken, moreover, there are further layers of ungrounded ideology or myth through which rationalism must pass. The assertion that ratio is neutral should immediately warn us of biased goingson, for its very contentlessness lends it especially well to an absorption of the arbitrary ruses of myth, since it is by definition compatible with any ideological sedimentation whatsoever. Delphini and Piccone note how the various attempts by Enlightenment ideologies to construct alternative ‘substantive’ versions of reason seek to smuggle content into an otherwise merely instrumental – though powerful – construct which, precisely because of its purported contentlessness, can readily be presented as neutral in order to wield a more universal sway as a cultural foundation, thereby all the more effectively displacing other allegedly arbitrary particularistic versions based on traditions, religion and myth. One might also mention, following Eric Voegelin, the recourse by advocates of Enlightenment ratio to the language and ideology of gnosis, which assumes an esoteric and publicly incommunicable access to reason itself (for example through the specialisms of science) as well as purveying myths concerning rationally necessary travails through the irrational.7 Thus the Enlightenment’s supposed neutrality is described in terms of an immanentized eschatology, whose teleological consummation rests in the promise of ratio to disseminate its neutral mathematics in order to accelerate progress and perfect man in the face of its regrettable – one is tempted to say ‘fallen’ – tendency to mythicize and particularize its reality. One can trace the history of the Enlightenment’s intolerance towards other cultures, under the pretext of spreading ‘civilization’, as the revolutionary gnosis par excellence (of which the current postmodern preciosity as regards engaging with the ‘other’ is but the reverse face).8 And this covert teleology even has a soteriological dimension; Voegelin chose the word ‘gnostic’ to describe the emergence of modernity because, as Ted McAllister notes, it refers to claims about esoteric knowledge as ‘salvific’ and effecting a ‘purification’ of society, purged of its local eccentricities and particularities.9 Delphini and Piccone are keen to see the tyranny of ‘political correctness’, especially in the United States, as a recent example of this extirpation through legislation of the peculiar, personal or traditional, for their harbouring of inherited and therefore unjustifiable myths. And it is here that they seek to excavate the secret alliance between the totalitarian ratio of the Enlightenment and the purported ‘respect’ for particularity claimed by liberalism. The latter’s subtle prohibitions of

The mediaevel origins of civil society 23 behaviour can be seen as just a new variant of a mathematics of citizenry, which, one might add, traces a direct lineage back to the seventeenth-century protocols of polite conduct and even earlier to the manuals of civic ritual and manners which began to circulate in the later middle ages.10 Many of these arguments are of course well rehearsed, and it is scarcely original now to point to the secret pseudo-religiosity of rational modernity. In what follows, however, I will explore two further dimensions of the secret collaboration between ratio and myth. First, I will consider its surprisingly early emergence by examining its operation in one early modern humanist attempt to methodize knowledge; part of my purpose here is to suggest that the phenomenon of rational modernity began to arise considerably earlier than is often supposed; many commentators have observed the epiphenomena of modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but can one see traces of these epiphenomena even earlier? And, second, by examining its roots in late mediaeval theology, I will suggest that this collaboration has implications for a possible understanding of modernity as such. First, then, and quite briefly, is there a basic manoeuvre taken as axiomatic in the dichotomy of ratio and mythos? As mentioned above, it is commonplace to argue that fundamental to the dichotomy is a condensation of a general process of abstraction from time and embodiment, where the vicissitudes of the latter become aligned with all that is spurious, unreliable, uncertain, multiple, private, arcane and often fanatical. I have already mentioned the gradual hiding of bodily functions from the late middle ages onwards via such innovatory devices of concealment and bodily distancing as the nightdress, the handkerchief, the fork and other ‘implements of civilization’; in many other areas of life as well, the effects of time and its unseemly variousness have been systematically concealed or apparently regulated by an array of methodological contrivances. What is perhaps the significant move here is not so much the protocols of regulation themselves, but the way in which these protocols become substituted for the ‘real’, in such a way that one is led to imagine that the neutrality and predictability of operations within a new artificial sphere exhibit our true, primary relationship to the world.11

Petrus Ramus and the Logike of 1574 In the realm of theoretical reason, one can mention the Logike of the French humanist Peter Ramus, which provided a method or series of ordered steps of epistemological procedure applicable to every art and science, and sought to open these disciplines to a condition of availability and accessibility.12 Ramus is well known for his use of tabulations, diagrams and charts which apparently organize noetic material in a timeless domain of abstract lines, whose ability to communicate facts at a single glance seems to bypass the mediations of language itself. These diagrams were designed to arrange the myriad phenomena of a particular topic according to a series of designated laws whose philosophical emphasis was upon formal arrangement rather than content or depth.13 For

24

Catherine Pickstock

already, the successive crises of the late middle ages and Reformation had engendered a search for methodological and pragmatic security, of which humanism itself sometimes partook, especially when it sought to establish a readily usable and universally acceptable ‘place logic’. It is possible here to note various ways in which Ramus’ tabulations anticipate the secret collaboration already mentioned, between ratio and myth, the publicly objective and the privately subjective. Their purported ‘convenience’ as a methodizer permits the pedagogue to simplify the confusions of reality, generating an apparently objective ontology from a secretly subjective method. This subterfuge depends entirely upon a new distinction from, and elevation above, the flow of reality on the part of the subject, which alone permits reality apparently to render itself in terms of discrete definition, distribution, clarity and distinctness. A new cultural fear that without such imposition-disguised-asmere-reading, reality is ineluctably chaotic, is here scarcely concealed. The logical conclusion of such a configuration of method as distinct from the myriad complications of reality it observes and configures, is that the appearance of disorder is ‘merely’ real, whilst the method and the mind which deploys it, are supra-real. The mind is posited as a superior cipher or mirror whose systematic operation discloses a hidden regularity. Furthermore, the categories, both those inherited and those devised by Ramus, assumed a supra-linguistic status which bypasses all contingency, as though ordained prior to language to deliver the clear and distinct essence of reality as it really is, rather than as it merely seems, by means of a direct and exalted access. According to such a scheme, the Ramist charts map the divisions and subdivisions of a particular proposition in a fashion which resembles exalted mnemonic devices (where memory is now defined as local recall) for the storage and re-use of data, and yet what was once an ‘art’ of memory now serves as a method for understanding, and the logic of this method in turn secretly usurps the place of an ontology.14 Thus ease of comprehension and ease of communication are compounded with the neutral delivery of a reality whose authentic mark is taken to be its instant simplicity and self-identity. One can also mention here a further way in which Ramist dialectic can be situated within a general tendency to obscure the diverse and temporal, and that is its pejoration of language, and reduction of rhetoric to mere elocutio, related, as Walter J. Ong has shown, to the demise of dialogue. The chief goal of Ramist dialectic, namely pedagogic clarity, problematized the tension between the traditional categories of dialectic and rhetoric, in such a way that the classical notion of dialectic as dialogue, and the scholastic art of disputation (according to which, both dialectic and rhetoric had their own respective categories of invention and judgement) were conflated into a monologic art which simply retained the name of dialectic.15 But it is a specifically textual – and, one might add, identically repeated or printed – monologue which further reduces dialectic to the condition of a sophistic rhetoric, i.e. a rhetoric which makes no appeal beyond itself to the variant ethical circumstances of life, nor offers modes of praise and honour as the traditional rhetorics sought to do.16 By thus

The mediaevel origins of civil society 25 obscuring the dynamic poles of traditional dialectic and the reality of sounds, Ramus concomitantly displaced rhetoric itself, encouraging its relegation to the now innocuous category of ‘elocutio’, which, in a context where the textual is now normative, has less to do with the structures of oral delivery than with spatially construed ornamentation.17 This further accentuates the separation of inhabited reality from the noetic categories, for this new casting of rhetoric simply involves the ornate utterance of preconstituted truths. Moreover, for Ramus, the notion of elocutio was doubly textual, for in encouraging brevity, clarity and schematization, he preferred above all not language, but the use of spatial diagrams. And as regards language itself, he advocated the use of ‘plain style’.18 This did not mean a ‘low style’, but rather a synthesis of the three former styles of elocutio – high, medium and low – which emerges as an expository, cerebral and analytic language, highly unlocated, depersonalized, and as close to mathematics as language can be.19 Indeed, it is ironic that a system which rejected the obscurantism of scholasticism by seeking to assimilate ‘common parlance’ should result in a style so polite as to be voiceless, presaging so succinctly Descartes’ attempt to ‘get outside’ the vagaries of subjectivity and language and to find a pure, unmediated mathesis. The hidden operations of Ramus’ tabulations suggest that certain assumptions were already in place within one strand of humanism which permitted a full acceptance of the apparent naturalness of the dichotomy of reason over against myth. But why was the construction of this dichotomy so easily accepted? A possible answer, ironically, lies at the very point of collaboration between the two terms. First of all, it should be noted that the attempt to find a logical and voiceless discourse is part of a more general movement towards a construal of language as a purely constative, disinterested reporter of things,20 constituted not so much in opposition to the mind, but paradoxically in opposition to language itself – since it assumes that the naturalness and immediacy of its ‘language’ permits a conflation of language and reality. In the second place, over and against ordinary language and its local prejudices of time, aspect and person, stands a pristine realm of diagrams and abstractions. But this involves a contradiction: Ramus’ mathematical conventions are still mediated, and its lines are still metaphors. But why did they so comfortably pass for the ‘real’, for a realm more original than the metaphorical? Perhaps it is because the abstract and silent formulations of its charts shared a kind of invisibility with the transcendent, and so borrowed from its authority. But in their new immanent context, authority and eternity are translated – imperceptibly – into their mundane counterparts, pedagogy and permanence. Nevertheless, what is to be seen here is a hidden appeal to the myth of transcendence to secure the naturalness of its own pristine mathematics. In the foregoing, we have seen one instance, long before Descartes, of a mathesis being substituted for the real, and of neutrality and distance coming to define the way things are. One could say that such matheses are an epistemological equivalent to the practical codes of manners with which Ramist dichotomizations were concurrent; both share an overall eschewal of the diverse

26

Catherine Pickstock

and inchoate. Moreover, like the early modern manuals and codes of manners, Ramus’ ordering of knowledge is concerned with form and not content, and in this way can be seen to anticipate later methodical approaches to knowledge, such as the seventeenth-century codes of civility and conventions of moderate speech recently discussed by the historians of science Shapin and Schaffer.21 The point of such manners is not really what one does, but that one does it in a predictable and modest, neutral way which somehow tries to get outside the situatedness which characterizes all our knowledge and behaviour. Now, it would be very easy to say that this shift to a methodized and supposedly neutral outlook, whilst, on the one hand, seeming to issue from a perhaps superstitious form of reasoning, on the other hand, of course really arises from a new world order, after the middle ages, when a theological outlook had begun to disintegrate. Indeed, it is a commonplace to say that the rise of civil society with its laws and codes and methods, arose to counteract the chaotic outcome of religion’s uncontainability in the form of the wars of religion. But is this really the genealogy of the ratio of the Enlightenment? The assumptions which we have seen to operate within the protocols of civil reason as described above, issue from a transformation from within theology itself and not as a reaction against it. To examine this suggestion further, I will briefly discuss this theological change as it was expressed in one aspect of the thought of the late mediaeval philosopher Duns Scotus (c.1265–1308), whose theoretical manoeuvres laid open the possibility of no longer seeing any necessity or intrinsic meaning as belonging to actuality.

Duns Scotus The two main categories of Duns Scotus’ philosophy, the univocity of Being and the formal distinction, are notoriously abstruse and complicated. But, in the briefest possible terms, these categories were pitted against Thomas Aquinas’ framework of analogy of Being and actual necessity, with the result that a new insistence upon the intervention of divine will as the prime determining factor as to the way things are in the world, both in terms of how one perceives or ‘knows’ what is in the world, and in terms of theological matters, such as the interpretation of the eucharist and revelation, came to be emphasized.22 For things now become detached from any notion of eternal ‘right order’ (a necessity-lodged infinite actuality) and instead became formed by more rational determinations of possibility and by the imposition of the supremacy of will which can decide the nature of things at any given moment. Actuality now had to compete with residual logical possibilities. It should be mentioned that before Scotus, revelation of the divine was thought to be discernible in the ordinary but mysterious resemblances of things; but following Scotus’ inauguration of a more voluntarist outlook, revelation of God came to be seen in terms of a more isolated, extrinsic shock of new and discontinuous arrivals over against the mundane. The miracle of transubstantiation, for example, now resided in the radicalness of the transposition of bread and wine into body and blood, and its

The mediaevel origins of civil society 27 giving rise to a physical change which under ordinary conditions would be contradictory. This is in contrast to the Thomist order of things for which the miracle of transubstantiation resided more in the mysterious appropriateness of the bread and wine, and its continuity with the idea of the body of Christ as being synonymous with the Church.23 A certain paradox in the new emphasis upon voluntarism should also be noted. In keeping with Scotus’ modification of the Aristotelian and Thomist more ontologically based theory of knowledge,24 in favour of a shift towards the model of mirroring representation (which will admit the supposition that God might imprint knowledge in the human mind, bypassing the mediations of the material realm),25 this new high piety, which looks for direct intervention from God, paradoxically also relies upon human reason as an arbiter of these divine messages. For instead of taking the truths of material phenomena mysteriously to unfold eternal truths in and through the following of their habitual courses, revelation now arrives in the form of discrete units of information divorced from the realm of habitual continuity. For Scotus there is already the possibility of a rational recognition of an instance of revelation and grace, outside the operation of grace upon one’s recognition. Thus at the same time that the divine will is exalted, so also the status of human reason and its ability to process the ciphers of the divine is elevated and becomes its necessary corollary.26 Here we can see how this new Scotist high piety, or abasement before the will of God, becomes unwittingly an accomplice of the gradual exaltation of human reason in Western thought. Now, the two main threads of Scotus’ thought which bear most directly upon the realm of practical reason are, first, the augmenting of the role of the will, both human and divine, taken as mutually poised between willing and nilling, and second, the rejection of Thomist ideas as to the necessity of actuality, in favour of a more rationalized emphasis upon possible logical alternatives to the arrangements of actuality. Before Scotus, the tendency was to see actuality in teleological terms; reality as it appeared was necessary, and concealed no alternative possible arraignments. If a ‘necessity’ was here discerned within the real, this was not an expression of a prior logical imperative or decision within the order of the possible, but rather a necessity indissociable from actual appearing itself. Such a notion is intrinsically an aesthetic one, because a particular actual way of being only slips from contingency into necessity where its desirable integrity and harmoniousness is seen as the mark of the way it should be and therefore must be. Within such a perspective, the very idea of concealment of alternative possibilities or dissembling or logical scheming on the part of actuality was simply out of the question. The created order was in no way to be seen as held ‘outside’ God, like a merely accidental option, although as created, it was of course ontologically different from Him. And insofar as creation was regarded as continuous with God, or participating in Him, it must follow that the created realm must analogically resemble Him. Although such a symbolic manifestation of God cannot be ‘read off’ in any mundane informational way – since God’s nature

28

Catherine Pickstock

cannot be circumscribed or exhausted – nevertheless everything that is perceived exceeds itself and resembles, although inappropriately and always within an ever-greater non-resemblance, transcendent necessity. Now, all this might sound like the perspective of some kind of mystical ecstasy far removed from the practicalities of everyday life in the middle ages; nonetheless it is possible to show how the economy of ritual life in this period, which was inseparable from the social totality,27 was itself like a kind of performance of the logic of analogy.28 To claim this is not in any way to idealize or romanticize mediaeval society, since, first of all, much of its actual practice was by no means true to its ritual demands, and second, the analogical economy of these demands was itself generally distorted by hierarchical considerations deriving from the fixed and supposedly natural social conventions of feudal society, and not from the dynamic and educational hierarchy envisaged by the analogical vision from Pseudo-Dionysius onwards.29 Nevertheless, this vision frequently challenged the reality, and at times, especially in the monastic and small-town urban order, secured a certain limited but genuine purchase within that reality. To our mind, to speak of ‘ritual activities’ is to speak of certain non-rational or ‘mythic’ operations which have no immediate instrumental purpose, and although many cultures respect these activities very highly, they nevertheless trace a contrast between ritual and everyday operation, in keeping with the dichotomy mentioned above of myth and ratio respectively. But such a conception of ritual behaviour is in fact a relatively recent one. The idea of ritual as a distinct or definable operation did not enter the English language until the middle of the seventeenth century, although of course rituals in the sense of particular practices, scripts or liturgical ‘rites’ were known much further back, and definitely by the ninth century.30 But it is from certain nineteenth-century ethnographers that we have inherited a tendency to see ritual activity as relegated to the innocuous realms of the ‘purely aesthetic’, the magical or the religious, and, indeed, it has become so much an assumed part of our culture that it is difficult now to see how this transformation is itself a manifestation of a broader shift in the notion of everyday life as such. The idea of the everyday which we have inherited from the Reformation onwards has tended also to privilege ‘instrumental activity’ over against the gratuitous or ‘useless’; and to assume, following Scotus, that knowledge is the representation of hidden, privately registered meanings, which presupposes a dichotomy of interior logical possibilities and exterior forms. These transformations have tended to encourage two apparently disconnected views of ritual amongst anthropologists, as either a curious, quaint, ethnic or primitive custom which requires sophisticated, exhaustive and authoritative analysis by objective exegetes, or, on account of its concealed symbolic content and lack of immediate instrumental purpose, a dangerous and manipulative tool whose formalistic operations are repressive and authoritarian devices whose hypnotic effects force participants to surrender their freedom of will. But whatever the differences between these two interpretations, they both share a fundamental notion of ritual activity as distinct from the realm of the ordinary.

The mediaevel origins of civil society 29 But what has all this to do with Scotus and the late middle ages? The answer is that new notions of theoretical reason introduced into people’s minds the possibility that things are not necessarily as they might appear. Before the shifts in theoretical speculation of the kind which we have come to associate with Scotus, there was a quite different understanding of appearances.31 In the practical realm, how can we see this at work? One can look, for example, at the way in which civic society was ordered by a very different idea of ritual or liturgical activity. First of all, a glance at recent historical work shows that before the Reformation, and certainly before Scotus, it was not so easy to differentiate between ritual and everyday operation. As we shall see, this fusion of the liturgical and the mundane is closely allied with the prominence of the theological framework of actual necessity – that is, the idea that earthly things manifest their meanings in an unreserved or open-faced and yet aesthetic manner, that these meanings are teleological in character, and that there are no concealed logical realms behind the ‘actual’ competing for necessity. A brief survey of certain aspects of the social realm will show how an organization of society, in terms of the exercise of concealed rational and formalized structures held in place by pure will and power, was gradually being introduced and displacing a very different order of things. First of all, one should mention the most obviously ritualized segment of mediaeval society: the monasteries. Since they were taken to embody the ideal Christian life, their fusion of ritual and practice can in a sense be taken as paradigmatic for mediaeval society as a whole. Recent phenomenology of mediaeval monastic and liturgical ritual has stressed that such ritual operation did not encode or communicate special messages in an enclave remote from technological or ordinary activity, but rather sought to form or re-form moral dispositions or ‘virtues’ through the exercise of certain overt disciplines which are embedded within, and constitutive of ordinary activity, and form a whole way of life which is ritual in character.32 The liturgical rituals of St Benedict and Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, are not species of enacted symbol classified separately from activities defined as useful or technical, but practices among others essential to the acquisition of Christian virtues. On this analysis, rituals do not evoke, release, coerce, or inculcate isolatable values or universal human emotions, but rather seek publicly to reorganize certain distinctive and historically specific emotions such as charity, humility and contrition.33 Each task in the monastic programme was to be accomplished in order to make the self approximate more closely to a saintly exemplum. Such an order refuses any disjunction, therefore, between (1) inner motive and outer form, (2) personal contingencies and public ritual, (3) symbolic, expressive acts and technical, useful ones, and (4) between soul and body.34 In contrast to the modern ethnographic tendency to interpret conventional ritual behaviour as independent of the self (a characteristically post-Baconian view which detaches behaviour from subjectivity, and lays the self open to games of power35) the mediaeval outlook construes the self as constituted in and through Christian ritual acts: there is no self prior to ritual.

30

Catherine Pickstock

Moreover, the learning of appropriate practices and increased formalization associated with mediaeval monastic discipline does not, on this account, signify fixed unalterable hierarchy, but the reverse, for those less adept in the keeping of such practices were placed under the authority of the more adept with the goal, not of instrumental subordination but future elevation, while those excluded from ritual exercises in mediaeval Christendom – such as peasants or lay brothers – were precisely those most vulnerable to material exploitation. This understanding of mediaeval ritual as not over against the everyday, implies also that it stood as no simple antithesis to self-directed individual response. The primary object of ritual transformation was indeed the development of the Christian virtue of willing obedience, and yet this process did not ‘reduce people’s perception of available choices’,36 but in theory reorganized the basis on which choices were made.37 In a moment, however, we will see how this ritually constituted self later underwent a shift in favour of an empty, neutral self, which merely deployed conventions of behaviour in a convenient and instrumental fashion. Within the monastery, purely spiritual fraternity and paternity had become more real a bond than biological relation.38 Celibacy was the basis for an entirely ritualized existence. Outside the monastery, there was an approximation to this in the institution of godparenthood. Here also, spiritual relations assumed primacy over natural ones and hence godparenthood was the foundation of a liturgically dominated life outside the monastery, just as the fraternity of celibates was its foundation within the cloister. The bond between the godparent and the godchild, although spiritual or mystical in character, was a bond no less real than blood-relation – so real, in fact, that marriage between godparent and godchild was forbidden by the barrier of incest. To think of a spiritual bond being taken as so real as to provoke such a taboo might strike us as strange or superstitious, but if one can only unthink one’s contemporary assumed dualities of ‘ritual’ and ‘everyday’, ‘religious’ and ‘secular’, ‘nonrational’ and ‘rational’, ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, one can in some ways come to look quite differently at one’s own presuppositions, which indeed carry their own freight of superstitions and myths. In mediaeval society, the mystical bond between godparent and godchild, informed by the principle of compaternitas, was so powerful that it was seen to affirm kinship not only between the adult and the child, but also to extend to his natural family as well, by a kind of mystical contagion. It thus established a formal and objective ritual friendship, via the exchange of gifts and celebrating of festivals, to which natural or blood kinship could only aspire. Hence this kinship ritual was no innocuous, perfectly pleasant sideline which one might or might not eventually get round to; quite the reverse. This bond of psychic parenting was so powerful that it was considered to forge the link or mediation between blood relations and the wider community. Thus, just as Aquinas glimpsed a necessity in the actual orbits of the stars – a necessity in their beautiful order beyond mere logical necessity, or the empirical necessity of causal force – so also mediaeval society saw something binding in what we would take

The mediaevel origins of civil society 31 to be a mere ritual convention. Spiritual parenting constrained – without either logical or biological constraint. The same principle of alliance and social bonding governed the idea of marriage.39 The law of charity obliged Christians to seek a relationship with those to whom the natural tie of consanguinity did not extend, in such a way that the bonds of relationship and alliance might reach throughout the whole community. The creation of an actual social relation, at least in theory, came before considerations of particularity and sexual relation, for the marriage alliance was above all a method of conferring social peace and reconciliation between feuding families and groups. However, transformations of political structure, allied with the theoretical changes we have already met, in the later mediaeval and early modern periods altered the traditional priority of bonding with the wider community. The importance of the spiritual compaternity of godparenthood, with its plurality, bilaterality of gender, and disparities of age, was gradually displaced by the singular authority of blood paternity, and the structure of the enclosed family supplanted the wider collective in importance. With Jean Bodin, paternity, modelled on the inviolable sovereign wielding its supreme will, came to be conceived in terms of the absolute power of life and death, rather than as the mediation of a tradition, or the teleology of traditional natural politics. This elevation of literal paternity over mystical paternity or compaternity, which reached its fulfilment in the elevation by Luther of the fourth commandment, ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’, as the model of all social and political obligation, over against the seemingly atavistic and mythic persuasions of ritual kinship, affected the meaning and practice of the sacraments of baptism and marriage. Although the institution of godparenthood was not altogether abolished, it is no accident that Luther lifted the taboo of marriage between godparent and child, so rationalizing away the ‘actual necessity’ of the constraint of a bond neither logical nor natural.40 Meanwhile, the general tendency of Calvin’s teaching was to reverse the former exclusion of the role of natural parents in baptism, so that it was they, and not a child’s spiritual parents, who presented and received a child at baptism. The ritual stress on symbolic initiation and alliance became gradually displaced by disciplines of instruction in the faith, a task which was now assumed by the paterfamilias. Although the Reformation sought to stress the priesthood of all believers, by thus subordinating the ritual role of godparenthood, a central quasi-priestly lay role was lost. It might also be noted that parallel to the decline of the extended Christian family was the transformation of the sacrament of marriage. Whereas it had traditionally been the case that the bond of marriage was sacramental even without the presence of a priest, and took place significantly not within, but at the threshold of the Church, stressing the continuity between the ecclesiatical buildings and the wider community, in the later period, parental consent was required to validate the marriage in both Protestant and Catholic weddings alike; although, unlike the Catholics, Luther asserted that marriage was a contract and not a sacrament. Marriages could now only be contracted in the

32

Catherine Pickstock

face of the Church before the parish priest and witnesses, after the publication of the banns. All other marriages, whether clandestine or public, sacred or secular, were declared void. Thus, whereas the Protestant tendency was to elevate the authority of parenthood over the contract of marriage, the Roman Catholics stressed that the sacrament of marriage could be mediated only by the authority of the Church. Whilst this emphasis upon the ecclesial context of marriage might seem to lay stress upon its liturgical nature, traditionally the consent of alliance between the marriage partners themselves had been viewed as a liturgical act, in such a way that the bond itself had been regarded as a sacrament. Thus liturgical practice extended beyond the legitimating authority of the priesthood, and was reciprocally mediated by bonds of love between new alliances. But the alliance of marriage as such was now deritualized and reduced to the equivalent of a civil contract permitted by the consent of the father (who held dominion over the ‘small commonwealth’ or ‘little church’, i.e. the family), whilst the ecclesial contribution was reduced to an extrinsic miracle simply authorizing the legitimacy of the bond. This has parallels with the transformations in understanding of the eucharist where the new emphasis upon sovereign will now stressed that God decided quite arbitrarily that the bread and wine might become body and blood, where previously transubstantiation had been seen as the renewed realization of the body of Christ by the body of Christ. So also, in the same way, marriage became detached from the order of charity whereby the family opened out to wider collective bonds, and became equivalent to a contractualized exchange of commodities in which a transfer of private property secured a legalized alliance. A similar transformation can be traced in the economic realm. In the middle ages, the role of the lay fraternities and craft guilds ensured an active connection between the liturgical and the economic. These associations, formed under the patronage of a particular saint, the Trinity, Blessed Virgin Mary, or Corpus Christi, incorporated the individual within a ritualized social collective whose principal end was the attainment of a state of charity, through establishment of a confraternal kinship (which included women) both between members of the fraternity, and beyond, and through the practice of certain rituals which stressed the bonds of love, charity and peace.41 Central to these rituals of association, apart from election of new officers, admission of new members (with the token of a kiss) and worship, was participation in many forms of salutation and celebration.42 The statutes of many guilds contained exhortations to members to greet one another peacefully and in fraternal fashion; this mode of behaviour included the discipline of settling disputes between members through internal arbitration, and not via external juridical intervention.43 Nor was the bond of friendship limited to the membership of the fraternity, but actively extended to the wider community in the form of charitable acts. These were not extrinsicist deeds towards strangers, but were part of the essential extension of the social bond of exchange. As well as admitting new members to ‘intercommune’ at their annual feasts and festivals, the fraternities and trades guilds provided for the poor and founded hospitals, schools and

The mediaevel origins of civil society 33 almshouses; they looked after certain liturgical feasts, theatrical performances and other societal tasks such as rebuilding churches, bridges and highways, and maintaining seabanks and sluices.44 These provisions for the community were complemented by even more immediate and personal acts of giving. It was expressed in the canon law that charity was better directed to those with whom one was in some actual kinship or neighbourly relation than to strangers. And because charitable acts were more often tied to particularity than to abstract or professional benefaction, the opportunity for the extension or expansion of kinship bonds was provided. Giving was not simply a utility, but a further opportunity for alliance. Moreover, this personal dimension of charity permitted a more reciprocal potential to the notion of giving, and encouraged the attainment of a state of charity as the context of donation.45 The framework of the activities of the fraternities ensured that charity was a public liturgical discipline. Giving to the poor was neither a legal obligation nor a matter of personal whim. Moreover, the liturgical cycle of feasts and festivals freed charitable donation from the anxiety of private choice, and qualified any attempt to transform such giving into an impersonal and formalized tax where no bond is created between donor and donee. And just as in this way, an alienating formalism was held at bay, so also the accumulation of abstract capital was restrained, in that any economic surplus was perpetually returned to the order of the liturgical cycle. The economic was subordinated to the liturgical order, into whose cyclical repetitions financial surplus was expended. Thus liturgy prevented the tendency of capital to displace the eschatological reserve in favour of an immanent teleology of accumulation. The decline of the fraternities in the decades prior to the early 1530s, due to religious, political and economic uncertainties, had implications not only for the various charitable and educational foundations which they had maintained, but it also transformed the notion of charity itself.46 The centrality of kinship and the expansion of sociability lost persuasiveness as a principle of Christian action. As early as 1400, a new idea of charity had arisen in Florence whereby it was ‘transvalued into a generalized concept of philanthropy’.47 An actual connection between benefactor and recipient was no longer seen as central to the act of donation, which meant that giving was now deemed a one-way and impersonal phenomenon, no longer subordinated to the extension of kinship. Charity was transposed from an active and personal alliance to a private feeling of abstract beneficence, closer to a customary tax or duty on the part of a citizen. Such ‘philanthropy’ was accompanied by an apparently paradoxical distancing from social relations, symbolized by a discouragement of giving directly to beggars and a concentration on less specific, grander projects such as providing for ‘durable’ works by building schools and hospitals. By 1500, this new idea of charity affected the reconstruction of the fraternities in which charity came to comprise less a state of being achieved through ritualized disciplines of friendship, and more a distinct operation of benefaction towards an anonymous body of needy outsiders which could take place without the presence of a state of love.

34

Catherine Pickstock

Now, from all that I have said, the specifically ritual dimension of the civic realm in the middle ages, from the sacraments of baptism and marriage, to such institutions as godparenthood and the confraternities, viewed by mediaeval society as providing opportunities for social integration, the forging of alliances, and the attainments of a state of peace, differs markedly from our concept of the civic realm today. For to our post-Scotist minds, the idea of a specifically ritual attainment of peace and alliance smacks of social exclusionism, distancing, formality, lack of substantiality or divisiveness, and belies its genuine attainment. But, as we have seen, such a view presupposes a duality of ritual and non-ritual modes of practice, and mistakenly correlates ritualized with artificial actions as distinct from those that qualify as properly ‘real’ or ‘everyday’. But one has only to look at the theoretical origins of this duality to see how arbitrary and perhaps dubious it really is. It has been shown that within the social realm, peace, like charity, was characterized as a state of being attained through repeated affirmations of ecstatic collectivity. Indeed, at the mass, the reception of the host was accompanied by the choir’s singing of the words Dona nobis pacem and was followed by the exchange of the ancient kiss of peace or the kissing of the Pax. This centrality of the Eucharist might seem to contradict the assertion that there was no separation of the liturgical and the extra-liturgical. But, in fact, all social activity converged at this event, which at this point had not yet become an isolated spectacle or extrinsic miracle.48 And it is by no means arbitrary that it was the Eucharist, rather than any other sacrament, from which all other activities flowed, because, according to high mediaeval thought, the Eucharist gives the Church, the Body of Christ, and as such the Church alone legitimates the social bond as such, and provides the restoration of our genuine being through salvation.49 What undermined this notion of peace and the unity of the Body of Christ was paradoxically the rise of a devout piety of frequent communion which focused not upon the integration of disparate limbs into a single Body, but upon a private and interiorized devotion to Christ’s miraculous and discontinuous presence in the sacrament. It was this unique intensification of piety which paradoxically segregated the sacred from the secular, for by concentrating sacrality in a singular and exclusively holy event or place, any extension beyond that focal intensity was effectively secularized.50 How did this early modern transformation of piety affect the mediaeval notion of peace? In the sixteenth century, Erasmus brought to fruition the deritualization of peace. Although he affirmed the desirability of peace, alliance and reconciliation, he denied the traditional methods of their attainment, through sacraments and rituals. Peace was to be achieved through rigorous discipline and moral teaching. Thus the (newly de-vocalized and deritualized) Word now prevailed over all else to produce a frame of mind called pietas, a civilized devotion characterized by a dominance of the spirit over the passions of the flesh.51 This precipitated the substitution of civility, or a civic peace, for a ritual or sacral peace, to be instilled by the absorption of the proliferating manuals of manners and civil behaviour.52 Peace was now taught rather than

The mediaevel origins of civil society 35 received. Such a new pedagogic model is obviously linked with a general theoretical emphasis on the assertion of the will; but its new codes of manners and polite behaviour also relate to another thread in post-Scotist thought, the denial of actual necessity. These social codes assumed a new model of power as divorced from love, and increasingly as ‘virtual’ or abstractable from affectionate social bonds, from kinship and ritual action, while the public love that remained came to be regarded as a formal duty exercised towards strangers, enshrined in humanist protocols of civility. This constituted another layer of formality and virtuality, in that these manners and codes hovered uneasily between the formal injunctions of law and the genuine spontaneity of affection, and neither the formal structures of power, nor the new codes of manners were in any traditional sense liturgical; although they presupposed the sacralization of pure power in the immanent realm, they nonetheless rendered this realm ripe for secularization. Moreover, the enforced civility of the early modern institution of manners as a parodic version of the mediaeval ritual order gave rise to a perhaps more elusive but no less sinister development. In the case, for example, of the new civil peace attained via codes or protocols of manners, we can see what an unstable or negatively based peace it was, for it depended upon one’s ability to ‘dissemble’, to detach outward sign from inner meaning, a separation which would have been unthinkable in the high middle ages. The rise of such civil ritual is coincident, therefore, not only with the sundering of the symbolic from the literal and the ritual from the everyday, but also with the new idea that appearances are not all that they seem; that they might conceal logically disparate possibilities; that actuality is not to be trusted. For the Scotist rejection of actual necessity released a new distrust of appearances, which formerly had known no division from themselves. The new secular rituals of the civic realm were, by definition, disingenuous, and they needed to be, because they were introduced in order to secure an enforced peace in a newly agonistic society which sought hidden meanings behind the guises of actuality. The civic peace achieved through good manners might be a mere apparent peace which cloaked insincerity, but the disguise of one’s intentions could itself now be seen as a politique means of sustaining civil order in the long run. One has only to look at Francis Bacon’s cynical essay ‘Of simulation and dissimulation’ written in the wake of all these changes, to see how pervasive was this new idea that civil peace required deceit. Whereas formerly, ritual or liturgical activity candidly manifested inward intention, just as for Aquinas materialized form became knowledge, and actuality concealed no prior essences, the new secular rituals or manners were now seen to ‘represent’ an inner state, or to stand for one’s intentions, but not necessarily coincide with them. Like the representations introduced by Scotus’s new epistemology, representations may be unreliable. Once this cultural development has occurred, ritual itself is viewed on this later model of insincere manners, and becomes a drama at a remove from ‘the real’ or ‘the true’; ritual becomes a temporary ‘dressing up’, a ‘mere’ ritual or pointless excrescence probably concealing dubious purposes. Thus arose the notion of ritual as ‘theatre’, or as a special – and deceptive or ironic –

36

Catherine Pickstock

activity in contrast to the unfettered spontaneity and immediate expressiveness and trustworthiness of apparently non-ritual or ordinary activity. Inversely, one can also say that manners are a sort of parody of ancient liturgical discipline, since they do indeed inculcate discipline through habit and obedience to certain bodily observances. But the fact that the only moral attitude they seek to encourage is compliance with an arbitrary authority is mirrored by the arbitrary form of the new manners and their lack of symbolic signification, such as the proposition that one should not hold one’s knife in one’s left hand.53 The new civil peace was itself regarded as sacred. But this did not in any sense mean that it flowed from the Eucharist. Rather, sacral order now emanated from secular forms of sovereignty, namely the monarch, or later on, the state, whose realm was a space in which civility might flourish.54 Peace was thereby transposed from the category of gift mediated through Christ, to a given fact coincident with the being of the state, and enshrined in the duty of the abstract citizen. As a consequence, Christ’s peace was relegated to an otherworldly dimension, a detached spiritual model for civil earthly peace. This formulation of the state as sovereign peacemaker was fully realized in the political theory of Jean Bodin, for whom matters of religious disagreement were subordinated to the now innocuous region of the ‘soul’, whilst the state took responsibility for important matters such as the maintenance of peace.55 Hobbes took this tendency even further, not merely subordinating the Church to civil power, but swallowing it whole into the belly of Leviathan. The members of this Church cohere, as before, as a natural body, but no longer to one another. Rather, each member of this body depends directly upon the sovereign, for it can trust no forms of mediation. The body of Christ has now been nominalized, scattered and absorbed into the body of the state. And the peace of the body is no longer an active and noisy festival of renewed kinship resulting from the sacral power of love. It has become instead a rationalized and silent tranquillity imposed from above by a sacralized earthly authority. The emergence of a civil realm constituted by a kind of pseudo liturgy is supremely important, because modernity is in fact just as much characterized by the role of this realm lying between the public and the private, as by technology, market economy and bureaucracy. As we have seen, manners, as compared with ritual, are to do with form and not substance; in this way they are analogous to modern methodical approaches to knowledge – so much so, as we have seen, that seventeenth-century scientists assumed certain codes of civility and conventions of moderate speech. In this way, manners substitute for ritual; however, we have also seen that they are themselves a new kind of deritualized ritual. And it is at this point that we have been able to make a link between the emergence of civility and the way in which, after Duns Scotus, mediaeval theology no longer saw any necessity or intrinsic meaning as belonging to actuality. This made it possible to distrust appearances and to imagine that there was no essential link with what appears to be the case, and what really is the case. In addition, since anything can be the vehicle for anything else, alternative and equally valuable instantiations of the divine now

The mediaevel origins of civil society 37 remained always a possibility. So, first of all, nothing about the way things are is sacrosanct, and, second, the way things are may always be deceptive. This means that nothing in the liturgical or ritual order is essential, sacred or necessary, apart from the fact that it is divinely instituted: thus a deritualized ritual starts to be inaugurated. Moreover, liturgical forms are seen as not guaranteeing the meanings or realities they appear to express, and instead inner motivation becomes all-important. Thus the ‘real’ person is now thought to be something no longer ‘produced’ by ritual procedure, but rather as something which precedes this influence – something in command of itself, which in Pelagian fashion can control its lower impulses out of its own resources: the new Erasmian pietas. In consequence, monasticism and all lay, quasi-monasticism start to be despised as compromising the basis of virtue in pure, pre-given autonomy. And if the essential person is now seen as prior to ritual, then, inversely, ritual becomes a purely decorative and functional field. Since real meaning is now held in the gift of pre-expressive subjective motivation, ritual itself has started to be reduced to something like an ecclesiastical code of manners, where what matters is correct procedure and spectacular demonstrations of power. It can also be added that the same shift inevitably downgraded the para-liturgical realm of kinship, fraternities, charity and so forth, because whatever had not been explicitly appointed to a liturgical function now could no longer participate in the liturgical by virtue of its intrinsic character – or, in other words, according to a kind of necessity. The threat, then, was that the everyday world of marriage, child-bearing, production and trade was becoming pointless, and could therefore only aggrandize itself by erecting a rival to the liturgical order. And, indeed, in terms of the new theology, which made obeisance to an inscrutable God, a set of formal procedures was a much more plausible manifestation of His will as compared with liturgical forms which traditionally suggested a certain epiphany of the divine and a certain intrinsically appropriate response to the divine.

Conclusion Finally, I would like to end this tracing of the collusion between an apparently ‘rational’ dichotomy and late mediaeval forms of high piety, by suggesting its implications for a possible revised genealogy of the Enlightenment. In his book We Have Never Been Modern, the French philosopher Bruno Latour exposes the falsity of the myth that there are absolutely irreversible breaks in cultures through time.56 This observation bears strongly upon the theme of the present essay, for in tracing the several theoretical and practical transformations from the later middle ages to the early modern period, we have seen that certain aspects of late mediaeval theological thought in fact underpin later characteristically ‘modern’ ideas, even though much in the Enlightenment may also be seen as a qualified reaction against these changes. A subplot of this essay, therefore, has been to offer a revision of the commonly agreed-upon genealogy of certain problems of modernity. For it has been common to account for the

38

Catherine Pickstock

origins of modernity in terms of the vague edifice of ‘the Enlightenment’, and to see modernity as co-extensive with the rise of the secular modern state needed to quell the Wars of Religion, together with the rise of systematic organization of medical, educational and penal institutions. But if, as I hope to have shown, the real shifts which gave rise to secular modernity came not so much from these phenomena, but from within a late mediaeval strain of high piety and voluntarism both in theory and in practice, and given that attempts to improve society in a secular way via the state and market have so visibly failed, then perhaps this revised genealogy could also point us indirectly towards a more serious alternative future polity than the now all-too-reactionary liberal and postmodern critiques. But one can even go further than this. Against the one-dimensional ‘modern’ vision of progress without a genuine novum, postmodern philosophers and cultural theorists have protested in the name of the diverse, the more than human, the incommensurable. However, postmodern thinkers (such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida) have explicitly appealed back to Duns Scotus for their alternative vision. They regard his levelling of the infinite and the finite to a univocal Being, his unleashing of the possible and unmediably discontinuous, as permitting a radical break with a totalizing rationalism. But, as we have seen, this is a singularly sad effort, for all these Scotist innovations lay themselves at the inception of modernity. The flattening out of actual necessity to pure possibility, and of Being to the bare fact of existence, which are modern ‘rationalist’ moves (which place epistemology before ontology) at the same time and of themselves legitimate the postmodern anarchy which renders all possibilities in their limitless range equally valid, and all existence as merely phenomenal and ephemeral, lacking altogether in depth, or any symbolic pointing above itself. The truth of postmodernism is shown in the rising cult of virtual reality; in the prospect of unlimited genetic manipulation; in the reduction of art to the mere fact of its ability to shock the onlooker via its new rearrangement of reality. In all these cases, the vision of Scotism is palpable and brought to its fullest realization: we live under the sway of the formal distinction. But in that case the Enlightenment and being for or against ‘modernity’ is a curious irrelevance. For we still live within the Middle Ages, or rather within a theologically perverse late middle ages, which in the name of extreme piety locks us within the sway of a formalized law which is at the same time a violent anarchy. This law disallows any genuine future because it is regulated in advance so as always to follow the same procedures, but to produce and legitimate any outcomes whatsoever. Such an indifferent future cannot be the future, cannot welcome the new. Thus, strange as it might seem, if we are to have a future we have perhaps to escape the nostalgia in which we are already trapped in favour of another past; not because it is past, but because it points to an actual truth and so to an alternative future which would affirm rather than nostalgically deny this truth. We have to invoke another past which was an Augustinian and Thomist Middle

The mediaevel origins of civil society 39 Ages opposed to that mediaeval era in which we are still trapped. It is not, then, that we should simply return to a lost past via a rival nostalgia, but rather that we have to recover an alternative vision which was never fully realized. This is the truly radical alternative.

Notes 1 I am grateful for discussion, comment and criticism on a number of issues raised in this essay. In particular I would like to thank Paul Connerton, Thomas Harrison, Peter McMylor, John Milbank, Paul Piccone and Gary Ulmen. 2 Luciano Pellicani, ‘Modernity and totalitarianism’, Telos, 112 (Summer 1998) 3–22. 3 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 4 Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); The Civilizing Process: State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). 5 Alex Delphini and Paul Piccone, ‘Modernity, libertarianism and critical theory: reply to Pellicani’, Telos, 112 (Summer 1998) 23–46. 6 Delphini and Piccone, ibid., 28 n. 10; see ‘Introduction’ to Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. with an introduction by Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965) 26. See also Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) 389–90. 7 Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, (Chicago: Gateway, 1968) 90f. See further Delphini and Picconi op. cit., 42 n. 29. 8 Ibid. 9 T. V. McAllister, Revolt Against Modernity: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Postliberal Order (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996) 21. 10 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 55–79; John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) 69ff, 98, 120; C. S. L. Davies, Peace, Print and Protestantism 1450–1558 (London: Hart-Davis, MacGibbon, 1976) 148–52; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline for a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 94–5; Elias, op. cit., The History of Manners. 11 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Cottingham et al., The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) vol. II. I have argued elsewhere that this substitution of abstract rationalization for inhabited time and space can be discerned in many different areas of early modern and modern life, from Descartes’ revisioning of the flow of the real as geometric extensio, the Boylean regulation of experimental space, and even, following Baudrillard, Deleuze and Maravall, one can claim, within the folds and undulations of the baroque, whose riotous combinations secretly contain nature by reducing it to the single, rational, legible substance of stucco, into which a covertly meaningless infinitization of meaning is inserted. See José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone Press, 1993). 12 These ‘rules appertaining to the matter of every art’ declare ‘the methode and forme to be observed in all artes and sciences’; ‘No farther seeke but in this booke thy self doe exercise’, Ramus, The Logike (Leeds: Scolar Press, 1966) 7. 2. 13 One can note here a possible criticism of Stephen Toulmin’s claim in Cosmopolis that the modern desire to establish absolute rational certainty focused upon method – free from the supposed distortions of cultural particularity – is traceable first to

40

14

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Catherine Pickstock Descartes in the seventeenth century against a background of ‘general crisis’. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990). Walter J. Ong S.J. Ramus and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) 65–72. On Peter of Spain and Rudolph Agricola as precursors to Ramus, see Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982) chs 3–5. On Boethius and Peter of Spain, see Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London: Sheed and Ward, 1955) 97–106 and 319–23. On the development of printing, its acceleration of the notion of method, and other epistemological effects, see Edgar Zilsel, ‘The origins of Gilbert’s scientific method’, Journal of the History of Ideas II (1941) 1–32; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) vols 1 and 2; Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) and idem, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). Walter Ong compares this textual rhetoric with Aristotelian logic which, although essentially diagrammatic, could not be reduced entirely to spatiality because it derives from aural-type analogies rather than visual. This residue of the auditory, though not made explicit by Aristotle, is inseparable from his thinking because the categories are conceived as parts of enunciations. Thus human knowledge for Aristotle exists, in the full sense, only in the enunciation, that is, in the saying of something about something, the uttering of a statement, the expression of a judgement, and the union of a subject and predicate. Concomitantly, the topoi of ancient rhetoric were seen as fontal sources of arguments, with such open-ended places as relatio and similitudo. With Agricola and Ramus, however, the topoi are presented as headings, or as entries in a classificatory finding-system to a static and given resource of information which admits of no development. This shift towards knowledge as contained in ‘places’ was reflected in the structure of printed books, for example, as regards the introduction at this time of the index locorum. On the Agricolan and Ramist conceptual closure of topoi see Ong, op. cit., Ramus and the Decay of Dialogue, 104–12, and on the further implications of the format of printed books, ibid., 311–15. See also John Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico 1668–1744, vol. I, The Early Metaphysics (Lampeter and New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991) 278–80. On Aristotelian topoi as predicated on the spoken word, see Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 33. In spite of this textualization of both dialectic and rhetoric, Ramus claims (emptily?) that his ‘Dialecticke otherwise called Logicke, is an arte which teachethe to dispute well’, The Logike, 17. ‘Abolyshe all tautologies and vayne repetitions, and so thus muche being done, thou shalt comprehende the rest into a litle rome’, Ramus, The Logike, 12. See also Walter Ong, op. cit., Ramus and the Decay of Dialogue, 212–13, 283–4. Manfred Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 101–2, 122–8; see also Ong, op. cit., Ramus, 128. I refer here to J. L. Austin’s later-recanted distinction between constative and performative utterances; How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). See note 3 above. It has become fashionable to contest any interpretation of Duns Scotus which seeks to place him in any instrumental relationship with the kind of genealogy traced in the present essay; see for example David Ford’s review of Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 1999) in Scottish Journal of Theology (forthcoming in 2001) and my own

The mediaevel origins of civil society 41 response essay to his review in the same issue of that journal. The present author notes that her interpretation of Duns Scotus is scarcely controversial; see further Etienne Gilson, Jean Duns Scot: Introduction à ses Positions Fondamentales (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1952); Olivier Boulnois, ‘Quand commence l’ontothéologie? Aristote, Thomas d’Aquin et Duns Scot’, Revue Thomiste, TXCV.1 (January–March 1995) 84–108, and idem, Duns Scot: Sur la Connaissance de Dieu et L’Univocité de L’Etant (Paris: P.U.F., 1990); J.-F. Courtine, Suarez et le Système de la Metaphysique (Paris: P.U.F., 1990); Eric Alliez, ‘1300: the capture of being’ in, Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 197–239; Michel Corbin, Le Chemin de la Théologie chez Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972); J.-Y. Lacoste, ‘Analogie’, Dictionnaire Critique de Théologie, ed. idem (Paris: P.U.F., 1998); Bruno Puntel, Analogie und Geschichtlichkeit (Fribourg: Herder, 1969); Gilbert Narcisse O.P., Les Raisons de Dieu: Arguments de Convergence et esthétique théologique selon St Thomas d’Aquin et Hans Urs von Balthasar (Fribourg: Herder, 1997); David B. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); Mark D. Jordan, Ordering Wisdom: The Hierarchy of Philosophical Discourses in Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986) and The Alleged Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1992); Eugene F. Rogers Jr, Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); John Inglis, ‘Philosophical autonomy and the historiography of medieval philosophy’, in Scottish Journal of the History of Philosophy, 5.1 (1997) 21–53, and Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Mediaeval Philosophy (Leiden and Boston MA: E. J. Brill, 1998); H. Mohle, Ethik als Scientia Practica nach Johannes Duns Scotus, Eine Philosophische Grundlegung (Munster, 1997). The significance of Duns Scotus is not that he is the sole inaugurator of this transformation in theoretical speculation, but rather that he is one figure among many – although a crucial one – in a general drift away from a focus upon the metaphysics of participation (which he tended to express as a matter of external imitation rather than intrinsic ‘sharing in’), and he is noteworthy in particular because he gave attention to these issues in a comprehensive fashion. No scholar could deny that such a drift occurred (see for example such diverse figures as Gilles Deleuze and Richard Cross; Gilles Deleuze, Différence et Répétition (Paris: P.U.F., 1968); Richard Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus: The Scientific Context of a Theological Vision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), and Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). (Richard Cross is a critic of my own interpretation of Duns Scotus, although the reader is asked to note that, despite the former’s protestations, it is not so much that our analyses of Duns Scotus are at odds, but that our own negotiations of those analyses differ greatly; see, for example, his critique of my work in ‘Where angels fear to tread: Duns Scotus and radical orthodoxy’, Antonianum, LXXVI [2001] 1–36. See especially pp. 13–14 n. 40.) And so, whatever one’s position with regard to specific texts, one must take a position in relation to this drift and its relative importance or otherwise. Put briefly, my own position is that Duns Scotus and his antecedents and successors, within an approach seeking to emphasize the sovereignty of God and the primacy of scripture, for complex reasons, opened a space for univocal treatment of finite being without regard to any theology, rational or revealed. Although this space was not immediately exploited in a secularizing fashion, in the long run this came to be the case. 23 Duns Scotus, Opera Omnia (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1968); Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, ed. and trans. Allan B. Wolter O.F.M. (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986) 255ff (Ordinatio I, dist. 44); Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) 120–35; John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London:

42

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

Catherine Pickstock Routledge, 2001) chs 1 and 4. See further Duns Scotus, Reportata Parisiensia, 4, d. 10 q. 3; q. 6, in contrast to St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III q. 76 a. 1 and 3; a. 3; a. 4. See further Aquinas, De Veritate, Q. 1; Milbank and Pickstock, op. cit., Truth in Aquinas, ch. 1. In op. cit., Opera Omnia, ‘Metaphysics’, VIII, q. 18, n11. See further Pickstock, op. cit., After Writing. See Catherine Pickstock, ‘Ritual’, Dictionary of Pastoral Studies (London: SPCK, forthcoming). See further Pickstock, After Writing, chs 4–6. See Pseudo-Dionysius, ‘The ecclesiastical hierarchy’, in The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987); Nicholas of Cusa, The Catholic Concordance, ed. and trans. Paul E. Sigmund (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Asad, op. cit., Genealogies. Here an objection is raised: If a thing can be a necessary being only by reason of one, but not the other of two realities in it (for otherwise it would be necessary twice over) then it follows that in a necessary being one can never assume the existence of any realities that are formally distinct. Therefore one could never postulate such a distinction between the essence and relation in a Divine person. The consequent is false, therefore the first proof is invalid. A similar objection can be raised against the second argument that each will be the ultimate actuality or else one is unnecessary. To this I reply: wherever we have two formally distinct entities, if they are compatible like act and potency or as two realities fit by nature to actuate the same thing, then if one is infinite, not only can, but does indeed include the other by identity, for otherwise the infinite would be composed.…But if it be finite it does not include by identity anything which according to its formal meaning is primarily diverse. For such finite realities are mutually perfectible and can serve as component parts. Consequently, from the assumption that a necessary being consists of two realities neither of which contains the other through identity – the condition required for composition – it follows that one of the two will not be necessary either formally or by identity, or else the whole will be twice necessary. Consequently, both proofs hold. The counter instances about the Divine Person are irrelevant, since the two realities involved are not component parts, but one is the other by identity since one is infinite. (Duns Scotus, op. cit., Opera Omnia, ‘Tractatus de primo principio’, 4. 51).

32 Asad, op. cit., Genealogies; M. D. Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: 940–1216 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); C. H. Lawrence, Mediaeval Monasticism (London: Longman, 1984); J. Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1977); idem, Monks and Love in Twelfth Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 33 Asad, op. cit., Genealogies. 34 J. C. Schmitt, ‘Le geste, la cathédrale et le roi’. L’Arc, 2 (1978). 35 Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha Houle, fwd Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); H. Cooper, ‘Location and meaning in masque, morality and royal entertainment’, in The Court Masque, ed. D. Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 36 R. Paine, Politically-Speaking: Cross-Cultural Studies of Rhetoric (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1981) passim. 37 See further Asad, Genealogies.

The mediaevel origins of civil society 43 38 Bossy, op. cit., 15; Pickstock, After Writing, op. cit. 39 Bossy, 19–26. 40 See Bossy, passim.; A. Burguière et al. (eds) A History of the Family, trans. S. H. Tenison, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); Jean-Baptiste Molin and Protais Motembe, Le Rituel de Mariage en France du XIIe au XVIe Siècle (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974) 32ff. 41 See further Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (London: Methuen, 1984); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) 141–54. See also Greg Walker, Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith, and Political Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996) 127. 42 J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) 19–20; Bossy, op. cit., Christianity in the West, 57–9. 43 Scarisbrick, op. cit., 21. 44 Ibid.; Bossy, op. cit., Christianity in the West, 62–3; J. J. Jusserand, English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1889/1961) 20–3. 45 Bossy, op. cit., 145. 46 Walker, op. cit., Persuasive Fictions, 127. 47 Marvin B. Becker, ‘Aspects of Lay Piety in Early Renaissance Florence’, in C. Trinkaus and H. A. Oberman (eds) The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 10 (Leiden, 1974) 185–6. 48 Scarisbrick, op. cit., 21; see further Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et L’Eglise au Moyen-Age (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1949) passim; Pickstock, After Writing, 158ff. 49 ‘Réalisme eucharistique, réalisme ecclésial: ces deux réalismes s’appuient l’un sur l’autre, ils sont le gage l’un de l’autre’, Lubac, op. cit., 283. 50 Eamon Duffy, op. cit., The Stripping of the Altars, 95–107; a corollary to this rise in spectacle was an increase in inward devotion in contrast to an ecclesial mode of worship involving oral participation, dialogue and enacted narrative. De Lubac refers to ‘a general development of individualism’ which ‘appears to coincide with the gradual dissolution of mediaeval Christianity’. De Lubac, Catholicism, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (London: Burns & Oates, 1950/1962) 163–4. 51 Bossy, op. cit., 98. 52 Bossy, op. cit., 120. 53 Bossy, op. cit., 121–2. 54 Bossy, op. cit., 155. 55 See W. T. Cavanaugh, ‘ “A fire strong enough to burn the house”: the Wars of Religion and the rise of the state’, Modern Theology, 11.4 (1995) 377–420. 56 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).

3

The liberal civil subject and the social in eighteenth-century British moral philosophy Mary Poovey

Contemporary scholars have harnessed ‘the social’ to so many theoretical paradigms that the phrase no longer conjures a common set of assumptions about society, culture, representation, or the methods by which we write history. Nevertheless, whether one uses ‘the social’ to invoke an objective infrastructure that underwrites culture, as members of the Annales school did, to suggest a gradual, continuously changing process that establishes threshold conditions for cultural and political events, as Marx and Toqueville did, or to identify one in the series of relatively autonomous domains that compose modern life, as Luhmann tended to do, then to deploy ‘the social’ as a noun automatically mobilizes certain theoretical claims implicit in the term’s grammatical status. It is possible to use ‘the social’ as a noun phrase that designates an abstraction because of a historical process that has made abstractions seem as real as material entities. As a consequence of the rise of modern abstraction, in other words, it has become possible to think about social structures, relationships, and processes as entities, as relatively autonomous, and as sufficiently systematic to warrant scientific descriptions, which are systematic as well. Whatever individual theorists mean by the term, ‘the social’ has become thinkable as part of the long history of reification that we call modernity. In this essay, I discuss one phase of this historical process: the forging of a link between philosophical theories about a specific abstraction – ‘human nature’ – and the legitimation of a form of governmentality that was new in early eighteenth-century Britain. This episode is relevant to the history of ‘the social’ for three reasons. First, eighteenth-century British philosophical attempts to theorize human nature constituted one of the earliest attempts to position a law-governed abstraction at the intersection between a providential order that was presumed to exist and the institutions of society. In so doing, philosophical theories about human nature advanced a method for studying what-can-be-seen through an abstract intermediary, which also functions as a basis for understanding (or acknowledging) what-cannot-be-observed. This method lies at the heart of all modern uses of ‘the social’ to explain observable practices and relationships by reference to an infrastructure that can only be theorized through the mediating abstraction itself. Second, experimental moral philosophers advanced a theory about the

The liberal civil subject and the social

45

dynamics of human interaction that resembles the content of some modern theories about ‘the social’. According to this theory, individuals help produce a secular code or semantic system in the process of living and working together, but the code that individuals (collectively) generate is said to be delimited by something that lies beyond both consciousness and individual human beings. For the eighteenth-century philosophers, this ‘something’ was providential order, which was thought to manifest itself, among other places, in human nature. For modern theorists, this ‘something’ can be the entities comprehensible through one or more classificatory categories (class, race, gender) or one or more transindividual ‘structures’ or ‘processes’, which are also comprehensible through interpretive categories (class relations, capitalism, urbanization). Third, in theorizing that government emanates from human nature, instead of being imposed on it, eighteenth-century moral philosophers implied that another abstraction, which Foucault called governmentality, was as law-governed as human nature (and the providential order that informs it). One modern theory of governmentality follows this line of thought in maintaining that the ideal (liberal) state is not coercive but wields power indirectly, by inciting the voluntary cooperation of individuals. Before embarking on a more detailed account of eighteenth-century British moral philosophy, I want to address two theoretical issues that help clarify the concept of ‘the social’ more generally. The first concerns the historical process by which ‘social’ migrated from adjectival to nominal status. The second is the theoretical benefit that might accrue from positioning discussions of ‘the social’ within a consideration of what Charles Taylor and others call ‘social imaginaries’. I suggest in the second section of this essay that identifying ‘the social’ as one product of a specifically modern social imaginary helps illuminate some of the complexities that many theorists of ‘the social’ have overlooked. These complexities include the relationship between interpretive abstractions and the claims that can be made about (and with) these abstractions, and how modern uses of ‘the social’ carry over the theological connotations implicit in this concept’s providential predecessor.

Etymological migrations In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language and the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘social’ is almost always an adjective. Neither of the two definitions the OED gives for the noun illuminates modern usage: the first (‘a companion, an associate’) is no longer current; and the second (‘a social gathering or a party’) is too narrow to capture the theoretical work performed by nineteenthand (especially) twentieth-century analysts. If we pay close attention to the changes that the OED tracks in the adjective’s usage, however, we can begin to see when ‘social’ began to appear in contexts that encouraged social scientists to nominalize the lowly adjective by appending the relative pronoun ‘the’. From the Latin socialis or socius, meaning friend, ally, or associate, ‘social’ came into the English language in the mid-sixteenth century as a modifier that

46

Mary Poovey

described individuals’ ability to form relationships. Thus, in the OED’s first entry, from 1562, ‘social’ means ‘capable of being associated or united with others’ (my emphasis). In emphasizing capability, ‘social’ signals a departure from the Platonic idea, which assumed that human beings are not monads and therefore simply able to relate to others, but integral parts of a greater whole. When Wolloston in 1722 referred to ‘man’ as ‘a Social creature’, he elaborated the individualism implicit in the mid-sixteenth-century usage even as he implied the ethical burden introduced by this individualism. In the second sentence of Wolloston’s passage, what initially seems to be a definition (‘man is a Social creature’) proves to imply judgement, when Wolloston yokes the adjective ‘social’ to the noun ‘Society’, which he uses in Johnson’s sense of ‘company’: ‘a single man, or a family, cannot subsist, or not well, alone out of all Society’ (my emphasis). Later in the 1720s, Butler drew out the complexities inherent in conceptualizing individuals as monads charged with ethical choice. In 1729, Butler explained that ‘the nature of man considered in his…social capacity leads him to a right behaviour in society’. This sentence suggests that by the late 1720s, ‘social’ had come to seem like one attribute of an abstraction, ‘human nature’, which was implicitly given to all individuals by God. As one among several God-given capacities, moreover, ‘social capacity’ could only actualize human nature’s virtuous potential if the individual exercised this and controlled other capacities, including the capacity for what contemporaries called ‘self-love’. By 1785, the connotations of divine provenance implicit in Butler’s ‘nature of man’ had been minimized by Thomas Reid’s ascription of ‘social’ and ‘solitary’ to ‘operations of the mind’. By opposing this pair of mental ‘operations’, Reid not only naturalized capacities that had once been thought of in theological terms. He also offered a picture of a mind whose dynamics could be conceptualized in isolation from ethical considerations. In Reid’s objectified ‘mind’, the ‘social’ ‘operation’ is an object of study in its own right, regardless of the context in which an individual lives, the motives that inspire behaviour, or the consequences that actions produce. In the 1840s, the objectification implied by Reid’s reference to mental ‘operations’ was taken to another level when ‘social’ began to appear in noun compounds that were themselves secular abstractions. C. Bray’s 1841 reference to ‘social reform’ and Polson’s 1845 invocation of ‘social economy’ reveal that what was formerly conceptualized as an ethical capacity of a nature given by God, then, by Reid, as the property of a naturalized mental operation, had been liberated altogether from individual humans. The migration of ‘social’, from its adjectival relation to an abstraction that implicitly invoked God to an integral position in a noun-compound detached from human agents, implies the twin processes of alienation and reification that modern uses of ‘the social’ assume: in order to imagine that ‘social reform’ and ‘social economy’ are relatively autonomous secular projects or areas of analysis, one must conceptualize ‘reform’ and ‘economy’ as separable from the individuals who engage in these activities, as amenable to scientific (rather than theological) analysis, and as relatively

The liberal civil subject and the social

47

concrete projects or relations. These mid-nineteenth-century compound nouns thus carry over the atomism implicit in the adjectival uses of ‘social’ since the mid-sixteenth century, but they isolate not the individual human being but activities that human beings collectively pursue. Beyond implying the autonomy and materiality of abstractions that have been separated from human actors, these mid-nineteenth-century noun-compounds also imply that the dynamics of what were once considered God-given human capacities or mental operations were by then considered sufficiently lawful in their own right to be populated by new abstractions, which function as agents whose actions are subject to description, not ethical judgement. These complexities are all implied by Polson’s definition of ‘social economy’ as the study of the ‘laws which directly consult the health, wealth, convenience or comfort of the public’ (my emphasis). When modern theorists use ‘the social’ as a noun, they carry over the theoretical assumptions captured in Polson’s definition. These assumptions number at least four: 1

2

3

4

that a relatively autonomous domain of sociality exists – either as the expression of a universal subjective orientation or capacity (Butler’s ‘social capacity’ naturalized and secularized as Reid’s ‘social operations of the mind’), or as the product of an interpretive act, which objectifies underlying principles into something that can be studied in isolation; that the dynamics of this objectifiable set of practices or structures are lawful and, when manifested in institutions and practices, amenable to systematic (scientific) analysis; that this intermediate domain both informs the social institutions that its dynamics help explain and, in turn, refers to some invisible but law-abiding system; and that aggregates, which are also abstractions (the public, labour), constitute the agents of more foundational abstractions like ‘the social’. Since the mid-nineteenth century, these aggregates have most often been constructed so as to be amenable to representation in the languages of quantification (enumeration and statistics).

As I have already suggested, these etymological changes allude to what has been called the rise of modern abstraction, that complex series of theoretical and institutional developments by which particular abstractions (like ‘society’ and ‘the economy’) acquired sufficient institutional presence to become transindividual entities with real material effects.1 This etymology also suggests that a more precise way to conceptualize this history might be to subdivide modern abstraction into a number of levels of complexity, the development of which does constitute the episodes of a history but whose primary relationship to each other is logical rather than temporal. These levels would include first-order abstractions, like ‘society’ or ‘the economy’, which constitute the empty but necessary organizational units of the whole (and which, by necessity, are theorized first, or are at least conceptually prior to other formulations); second-order

48

Mary Poovey

abstractions, like ‘providential design’ or ‘the social’, which provide historically specific content and narrative paradigms for the first-order abstractions and which also bear a historical relation to each other; and third-level abstractions, like ‘desire’ or ‘the public’, which further differentiate the second-order abstractions in such a way as to populate and animate their internal dynamics. To understand how second-order abstractions like ‘the social’ function, as well as to grasp the historical provenance of this abstraction in particular, it is helpful to examine this entire theoretical edifice as the internal scaffolding of what Taylor and others have referred to as the social imaginary of modern societies.

‘The social’ and social imaginaries In theorizing the concept of a social imaginary, Charles Taylor follows Cornelius Castoriadis, who uses the term to refer to ‘the final articulations the society in question has imposed on the world, on itself, and on its needs, the organizing patterns that are the conditions for the representability of everything that the society can give to itself’ (Castoriadis 1987: 143).2 The significant contribution of this concept is its ability to conjure something like an epistemological and ontological a priori for a particular society’s representations, institutions and practices. In its most basic sense, the concept of the social imaginary refers not to particular representations or actions but to the foundational assumptions about what counts as an adequate representation or practice in the first place. Thus defined, modern society’s social imaginary would encompass all of the levels of abstraction I have described above, but this concept could also be used to describe a society that lacks abstract self-understanding. In other words, ‘social imaginary’ is an interpretive product of modern abstraction. It is a concept that modern analysts use to describe the most foundational conceptual conditions of possibility for a society’s operation, even if the society in question lacks a theoretical formulation that describes its operation in the abstract for its participants. It may help to have a specific example in mind. I have tried to describe one component of modern Western societies’ social imaginary as the reliance on the concept of the modern fact (Poovey 1998: ch. 1). This concept is an epistemological unit rather than a content. It functions to link individual claims about specific observations with generalizations about ‘larger’ or ‘deeper’ principles that presumably lie behind the observed phenomena. The modern fact thus anchors an epistemology that assumes a syntagmatic relationship between the part and the whole, an ordered universe of natural objects, and a dichotomy between the observing subject and the object that is observed. While this way of knowing the world now seems simply like common sense, the kind of reasoning implicit in the modern fact was initially developed only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when it was institutionalized as a mode of writing particular to one occupational group (Italian merchants or bookkeepers). In the seventeenth century, members of another social group, the English Royal Society, appropriated the epistemological assumptions implicit in

The liberal civil subject and the social

49

the modern fact to authorize another set of social behaviours – that is, to convince the king that the knowledge they produced about the natural world was reliable because non-sectarian. During the next century, the assumptions and representational practices associated with the modern fact were gradually taken up by increasing numbers of theorists and lay people as the method associated with this epistemological unit (the scientific method) gained more general cultural authority. While the way of thinking associated with the modern fact continued (and continues) to vie with other explanatory paradigms, it had gained sufficient ascendancy by the end of the eighteenth century to be considered the dominant or hegemonic social imaginary of all Western European societies that embraced the principles of scientific, natural knowledge. Charles Taylor helps illuminate the general principles behind this specific example, although his brief exposition can also benefit from the kind of elaboration I offer here. Taylor stresses, for example, that a ‘social imaginary’ is not simply a theory developed by specialists. Instead, it is at least partly generated by ordinary people for use in everyday life, and it reveals itself in stories, myths and commonplaces as well as theoretical narratives. According to Taylor, a social imaginary ‘is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society’ (Taylor 1999: 1). Taylor also helpfully points out that a social imaginary is not simply descriptive; instead, it has a normative or prescriptive function, which guides the evaluation of practices as well as the practices themselves. It incorporates a sense of the normal expectations that we have of each other; the kind of common understanding which enables us to carry out the collective practices which make up social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice. This understanding is both factual and ‘normative’; that is, we have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what mis-steps would invalidate the practice. (Taylor 1999: 20) In seeking to align description with prescription, social imaginaries also perform a legitimating function: ‘the social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (Taylor 1999: 20). Taylor’s understanding of social imaginaries, which is explicitly indebted to Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’, bears affinities with the concept of ‘ideology’, which also attempts to explain representations and collective practices by reference to a more capacious abstraction. Unlike most uses of ‘ideology’, however, Taylor’s treatment of ‘social imaginary’ does not imply that some absolute ground causes a society’s representations and practices and that, as a consequence, one can know this ground outside of the representations ideology creates. Instead, as I understand Taylor’s account, social imaginaries are self-authenticating (if not self-generating); they produce the terms by which

50

Mary Poovey

they can be understood in producing the conditions in which some understandings count more than others. While a theorist can identify the imaginary that can be said to govern a given society’s representations and practices, then, she cannot be said to reveal a ‘deeper’ truth in doing so. In making certain explanatory paradigms (and not others) available and credible in the first place, a particular social imaginary makes certain kinds of theoretical statements about ‘deeper’ causes possible, but this concept does not hold open a place for truths that lie outside the imaginary that produces them. In eliminating ideology’s dichotomy between surface and depth (and between subjective delusion and the objective understanding offered by experts), Taylor’s concept allows us to conceptualize social imaginaries as characterized by something like a feedback loop. In this loop, all of the elements inform each other, so that causation flows in multiple directions at once. Thus particular representations can influence institutional practices and vice-versa, and explanatory paradigms that depend on abstractions can also be said to derive their power partly from the concrete images and stories these abstractions purport to explain. In describing a recursive structure rather than a dichotomy, Taylor’s account also allows us to connect the theoretical formulations that experts produce with the common understandings that ordinary people generate in living together. We can conceptualize this relationship temporally, as if images pass from theory to common sense (or vice-versa), or spatially, as if the images produced by one group of social participants are variants of the images produced by another. It is impossible to know whether the temporal account is more accurate than an account that emphasizes spatiality – or even to be certain that these are not just two ways of viewing a process whose complexities can only be theorized in temporary isolation from their unfolding in time and space. Since we know that the terms in which we conceptualize a given social imaginary are generated by the practices that institutionalize its assumptions, all we can know is that, in claiming to know, we also help create the conditions in which (some kinds of) knowledge is accorded truth-value. To be fair, Taylor does not emphasize the self-authenticating nature of individual social imaginaries as much as I have done, nor does he detail the recursive dynamic that I associate with the self-authenticating nature of this concept. I think that emphasizing self-authentification is important because doing so liberates the concept from the dichotomies generally associated with ‘ideology’; this is important, in turn, because it enables us to conceptualize dichotomies, such as the split between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, as products of a particular social imaginary, not a natural relation between terms that somehow stand outside a society’s way of understanding and organizing itself. Even as Taylor’s concept would benefit from being further distinguished from most uses of ‘ideology’, I think that that it would be also more useful if we were to embellish it with the internal differentiation that Raymond Williams has introduced into the concept of ideology. Rather than viewing ideology as homogeneous, and therefore totallizing, Williams discriminates among the emergent, dominant, and residual ideologies that may co-exist in a single society. At any

The liberal civil subject and the social

51

given moment, Williams explains, the dominant ideology must compete with new collective understandings that are just beginning to gain credibility, as well as with lingering traces of old ideological formations (Williams 1977: 121–7 ). Combining Taylor’s idea of social imaginaries with Williams’ model of competing ideologies encourages us to think of a society’s social imaginary as an ensemble of ideas and practices, some of which contain germs of models that will eventually assume greater definition, and some of which carry over understandings that belong to older conceptualizations of social relations.3 Taylor does suggest that social imaginaries are plural geographically (Taylor 1999: 1). Emphasizing the synchronic multiplicity of geographically separated social imaginaries is helpful because it prevents us from generalizing the social imaginary a particular theorist or citizen inhabits (and whose terms she or he necessarily uses) to all of the societies on earth. When imaged as synchronically and geographically plural, the concept of social imaginaries even suggests the limitations of the abstraction ‘modernity’. The existence of different social imaginaries at the same time may mean that there is no single way of being ‘modern’; this may also mean that we need further clarification about the relationship between the development of particular social imaginaries, including those characterized by ever-more-finely discriminated levels of abstraction, and the term ‘modernity’, which is intended to characterize a general phase of historical and epistemological achievement. However we think about the limitations of generalizing ‘modernity’, we can use Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries to clarify how second-order abstractions like ‘the social’ function within societies that have embraced the epistemology of the modern fact. According to Taylor, the social imaginary that fosters such second-order secular abstractions rests on two first-order abstractions: an ideal of order and a normative image of human nature. The distinctive modern accomplishment, according to Taylor, has been to separate the former from its Platonic predecessor and to secularize the latter. As part of the reworking of these old categories, the modern social imaginary casts social order as exclusively deriving from and also benefiting human beings, who are by nature capable of relationship but required to create and sustain the affiliation that sustains monadic individuals. In Taylor’s succinct phrase, (Western) modernity is characterized by an ‘ideal of order as mutual benefit’ (Taylor 1999: 61). As part of this ideal of order as mutual benefit, second-order analytic categories like ‘the social’ have been generated to explain how the first-order abstractions (order, human nature) ‘naturally’ produce the precise relationship (ideally, of mutual benefit) that characterizes society. In so doing, ‘the social’ plays the role for the modern theorist that ‘providence’ did for philosophers of an earlier age: it explains why this relationship is necessary or natural, not arbitrary or simply a projection of wishful thinking.4 In so doing, the concept of ‘the social’, like the commonplace images and stories to which it is related and with which it competes, ultimately functions to legitimate social arrangements that are no longer seen as resting on a providential ground (or housed in a formal relation, in the Platonic sense).5

52

Mary Poovey

It is important to acknowledge the legitimating function that second-order abstractions play because, according to Taylor, a historical crisis in legitimacy (and faith) initially provoked natural law theorists like Grotius and Pufendorf to generate the first-order secular abstractions that these second-order abstractions were intended to elaborate. In Taylor’s account, the particular conceptualizations of order and human nature that eventually came to organize a new social imaginary were first generated in a rather specialized conversation among theorists trying to rethink the legitimacy of governments and the rules of peace in the wake of the Religious Wars (Taylor 1999: 3). From this conversation, which drew upon but reworked older theological ideas about relations between idealism and civil society (Pickstock this volume: ch. 2), the modern idea that social order emanates from the human nature it also serves gradually began to influence the terms of other discussions, which were intended to legitimate other activities, like the spread of Western commerce or the printing press’s dissemination of secular knowledge. Taylor’s account of the modern social imaginary helpfully positions this ensemble of ideas and practices in relation to three large historical ‘events’. Following Jacques Lezra, I place ‘events’ in quotation marks to designate the characteristically mixed nature of these concepts/institutions: each of them is an analytic abstraction, and thus a product of the historical process I am describing, and a set of institutions and practices that materialize that abstraction and thus make descriptions of it credible (Lezra 1999: ch. 1). In Taylor’s account, the three ‘events’ that simultaneously accompanied and could be explained by the emergent modern social imaginary were the consolidation of ‘the economy’, the appearance of what Habermas has called the ‘public sphere’, and the codification of the practices and outlooks of democratic self-rule, which Foucault calls liberal govermentality (Taylor 1999: 25). Temporally, the consolidation of the economy constitutes the first of these large historical ‘events’. During the seventeenth century in England, in the wake of the Civil War, ordered life and work began to seem newly important to individuals’ ability to achieve self-realization and serve God, and commerce began to seem newly important to domestic and religious peace. Gradually, using imagery generated by merchants and political theorists, common individuals began to think of daily production and consumption, as well as the nation’s prosperity and strength, in terms of an ‘economy’. Instead of being merely the management, by those in authority, of the resources we collectively need, in household or state, the ‘economic’ [began to define] a way in which [individuals] are linked together, a sphere of coexistence which could in practice suffice to itself, if only disorder and conflict didn’t threaten. (Taylor 1999: 19)6 The images, theoretical paradigms and institutions that composed the economy had attained sufficient visibility and regularity by the end of the

The liberal civil subject and the social

53

seventeenth century to help fill the vacuum left by the dilution, then obliteration, of absolute monarchy in England. As John Brewer has argued, the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate virtually destroyed the court culture that had once represented itself as the legitimating ground of the British nation. Even though Charles II and James tried to resurrect the monarchy’s old glory, they did not succeed, and with the Hanoverians the prestige of the court deteriorated even further. At the same time, because of royal cupidity and the Reformation’s repudiation of images, the Church also lost the public credibility and economic power essential to legitimate its rule (Brewer 1995a: 342). As a consequence, early-eighteenth-century Britons lacked a clear sense of the basis of their nation’s authority, not to mention terms that could authorize the new dynasty’s novel compound of rule by party politics and rule by finance. The primary instrument of the emergent public sphere – the press – helped supply these legitimating terms in images of politeness and a civilizing process of exchange that fitted well with the new economy of paper credit and party politics. Periodicals like the Spectator enabled a newly empowered ‘public’ to imagine itself as a single entity, whose rules were those of polite and rational discourse and whose legitimacy was founded not on the monarch or Church but on its members’ ability to disagree without overt conflict. This public, as Brewer, Habermas and others have emphasized, came to self-understanding not merely through elite individuals reading philosophical theories in formal educational settings, but by all kinds of literate people reading various kinds of literature and discussing literary and other matters in coffee houses and over tea (Brewer 1995a: 344). The resulting ‘polite culture of the public sphere’ functioned to constitute and instruct ‘a body of arbiters of taste, morality, and policy’ (Brewer 1995a: 344). As suggested by the mixed nature of the three large concepts/institutions Taylor identifies, the public sphere was partly constructed by the shared understandings and the shared images of itself that were generated through print and conversation; partly, it was generated by the institutions that enabled these ideas about politeness to circulate and acquire social prestige. (These would have to include institutional practices that had little to do with Addison and Steele’s sense of politeness. I have in mind here Robert Harley’s use of the press to propagate political propaganda in the new context of party politics.) However we describe its mix of representational and institutional components, the public sphere generated a new sense of public order and of the public nature and accountability of political behaviours. ‘With the modern public sphere comes the idea that political power must be supervised and checked by something outside’, Taylor explains. What was new, of course, was not that there was an outside check, but rather the nature of this instance. It is not defined as the will of God, or the Law of Nature (although it could be thought to articulate these), but as a kind of discourse, emanating from reason and not from power or traditional authority. (Taylor 1999: 29)

54

Mary Poovey

This public sense of ‘agency grounded purely in its own common actions’ (Taylor 1999: 33) and legitimated by the rational discourse that also explained these actions, underwrote a society of individuals conceptualized as both interchangeable and newly unique. The tensions we have already seen in eighteenth-century definitions of ‘social’ reveal that the individuals who composed the public sphere seemed to contemporaries both more public and more private than ever before. On the one hand, the new emphasis on commerce and public participation in politics placed a burden on individuals to perform socially, in the glare of the publicity they consumed and generated. On the other hand, the new emphasis on personal freedom and the sanctity of everyday life urged a new valuation of privacy and the elaboration of what Habermas calls the sphere of intimacy (Habermas 1989: 151–9). In the new social imaginary, publicness and privacy were actually the two sides of a single coin. Periodicals like the Spectator provided rules for the individual’s most solitary behaviours, but, being promoted in print, these rules brought the sphere of intimacy into the glare of public norms. Books of correspondence, as well as the innumerable letters printed in popular periodicals, generated the paradoxical image of a sphere of privacy simultaneously enforced by and evacuated of the very autonomy that was supposed to insulate it from the public.7 As I suggest at the end of this essay, the paradoxical formation of the sphere of intimacy had a particularly powerful effect on women; but for men too, it was arguably one of the most prominent and inescapable features of the social imaginary that was new in eighteenth-century Britain.

Scottish moral philosophy and the liberal civil subject The admittedly overly schematic narrative I have just provided is intended to remind readers of the kind of story that uses ‘the modern ideal of order as mutual benefit’ to distinguish ‘modern’ societies from their predecessors (and contemporary rivals). To make this narrative less schematic would require not only more historical detail, but also a continuous emphasis on the way that various kinds of abstractions were created to explain and legitimate the institutions and practices that materialized this ideal. This is the dimension of such historical narratives that is most frequently omitted, but without it, we too often imagine that the terms by which we understand the past provide a vantage point somehow superior to our analytic object, instead of thinking of our analytic terms as products of a historical process too. In the space remaining, I can offer only a brief description of what I take to be a critical phase in the rise of modern abstraction: in this phase, philosophers began to elaborate a new theory of governmentality by reworking their understanding of providential order, which was the predecessor of ‘the social’; they reworked providential order, in turn, by developing an understanding of ‘human nature’ that entailed the nuanced dynamics of such third-order abstractions as ‘desire’, ‘social capacity’ and ‘self-love’. I intend my brief account of this elaboration as a contribution to other scholarly work on this process, and I refer interested readers to this growing body of important scholarship.8

The liberal civil subject and the social

55

During the first half of the eighteenth century, British moral philosophers began to justify the mode of government inaugurated by the Glorious Revolution with theoretical accounts of human nature that stressed human beings’ natural tendency to benefit each other as they advanced their own interests.9 Initially, philosophical accounts of human nature referred this natural tendency to God’s design, although, as the OED’s exemplary quotations reveal, conceptualizing human capacity as an articulation of the providential order presumably embedded in the nature of man opened the door for marginalizing, then dispensing with, the providential explanation. The kind of naturalization we saw in Thomas Reid’s reference to ‘operations of the mind’ was arguably facilitated by the philosophical elevation of new abstractions – including, centrally, ‘human nature’ – to an intermediary position between behaviours that could be observed and the providential order that was presumed to inform them. Thinking abstractly, in other words – or, more precisely, using secular abstractions to think about what could not be seen but was believed to exist, as well as about the observable behaviours the abstractions theoretically explained – laid the groundwork for thinking about interpretive abstractions apart from the original providential scheme. This was partly true because first-order abstractions like ‘human nature’ were amenable to – indeed, called out for – the kind of theoretical elaboration that generated second- and third-order abstractions. In discriminating the dynamics by which these second- and third-order abstractions animated the first-order abstractions, theorists enabled people to imagine how these abstractions ‘naturally’ worked, either as articulations of God’s order or as orderly (and relatively autonomous) entities in and of themselves. Thus, as theorists like Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, George Turnbull, David Hume and Adam Smith began to elaborate how ‘the social capacity’ worked, they helped their contemporaries to imagine that such a capacity actually existed, to experience their own emotions as expressions of (or impediments to) ‘the social capacity’, and to seek institutional guarantees for the regular expression of this capacity by as many people as possible. The first-order abstraction in which early-eighteenth-century philosophers anchored their defences of liberal governmentality was not completely new at the turn of the century, but, as Roger Smith has observed, ‘human nature’ had never before received the kind of attention the moral philosophers paid it (Smith 1995: 94–5). Historically, ‘human nature’ took the place of the sixteenth-century idea of natural law, but, as the difference between the two terms suggests, focusing on ‘human nature’ encouraged philosophers to supplement the idea of law, which could be said to originate outside of individuals, with reflections on human subjectivity, which was experienced as originating within the individual. This shift from an abstraction that refers to external necessity to one that conjures internal experience informed the general project the British moral philosophers undertook: to explain why individuals could be counted on to produce a mutually beneficial society in the process of gratifying themselves. To explain why individuals could be trusted to govern themselves – and why, as an extension of this mutually beneficial self-government, the party- and

56

Mary Poovey

market-governed character of the new British nation was legitimate – philosophers began to conceptualize the dynamics of interiority more precisely than ever before, both distinguishing, as we have already seen, between various ‘capacities’ (the ‘social capacity’, the ‘capacity for self-love’, and so on) and charting the relationships among these capacities (Pope’s ‘true self love and social are the same’). In order to draw exact discriminations among the feelings that had once been classified according to broad theological categories like ‘good’ and ‘evil’, British moral philosophers appropriated a variant of the apparently non-judgemental method that natural philosophers had developed to study the particulars of the natural world. This method, which depended upon observation and experiment, had enabled natural philosophers like Boyle to argue that the general knowledge they produced about particular experiments was ‘objective’, in the sense of being non-sectarian. Appropriating this method enabled moral philosophers to argue that the observations they made about the dynamics of subjectivity were as reliable – because as systematic – as the observations about nature for which natural philosophers had already established social credibility. Because they were making claims about the ‘moral’ domain, of course, the eighteenth-century philosophers were less eager to disavow judgement than their natural philosophical counterparts, but the moral philosophers represented judgements that we might call interested as unbiased descriptions of realizable norms. We see this characteristic coincidence of description and normative prescription in Hutcheson’s comment that the ‘moral sense’, which every individual supposedly possesses, reveals the ‘End or Design’ of God’s plan even in behaviours that are not self-evidently moral. To this sense, Hutcheson declares, ‘what is required of us by the Author of our nature’ is plain to see, even when a more superficial glance reveals nothing meaningful at all (Hutcheson 1969: xvi–xvii). The full title of Hume’s Treatise reveals that such descriptive/normative elaborations of the capacities that compose ‘human nature’ depended upon moral philosophers’ appropriating the natural philosophical method. The full title is A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. Yet, as Hume also suggested, only establishing a reciprocal relationship between the two variants of philosophy could authenticate the common project of finding informing principles, whether one sought those principles in nature or in ‘man’. ‘As the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences’, Hume declares, ‘so the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation’ (Hume 1984: 43). Even when Hume replaces experience with the more rigorous experiment, as he does by the last paragraph of his introduction, it is not clear how Hume intends to move from observation of discrete particulars to their informing principles except by assuming that such systematic principles exist. In other words, as Hume famously observed, the belief that order exists precedes our ascribing order to what we actually see, and this ascription of order to what we see follows our ability to create and elaborate systematic abstractions. Thus the mediating abstractions, like ‘human nature’, legitimate the foundational

The liberal civil subject and the social

57

belief in order because they can be elaborated systematically – into the dynamics of second- and third-order abstractions like ‘providential design’ and ‘social capacity’. The belief that principles of order exist and can be described was essential to the entire moral philosophical project, for the ability to produce systematic knowledge was what made moral philosophy a science, and the claim to explain why individual behaviours would guarantee social order anchored the philosophers’ bid for social authority. Various philosophers suggested various routes by which we can know that these principles exist: Adam Smith invoked the ‘invisible hand’ of the market as well as ‘sympathy’; Frances Hutcheson described a ‘moral sense’ that functions like the five physical senses; Hume invoked the analogy of billiard balls to endorse an inflexible model of ‘association’; and George Turnbull promoted mathematical reasoning as proof of an orderly universe. Aside from Hume, all of these philosophers referred the actual details of the order assumed to inform human nature to providential design. Only later in the century, as the science of man was divided into more specialized, nontheological practices, did the providential narrative have to compete with the naturalized explanations that eventually displaced it. While the explanatory content of the moral philosophers’ early-eighteenthcentury claims was eventually displaced by other explanatory paradigms, their foundational belief persisted. The idea that the orderly dynamics of philosophical abstractions refer to existing principles of order has proved more resilient than any particular account of that order. This is the belief, in fact, that informs modern invocations of ‘the social’, which attempt to explain observable institutions and practices by reference to some invisible, but determining ‘logic’, ‘structure’, or ‘dynamic’. Combined with the epistemology epitomized by the modern fact, this belief in underlying order lies at the heart of the modern social imaginary. If we did not collectively believe that such order exists – no matter what we call it – no systematic organization of knowledge (no science) would be credible, no observations about the past could purport to predict a future, and our ability to create and differentiate abstractions would have no explanatory power.

Coda If we were to turn from philosophical discussions of abstractions like ‘human nature’ to the accounts and practices of ordinary individuals, an even more nuanced picture of the modern social imaginary’s internal complexities would appear. Capturing this internal complexity seems a desirable goal of contemporary historiography, not because it reveals some ‘deeper’ explanatory truth that the moral philosophers could not see, but because these philosophical formulations constitute only one part of a social imaginary that was also produced – and lived – by people positioned differently in eighteenth-century British society. The nuances of any social imaginary are especially clear in the practices of individuals who are marginalized by theorists’ writing, for the work of these

58

Mary Poovey

marginalized individuals often constitutes the anomalies that philosophical writing is intended to normalize. This is the case, at any rate, of women of virtually all social ranks in the early eighteenth century. As Paula McDowell and others have observed, in fact, the rise of domestic norms, which played a central role in legitimating the institutional arrangements that stabilized eighteenthcentury market society and the public sphere, functioned to stigmatize or even outlaw the activities of women who did not conform to what emerged as a cultural norm (MacDowell 1998: 285–301) If our attempt to chronicle this phase of the rise of modern abstraction were to include the activities and writings of women, we would see at least two things: that the moral philosophers’ efforts to discriminate third-order abstractions like ‘the social capacity’ and ‘desire’ helped construct a normative picture of ‘human nature’ that relegated women to a single set of social functions: childrearing and moral governance; and that not all women accepted this assignment. Particularly in the first decade of the eighteenth century, as McDowell has demonstrated, women not only participated actively in the print industry as authors, booksellers and publishers, but they also articulated a community-oriented sense of self that did not conform to the philosophers’ norm of an individualized self naturally directed to the mutual benefit of the community (MacDowell 1998: 176–9, 180–2). By the same token, even after the domestic component of the modern social imaginary began to seem natural, some women continued to question or even to defy it openly. We have only to look at the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays late in the century to see that alternative opinions were still possible. If social imaginaries were internally self-consistent and self-policing, or if philosophers were the only ones whose formulations counted, then it would have been impossible for anyone to voice – or even imagine – such radical critiques. Of course, even a critique as radical as Wollstonecraft’s deployed abstractions to explain a ‘human nature’ that seemed to her simply to have been misrepresented by the philosophers. Like the philosophers she scorned, Wollstonecraft advanced her critique by means of abstractions, and she did so at least partly to defy the philosophers’ claims that women were incapable of making generalizations. Willing to question virtually every other social and intellectual convention of her day, Wollstonecraft was not willing to interrogate what had by then become a cornerstone of her society’s social imaginary: authoritative knowledge-production depends on and proceeds by means of abstractions that mediate between what everyone can see and what everyone believes. To change our understanding of these abstractions, Wollstonecraft asserted, would alter the institutions in which we live because doing so would reveal the truth about the order God had written into the world. Wollstonecraft’s confidence is not so different from the enthusiasm of modern theorists, as they replace ‘providential order’ with other second-order abstractions like ‘the social’. With every claim to identify a law-abiding abstraction that explains what can be seen by reference to what cannot, we reinscribe the social imaginary that positions the human capacity to imagine order at the foundation of society itself.

The liberal civil subject and the social

59

Notes 1 2 3

For discussions of the history of abstraction, see Poovey 1985: ch. 2; Lefebvre 1974: ch. 4; Williams 1979: 55–71. Craig Calhoun initially alerted me to Castoriadis’ influence on Taylor. See Calhoun 2000: 10, n. 15. That Williams’ discussion seems compatible with Taylor’s is clear from the latter’s discussion of the various stages by which ‘the long march’ from idea to social imaginary can occur. This can consist of a process whereby new practices, or modifications of old ones, either developed through improvisation among certain groups and strata of the population…or else were launched by elites in such a way as to recruit a larger and larger base.…Or alternatively, a set of practices in the course of their slow development and ramification gradually changed their meaning for people, and hence helped to constitute a new social imaginary. (Taylor 1999: 24)

4

Here the comments of Fredric Jameson are illuminating. Jameson argues that the most fully theorized version of ‘the social’, historical materialism, makes the same assumption about necessity that providentialism did. The idea of Providence is the distorted anticipation, within the religious and figural master-code, of the idea of historical necessity and historical necessity in historical materialism.…The function of this concept is…simply the enabling presupposition of the historian herself, and governs the form with which historiography endows the events of the past, the things that have already happened once and for all. The concept of historical necessity is simply the assumption that things happened the way they did because they had to happen that way and no other, and that the business of the historian is to show why they had to happen that way. (Jameson 1981: 323)

5

6 7 8

This is true even when the analyst’s specific use of ‘the social’ is highly critical of modern social relations or when the point of the social-historical account is to show how modern social relations are not mutually beneficial. Thus Marxists emphasize that the economic relations of production systematically enslave some individuals for the advantage of others; for many Marxists, ‘capitalism’ or ‘the economic’ exists on the horizon of ‘the social’. In this account, however, the tendencies Adam Smith attributed to ‘human nature’ are simply being transferred to another abstraction (’capitalism’), which presumably still articulates ‘natural’ human proclivities. ‘Mutual benefit’ is obviously not achieved under ‘capitalism’, but the animating idea of Enlightenment models of mutual benefit is being carried forward by capitalism because this system allows for the expression of individuals’ ‘natural’ and orderly inclination to ‘truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’. I also describe various components of the consolidation of ‘the economy’ in Poovey 1998: chs 1–3. John Brewer notes that ‘the first series of the Spectator, which consisted of 555 essays issued between March 1711 and December 1712, included 250 such letters’ (Brewer 1995b: 13). See McKeon 1987: 26–8; McKeon 2000: xiii–xviii; Kramnick 1999: 189–90, 204–5; and Siskin 1988: part II.

60 9

Mary Poovey It should be noted that moral philosophy was not the only kind of writing that sought to discriminate among kinds of feelings or to delineate a descriptivenormative relationship among feelings. In imaginative writing, novelists and poets also developed these discriminations, and a modern reader would be hard-pressed to decide which kind of writing was more influential. Indeed, the recursive nature of the relationship between moral philosophical texts and novels or poetry is a good example of the internal dynamics of a social imaginary.

References Brewer, J. (1995a) ‘ “The Most Polite Age and the Most Vicious”: attitudes towards culture as a commodity 1660–1800’, in The Consumption of Culture: Word, Image, and Object in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, eds Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, London: Routledge. ——(1995b) ‘This, that, and the other: public, social and private in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, eds Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Calhoun, C. (2000) ‘Nationalism, postnational identity, and the project of a European public sphere’, unpublished manuscript. Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institutions of Society, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, ed. Thomas Burger, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Hume, D. (1984) A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. E. Mossner, London: Penguin. Hutcheson, F. (1969) Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and the Affections with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. P. McReynolds, Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Jameson, F. (1981) ‘Religion and ideology’, in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century, ed. F. Barker, Essex: University of Essex Press. Kramnick, J. (1999) ‘Locke’s desire’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 12, 2: 189–208. Lefebvre, H. (1974) The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell. Lezra, J. (1999) Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe, Stanford: Stanford University Press. MacDowell, P. (1998) The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730, Oxford: Clarendon Press. McKeon, M. (1987) The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——(2000) ‘Introduction’, in The Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. M. McKeon, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pickstock, C. (2001) ‘The medieval origins of civil society’, Chapter 2 of this volume. Poovey, M. (1995) Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——(1998) A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Siskin, C. (1988) The Historicity of Romantic Discourse, New York: Oxford University Press.

The liberal civil subject and the social

61

Smith, R. (1995) ‘The language of human nature’, in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, eds C. Fox, R. Porter and R. Wokler, Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, C. (1999) ‘Modern social imaginaries’, unpublished manuscript. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4

Repatriating modernity’s alleged debts to the Enlightenment French Revolutionary social science and the genesis of the nation state Robert Wokler

I As I understand them, modern social science and the modern nation state were conceived as incompatible twins. In these remarks on what I take to be the parallel history of their birth and infancy, I mean to show that their widely presumed pedigree in each case, and in particular their ascription to a so-called ‘Enlightenment Project’, are instances of mistaken identity, even if we allow that this neologism, invented by Alasdair MacIntyre some thirty years after the world first learnt of a Manhattan Project,1 actually has some purchase with respect to the doctrines of eighteenth-century philosophes. Both modern social science and the modern nation state were invented in the course of the French Revolution by innovative thinkers and political actors whose most distinctive contributions to the history of modernity owe little, in my view, to any ideas of their putative Enlightenment precursors, which they more often sought to correct than to put into practice. At least with respect to the subjects I address here, the French Revolution marks not the fulfilment of the ‘Enlightenment Project’, or of any plausible candidates embraced under this term, but its demise. That is my central thesis, which I aim to develop by way of certain themes and expressions I owe to Michel Foucault on the one hand, and to Sigmund Freud on the other. In Les Mots et les Choses Foucault portrayed the epistemic metamorphosis of l’âge classique into l’âge moderne by way of transfigurations of academic discourse and the objects of academic scrutiny which he traced mainly to the last decade of the eighteenth century,2 locating the genesis of the human sciences of biology, linguistics and economics, in particular, within this brief period of rapid intellectual change. In suggesting that 1795 was a pivotal year of that intellectual transformation, Foucault anticipated the more detailed work of Georges Gusdorf, Sergio Moravia, Emmet Kennedy, Martin Staum, Cheryl Welch, Brian Head and others devoted to the idéologues of the 1790s,3 and while he seldom turned his gaze upon the French Revolution in his conceptual history of modernity, he drew special attention to a short span of years in which terms such as démocrate, révolutionnaire and terroriste – as well as idéologie itself – erupted into European political discourse in conjunction with the events or doctrines which these new words defined.

French Revolutionary social science 63 Although I believe Foucault was mistaken to suppose that our modern human sciences first arose around the end of the eighteenth century, I am largely persuaded by his thesis that in a very brief period around 1795 the human sciences which we still study today acquired new forms that were unlike any of the studies of human nature prevalent before. It seems to me regrettable, therefore, that Foucault should have ignored the unfolding of ‘la science sociale’ in his account of the gestation of les sciences humaines, since in its proper place a chapter on that subject would have lent more weight to his argument as a whole. My remarks here on the origins of social science may thus be read as a kind of appendix as well as tribute to Les Mots et les Choses, in the light of evidence supporting Foucault’s case, although to my mind this evidence also shows that the genesis of the human sciences in their peculiarly modern forms owes as much to newly bred scientific institutions and societies in the 1790s as to new concepts and vocabularies, and that in many respects these sciences were shaped by the greatest political and social upheaval their practitioners supposed the world had ever known – that is, the French Revolution. My debt to Freud is of a different and more general kind, which I may perhaps best explain in the light of my understanding of what is centrally at issue for most of the critics of a so-called ‘Enlightenment Project’ with whose writings I am acquainted. As I understand them, such critics, however striking the differences between them, characteristically subscribe in one way or another to two fundamental propositions. They believe, on the one hand, that in replacing dogmatic faith with dogmatic reason the Enlightenment loved the thing it killed and framed the secular world of modernity within an ideological mould which merely turned Christianity inside out, in the service of absolutist principles of another sort. They imagine that it made science the new religion of humankind and offered terrestrial grace or happiness to its true believers alone. That in essence is the thesis of Carl Becker’s Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, first published in 1932, and in its more political manifestations, such as in Jacob Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy or Simon Schama’s Citizens, much the same proposition informs their authors’ interpretations of the excesses of the French Revolution. On the other hand, critics of an ‘Enlightenment Project’, when they seek to explain the moral underpinnings of the world they inhabit themselves, also commonly trace its conceptual roots to eighteenth-century philosophy. They are convinced that modernity was bred from the loins of the Enlightenment, out of its notions of the rights of man and its principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, which brought the age of feudalism to a close. If they are communitarians or postmodernists, they seldom hesitate to blame the Enlightenment for having conceived that monstrous child which our civilization has become, since they believe that, even while disposing of original sin, the philosophes of the eighteenth century actually committed it. The attempts of eighteenth-century thinkers to free human nature from the shackles of tradition are alleged to have given rise either to the empty desolation of atomistic individualism or to schemes of social engineering on a vast scale, or indeed to both at once. Such

64

Robert Wokler

propositions, in different permutations, inform Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust. To my mind, each of these propositions – that the Enlightenment loved the thing it killed, and that modernity springs from the Enlightenment – is false. The first claim, I believe, misconstrues the nature of the ‘Enlightenment Project’, supposing that there was one, with respect to the religious doctrines which its adherents opposed, since it cannot be plausibly interpreted according to any scenario as having turned Christian absolutism inside out. The second proposition, by contrast, misdescribes modernity, insofar as it presumes that the French Revolution enabled the philosophy of the Enlightenment to take its currently predominant form, and I shall accordingly try to show here that the modern nation state, which I take to be an invention of the French Revolution, not only distorted but betrayed the ‘Enlightenment Project’ in the course of its legislators’ pursuit of programmes largely unheralded in any pre-revolutionary constitutional scheme. In elaborating both of these arguments, I feel drawn to the language of Freud in his Moses and Monotheism, where he maintains that the redemption of man’s original sin by way of Christ’s absorption of the guilt of his people through his death at their hands had been prefigured by the forgotten event of the Jews’ killing of Moses, who was their first Messiah. Out of this primal parricide the Jewish people was born, and with it their collective guilt, he claims.4 My treatment of the genesis of the nation state, untimely plucked from the womb of the Enlightenment rather than germinated out of its seed by design, follows Freud. The primal patricide of modernity, as I describe it here, constitutes the murder of the ‘Enlightenment Project’, the destruction of the international republic of letters by way of the birth of the nation state, conceived as a form of republic whose members are bound together in a quite different way. On my reading of its principles, the ‘Enlightenment Project’ was not fulfilled in the course of the French Revolution but, on the contrary, came to be strangled in the zealous embrace of its admirers, once they seized the opportunity to put their own ideals into practice. Instead of turning to Becker’s Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, critics of the ‘Enlightenment Project’ would be better advised to study Ernst Cassirer’s magisterial study of Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, produced in the same year – 1932 – at the dusk of the age of the Weimar Republic by one of the first Jewish chancellors of a German university. I know of no work which shows with more tragic perspicacity that it was not the Enlightenment that loved the thing it killed but, rather, modernity that, by and large, has killed the thing it loved.

II If the notion of an ‘Enlightenment Project’ has any specificity at all, how can it be defined sans parti pris? When in doubt about underlying meanings, it may be

French Revolutionary social science 65 sensible to begin with superficial facts, which even in intellectual history often turn out to be dates. Archbishop Ussher, who in the seventeenth century established beyond doubt that the world had been created by God at 8 a.m. on Saturday 22 October in the year 4004 BC, has long held my admiration, and in my next section I shall try to show that we can date the advent of the age of modernity with similar precision. So far as I know, no one has ever suggested that the ‘Enlightenment Project’ was invented in a single day, but I believe that there is virtually unanimous agreement among commentators that the principal contributors to it flourished in a specifiable period. Whether we take the ‘Enlightenment Project’ to have been launched by Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1690 and completed by Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un Tableau des Progrès de l’Esprit Humain of 1795, or, alternatively, inaugurated by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and completed by the Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme of 1789, our conception of the whole age of Enlightenment encompasses just that century of European history. To put my point another way, an unobjectionable temporal definition of the ‘Enlightenment Project’ would embrace the period delimited by two seminal works which define the transfiguration of the age of classicism into the age of modernity, with reference to the 1680s on the one hand and the 1790s, on the other – that is, Paul Hazard’s La Crise de la Conscience Européenne of 1935 and Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses of 1966, which I have already addressed. Somewhere within the intellectual worlds or movements delimited by Hazard and Foucault lies the ‘Enlightenment Project’ as I see it. Swirling beneath their main philosophical currents, the moral and political tributaries from which the French Revolution was to be spawned should be detectable, for it is those tributaries which so many of our leading social theorists of the twentieth century have come to identify as forming the Enlightenment incubus of modernity. Why do I hold them to be mistaken? What do our standard chronologies of eighteenth-century intellectual history tell us about the real nature of the ‘Enlightenment Project’? Simply this. That above all else, in the countries in which it flourished, it was committed to principles of religious toleration. In France, we may date its inception from the year 1685, when, first, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV, and subsequently his acceptance of the papal bull Unigenitus of 1713, inaugurated a century-long quarrel between Catholic assenters and dissidents, and between ultramontane monarchists on the one hand, and gallican clerics and parliamentarians on the other, which was to issue in the remonstrances of the parlements and their expulsion by Louis XV, followed by the suppression of the Jesuits and ultimately Louis XVI’s convocation of the Assembly of Notables in 1787, succeeded by the Revolution of 1789. That history of the institutionalization of political and theological intolerance coincides with the whole history of the French Enlightenment itself, as opposition to the Revocation united philosophes of all denominations. From Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes to Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, sceptics in France denounced theological controversy and the persecution of heretics,

66

Robert Wokler

often condemning, like Rousseau in the Contrat Social or Voltaire in his Traité sur la Tolérance, the refusal of French Catholic priests to administer the sacraments to Protestants, which thereby disenfranchized them of all their civil rights. Under the reign of a Catholic king in England, religious dissenters in the 1680s fared little better than did Protestants in France, and it is as much with reference to the same issue – either by way of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, or William and Mary’s Act of Toleration, both dating from 1689 – that the English Enlightenment may be said to have been inaugurated as well. The idea of toleration lies at the heart of Locke’s philosophy in virtually all the domains which engaged his attention, and it was by embracing that idea and the civic culture which gave rise to it that enlightened philosophes in France who described themselves as lovers of freedom emulated both his achievement and his country’s success. For much the same reasons as in England and France, moreover, the Enlightenment of course also flourished in Holland. Immediately following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the most important writings bearing testimony to its impact were those of French Protestants who either fled to Holland from France for their safety or, like Pierre Bayle, had been victims of the dissolution of Huguenot academies even prior to 1685. It was also in Holland that Spinoza put his case for the liberty of opinion; it was in Holland, while in exile, that Locke drafted his own account of the need for freedom of conscience; and it was from Holland that England’s new king and queen, committed to religious toleration above all else, would descend. The religious purification of the French nation after 1685 – what might today be termed its ‘ethnic cleansing’ – did not take the murderous form of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre more than a hundred years earlier. But like all such campaigns it gave rise to a diaspora, to a brain drain and an outcast culture which abroad fermented more richly than it had managed under relative tranquillity at home. As much as from any other philosophical, political or economic source, it was from the precipitation of that brain drain, and the depth of the reaction to it among intellectuals in France, that the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was formed. Religious intolerance kindled the ‘Enlightenment Project’. At the heart of the philosophes’ commitment to the progressive education of mankind lay a crusade against all the dark forces of idolatry. Through the Encyclopédie and the book trade as a whole, progressive thinkers of the age of Enlightenment sought to build an eighteenth-century Crystal Palace of the human mind, accessible to readers of all vernacular languages, as transparent as the open book of nature. By contrast, they held the arcane dogmas of Christian theology responsible for fanaticism and hypocrisy throughout human history – for wars of religion, for the Inquisition, for bigotry virtually everywhere. If such notions comprise the kernel of what we mean, or ought to mean, when we speak of the ‘Enlightenment Project’, then it would appear that our civilization shows only slight and intermittent traces of its influence. Like that long day’s journey into night which descended upon the culture of ancient Rome, the last

French Revolutionary social science 67 century, in Gibbon’s phrase, bore witness to ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’.5 The ‘Enlightenment Project’ has been our god that failed.

III I turn next to the French Revolutionary invention of social science in its modern form. When in January 1789 the abbé Sieyès introduced the expression ‘la science sociale’ in the initial issue of his most famous pamphlet, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-état?,6 he did not herald this neologism as signifying a new science of society, different in its approach from all previous disciplines. The epistemic metamorphosis of the concept was no thunderbolt which, like the goddess Athena, burst from Zeus’s head. It was to follow rather than accompany the first appearance of the words, and Sieyès himself thought so little of them that in subsequent editions of this most popular of all French Revolutionary pamphlets he replaced them with the expression ‘la science de l’ordre social’. As he employed them the words simply referred to the principles of social order which the third estate, representing the nation as a whole, sought to realize in practice, divorced from all factional interests. With Sieyès’ encouragement, he imagined, France’s political system would be empowered to put into practice the science of society he had himself set out in theory to be publicly enacted and thereby made real. Subsequent appearances of the term in its earliest articulations have been traced to Pierre-Louis Lacretelle’s De l’Etablissement des Connoissances Humaines of 1791, to a pamphlet by Dominique-Joseph Garat addressed to Condorcet in December of that year, and to Condorcet’s own Projet de Décret sur l’Organisation Sociale of January 1792.7 It is very likely that the expression ‘la science sociale’ gained a certain currency in the fertile political literature of the period from 1789 to 1792, and that other instances of their use in those years have still to be uncovered. But with respect to the expression’s already ascertained pioneering examples, two points in particular ought to be noted: first, that every one of these authors of the earliest recorded uses of the term was a member of the short-lived Société de 1789 – a club formed to commemorate the launch of the Revolution – dissolved in 1791 after its membership had splintered into just such sectarian groups as Sieyès had sought to prevent; and second, that its authors largely conflated ‘la science sociale’ with other human sciences, such as ‘la morale’ and ‘la politique’, in the terminology of Lacretrelle, or with ‘l’art social’ in the language of Condorcet, whose aim was to promote political stability through constitutional reform. In its first printed articulations in the most politically explosive period at the dawn of the establishment of the modern state, ‘la science sociale’ was introduced, quite innocuously, as a term roughly equivalent to politics in general. After the rise and fall of the Jacobins and the passing of their Terror, the new term, science sociale, was to undergo the epistemic break or metamorphosis proclaimed by Foucault on behalf of all the human sciences, precisely in 1795, the year of the décalage, the great rupture or conceptual guillotine, as if people’s

68

Robert Wokler

minds could only be changed after their heads had already been severed. In that year the Convention established the Institut National des Sciences et des Arts, and within it the Classe des sciences morales et politiques, one of whose six sections was called ‘Science sociale, et législation’. The stipulated conjunction of social science with legislation in this name, and the election of Sieyès, Garat and Cabanis to other sections of the Classe des sciences morales et politiques, might appear to make Foucault’s notion of an epistemic metamorphosis with regard to ‘la science sociale’ just a tame sequel to the first performance, articulated by a cast of already familiar characters, but after 1795 the term came progressively to acquire a fresh meaning, all the more explosive for its divorce from, rather than conjunction with, politics and legislation. From the time of Foucault’s annus mirabilis of the human sciences in general, social science in particular came to acquire the meanings now associated with it as the central science of modernity. That transformation of a novel expression into a new concept was made possible by the intellectual predominance within the Classe des sciences morales et politiques of another section devoted to the analysis of sensations and ideas, the specially recognized domain of the so-called idéologues, led by de Tracy and Cabanis, until the dissolution of the entire Classe in 1803 by the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had his own way of effecting epistemic change. Separately and collectively, the idéologues attempted to delineate a fresh science of human nature more deeply rooted in the psychology of the human mind and the physiology of the human body than any conception of ‘la science sociale’ as the art of politics could ever be. They had learnt the dreadful lessons of the Terror and, following the Constitution of the year 1795, were less disposed than their precursors had been to proclaim the dangerously egalitarian doctrine of the natural rights of man, preferring instead to defend such rights as mankind could only enjoy in society. Distrustful of the critical character of the revolutionary programmes which had inspired the establishment of the Société de 1789, they were convinced that the problems of social disorder generated by the Revolution were no less striking than the despotism of the ancien régime. Wholesale constitutional reform had proved a remedy as harmful as the disease itself, in part because it was too drastic, in part too superficial, engendering political violence without producing social change. While they were men of predominantly liberal temperament whose outlook remained, by and large, as secular as was the anticlericalism of their precursors, their new conception of the science of society was more historical, more preservative, more solidly situated, they supposed, in the concrete world of real experience. Perhaps above all, the idéologues sought to explain mental and moral phenomena scientifically by retracing them to their physical roots. One of their central figures, Volney, attempted in this way to account for the production of cultural institutions, including political systems and religious beliefs, in connection with the physical geography that shaped the manner in which diverse populations lived. In his Rapports du Physique et du Moral, first delivered as a set

French Revolutionary social science 69 of readings to the Classe des sciences morales et politiques, Cabanis himself expounded a doctrine of ‘la science de l’homme’, which he conceived to be a synthesis of physiology, morals and the science of ideas. If the idéologues had produced their writings in the twentieth century, they would have been warmly received as fellow travellers of the contemporary school of the French Annales; already in the eighteenth century theirs was a social science of ‘mentalités’.8 Unlike Condorcet and Sieyès, they could never have confused the nature of that science with the art of politics. There were no doubt other factors as well as their distrust of politics and legislation which made the idéologues conspicuously less incendiary than had been the inventors of a more critical notion of ‘la science sociale’. It may even be the case that their membership of the Classe des sciences morales et politiques, which Keith Baker has described as the embodiment of Condorcet’s dream of a social sciences academy, lent a more conservative character to the discipline than had been conceived by their patron saint, just on account of its institutionalization in an academic setting made possible by patronage of another type. In adopting holistic methodologies of social explanation of a kind different from those that had figured in the notions of Condorcet and Sieyès, at any rate, they parted company from their ideological precursors, and could even appear to have made common cause with a number of profoundly reactionary critics of the entire French Revolution, including Bonald and de Maistre, who likewise supposed that the political manipulation of French society had fractured it. In France after 1795, the idea of a genuine social science, or ‘science de la société’, as Bonald sometimes termed it, could be appropriated by romantic conservatives no less than by progressive liberals or socialists. In every case, however, it would exclude the political tampering of naively enthusiastic legislators and metaphysicians, now identified in the same rogues’ gallery as the clerics and despots reviled by the philosophes. In large measure modelled upon the idéologues’ attempt to sketch a new science de l’homme, the first great synthesis of a post-French Revolutionary science of society was to be the scheme elaborated by Saint-Simon in several writings of the early nineteenth century, culminating in his Introduction aux Travaux Scientifiques du XIXe Siècle of 1807–8 and his Mémoire sur la Science de l’Homme of 1813. While Saint-Simon perceived himself as a disciple of the Enlightenment, inspired in his revolutionary ardour by its critical spirit, its commitment to science and its Encyclopédie, he was also drawn to the philosophical conservatism of Bonald, and acknowledged a special debt to the physiologist Jean Burdin, the author of a Cours d’Etudes Médicales ou Exposition de la Structure de l’Homme of 1803. Through Burdin’s influence Saint-Simon came to believe that physiology was the chief of all human sciences, and in his Mémoire sur la Science de l’Homme he was to put a case for a positive science of human nature and society which had as its aim the synthesis of the anatomy of Vicq-d’Azyr, the physiology of Bichat, the psychology of Cabanis and the philosophical history of Condorcet.9

70

Robert Wokler

That ‘science de l’organisation sociale’, as he sometimes termed it, was to lead Saint-Simon to inspect the morphology of the social body in a fresh idiom, different from the perspectives adopted by the philosophes of the Enlightenment he admired. By contrast with their deconstructive and critical doctrines, SaintSimonianism was designed to lubricate and integrate the technologies of a post-revolutionary and organic age of social reconstruction. In the course of the nineteenth century, through the influence of Saint-Simon’s principal disciple, Comte, this new positive science of society, soon to be known by the word Comte invented – ‘sociologie’ – was to become the pre-eminent science of modernity itself. It would be the science of society conceived in terms of its organization, its infrastructure and internal functions. It would nurture the practices of modern bureaucracy and promote the ascendancy of policy planners, experts and technicians. To ensure society’s proper order, it would require not the constitutions of legislators but regulation by administrators and engineers. In place of the political power sought on behalf of the public good by the first social scientists, after its epistemic metamorphosis the new science of society would promote social hygiene. Rather than aiming to achieve the enfranchisement of all citizens, it would be designed to fulfil the prognosis of Pope’s couplet from An Essay on Man, For Forms of Government let fools contest; Whate’er is best administer’d is best.10 Saint-Simon was convinced that, in the post French-Revolutionary age of organization and reconstruction, the intercessionist agencies of government were to be superseded by the merely prophylactic functions of administration.11 This critique of the art of politics would come to inspire socialist thinkers of later generations, Engels foremost among them, when they advocated the abolition or withering away of the state.

IV If modern social science is in large measure an invention of the French Revolution, so too is the modern state whose excesses that science was devised to combat. By way of the establishment of the French National Assembly of 1789, which at a stroke put an end to the ancien régime, the self-creation of modernity was to take its still predominant political form. In a notable series of writings, Quentin Skinner has traced the origins of our conception of the state to transfigurations of the language of status or the condition of the members of a civitas, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe into the modern terminology of état or state to signify the civitas as a whole.12 Foucault as well, in addressing what he took to be a shift in the art of government from control over lands to control over the conduct of subjects, came to hold the view, albeit from a different perspective, that the character of the modern state crystallized around the theme of its own rationality – its raison d’état – towards the end of the sixteenth century.13

French Revolutionary social science 71 But however much prefigured by Bodin’s and Hobbes’ doctrines of sovereignty, the modern state required for its formation a principle absent from their political philosophies, and missing as well from the vast number of tracts on the practice of government produced even earlier in the Renaissance. In addition to superimposing undivided rule upon its subjects, the genuinely modern state further requires that those who fall under its authority be united themselves – that they form one people, one nation, morally bound together by a common identity. With some notable exceptions, the modern state is of its essence a nation state, in which nationality is defined politically and political power is held to express the nation’s will. Hobbes had conceived a need for a unitary sovereign in his depiction of the artificial personality of the state, but he had not supposed that the multitude of subjects which authorized that power could be identified as having a collective character of its own. Joined together with his conception of the unity of the representer, as outlined in the sixteenth chapter of his Leviathan, the modern state generally requires that the represented be a moral person as well, national unity going hand-in-hand with the political unity of the state. While it speaks with only one voice in the manner imputed to absolutist monarchy, the modern nation state cannot take the form of a monarchical civitas along any lines set forth by Bodin or Hobbes, nor does it arise out of the populist imagery or mythology of the nations of Celts, Goths, Franks, Britons or the English, of predominantly mediaeval origin. It is instead, as it has been known since the late eighteenth century, a democratic republic. In neglecting the most immediately pertinent political dimensions of modernity, Foucault managed to obscure the best reason for tracing its epistemic metamorphosis to the pivotal year of 1795. But he also left too vague his dating of modernity as a whole, since, if I may here emulate Ussher’s chronology of universal history since Genesis, modernity was endowed by its creator with its political form on 17 June 1789. Between modernity’s explosive birth and the fall of the Bastille, that is to say, the human race must have enjoyed four weeks of innocence. It might be supposed that conceptual historians are characteristically imprecise about dates, but Hegel’s grasp of the creation of political modernity was perfectly correct, and for almost two hundred years the section devoted to ‘Absolute freedom and terror’ in his Phänemonologie des Geistes has comprised the most accurate reading of its earliest stages. On 17 June 1789, the deputies of the Estates General, which had been convoked the previous autumn by King Louis XVI, resolved that they were no longer assembled at the monarch’s behest but were rather agents of the national will (le vœu national), entrusted with the task of representing the sovereignty of the people of France. The three estates thereby constituted themselves as a single Assemblée Nationale, bearing sole authority to interpret the people’s general will. It is in this way that political modernity came to be born, in France, through the establishment of a unicameral parliament corresponding to a unitary will and the creation of a unified state designed to give voice to an undifferentiated nation.

72

Robert Wokler

Since it was the abbé Sieyès himself who introduced the motion that generated the National Assembly, it may be said that Sieyès is the father of the nation state, standing to the whole of political modernity as does God to his creation. Through a single text, Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-état?, Sieyès not only invented the expression ‘la science sociale’ which would come to supplant ‘la science politique’ as the principal science of modernity itself; in the same work he also invented the modern state in theory before he helped supervise its manufacture in practice some months later. In his own fashion Sieyès strove even harder than God had done to ensure that his handiwork flourished, since he set himself the task, over the next several years after the nation state had been born, of serving as its nursemaid and counsellor as well. No one has contributed more to shaping the modern world’s political discourse. Hegel, who in addition to witnessing modernity’s birth was also to devote much of his life to portraying its childhood, came eventually to reflect upon Sieyès’ paternity of modernity, as it were, in his Über die Englische Reformbill of 1831, where he observes that Sieyès managed to assemble from his own papers the constitution that France came to enjoy.14 In the language he employs in his section on ‘Absolute freedom and terror’ in the Phänomenologie, he describes this birthday of modernity, in his fashion, as the undivided substance of absolute freedom ascending the throne of the world without there being any power able to resist it. Lack of space prohibits my rehearsing here the events which were to generate the Terror four years later, through the unfolding logic of the establishment of the National Assembly so remarkably retraced by Hegel. Let me just offer the briefest possible sketch. In pursuit of the reasoning which had led to the formation of the National Assembly, it next followed from its members’ debates of late August and early September 1789 that the King of France must be denied an absolute veto over its deliberations, since the unity of the nation prohibited any executive constraint by way of elevating the King’s own will over its sovereign legislative will. Then it was agreed that the people must be similary denied any binding mandate, or mandat impératif, over their own delegates, such as was sought by republicans who subscribed to a Rousseauist ideal of absolute popular sovereignty. A binding mandate, Sieyès contended, would deprive the people’s representatives of their freedom and would substitute the multifarious particular wills of scattered citizens for the collective will of the nation as a whole. The act of creation of the National Assembly which he had sponsored declared that the Assembly was one and indivisible. As the father of modernity insisted, if the general will was to speak with one voice in a unitary nation state, it could no more be accountable to the people at large than to a king. At the heart of Sieyès’ conception of modernity lay an idea of representation which in his eyes was to constitute the most central feature of the French state. The modern age in its political form, or ‘l’ordre représentatif’, as he termed it, depended for its prosperity upon a system of state management that adopted the same principle of the division of labour as was necessary for a modern economy or commercial society. This system entailed that the people must entrust authority to their representatives rather than seek to exercise it directly them-

French Revolutionary social science 73 selves, their delegates articulating their interests on their behalf while they accordingly remain silent. As Sieyès knew perfectly well, nothing could have been further from Rousseau’s republicanism than such notions of the representation of the people in a commercial society in which the electors take no direct part in the political management of their own affairs. Exactly contrary to Rousseau, Sieyès stood for both finance and representation at the same time. It was by dint of his genius in recognizing that the National Assembly could only be sovereign if it took the place of the people themselves, that he introduced into Western political thought a scheme of the political division of labour which transposed from the economy to the state a principle that Smith, in fact, believed required regulation so as to ensure that in commercial society citizens could be drawn together in pursuit of common goals. Sieyès was unimpressed by this ancient republican doctrine of public engagement. He instead employed Smith’s principle, which he supposed he had invented himself before the publication of The Wealth of Nations, to justify a distinction between active and passive citizens, whose separate identification for a brief period under the French Constitution of 1791 was to prove one of the crowning achievements of his career. There could be no confusion in France between representation and democracy such as inspired Paine and others to imagine that the hybrid form of government established in America had nourished a classical principle of selfrule in a large state. For Sieyès, who often spoke of direct democracy as a form of ‘démocratie brute’, it would be tragic for the first genuinely modern state of human history to make a retrograde step. Democracy, he thought, was no more fit for modernity than was the mixed constitution that would issue from the preservation of a royal veto. According to his philosophy, sovereignty passed from the nation’s multifarious fragments to the people’s delegates constituted as one body, the populace ceasing to have any political identity except as articulated through its representatives, who by procuration had been granted authority to speak for the electorate as a whole.15 Of course the Jacobin notion of sovereignty, conceived as residing with the people as a whole in their districts and communes, was meant to contradict this logic of modernity. But, in thereby seeking to restore the indissoluble sovereignty of the nation which had been expropriated by its independently minded political delegates, the Jacobins’ rejection of Sieyès’ case was in a crucial sense illusory, since the nation which they envisaged as comprised of all its people was to prove as monolithic as his conception of a nation represented by the state. When they came to power within the Convention in the autumn of 1793, they behaved precisely as Sieyès and his associates had done earlier, but in reverse – that is, they attempted to root out the people’s enemies within the state, just as Sieyès had sought to silence the enemies of the state within the nation. The Terror orchestrated by the Jacobins was to follow directly from their idea of the sublime unity of the nation, which required a lofty purity of public spirit that made the vulgar purity of democracy seem an uncouth substitute for virtue. Popular sovereignty was not only to be expressed through but

74

Robert Wokler

actually created by the nation’s genuine representatives. The greatest enemy of the people for whom they stood, and who had still to be manufactured in the image of what they might become, were all the fractious people – that is, actual persons – cast in recalcitrant moulds resistant to such change, who thereby stood in the way of the agents of the people of the future. As Hegel concludes by way of introducing a vegetable metaphor in the most trenchant lines of his section on ‘Absolute freedom and terror’ in the Phänomenologie, in its abstract existence of unmediated pure negation the sole work of freedom is therefore death, a death without inner significance, the coldest and meanest of deaths, like splitting a head of cabbage. The Hegelianized reading of the logic of the French Revolution’s descent into terror which I have offered here can only be sustained if we abandon Hegel’s contention in his Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts that the real procreator of modernity in its political form, the true inventor of the modern state, was Rousseau. As is implied in the very title of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s work of 1791, Rousseau, Considéré comme l’Un des Premiers Auteurs de la Révolution, Jean-Jacques was of course the spiritual guide of a regenerated France. He pointed the way to the promised land. But while his Contrat Social would come to be esteemed as the holy writ of the French Revolution, its most central tenets with respect to representation and finance were to be repudiated in the age of modernity launched by the political upheavals of 1789. Even in adopting much of his rhetoric, France’s revolutionary leaders abandoned his most fundamental principles and, at each stage of their deliberations, triumphantly opposed everyone who endorsed them. On this interpretation of the ideological origins of the Terror, the French Revolutionary nation state, apparently cast in the image of Rousseau’s philosophy, betrayed it. In coming to decapitate the king, the new body politic of France also came to decapitate the people, so that, in representing them, their government formed the only true head of state. The political system devised by the pre-eminent French Revolutionaries not only destroyed the ‘Enlightenment Project’ in substituting the nation state and its attendant rights of the citizen for the international republic of letters and human rights in general. It also suffocated the most fundamental strictures of that system’s primordial founder. Like Freud’s conception of the birth of the Jewish people, even like Rousseau’s birth, which cost his mother her life, the first modern nation state that ostensibly embraced his doctrines suppressed them. In the act of its self-creation, modernity killed the Rousseauist ideals to which it purportedly subscribed. Ours is the age not only of the primal patricide but of the primal parricide as well.

V Where, then, does this scenario, focused upon the French Revolution, leave the conceptual history of modernity with respect to its imputed origins in the Enlightenment? The pioneers of modern social science around the year 1795 plainly owed a debt to certain eighteenth-century thinkers and traditions of

French Revolutionary social science 75 thought. Sieyès, as well as many of the idéologues whose use of the term ‘la science sociale’ differed from his own, drew inspiration from the sensationalist philosophy of Condillac, and especially his sketches of a unified science of human nature freed of the metaphysical abstractions associated with seventeenth-century notions of the soul. By way of Condillac, they also owed a more distant debt to Locke’s epistemology; and they agreed with Maupertuis, La Mettrie and d’Holbach, among Condillac’s contemporaries, that our moral attributes could be explained with reference to man’s physical constitution alone, and with Helvétius that the central task of a system of education was to shape the pliant clay of human nature. In their physiological conception of a social science the idéologues owed a certain debt to Bordeu and Barthez, taking particular stock of such features of the Montpellier school of physiology as had inspired Diderot’s writings on the subject and were to come to the notice of Saint-Simon mainly by way of Burdin and Bichat. Above all, perhaps, they were spiritual descendants of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, in its attempt to formulate what might be termed deep structural explanations of human behaviour, interpreting laws in terms of manners and mores, and even religions by way of mental dispositions shaped by climate and the influence of other external factors upon the nerve fibres of the body. I am convinced that Foucault was mistaken to suppose that the human sciences were first invented around 1795, since the epistemic metamorphosis he traces to that period actually had a longer term of gestation throughout eighteenth-century Europe than he allows. In its materialist philosophy it may indeed be said to have issued, through the Enlightenment, from some central elements of seventeenth-century Cartesian science itself. But to describe that metamorphosis, in Foucault’s manner, as the invention of the human sciences does a great injustice to other themes and traditions of eighteenth-century thought, including Hume’s perspective, which aimed at establishing a science of human nature on different foundations, equally concerned with the internal operations of the mind, but drawn from a conceptual framework of natural philosophy or physics rather than physiology. It could even be plausibly argued that the human sciences were not so much invented around 1795 as superseded then by fresh scientific schemes, which had eliminated notions of human action and the human will as objects of scrutiny. Perhaps the most striking feature of the new sciences of society portrayed in Foucault’s conceptual history of the birth of the modern age, is their removal of politics from explanations of human nature, redescribing legislation and political action as abstract, utopian, metaphysical and, after the Terror, dangerous to know. Nothing was to prove so destructive of the ‘Enlightenment Project”s commitment to toleration by way of legislative schemes promoting human happiness than the birth, by Caesarean section torn from the old society’s womb, of genuinely modern social science. The proponents of the fresh approaches that arose from around 1795 were far less committed than their predecessors to changing the world. They sought instead, by interpreting its internal functions, to preserve it.

76

Robert Wokler

While a comprehensive history of the early development of modern social science can only be pieced together from detailed accounts of its various disciplines, the advent of the nation state, in its manufacture by the father of modernity and his successors, has been largely responsible for bringing the ‘Enlightenment Project’ to an untimely end. In the refinements of his theories devoted to the structural transformation of the public sphere which he has advanced over the past thirty years, Jürgen Habermas has argued valiantly against modernity’s detractors on behalf of the great and still unfulfilled promise of the ‘Enlightenment Project’ – its promotion of rational and critical discourse in a bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit, or bourgeois public sphere, comprised of citizens committed to ideals of social progress through all the richly textured mediums of self-emancipation. Yet the promise of genuinely open societies came to be progressively suppressed by way of the establishment of the nation state under the guidance of Sieyès, who contrived in advance to cut off Habermas’ fondest hopes as if, instead of seeds that should be nurtured, they formed, in Hegel’s terminology, the useless head of a cabbage. For, as has been noted by communitarian critics of modernity of all denominations, the development of the nation state has been marked throughout its history by the depoliticization of its subjects and the destruction of the public sphere of their engagement with one another as citizens,16 accelerating a process decried in the Enlightenment itself with reference to the state even before it had become a nation state, not least by Rousseau. Unless it is the legal despotism of Le Mercier de la Rivière, not a single major scheme of government conceived by Enlightenment thinkers – not classical republicanism or its modern derivatives meant for large states, not enlightened monarchy, nor democracy, nor the reestablishment of the ancient constitution, nor the mixed constitution, nor the separation of powers – has come to prevail anywhere in the age sired by the father of modernity. The mandat impératif was in the eighteenth century designed to preserve an essential element of democracy within a system of representation whose centripetal force progressively tore it free of any popular control. In the course of the French Revolution democracy’s advocates were accordingly defeated, as they would be again in the Paris Commune of 1871 and equally under the Leninist conception of a communist party vanguard of the proletariat over the democratically inspired criticism of Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg. The utter inappropriateness of democracy for the modern age had been perfectly plain to Sieyès, and it is a measure of his own and modernity’s impact upon our social sciences inherited from the end of the age of Enlightenment that political scientists of the twentieth century, following Roberto Michels and Joseph Schumpeter, have shared Sieyès’ objections to pure democracy, merely pursuing them a few steps further. For in portraying the establishment of rule by competing elites as genuine democracy – that is, as the only sense of democracy that has any real meaning – they have adopted the representative alternative to democracy which Sieyès bequeathed to the modern age and have granted to it the name of its opposite. Almost every state throughout the world now describes itself as democratic in just this way.

French Revolutionary social science 77 If all this was in a fundamental sense predictable, what could not have been foreseen by anyone in the Enlightenment or in the course of the French Revolution was the price modern civilization would be obliged to pay for its establishment of the nation state. In opposing the democratic mandat impératif in the National Assembly, Sieyès recognized the threat to the expression of the nation’s general will which might be constituted by the people. It was of the essence of his plan that the nation in assembly spoke for all the people and must never be silenced by the people themselves. Over the past two hundred years the nation state has characteristically achieved that end because it represents the people, standing before them not just as monarchs had done earlier, as the embodiment of their collective will, but rather by assuming their very identity, bearing the personality of the people themselves. Virtually all peoples everywhere now live in nation states. All peoples that have identities form nation states. What Sieyès did not foresee was that in the age of modernity heralded by his political philosophy, a people might not survive except by constituting a nation state. In the age of modernity, it has proved possible for the nation state to become the enemy of the people. To the Hobbesian theory of representation, the nation state adds the dimension of the comprehensive unity of the people, the representer and represented together forming an indissoluble whole, the state now identical with the nation, the nation bonded to the state, each understood through the other. As Hannah Arendt rightly noted in her Origins of Totalitarianism, it has been a characteristic feature of the nation state since the French Revolution that the rights of man and the rights of the citizen are the same.17 By giving real substance and proper sanction to the various declarations of the rights of man within the framework of its own first constitutions, the French Revolutionary nation state invented by Sieyès joined the rights of man to the sovereignty of the nation. It defined the rights of man in such a way that only the state could enforce them and only members of the nation could enjoy them. Yet so far from putting into practice the universal rights of man long advocated by proponents of cosmopolitan enlightenment, the modern nation state was to ensure that henceforth only persons comprising nations which formed states could have rights, with the history of modernity since the French Revolution accordingly marked by the abuse of human rights on the part of nation states which alone have the authority to determine the scope of those rights and their validity. Not only individuals but whole peoples comprising nations without states have found themselves comprehensively shorn of their rights. At the heart of the ‘Enlightenment Project’, perceived by its advocates as putting an end to the age of privilege, was their recognition of the common humanity of all persons. For Kant, who in Königsberg came from practically nowhere and went nowhere else at all, to be enlightened meant to be intolerant of injustice everywhere, to pay indiscriminate respect to each individual, to be committed to universal justice, to be morally indifferent to difference, even while obedient to civil authority. But in the age of the nation state, it is otherwise. Thanks ultimately to the father of modernity, ours is the age of the

78

Robert Wokler

passport, the permit, the right of entry to each state or right of exit from it which is enjoyed by citizens that bear its nationality alone. For persons who are not accredited as belonging to a nation state in the world of modernity, there are few passports and still fewer visas. To be without a passport or visa in the modern world is to have no right of exit or entry anywhere, and to be without a right of exit or entry is to risk a rite of passage to the grave. That above all is the legacy bequeathed to us from the political inception of the modern age on 17 June 1789. It was then that the metempsychosis of modernity began, when we started to manufacture Frankenstein’s monster from Pygmalion’s statue, inadvertently passing from a miscreant birth to the premature burial of the ‘Enlightenment Project’.18

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6

7

8

9

See MacIntyre’s After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981). See Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1968) especially chs 8 and 10. With respect to the pivotal significance, for Foucault, of the year 1795, see Les Mots et les Choses, 238 and 263. With respect to the doctrines of the idéologues, dating as well from the 1790s, see especially vol. VIII (La Conscience Révolutionnaire: Les Idéologues), published in 1978, of Gusdorf, Les Sciences Humaines et la Pensée Occidentale, 8 vols (Paris: Payot, 1966–78); Moravia, Il Pensiero degli Idéologues: Scienza e Filosofia in Francia (1780–1815) (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1974); Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of ‘Ideology’ (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978); Staum, Cabanis and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Welch, Liberty and Utility: The French Ideologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); and Head, Ideology and Social Science: Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1985). All recent commentators on this subject owe a debt to the seminal work of François Picavet, Les Idéologues (Paris: F. Alcan, 1891). See Freud, Moses and Monotheism (London: Hogarth Press, 1939) 58–64, 130–45. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury (London: Methuen, 1909–29) ch. lxxi, 7.321. See Sieyès, Qu’est que le Tiers-état?, ed. Robert Zappieri (Geneva: Droz, 1970) 151. His inaugural use of the term is noted by Brian Head in ‘The origins of “La science sociale” in France, 1770–1800’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 19 (1982) 115–32. For these earliest recorded references to the term ‘science sociale’, see especially Keith Baker, ‘The early history of the term “social science”’, Annals of Science, 20 (1964) 211–26; Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) 391–5; Head, ‘The origins of “La science sociale” in France’; and my ‘Saint-Simon and the passage from political to social science’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.) The Languages of Political Theory in EarlyModern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 325–38. On the influence especially of the Classe des sciences morales et politiques, but also of other classes of the Institut National over the same period, see Jules Simon, Une Académie sous le Directoire (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1885); Staum, ‘The Class of Moral and Political Sciences, 1795–1803’, French Historical Studies, 11 (1980) 371–97; and Staum, ‘Individual rights and social control: political science in the French Institute’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987) 411–30. See Saint-Simon’s Oeuvres, 6 vols (Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1966) vol. 5, part 2, 21 and 175.

French Revolutionary social science 79 10 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle III, lines 303–4. 11 See especially Saint-Simon’s L’Organisateur of 1819–20 and his De l’Organisation Sociale of 1825, in his Oeuvres, vol. 2, part 2, 186–8; and vol. 5, part 1, 130–1 and 138–9. 12 See especially the conclusion to Skinner’s Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) ii, 349–58, and his essay on ‘The state’, in Terence Ball, James Farr and Russell Hanson (eds) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 90–131. 13 See the summary of Foucault’s lectures on ‘Sécurité, territoire et population’, offered at the Collège de France in 1977–8, in his Résumé des Cours, 1970–1982 (Paris: Julliard, 1989) 99–106. 14 See Hegel, Über die Englische Reformbill, in his Politischen Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966) 310. It must be noted that Hegel here refers, not to Sieyès’ role in establishing the National Assembly in 1789, but to his authorship of the constitution of the year VIII, which he drafted as provisional consul a decade later, following the bloodless coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte that marked the transition of France’s revolutionary government from the Directoire to the Consulat. As First Consul, Bonaparte altered Sieyès’ scheme to suit his own advantage and ambition. 15 On the political thought and Revolutionary career of Sieyès, see especially Paul Bastid, Sieyès et Sa Pensée (Paris: Hachette, 1939); Murray Forsyth, Reason and Revolution: The Political Thought of the Abbé Sieyès (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987); Jean-Denis Bredin, Sieyès: La Clé de la Révolution Française (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1988); Baker, ‘Sieyès’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds) Dictionnaire Critique de la Révolution Française (Paris: Flammarion, 1988) 334–45; and Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Antoine de Baeque, Le Corps de l’Histoire: Métaphores et Politique (1770–1800) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993); William H. Sewell Jr, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and ‘What is the Third Estate?’ (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Istvan Hont, ‘The permanent crisis of a divided mankind: “contemporary crisis of the nation state” in historical perspective’, Political Studies (1994) special issue on ‘Contemporary crisis of the nation state?’, ed. John Dunn, 166–231. 16 Habermas’ conception of the public sphere is elaborated above all in his Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand, 1962), of which an English translation, mainly by Thomas Berger, is available under the title The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 17 See Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, 2nd edn (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958) 230–1. Arendt here comments on what she terms ‘the secret conflict between state and nation’, arising with the very birth of the nation state on account of its conjunction of the rights of man with the demand for national sovereignty. 18 This essay draws upon and distils themes I have pursued elsewhere, including my ‘Saint-Simon and the passage from political to social science’; ‘Hegel’s Rousseau: the general will and civil society’, Deutscher Idealismus, Göteborg (Arachne) 1993, 7–45; ‘Democracy’s mythical ordeals: the Promethean and Procrustean paths to popular self-rule’, in M. Moran and G. Parry (eds) Democracy and Democratization (London: Routledge, 1993) 21–46; ‘Projecting the Enlightenment’, in J. Horton and S. Mendus (eds) After MacIntyre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) 108–26; ‘The Enlightenment Project and its critics’, Poznaæ Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 58 (1997) 13–30; ‘The French Revolutionary roots of political modernity in Hegel’s philosophy, or the Enlightenent at dusk’, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 35 (1997) 71–89; ‘The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary birth pangs of modernity’, in Lars Magnusson et al. (eds) The Rise of

80

Robert Wokler Social Science and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750–1850, Sociology of the Sciences, A Yearbook, 20 (1998) 35–76; ‘Contextualizing Hegel’s phenomenology of the French Revolution and the Terror’, in Political Theory, 26 (1998) 33–55; ‘The Enlightenment Project as betrayed by modernity’, History of European Ideas, 24 (1998) 301–13; ‘Multiculturalism and ethnic cleansing in the Enlightenment’, in Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter (eds) Toleration in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 69–85; and ‘The Enlightenment, the nation-state and the primal patricide of modernity’, in Norman Geras and Robert Wokler (eds) The Enlightenment and Modernity (London: Macmillan, 2000) 161–83.

5

The colonial genealogy of society Community and political modernity in India Gyan Prakash

While the concept of society as a pre-political category has come under serious scrutiny only now in Europe, its fate in the colonies was imperilled from the very beginning. There, it was impossible to maintain the Hegelian fiction that the system of particular interests that prevailed in the domain of civil society were dependent upon and achieved their general expression in the realm of the state.1 In fact, the European colonizers had little hesitation in acknowledging that the state was grafted from the outside, that their political authority was founded in conquest, not consent. Regardless of the variations in the ideology of domination – conservative versus liberal government, direct versus indirect rule – the defining feature of the colonial state was its externality. Unable to position itself as the political instance of the indigenous society, the colonial state operated as a Leviathan brought into existence by the conqueror’s sword. Marx clearly recognized that the colonial state imposed on India was coercive and exploitative, but thought that it acted as the ‘unconscious tool of history’.2 By this he meant that colonial rule had brought India under the universal rule of capital – this is what distinguished British colonialism from the previous empires that India had known. India’s previous history, he famously wrote, had been no history at all, but ‘a succession of intruders who had founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society’.3 British rule, on the other hand, was fundamentally different because it placed industrial capitalism in command, destroying India’s centuries-old mode of production. Based as it was on colonial sources and writings, there is much that was wrong in Marx’s interpretation of India. My intention here, however, is not to set the record straight, but to pinpoint the relationship he sketches between society and politics. As is well known, Marx insisted that the state represented particular class interests, rejecting the Hegelian formulation that the state was society’s universal instance. He reiterated this view in his writings on India by identifying the colonial state with the rule of capital, not of reason or freedom. Capital’s universalization in the colonies, however, was clearly and completely dependent on political coercion. Recall, for example, his discussion of the ‘socalled primitive accumulation’ where he argues with great passion that capitalism’s worldwide triumph was inseparable from the forcible dispossession of the peasantry, the imposition and expansion of plantation slavery, and the

82

Gyan Prakash

conquest of overseas territories. Though force was not absent in the development of capitalism in Europe – Marx cites the enclosure of common lands in England as an instance – primitive accumulation was the rule outside Europe. He wrote: ‘The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked’.4 In the colonies, capitalism encountered modes of production that could be subordinated only with force. So, if colonialism functioned as an ‘unconscious tool of history’, the ‘unconscious’ of history was conquest and coercion. Founded in force, the colonial state was a Hobbesian colossus that acted upon and constituted a society deemed unable to self-constitute and self-regulate itself. Because the indigenous society did not resemble the European bourgeois civil society, the colonizers concluded that society qua society was absent. The very establishment of social order as such (by which was meant an order based on private property and European culture) demanded the ‘civilizing’ presence of European domination. What was acknowledged to exist prior to the colonial state was not society, but something else – races, tribes, castes and clans. Not surprisingly, the colonies became the location for the development of the discipline of anthropology, not sociology, which is the classic discipline of European modernity. Anthropology, on the other hand, developed as a discipline to study other peoples locked in other times. Foucault remarks that ethnology, like psychoanalysis, develops as a counterdiscourse to modernity and its human sciences. This is not because it is more scientific than psychology, sociology, literary studies, or history, but because it marshals cultural difference to question the universal claims of the modern concept of ‘man’ upon which the human sciences – psychology, sociology, literary studies, history – are founded. Traversing the region occupied by the human sciences and exposing their relativity, ethnology, according to Foucault, reverses the question of history. Historicity, he writes, becomes a matter of determining, according to the symbolic systems employed, according to the prescribed rules, according to the functional norms chosen and laid down, what sort of historical development each culture is susceptible of.…And thus is revealed the foundation of that historical flow within which the different human sciences assume their validity and can be applied to a given culture and upon a given synchronological area.5 Ethnology, then, exposes and emerges at the limits of European modernity. Situated ‘within the particular relation that the Western ratio establishes with all other cultures’,6 it undermines the epistemological foundation of Western ‘man’ and the human sciences that go along with this idea. Foucault, however, denies that colonialism was indispensable to ethnology; the relationship between the two, according to him, was a contingent expression of the ‘Western

The colonial genealogy of society 83 ratio’ that was constituted in Europe’s history – the ratio ‘that provides a foundation for the relationship it can have with all other societies, even with the society in which it has appeared’.7 By denying ethnology’s intrinsic connection with colonialism, Foucault also disavows the deep relationship between colonization and modernity, overlooking the fact that the Western ratio in other places was practised in acts of colonial conquest and domination. Ethnology, in fact, emerges precisely at the point of this contradiction in the career of modernity. Even as it functions as a counterdiscourse to the European human sciences, ethnology also operates as the colonial discipline of the Other, produced at the point where the bourgeois civil society and its discipline – sociology – meet their limits in the colonies. It is at this conjuncture that community, rather than the bourgeois individual, emerges as an object of colonial knowledge and power. Appearing as a result of the colonial state’s structural inability to universalize capital through the establishment of bourgeois civil society – the ‘civilizing mission’ – community becomes the mediating arena for the articulation of state and capital. It represents the displaced other face of European modernity and its human sciences, a distortion forced upon by colonial difference. This essay traces the colonial genealogy of community in British India and examines its functioning as a framework for the political constitution of society. My purpose here is to ask how the colonial situation provided a challenge to the universalization of the European civil society, how it functioned as a setting for other trajectories and possibilities of modernity. This means that I analyse community as a category of modernity, rather than as a pre-modern and pre-political form that the modern state confronts.

The limits of civil society and the colonial genealogy of community In 1874 a literary club, composed of the Bengali elite, held one of its regular meetings in Calcutta. Addressing the gathering, Gosto Behary Mullick, the secretary of the club, spoke of reviving the days of Elphinstones and Malcolms, Thomasons and Metcalfs, of Joneses and Wilsons and Bethunes…who came to India not for its rice or cotton, indigo or jute, shell-lac or lac-dye, sugar or salt-petre, but to raise from the depths of ignorance and superstition – fruits of years of foreign [Muslim] domination – a race whose venerable relics of literature and science play fantastically like the dazzling coruscations of a polar winter athwart the mysterious gloom that shrouds the dark night of ages. Such lofty sentiments of loyalism were not unusual in late-nineteenth century India. Western education had given men like Mullick in Calcutta and other big cities a whole new idea of India’s past and present. They applied to their native land the pattern of historical development outlined by the myth of

84

Gyan Prakash

Renaissance Europe’s recovery from the darkness of the Middle Ages, into which it had fallen after the glory of ancient Greece and Rome. India, too, thought Mullick and others like him, had sunk into darkness under Muslim rule after its brilliant ancient past. But now that the British conquest had lifted India out of the Dark Age of Muslim rule, Indians could see for themselves what they had lost, and the depths of ignorance and superstition they had fallen into. The bright past of literature and science brought to light by colonial conquest intensified the consciousness of loss. Tellingly, the glorious relics rescued by colonial conquest were objects valued by modernity. It was fitting, then, that the forum for articulating such a notion of the past was a voluntary association composed of Western-educated Indians and Europeans. The sign of the modernity of such bodies was their strong consciousness that they stood amidst the wreckage of the old, and that their project was to rebuild a modern society out of the ruins of the past. Such modern voluntary associations, which had proliferated in Calcutta, and other big cities and small towns during the second half of the nineteenth century, were founded to rebuild the lost community into a society, that is, into a configuration determined by laws, markets and modern reason. Embodying the desire to constitute India as a civil society, they saw themselves as instruments of reforming India and Indians in light of the authority of modernity. The civilizing mission underwrote this project of transforming India as a civil society, but leaders of these voluntary associations, like Mullick, viewed the relationship between the two as contingent, not necessary: the conquest had been instrumental in ending Muslim tyranny, in lifting India out of the gloom of the Middle Ages, but it did not cast a shadow on India’s future. On the contrary, India could develop as a society in accordance with the past that the British conquest had brought to light, a past that the present valued. Clearly, this vision was blind to the deep contradiction entailed in forming a civil society with a civilizing mission, in using colonial despotism to establish society as a domain of liberty and free subjects. Caught up in this contradiction, the Western-educated elite’s efforts to mould India after the European model of civil society could only be a pedagogic project destined to always remain incomplete.8 In Presidency capitals like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, the Western-educated Indian minds wrote learned essays, composed poetry and novels, met in small gatherings to listen to lectures on science, all in order to transform Indian society in the image of European modernity. But this was an impossible and frustrating endeavour in the face of the contradictions of the colonial setting. It was precisely at the site of this contradiction that community emerged as an alternative social imaginary of power in colonial India. By community I mean an affiliation that invokes collective bonds and rights based on imagined ties of kinship, religion, culture, past and sentiments. The notion of collective interests and affiliation distinguishes community from society, that is, an association of sovereign individual subjects based on laws and contracts. The emergence of such communities in India has a colonial genealogy; that is, their

The colonial genealogy of society 85 coming into existence as social facts occurs as an aspect of British rule. This is not to suggest that the India that the British conquered was a tabula rasa, but that the colonial government affected the shape and functioning of communities so deeply as to make them sharply discontinuous from their pre-British forms. Communities came dressed in the garb of tradition and intimated unbroken pasts, but they articulated the discourse of antiquity and continuity in the political context of colonial governance. The belief that India was composed of primordial communities was as old as the establishment of British rule. However, it was in the latter half of the nineteenth century that the rulers began to increasingly describe and administer India as a territory composed of primordial communities. The evangelical belief in ‘improvement’ faded as north India broke out into the Great Rebellion (the Mutiny) of 1857. The government’s energies, concentrated as they were in any case in building a vast authoritarian edifice organized around law and order even during the heyday of the civilizing mission, lost their reformist impulse. The lesson that the British drew from the rebellion was that, if anything, India needed to be ruled with a stronger hand, that what the natives required was a productive and secure empire fashioned with modern technologies of rule. The imperial mood stiffened, and the rulers took to regularizing and fortifying the technologies of governance with rationalistic, bureaucratic means. Military engineers built walls around rivers to tame them and channel the water for irrigation, and the grid of railways and telegraphs expanded rapidly, making the vast space of India manageable. Medical doctors and scientists followed to isolate diseases, control epidemics, and nurture healthy, productive bodies. As the ‘long nineteenth century’ wore on, bit by bit a new structure of governance crystallized.9 This structure of governance accommodated the growing Western-educated middle classes of the Presidency capitals – Bombay, Calcutta and Madras – as lower-level administrators, but what was to be done with the vast majority of the native population? The 1857 rebellion had dashed the government’s hopes of reforming the indigenous population; and the consensus among the rulers was that the rebellion had demonstrated that the vast majority of Indians were too tradition-bound to be reconstituted as modern individuals. All the old ideas about the unchanging nature of Indian society and culture came roaring back as the confrontation with colonial difference forced the rulers to acknowledge the colonial limits of society. The security of the dominion now turned on the strategy of seeking the cooperation of communities and their so-called ‘natural leaders’. The stage was set for colonial knowledge and practice to represent and constitute India as an assemblage of timeless traditions and communities. Consider, for example, the modern history of the caste system. Caste and India are synonymous in popular and scholarly imagination, not just in the West but in India as well. Caste serves as a fundamental symbol of India’s identity and its difference from the West. How did this come about? As Nicholas Dirks’ work shows, it was British rule that placed caste, or rather the caste system, at the centre of modern India’s politics and scholarship.10 Dirks is

86

Gyan Prakash

careful and right to insist that the British did not invent caste ex nihilo. While India had always had caste, it functioned as one among several determinants – language, occupation, wealth, landed property, worship, etc. – of the social and political order. But British rule, Dirks argues, turned caste into something altogether more powerful and foundational by defining and administering it as a caste system. Caste came to signify the fundamental organizing principle of society and culture, underlying and determining every aspect of Indian life. An essential part of this process was the textualization and Brahmanization of caste. What had existed previously in varying and local contexts of political and economic power was now pegged to textual authorities that defined caste in Brahmanical terms. The British did not just misrecognize caste, but gave material shape to their misrecognition through their laws and administration. Census operations, for example, reified caste, and transformed what was a localized form of social and political organization into an all-India system of ritual ranking authorized by the power of colonial government. Here, Dirks’ work confirms and amplifies Bernard Cohn’s classic study showing that when the British turned to the census in order to gain precise information useful for administration, they succeeded in putting caste in a different register.11 The enumeration of castes, the collection of empirical data on them, and the production of an all-India, rather than local, system of caste classification by census operations produced castes as governable social facts. Caste came to sustain the powerful idea that ‘traditional’ India did not know state power but only a succession of kings and emperors whose reigns did not affect the selfgoverning village communities composed of interdependent castes who accepted the supremacy of the Brahmans. Marx’s infamous statement that India knew no true history but only a succession of kings and rulers was heir to this orientalist idea. As the British administration recast India according to this image, caste became the caste system – a comprehensive method of organizing society based on religion, not power. Tellingly, the study and enumeration of castes went hand-in-hand with the development of anthropology as a discipline of colonial governance. From the late nineteenth century onwards, the idea that Indians were changeless became an imperial orthodoxy, and the colonial administration increasingly represented and governed India as a collection of pre-modern castes, tribes, races and religious communities. As colonial officers, doubling as ethnographers, meticulously recorded data on physical and cultural characteristics of different groups, British rule dressed itself in the invented garb of indigenous imperial traditions to play the role of a benevolent state presiding over its pre-modern subjects. But looks could be deceiving. The colonialist rope-trick produced the illusion that all the government did was to secure the conditions for the autonomous functioning of customary communities, when, in fact, it was deeply immersed in shaping their existence and functioning. The failure to institutionalize the bourgeois civil society did not mean the end of colonial intrusions in the lives of the colonized; rather, the stated desire to maintain customs and

The colonial genealogy of society 87 traditions, now enshrined in ethnographic knowledge, opened new grounds for interventions. Thus the British brought Hindu temples under the purview of colonial law at the same time that they claimed that they had no interest in interfering in their subjects’ private domain of religion. The justification they offered was that disputes over temple management had to be settled so as to permit them to function in an authentic fashion. But these disputes were, in fact, products of the new context of British rule; and their adjudication by colonial courts opened the community organized around worship to state regulation and policing.12 The government also enacted personal laws for discrete communities in order to specify and regulate practices regarding property, inheritance and marriage. These measures were tied to a discourse of rule that represented and regulated Hindus and Muslims as distinct communities. This is not to say that such identities did not exist before, but previously they were not central to the distribution and exercise of power. When subjected to the new practices of colonial governmentality, such as enumeration of Hindus and Muslims and the fixing of political representation in councils according to such enumeration, communal identities acquired a new basis. Debates over the proportionate shares of different communities in education and administrative services now became central to the political discourse. It was thus that the colonial construction of communalism, to use Gyanendra Pandey’s term, became a forceful presence.13 By the late nineteenth century, then, the colonial government had succeeded in producing a new social imaginary that projected India as a collection of discrete communities whose primordial sentiments were to be modified and controlled by colonial legislation. This imaginary did away with older and local forms of hierarchy and law, and provided a new order of social intelligibility derived from colonial censuses, legal enactments and administrative measures. Twentieth-century constitutional reforms, such as the Morley-Minto Act of 1909, the Montagu Reforms of 1919, and the 1935 Act, advanced this process further by giving a formal constitutional shape to this order of colonial governance. Using census data to meticulously define and enumerate each community and affix its share of representation, these reforms were calculated to defuse the nationalist challenge, treating the demand for political power as a question of representing communities in the constitutional structure of the colonial government. Communities, then, I am arguing, emerged as objects of colonial governmentality. By colonial governmentality, I wish to invoke Foucault’s discussion of what he calls the governmentalization of the state,14 but I also want to stress the specificity of governmentality in the colonial context. Foucault distinguishes governmentality from sovereignty – which is concerned with territory, legitimacy and obedience to law – and from disciplines – which are elaborated in such institutions as prisons, schools, armies, manufactories and hospitals. Locating modern power in a sovereignty–discipline–government triangle, he defines governmentality as a mode of ‘pastoral power’ aimed at the welfare of each and all. While the nineteenth-century colonial state can be described in

88

Gyan Prakash

these terms, it must also be noted that colonial governmentality had to be radically discontinuous with the Western norm. Colonial governmentality could not be a mere ‘tropicalization’ of the Western norm, but its fundamental dislocation. Utilitarian theorists from Jeremy Bentham to Fitzjames Stephen, and including James and John Stuart Mill, had maintained that British rule in India must necessarily violate the metropolitan norm: only despotic rule could institute good government in India. Such an estrangement of the ideals of law and liberty in colonial despotism meant that British India could not fashion the elegant sovereignty– discipline–government triangle that Foucault identifies in Europe. Fundamentally irreconcilable with the development of a civil society, the colonial state was structurally denied the opportunity to mobilize the capillary forms of power. Unable to position its knowledge and regulations as disciplines of selfknowledge and self-regulation of its Indian subjects, the colonial regime was obliged to violate the liberal conception that the government only harmonized and secured with law and liberty the autonomous interests in civil–social institutions. The focus on communities as governable objects, then, represented the colonial state’s commandeering and combination within itself of the functions of government, disciplines, and sovereignty. The British dismissed the educated natives and their visions of civil–social modernization, and turned on the full force of the Indian Leviathan to administer what they regarded as the ‘real’ India of tradition-bound communities and their ‘natural’ leaders.

Community and the discourse of self-governance It is important to bear in mind community’s colonial genealogy if we are to understand how it came to function as the locus for anti-colonial mobilization. This was not because, as is commonly assumed, communities became ‘politicized’ when community leaders began to pursue their ‘traditional’ concerns in modern, secular spheres.15 In fact, colonial power underwrote the constitution of communities; its practices created communities as empirical/enumerable facts that served as the basis for the exercise of colonial power. These very measures, however, also made communities intelligible to native subjects who could rework the terms of colonial governmentality to reform these communities and mount challenges to British rule. In other words, the very representation and governance of community as a pre-colonial and pre-modern formation opened it to the discourse of self-governance, one that insisted on the antiquity and organicity of community to press for its self-government. Not surprisingly, the discourse of self-government seized upon the issue of women’s reform. Women’s education and improvement of their status formed the centrepiece of the reformist project undertaken by the Western-educated elite during the nineteenth century. Stung by the colonialist critique that the oppressed condition of Indian women reflected the barbarity of indigenous traditions, they eagerly embraced the cause of women’s reform. Partha Chatterjee suggests that the central question before the reformers was how to

The colonial genealogy of society 89 reform women’s conditions according to modern ideals and yet maintain the autonomy of the indigenous community.16 How could women be educated and transformed according to middle-class Victorian ideals, into modern housewives and managers of households without losing their ‘Indianness’? Even as the condition of middle-class women in major colonial cities changed with the spread of education, the prospect of women as modern individuals created anxiety among elite males who saw such a change eroding tradition and bringing into existence unwanted and morally inferior Western mores. This was not a confrontation between modernity and tradition. Underlying the masculinist fear of the world turning upside down by women’s agency was not a knee-jerk defence of tradition but a fear that the autonomy of the indigenous community would be lost to colonial dominance. The elites fastened on women because, as Chatterjee suggests, they served in the elite discourse as signs of an ‘inner’, uncolonized domain of the national community. Thus, while the elite men eventually accepted the need for the education of women and even became its energetic advocates, they worked strenuously to draw a sharp boundary between the improvement of women’s status and what they saw as Westernization – the latter appeared as the intrusion of a morally inferior culture in the essential core of the community. Similarly, the elites opposed social legislation enacted by the colonial government on women’s issues because they viewed it as interference in the inner sphere of the community. As the tide of modern bourgeois subjecthood beached on the shores of native resistance, what took shape on the colonial landscape was a discourse on the rights of the community. This discourse evoked the idea of an ‘inner’ sphere, a collectivity bound by culture, traditions and social memories, not by economic and legal contracts between individuals. Clearly, it was to be governed by another set of institutions and practices than those of the civil society. Yet the discourse of community did not function outside the domain of modernity; the ‘inner’ – defined as the essential, spiritual domain from which the West was to be kept out – was not separate from the ‘outer’ – the sphere of science, technology, economy and power in which the West’s dominance was acknowledged. As Chatterjee himself notes, the ‘inner’ sphere defended by the elite Bengali men did not mean an uncritical return to the past; rather, the elites’ vision of ideal Bengali womanhood signalled a ‘new patriarchy’, one that was distinguished from the traditional patriarchy.17 Paradoxically, the inviolability of the ‘inner’ was achieved by its violation; women became powerful symbols of the traditional community precisely when they were fortified with new ideals of learning, hygiene, loyalty and respectability. This point emerges even more sharply in G. Arunima’s study of the discourse of modernity among the Nayar men in Kerala. Analysing two Malayali novels – Indulekha (1889) and Padmavati (1920) – she reads these works as literary representations of changes confronting the upper class and matrilineal Nayar society. These representations portray historical change as a crisis of the self, and offer strategies of self-fashioning. The fashioning of a new self, however, could not be undertaken without redefining the Nayar community as a whole, for at issue in

90

Gyan Prakash

self-fashioning was the status of the polyandrous matrilineal household which had come under attack as an immoral and backward institution. Thus the novels oppose the practices of the matrilineal household with a new self embodying the ideals of romantic love and Victorian standards of marriage and female sexuality. The new self, however, was not a bourgeois individual but a Nayar engaged in distancing the community from the ‘immoral’ past of polyandry and resignifying it with both Western modernity and ‘classicalized’ traditions of Sanskrit and Malayalam. Predictably, the novels designate women as symbols of the Nayar community, but they do so by subjecting them to new, modern disciplines of female sexuality. What was clearly at work in these discourses was the resignification and redeployment of orientalist images of Hindu spirituality, tradition and womanhood in order to produce new disciplines of governing women and community. This maintained the civil society/community distinction, but the representation of community as traditional, inner, and spiritual was a conjuring trick. This trick permitted the staging of community as the site where the elite discourse interbraided the disciplines of modernity with claims for self-governance.

Community, nation, history The framework of community used to formulate indigenous strategies of governance, like its colonial counterpart, invoked bonds of territoriality, language, culture, tradition and religion. These ties attributed to the community’s members a common essence; they were supposed to be bound together by a shared substance. This idea of community sets it apart from one that Jean-Luc Nancy defines as ‘being-in-common’. The latter concept assumes that a differential relation underlies being-in-common; it denies that there exists any common essence, any organicity that binds the community: Being in common has nothing to do with communion, with fusion into a body, into a unique and ultimate identity that would be exposed. Being in common means, to the contrary, no longer having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this (narcissistic) ‘lack of identity’.18 The idea of community in colonial India, on the other hand, presupposed that the members of the community embodied a common essence. This presupposition led to the view that the goal of the community was to achieve itself in its essence, that is, produce its essence as community. Such a representation denied the existence of a sexed community; instead, it folded sexual division into community’s identity signified by women as symbols of spirituality, tradition, inner essence, etc.19 This was a highly authoritarian vision that permitted the nationalists to formulate and represent disciplines of national governmentality as expressions of an inherent togetherness – an ‘immanentism’, to use Nancy’s term. This

The colonial genealogy of society 91 immanentism permitted a unitary conception of the national community insofar as it authorized the nationalists to represent the nation as the ‘recovery’ of a ‘lost’ togetherness. But because the ‘lost’ togetherness was the ‘before’ of modernity, the nationalist intelligentsia ended up authorizing modernity in the alienated image of tradition. It was thus that the modern nation became represented in the archaic and immanent Hindu science. During the late nineteenth century the claim of a scientific past was a common one in nationalist circles. For our purposes, what is significant to note is that these claims were made on behalf of the Hindu community and formed part of Hindu reform and revivalism. The origin of this revivalism lay in the conflicting pressures of two opposite demands faced by reform-minded Hindu intellectuals. On the one hand, the emergence of Western science as a sign of modernity demanded that the indigenous culture cast off its difference and be recast in the image of Western reason. On the other hand, the association of science with colonial power required that reason speak in the language of the indigenous culture, that its authority emerge in India’s ineluctable difference. It was at the site of this dilemma that Swami Dayanand Sarasvati appeared as a powerful advocate of Hindu reform and revival, founding the Arya Samaj in an attempt to establish Vedic Hinduism as a religion and the Hindus as a modern community. Central to his project was the claim that the Vedas formed the true basis of Hindu identity. Everything else, particularly the myths and legends of the Puranas, was alien to their essential and true being, for only the Vedas were supremely rational.20 The assertion of the Vedas’ absolute authority was not new, nor was the claim that, strictly speaking, the Vedas were not religious texts, but transcendent knowledge. Derived from the Sanskrit root vid, ‘to know’, veda means ‘true knowledge’. Thus the orthodox and pedagogical Brahmanical tradition of Mimamsa philosophy argues that the Vedas contain timeless and absolute truths. Dayanand, however, advanced these claims in a new context in which the Hindu intelligentsia was anxious to not only establish the Vedas as a canonical ‘scripture’ on par with the Bible and Qur’an, but also superior to them as a body of knowledge, as science. A simple reassertion of Mimamsa philosophy on the Vedas’ transcendent truths could not suffice because the colonial context demanded that traditional arguments confront Western criticisms buttressed with the authority of modern reason. Thus Dayanand found it necessary to invoke modern science in order to show that Vedic knowledge deserved the status of scientific truths. Claiming that the Vedas contained scientific truths, however, was not an act of nativist one-upmanship. Dayanand invoked science’s authority in order to both deflect Western criticism of the Vedas as a body of texts riddled with myth and magic, and to authorize a reading that delegitimized popular rituals and legends associated with the epic literature of the Puranas. Underlying his effort was an attempt to define Hinduism as a religion qua religion, and the Hindus as an authentic religious community. Science helped to specify religion, to script it in texts, to divest it of ‘improper’ accretions and devise new standards of its order and intelligibility. Hinduism was to be a religion like other religions, such

92

Gyan Prakash

as Christianity, Islam and Judaism; and the Hindus were to be a community whose being was defined by the Vedic essence of their religion. To represent Hinduism as a religion, free of magic and armed with the power of reason, was to press its claim for universality. But how could a tradition stigmatized as metaphysical and out of joint with modernity claim modern authority and universality? While global expansion permitted the West to assert the universality of its reason in spite of its particularity, the colonized were denied this privilege; they had to come to terms with precisely this universalization of the West-as-History if they were to express the universality of their cultures. Their historical fate was to assert the autonomy and universality of their culture in the domain of the nation. Because alien domination was structured as the rule of one nation over another, the colonized culture was obliged to express its autonomy and universality in the framework of the modern nation. Thus Dayanand linked community, religion and nation. He positioned Vedic Hinduism not just as an authentic religion of the Hindus but also as India’s national religion. Such a view of Hinduism was doubly authoritarian. First, it identified Hinduism with the Vedas alone; and second it equated the Hindu community with India. The culprit here was something larger than Dayanand. For the identification of a Brahmanical Hindu genealogy of the nation was not confined to him; Indian nationalism as such, including its leading secular leaders, such as Nehru, was not exempt from harbouring such ideas. The failure to conceive the nation in other terms was due to the commitment to the idea of community as essence, as the embodiment of an inherent substance. This led the nationalists to project the nationalist struggle as the search for the ancient roots of the modern community. Accordingly, community was given a history, not just a past. Let me turn once again to Dayanand, to illustrate this point. All the sciences and arts and religions, Swami Dayanand asserted, originated in Vedic India. But then came the Great War, the Mahabharata, when learned men and philosophers were slain on the battlefield. Knowledge declined; the religion of the Vedas disappeared or was perverted by the Brahmins, who had become ignorant; fraud, superstition, and irreligion flourished; and numerous religious sects were born. A priesthood took root. It convinced the Kshatriya warriors and kings that their word was the pronouncement of god himself, and flourished in the lap of luxury. It invented idol worship, temples, and the idea of incarnations to ensnare the masses and prevent them from accepting Jainism. Thus arose Puranic Hinduism, a system of false beliefs and idolatry.21 How could such false beliefs overpower the true knowledge of the Vedas? According to Dayanand, the Puranas triumphed because people were naturally prone to indulgences of imagination and ignorance. As people succumbed to the bewitching charms of poetry, science gave way to the spell of myths and legends. This sense of the decay and loss of the science of the Vedas animated the Arya Samaj’s powerful reformist critique of Puranic Hinduism and plunged it into numerous controversies. These critiques and controversies were not

The colonial genealogy of society 93 inconsequential debates on arcane theological matters, but vital contests concerned with creating a new national subject in the regenerated Arya. History, then, was useful for not only rationalizing the demand for the nation, but also for shaping the Aryas as rational, governable subjects; it offered a rational mode of being in the world, illuminating the misty past of the nation with the narrative of reason. Dayanand presents a very specific case, but the idea of loss and regeneration of the nation as a rational subject was common to the nationalist imagination as a whole. Nehru’s Discovery of India, for instance, also narrates the nation as a story of beginnings in ancient Hindu science and philosophy, its decay in the sterility of Hindu formalism and ritualism, and projects the nation state as the body that will institutionalize the intrinsic nationness and rational disposition that he identifies in India’s history.22 In this respect, the notable exception was Gandhi. He cared very little for history, and he did not locate the independent nation as the fulfilment of its history as a rational subject. Not surprisingly, his vision of the nation did not visualize the nation state as an instrument of a rational reconstitution of Indians. Having said this, I also want to point out that his notion of India as a unitary national community, embodying a common substance, made his concept of community open to appropriation. ‘We were one nation before they [the British] came to India’, he wrote. ‘One thought inspired us’.23 Once the nation was represented as a community embodying oneness, it became possible for the nationalist movement to hijack the Gandhian community for building the nation state. If community has proven to be an enormously influential framework for modern political mobilization and cultural imagination in India, this has something to do with its existence as an aspect of governmentality. As against the elitist and the narrowly conceived arena of civil society, community has provided a framework for acting upon the common people. In this respect, I agree entirely with Partha Chatterjee that the understanding of Indian politics in terms of civil society can only lead to a narrative of failure, that is, India’s failure to follow Europe’s pattern. However, I think that the civil society/community contrast, highlighting individual versus collective interests, is only part of the story. Equally if not more important is community’s location in the imaginary of the colonial and nation state. Attention to this location, as I have been arguing, casts a different light on the conjuring trick that makes community appear as an archaic, pre-political solidarity – it clarifies that the attribution of the pre-political to community was an effect produced by modernity in the colonial context. This effect permitted both the colonial state and the nationalists to treat communities as governable objects, open to reform and reshaping through legislation, education, administration, exposure to modern science and technology, social and cultural change, political mobilization, etc. One has to only think of the rise of the BJP and the right-wing politics of Hindutva (‘Hinduness’) to appreciate the interbraided existence of community, state and governmentality.

94

Gyan Prakash

The promise and predicaments of community Nancy suggests that the term ‘community’, and by extension, the word ‘communism’ stands as an emblem of the desire to discover or rediscover a place of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical dominion, and thereby beyond such wasting away of liberty, of speech, or of simple happiness as comes about whenever these become subjugated to the exclusive order of privatization. The history of community that I have outlined evokes the promise of this beyond, only to betray it. At first glance, the community’s organization around common bonds of kinship and culture appears to be set against capital’s determination of subjectivity as individual and market-driven, and against the modern state’s claim to be the primary arena and arbiter of political rights. Indeed, modern communities took shape in colonial India against the background of the failed attempt to institutionalize a society composed of bourgeois individuals. But the colonial state’s governance of India as an assemblage of prepolitical and premodern collectivities succeeded in opening another arena for the operation of capital. Community permitted the functioning of modernity in disguise; it became another site for the political constitution of society. Even as the social, represented in the form of community, took on the appearance of a pre-modern togetherness, it became disjunctively combined with the institutions of political modernity. Thus the representation of India as an imagined community went hand-in-hand with demands for a modern nation state and the implementation of a developmentalist project of modernization. The question that arises, then, is how can community be made to work differently? How might we think of a politics of community that does not function as a will to realize its essence? How might we think of a political practice that thinks of social existence in non-organic terms and yet captures something of the promise of liberation from social divisions and technopolitical dominion that the term community evokes? Here, one can point to the contradictory elements in the historical production of modern communities. If, on the one hand, an immanentist claim has been central to the formation and functioning of communities, and opened it to appropriations by capital and the modern state, the very realization of immanence, on the other hand, has required community’s deep immersion in politics. In this respect, the mobilization of oppressed castes and women around shared conditions of injustice and exploitation points to alternative forms of community made possible by the political constitution of society. For what is crucial in these mobilizations is not some claim of intrinsic togetherness, but an invocation of common historical conditions of oppression and the articulation of the language of rights. Of course, the limitation of such mobilizations is that their politics often amounts to what can be called, to use Wendy Brown’s characterization of identity politics in the United States, the politics of ressentiment,24 that is, a form that accepts the

The colonial genealogy of society 95 normativity of the given power structure while demanding a share in it for the previously disadvantaged group. But insofar as they squarely place society in the field of politics, such aspirations of community force open modernity to difference, to plural discourses of politics and society.

Notes 1 In contrast with the spheres of private rights and private welfare (family and civil society), the state is from one point of view an external necessity and their higher authority; its nature is such that their laws and interests are subordinate to it and dependent on it. On the other hand, however, it is the end immanent within them, and its strength lies in the unity if its own universal aim with the particular interests of individuals, in the fact that individuals have duties to the state in proportion as they have rights against it. (G. F. W. Hegel, Philosophy of Right trans. T. M. Knox [New York: Oxford University Press, 1967] 161) 2 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, On Colonialism (New York: International Publishers, 1972) 41. 3 Ibid., 81. 4 Ibid., 86. 5 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973) 377–8. 6 Ibid., 378. 7 Ibid., 377. On this point, see Homi Bhabha, ‘In a spirit of calm violence’, in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, Gyan Prakash (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) 326–8. Bhabha seizes on Foucault’s disavowal of colonialism and the indeterminacy in his discourse to read the Western ratio from the margins. 8 On the limits of civil society in colonial India, see Partha Chatterjee’s insightful discussion, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 238. My interest in the historical career of civil society and community in colonial India was sparked by Chatterjee’s writings, although, as will become clear later, I differ from him in my reading of community. 9 For a fuller treatment of this process, see my Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) ch. 6. 10 Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of British India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also his The Hollow Crown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 11 Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987) 224–54. 12 Arjun Appadurai, Worship and Conflict under Colonial Rule: A South Indian Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 13 Gyanendra Pandey, The Colonial Construction of Communalism in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990). 14 ’Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Graham Burchell et al. (eds) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 87–104. 15 Such an assumption frames, for example, Sandria Freitag’s study of communities and the public sphere in north India. She neatly separates the arena of the modern state and politics from the domain of community and communitas, and explains the latenineteenth-century Hindu/Muslim communal riots in north India as products of the

96

16 17 18 19

Gyan Prakash collision between the two spheres. Communities built around kinship, language and religion appear as premodern Gemeinschaften that produce communal conflict by bursting into the modern public sphere. See her Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) 117–34. Chatterjee, op. cit., 127. Jean Luc-Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) xxxviii. Etienne Balibar writes that the modern political community is never, as such a sexed community: what underlies it, as a national community, is not a simple relation between the sexes (except metaphorically, it is not an extended family), but rather practical and ideological sexism as a structure of interior exclusion of women, generalized to the whole society. (Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson [New York: Routledge, 1994] 57)

20 Swami Dayanand Sarasvati’s key ideas are contained in his Saty‰rth Prak‰sh [Hindi] (1882, 2nd edn; reprint, Delhi: Govindram Hasananda, 1963). 21 Sarasvati, op. cit., 369–406, passim. 22 My Another Reason, ch. 7, contains such a reading of Nehru’s book. 23 M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (Natal, South Africa, 1910; reprint, Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing House, 1938) 46. 24 Wendy Brown, States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

6

Maps, blood and the city The governance of the social in nineteenth-century Britain Patrick Joyce

In the first half of the nineteenth century governance and the social converged for the first time, governance now being enacted explicitly through the social, which increasingly became a central part of the social imaginaries of power. Actual governance was built upon those early excavations of the social that Mary Poovey’s contribution in Chapter 3 of this volume indicates, namely the role of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century in naturalizing a providential social order. Seen now to work through humans, this order operated with an increasing degree of autonomy from divine intervention. Understanding ‘human nature’, and relating it to how a benificent social order could be attained out of the ‘social capacity’ that was the result of this nature’s operations, were in effect foundations for later understandings of how actual state government might work. As the contribution of Robert Wokler (Chapter 4 in this volume) shows, social science in France from the late 1790s was increasingly enlisted in the service of the state, and represented an attempt to govern according to a science that was autonomous of politics and legislation. There was shift from the legislator to the administrator and the bureaucrat, the new science of the social receiving its most characteristic expression in the form of the techno-administrative state that began to emerge at this time, one supposedly neutral in its command of new kinds of expertise and its deployment of new sorts of experts in power and the social. In Britain a different route was taken, different from the French case of the recognition of the failure of politics in a situation of war and revolution. But the end result was quite similar. In this contribution I should like to explore this phase of the employment of the social in the service of the state by considering something of the epistemological and material foundations of power, and of the relationship between the two. In this, in the first half of the study, I shall concentrate chiefly on cartography and how the state set about identifying those things and people over whom it sought to rule. What it identified was a form of the social as a medicalized, and particularly a sanitary, entity. In the second section, I will consider something of how, once identified, governance over these objects of rule came to be secured. My chief focus in both sections is the city, as a particular problem and opportunity for the state, and in the second section I consider what I call the ‘civic toilette’, that cleaning, clearing, paving

98

Patrick Joyce

and improving of the city designed to secure the city as a place of free selfregulation, like society and indeed like the economy. This takes me into the relationship between the social and the natural, and into a consideration of anthropological dimensions of the social that were inseparable from power.1

Cartographies of power In producing a version of the city that was amenable to governance, the map shared in the epistemic characteristics of statistics. The cognitive nature of both turned on a particular version of space, ‘abstract space’, which had first been elaborated at least as early as the seventeenth century. This now lent itself to the social sciences as once it had been integral to the foundation of the natural ones. As ‘the elusive heart of the epistemology associated with modernity’,2 space was rendered abstract. The spatial dimension of ‘modern abstraction’ was both isotropic and absolute. Geometric models assumed that space was continuous and uniform in all directions (isotropic), and therefore uniformly subject to mathematical laws. In addition to this mathematical regularity, absolute space was independent of all time, matter and motion.3 Fundamental to the transference of the idea of space into the social sciences was the idea of functional equivalence, the notion that space was reducible to formal schema or grids, in which the elements of the schema could be reproduced as equivalents one of another. As a consequence of this, abstract space was ‘symbolically and materially associated with homologies: seriality; repetitious actions; reproducable products; interchangeable places, behaviours and activities’.4 The epistemic foundations of statistics will be clear. Homology and seriality made classification, comparison and counting possible. Particularly in Britain and France, the early nineteenth century saw the eclipse of an older ‘political arithmetic’ by what was increasingly to become modern statistics.5 Political arithmetic was associated with the centralized bureaucracies of the absolutist state, and the information it conveyed was often its privileged secret. By contrast, the new statistical thinking was frequently pioneered outside the state, by makers of opinion about the condition of ‘society’, such as doctors and clergymen. Statistics in fact helped constitute the very ‘civil society’ in whose name it sought to speak. It maintained that ‘society’ was more important than the state or government. Statistics uncovered those ‘laws’ of the social, knowledge of which would enable correct governance to take place, a governance which respected the ‘natural’ self-regulation of society, and allowed rule to be ‘at a distance’.6 ‘Social science’ itself grew up in intimate relation to this new way of thinking by means of number and ‘social facts’. Emerging in civil society, statistics did not, however, abrogate the power of the state. The calculating apparatus evolved at this time was as a consequence closely tied to the idea of objectivity. This elaboration of objectivity was involved with what has been called the’technicization of politics’.7 What was involved was the accumulation of

Maps, blood and the city 99 increasingly specialized knowledge about governing. In order to govern people and processes occurring at a distance from power (as in the new forms of civil society then actually emerging) it was necessary to turn these into traces that could be mobilized and accumulated, much in the manner of the natural sciences and their technical operations. These operations are made possible by what Bruno Latour has called the ‘immutable mobile’, the trace that can be made visible, docile and knowable.8 Both the statistic and the map can be understood in this way. In respect of liberal governmentality, a political rationality that sought explicitly to ’rule at the distance’ (through the media of the free self, or the free social), statistics was therefore of particular importance, as part of a rhetoric of liberal objectivity, and of the objectively given and hence ‘natural’ operation of that which statistics identified, namely what were called at the time ‘social facts’. Statistics in fact gave rise to a public rhetoric of disinterestedness, and to the idea of fairness and rule-following. The epistemic foundations of maps will also be apparent. ‘Abstract space’ was the foundation of the modern map, which in turn reinforced the idea of abstraction upon which it was based. It standardized what it represented. Measured against an abstract grid of space, what was represented – towns, streets, coastlines – became essentially one. The standardization of scale served to homogenize space, substituting space for what has been called ‘place’, or lived, particularized positionality. This standardization of space was further accentuated by the increasingly sophisticated printing of maps, especially in the nineteenth century. Standardization involved in turn classification and ordering, one thing being read in terms of another. Because reality became knowable in standardized form, it became amenable to ordering. In short, the modern map is essential to power and to the practices of rule.9 These aspects are particularly apparent in the case of the survey method of triangulation. For it was triangulation, most extensively developed in the British mapping of India in the early nineteenth century, which most faithfully represented this characteristically Enlightenment view of the world. Triangulation offered the potential perfection of the map’s relationship with the territory. Triangulation ‘defines an exact equivalence between the geographical archive and the world’.10 It made it possible to conceive of a map constructed on a scale of 1:1. What the map historian Edney calls the ‘technological fix’ offered by triangulation served to intensify the Enlightenment’s ‘cartographic illusion’ of the mimetic map. This dealt in ‘a rational and ordered space that could be governed in a rational and ordered manner’. The rationality of this space, in line with the belief in mathematical perfection, was in fact viewed in terms of an ideology of transcendent law and sovereignty. This space and its contents, including its subjects, were configured as scientific and rational in line with this geometrization of space. However, it is apparent that the same sorts of process were at work in the metropolitan state as well. In order to explore these metropolitan dimensions of maps and power, I shall say something about the single most important influence in the history of the contemporary map in Britain, namely the Ordnance Survey. The Survey owed a

100

Patrick Joyce

great deal to the example of the eighteenth-century French state, especially that of Louis XV. The European states’ mapping of their own territories developed systematically after 1600, the French case being the most highly developed.11 The mapping of the modern state as a single, uniform, territorial entity, unlike the mapping of the multiple territories and jurisdictions of the dynastic state, was a major outcome of the objectifications ‘abstract space’ made possible.12 The (literal) delineation of boundaries and frontiers in this regime of the unequivocal, geometrical line; the setting apart of the state from the ruler and the character of rulership, also the naturalization of the state as (again literally) grounded in the putativly physical reality of a territory, were all aspects of a wider process involving the ‘territorialization’ of the state, and the consolidation of what has been referred to as the ‘state country’.13 What is striking about contemporary cartography is the relatively late date of some of these developments. Only in the 1790s, when in fact the initiative in state cartography began to slowly shift from France to Britain, did things begin to develop. Official state mapping in Britain was then still highly limited, and said to be very deficient in comparison with other European states. In 1790 Britain had no accurate national maps, nor any survey upon which these could be based. Here the map as a public document seems to be a significant departure. The state maps of eighteenth-century France were in fact for public consumption as well as state use, just as at different times their development depended on private patronage. These can be contrasted with the Hapsburg (quasi-dynastic) maps of 1774, only three, jealously guarded, and hand-drawn copies of which were kept by the state. This projection of civil society into both the production and consumption of maps can therefore be said to mark their ‘liberalism’, liberalism as a political rationality not at all being the same thing as political liberalism, and this liberal dimension of new governmental epistemologies was especially evident in the case of the Ordnance Survey (OS). The ‘state space’ of the Ordnance Survey was in fact an amalgam of civilian and military cartographic influences.14 These, as it were, ‘engineered’ into state space a whole range of techniques, competencies and agencies which represented an opening out to civil society. The ‘liberalism’ of state space can also be understood in terms of the sheer plenitude of the information provided, which is striking, above all in the urban plans produced at the time: there is information on sanitary detail, a vital ingredient in contemporary imaginings of the social; on historical detail, so that there is a temporal layering as well; on political and administrative detail; and economic information, as well as the wealth of information on living spaces and conditions. This plenitude of information involved almost a positive invitation to interpretation: with so much information available it became possible to combine the different elements of this information in hitherto undreamt-of ways. This was especially the case for those who governed, but also to some extent those who were governed, in that Ordnance Survey material was becoming increasingly publicly available, and commercial mapping unashamedly plagiarized the OS. The unprecedented nature of the variety of

Maps, blood and the city 101 information published should be emphasized: reflecting the extraordinary multiplicity of state and civil society inputs into this mapping, this plurality can be understood as inviting and exciting a freedom of choice in interpreting maps, and therefore in this political sense the exercise of ‘liberal’ freedom. If this gave the Survey, and maps more widely, a certain ‘liberal’ character, then the disciplinary, ‘police’, dimensions of the state were inseparable from this. This was particularly the case in Ireland. In the course of the first half of the nineteenth century the Ordnance Survey became in effect an important cultural arbiter of the territory of the British. The 1841 Survey Act gave the OS legal authority to collect the names of places. One was legally obliged to tell the names of places. These names thereafter became a sort of property of the Survey, in that once represented on the map they took ‘official’ status, and tended to be fixed in this form. This was nowhere more evident than in Ireland. There the systematic Anglicization of Irish-language place names was a significant element in the decay of the old Gaelic culture. Power over the name was paralleled by power over the space the name demarcated: the 1841 Act also gave the OS the legal authority to ascertain boundary divisions (a right given in Ireland in 1825). It also ‘officially’ mapped fields and parishes for the first time. What had earlier been relatively unfixed and subject to extra-governmental jurisdiction, now became fixed by the state.15 What these names and boundaries represented itself took increasingly abstract form. This is evident in the history of the contour. In the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, elaborate hatching techniques were developed for representing relief, especially for military purposes. The OS rapidly brought the hill sketching upon which these techniques were based under the sovereignty of the contour. The older techniques were said to be based on ‘taste, imagination, and fancy’. Hatching was still to some extent used, but came to be based solely on the contour and not on the eye and fancy. By the late 1840s the contour had been introduced to the Survey. By the late nineteenth century it dominated OS maps.16 The sheer size of what were in fact very considerable state undertakings should be emphasized. The outdoor staff of the OS in Britain between 1800 and 1820 numbered usually around twenty people. After 1820 the growth was immense: by 1837 the Irish OS employed over 2,000 workers, and its final costs were over £800,000.17 However, perhaps the clearest example of the map in the service of a liberal form of governmentality was what can be called the social mapping developing at this time. The period between 1835 and 1855 marked a revolution in the history of non-topographical cartography.18 Social mapping, especially the mapping of populations, was at the heart of this revolution. Before this time, no map of population distributions or density was known of in Britain. ‘Flow maps’ of population movement originated in 1844, and the use of graduated circles to represent population concentrations a little later. Every technique of the new social cartography originated in this period, in fact. The Irish Railway Committee Report of 1837 pioneered much of this, under the influence of H. D. Harness, an engineer of the Royal Military Academy. The influence of

102

Patrick Joyce

developments in Ireland was again apparent in the 1841 Irish census. The maps produced for this had a great influence on social mapping. T. A. Larcom of the Irish Ordnance Survey followed Harness in using maps to represent statistics on literacy rates, population density and living standards. The link between statistics and mapping was therefore very close. In fact, Larcom’s work for the Irish Census was every bit as important as his work for the OS. In both, heavily influenced by the publications of the Moral and Statistical Society of France, Larcom pioneered the use of the survey as an adjunct to the statistic. In turn the ‘survey’, not only of economic, demographic, and ‘social’ characteristics, but also of the cultural constitution of the Irish population, bred its own range of state experts in the ‘condition of the people’.19 In the case of the Irish Ordnance Survey, this expertise tended in time towards the natural sciences rather than the incipient cultural ones of Larcom and his associates. Statistical societies throughout Britain, such as the one in Manchester, rapidly took up mapping in the late 1830s. It was in fact the city that played the central role during this seminal period of social mapping. For it was the city upon which the most marked anxieties about the nature of the social were centred. The Health of Towns Association was behind most of the mapping activity of the 1840s, especially the large-scale OS town plans, such as the 1:528 Board of Health Town Plans of Warwickshire, made between 1848 and 1854.20 Boards of health themselves sometimes privately commissioned plans and maps. Medical practitioners also created a medical cartography at this time. There was again the characteristic fusion of state and extra-state expertise in these activities. However, the translation of the map into an instrument of the state was clear enough: Chadwick’s seminal 1842 report on the sanitary condition of the towns led directly to the OS maps and plans. This social, and medical, mapping was also a moral mapping. The health of the city was both medical and moral.21 It is the OS plans themselves that most reveal the power inherent in maps. The OS was in 1841 authorized by the Treasury to produce town plans of five feet to the mile (when it was already mapping the northern counties at the sixinch-to-the-mile scale).22 Ten-feet-to-the-mile plans were published in the early 1850s for eighteen more towns in England and Wales. These were based on surveys stimulated by the evidence of witnesses to the First Report of the Commissioners for Inquiry into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts (1844), and by the Public Health Act of 1848. In 1855 a third series followed, covering all towns with a population of more than 4,000. By 1892 and the end of the programme, urban Britain was mapped on a scale sufficient to show detail down to the size of the doorstep, as the OS Annual Report of 1891 noted. These plans provided an unprecedented view of the city and its inhabitants. Perhaps a better term would be an unprecedented view into the city, for the model of vision here was the medical one of the microscope, as well as the omniscient view of the surveyor.23 Figures 6.1 and 6.2 are parts of the five-feet plan for the city centre of Manchester in 1849.

Maps, blood and the city 103

Figure 6.1 Ordnance Survey map of Manchester City Centre, 1849, detail of Wood Street and surrounding area. Reproduced with permission of Alan Godfrey Maps.

The plan literally opens the city to view. It ‘looked into’ buildings as through a microscope, discerning the inner nature of what had hitherto been hidden. Previous maps had not shown the contents of buildings like this. These did, down to the level of not only the doorstep, but the stairwell, and the water tap. They looked into places of social interaction, registering and emphasizing the notion of what was ‘public’ – the place of worship, the theatre, the town hall, the workhouse, and markets, were ‘public’, but not places of work for instance, and not hotels. The inner contents of ‘private’ houses were also not on show, aside from marking external stairs, though nonetheless the imperious gaze of the OS plan makers roved in freedom from on high. What was looked into, and down upon, with the most dramatic effect were the city centre dwellings of the poor. These labyrinthine dwellings were made up of the jumble of courts and alleys that at the time represented the greatest source of anxiety about the city: it was these areas that bred both immorality and ill health. It was these areas, the courts of Manchester (around Wood Street) and the

104

Patrick Joyce

Figure 6.2 Ordnance Survey map of Manchester City Centre, 1849, detail of King Street and surrounding area including Manchester Town Hall. Reproduced with permission of Alan Godfrey Maps.

‘wynds’ of Glasgow, prototypes of the late nineteenth-century ‘slum’, which provided the motivation for the Health of Towns Association. The ‘courts’, ‘alleys’, ‘buildings’, ‘yards’ and ‘passages’ of the old city (complete with their ‘cellar dwellings’) preceded the rows of uniform housing and streets, sometimes called by-law housing, that became the dominant form of ‘working-class’ domestic built space in the second half of the nineteenth century. These new areas were seen as the antidote to the old ones. Before the rational housing of the mid- and late nineteenth century could be built, the existing irrational housing of the city had to be made rational first, this paper rationality both quelling fear and providing a blueprint for action. Making these spaces legible and hence governable involved untwisting the winding alleys, and smoothing out the irregularity of the spaces of the courts and the wynds. Of course, previous maps had geometrized space like this (and shown the ‘wynds’ and

Maps, blood and the city 105 alleys of the city, as well as separate units of habitation), but never quite in this way, the way that an increasingly ‘scientific’, and vastly expensive, triangulation made possible.24 In the plan space is delineated, reduced to the clarity of the line. This sharpened line demarcates spaces, so that buildings, streets, and so on, are differentiated, but this is with reference to a common rhetoric concerning legiblity. Individuation can be seen to occur therefore in tandem with the construction of epistemological potentials for the collective. All the elements are different (one dwelling is sharply different from another, to a degree that is striking and new) but all are composed of the same medium, that of an extreme form of geometrized space. In this form a ‘functional equivalence’ is taken to new heights, in terms of the interchangeability of standardized units. One thing is read in terms of another in ways that become ever more emphatic as the standard of measure becomes ever more standard. The spaces of the poor became in this form of representation equal to the spaces of the rich. All were composed of the same visual rhetoric. Theoretically, all were equal therefore. The poor city dweller was invited to look upon the map in the same way as the rich city dweller. They looked upon a similar condition. The standardized map made possible the imagining of the city as a collective entity in new kinds of ways, ways that were woven into the social imaginaries of liberal democracy.

The blood of the city The nineteenth-century liberal governance of ‘society’ meant less of an emphasis upon securing power over a territory, as had earlier been the case, and more of an emphasis upon seeing, knowing, and securing this ‘society’ as the free play of goods, information and persons. Communication had to be secured in such a way as to permit free exchange and free circulation. In fact, as Foucault recognized, in the nineteenth century architecture was superseded by communications as a mode of liberal governmentality, and correspondingly the engineer rather than the architect became central to the management of human souls.25 Under liberalism, models of free play were held to be self-regulating, and hence subject to the ‘laws’ which governed this regulation. Rule, as far as possible, was to be in accordance with these laws. In short, whether the model of the self, the family, the model of civil society, the economy, or the city, the model upon which liberal rule was based was ‘naturalized’ in this sense of being a self-governed and self-evident entity (though one in which intervention might be required to secure this self-governance). The city itself was seen in these terms, and acted upon in these ways. This was particularly evident in the analogy of the city and the body. In viewing the city as a body, the natural systems that were invoked at the time were marked most emphatically by the medical gaze. The ‘sanitary economy’ of the town was like that of the body. Both were marked by the dynamic interchange between living organisms and their physical environment. The

106

Patrick Joyce

constant circulation of fluids, and the continuous replenishment of vital functions, were to be secured in both cases by the introduction of fresh particles and by the elimination of waste ones. Thomas Southwood Smith was the central intellectual figure in sanitary reform. His physiology was rooted in the idea that living organisms are inextricably bound up with their physical environments, in this case the city, so that sanitation was always a ‘social’ question. His theory of ‘vital process’ involved viewing individual human bodies as composed of constituent ‘particles’; the social body in turn was made up of the entirety of the particles entering and leaving all living creatures. This physiology has been seen as closely related to the form of medical knowledge known as ‘anatomical realism’, which was concerned with opening the body to view, much as in the social statistics of the time the body of the city was opened to view. ‘Anatomical realism’, particularly in early nineteenth-century Manchester, was closely related to the rise of ‘social investigation’.26 In terms of the city and the body, therefore, ‘vital process’ had to be secured. The care of the city and care of the body became as one, just as the health of the city and health of the body were one. The public and private were created in parallel, and by a process of constant interaction between the two spheres. The Health of Towns Association was in fact a central element in this conjoint hygienization of the body and the city. Securing what may be called the ‘vitalization’ of the city involved the cleansing, clearing, paving, draining, and ventilating of the city, in fact what in a happy phrase Alain Corbin has called the ‘civic toilette’.27 The social imaginary of the city upon which this view of disease and health depended conceived of the city as a place of flows, movement and circulation. The body and the city were quite literally at one, most notably perhaps in terms of the water closet. Sitting on this quintessentially nineteenth-century invention involved directly coupling the natural functions of the body and the vital economy the city, so that in this ‘hydraulic city’ of modern sanitation the environment was no longer an ‘exterior’, but part of a grand socio-design. Materially and mentally the body and the city were as one, nature infusing the self and the self nature. Anonymous drains, sewers and pipes functioned as the material environment of a political division between public and private, establishing the sanitary integrity of the private home, without recourse to direct intervention. What was at stake was not just a Victorian fetish for cleanliness, but a strategy of indirect government; that is of inducing cleanliness and hence good moral habits not through discipline but simply through the material presence of fast-flowing water in and through each private household.28 The conduct of conduct did not need to come into play as material change directly shaped the possibilities of conduct that were open: the home and the family were simply left to themselves. This material inculcation of privacy, in which the state subsisted in material forms into which certain kinds of agency

Maps, blood and the city 107 were built, represented one of many spheres in which liberal forms of free subjectivity could be encouraged in the practice of everyday life. The civic toilette was about controlling the markers of organic time so that time might be endured, the markers of death; those of blood, excrement, secretions, rotting and dead matter. It therefore involved the deepest fears and anxieties of those who governed and those who were governed. John Hogg described the streets of London in 1837: the streets of the City were completely blocked two or three three times a day, sometimes for an hour at a time, by traffic, people, filth, animals, and by the results of their constant need of maintenance. Even the widened streets were blocked. Matters were made worse by the large number of narrow and irregular streets and courts, with streets often terminating abruptly without crossing other ones. Proprietors of land in London had no control in projecting new streets. Building size was regulated but the building line and street width were chaotic. This city ran with blood. Smithfield animal market was at its bloody heart: within one year well over a million sheep and a quarter of a million other beasts went there on their way to be slaughtered throughout the city. This all contrasted unfavourably with other European cities, which had suburban abbatoirs. The human dead were also buried in the centre of the city. The middle of London was likened to a mediaeval charnel house, the dead piled high upon one another, and constantly present to the living, in the most disturbing forms.29 The suburban cemetery of Kensal Green had been opened in 1832, and for some time was the only one in Britain. This was the city that had to be reformed, a blocked and bloody charnel house. In fact, the dead had been piled high upon one another for several centuries, without this being a cause for concern, or even interest. What was new was the awareness that all this was now ‘intolerable’. Let us dwell on this matter of death and blood. First, the animal bodies of Smithfield, and their death. The ‘vitalization’ of the city can be seen to have involved making the natural social, and in the process taming and controlling nature, even as a sort of obeisance was made to the natural. The transition from animal to edible,30 the production of ‘meat’,31 represented in the most powerful of forms this negotiation of the social and natural. ‘Meat’ is thus a ‘natural symbol’ of human control over nature,32 and therefore of human identity, in short a means by which the social imaginary is created. Slaughter was and is at the centre of these symbolic operations, hence its highly ritualized character in societies including our own (we only eat meat killed by humans, and killed in a particular way; we do not eat all animals, nor blood, usually, and so on). What happened in the course of the nineteenth century was that death, and the corrupt and decaying bodies of the dead, and this goes for the human as well as the animal dead, were finally rendered invisible and anonymous. The slaughterhouse, in the words of its anthropologist, became ‘a place that was no place’.33 This was the case in France before it was the case in Britain, the ‘abbatoir’ being exiled to the margins of towns and cities in the Napoleonic reorganization of slaughtering and butchery, and removed from everyday life, where it was still

108

Patrick Joyce

situated in Britain. Slaughter now took place in anonymous buildings in anonymous places, and death itself was an anonymous and private thing, paradoxically private in that abbatoirs were public institutions. In this process, as later in Britain, slaughter became monitored, controlled, hygienized, and punished if it did not measure up to its new ‘science’. Slaughter also became ‘humane’. In the process it also became large-scale and ‘industrial’. Something of the invisibility of the slaughterhouse is conveyed by the use of the euphemism for slaughterhouse, ‘abbatoir’, which in its origin in French means to cause to fall, as trees are caused to fall. The word appeared in 1806, at the same time as the new slaughter regime, and rapidly entered the English language. The prosecution of new public sciences such as that of slaughter, or the recycling of sewage and the provision of water supplies to the city, all shared this character of anonymity and the invisible, in that they were prosecuted in restricted and often out-of-the-way sites: the construction of the public was preceded by the accumulation of forms of the private, and by new forms of specialist, esoteric, and restricted forms of knowledge. Similar changes occurred with the human dead.34 Lacquer has traced the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transition from what in terms of the present argument may be called social burial in the old churchyard through to the new ‘society’ of the cemetery. The cemetery, an invention of this time, was a new sort of public space, the history of which is part of the same history as that of the reformed meat market, such as Smithfield in London. The new cemetery in theory welcomed allcomers, though in practice the better off, at least at first. Lineage gave way to history-as-progress, communal and spatially specific parish rights of burial to absolute and abstract property rights, and the relative hugger-mugger and confusion of the old churchyard to the possibility of the individuation of the dead person, by means of the memorial and the deployment of clearly demarcated spaces. One could really have eternal rest, instead of being dug up every few decades. And, unlike the old churchyard, the cemetery was portable. One could build a cemetery anywhere, and it would still be nowhere. However, it could still belong to everyone. In this process of change, anxiety and horror about death and dead matter was handled in the cemetery by the institution of memory, as in the individual memorial, and the landscaped setting, which the new cemetery made possible – ‘memory cleanses’, as Lacquer says. The dead were thus made clean again, and death was made bearable: it is no coincidence that in 1852 the Commissioners of Sewers in London displaced the Church authorities as the legally recognized administrators of the city’s burials. As with the abbatoir, death was exiled to the margins of cities, and if not quite anonymous, became located in a place abstracted from everyday life. Like the death of animals, the death of humans, and the bodies of the dead, became something to be avoided. Turning to the history of blood, in Paris this blood might be human blood,35 but the blood of London as opposed to the blood of Paris was usually animal blood, and the everyday horror of London was to do with animals. Although the sight of slaughter was dispersed beyond Smithfield alone, the market

Maps, blood and the city 109 symbolized for nineteenth-century Londoners the horrors of the old order. It did so because it meant so much in other respects too. This is how J. Stevenson Bushnan, Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Senior Physician to the Metropolitan Free Hospital, described Smithfield in 1851 (Bushnan was the very type of the medical reformer of the time, in this case one active in the fight of the City Corporation against the vested interests of the meat trade): the neighbourhood of Smithfield was made up of a series of ‘objectionable localities’ and ‘doubtful shops’, such as ‘bladder blowers’, ‘horse slaughterers’, ‘cat and a rabbit fur dressers’. These abounded in immorality and offensiveness, and were full of noxious fumes and ‘death-bearing gases’. He conducts the reader into a dustyard which is what he terms ‘the receptacle of the offal of the neighbourhood; while under the shadow of its mountainous heaps, may at night be discovered half-savage men and women, carousing and blaspheming around cauldrons teeming with unblessed food’. He leads the reader further on into the labyrinth of Smithfield: ‘From Smithfield, and extending to Victoria Street, are numerous slaughterhouses, presenting the most revolting scene, drenched with blood and other abominations’.36 To understand the nature of what it accomplished, the old Smithfield can be contrasted with the new, which can also be understood in the sense of markets as ‘hybrids’ (to employ the terms of Bruno Latour) producing the distinction between the natural and the social by the act of ‘purification’. Copenhagen Fields in Islington was opened as the new live cattle market in 1855 (the old dead meat market in Newgate, right in the heart of the city and a similar sight of bloody congestion to Smithfield, was condemned in 1861). The new Smithfield opened in 1861 as now the great dead meat market of the city. By the 1860s large amounts of killed meat were arriving in the city by rail, though a great deal of slaughtering of animals continued to be done at Copenhagen Fields. After 1876, US meat was being sent directly to Smithfield. Smithfield by then was the hub of a considerable railway network, produce coming into the market underground in this way. Slaughter had become ‘industrialized’. By contrast, the former Smithfield was one of the old neighbourhoods of London, like for example Old Bailey. Smithfield was also the neighbourhood of the ancient Cloth Fair, and according to Bushnan was a relic of a disreputable, old London, remaining much the same as it had since before the Great Fire. These areas were ‘famous in the history of crime’. What Bushnan and his like were doing was in fact attempting to destroy this old city, transforming the unknowable and the disturbing into the knowable, the rational and the governable. Much the same sort of thing was happening at much the same time in Haussman’s Paris. Perhaps Bushnan’s horror has something to do with the complex meanings of Smithfield. In particular there was a sort of historical horror at the capacity of the old order to continually thwart progress. Smithfield had been a place of death since at least the sixteenth century, when it was the scene of the burning of some 200 martyrs of the Marian persecution against Protestantism.37 It was also a place of disorder and misrule. Cloth Fair was in fact Bartholemew Fair, Wordsworth’s ‘Parliament of Monsters’, and for centuries the greatest of all the

110

Patrick Joyce

meeting places of the London multitude. This sacred site of the London crowd was instituted each year on 25 August, the day of St Bartholemew, the patron saint of butchers. Quite clearly, Smithfield was charged with the most powerful meanings (butchers were themselves still slaughterers, men of blood). Charged with such meanings, touching the deepest levels of thought about the social, its reform had great urgency. The power of Smithfield is to be understood also in terms of the symbolic nature of markets. Markets are liminal places, spaces of transition, places which occupy a position on a boundary, but which also partake of both sides of this boundary. They are intermediary in a literal sense, in that they are places where exchange takes place. They are immensely sensitive markers of boundaries and distinctions. They mark off buyer and sellers, and traditionally country and town, as with Smithfield and the other great food markets of the nineteenth-century city. Markets and fairs may occupy the (communal, sacred) spaces of urban centres, but also the places where town and country meet, for instance the outskirts of urban settlements.38 The food market in particular is an exceptionally sensitive location of the liminal, or the hybrid of ‘purification’. Mary Douglas’ understanding of how ‘matter out of place’ threatens cultural categorization enables the market to be understood as a place where the social meanings of pollution are especially apparent. The food market is a place of matter prior to and after decomposition, a place of flows, rot, deliquescence. It marks the transformation of matter from one state to another, when matter becomes threatening because out of its fixed place. This seems especially the case when this matter is living matter, in the sense of animal matter, so that places of slaughter mark the decomposition of life itself, the passage of matter to death. The market can be said to regulate life and death, therefore. It is also the case that, as the place where what is outside, namely food, becomes what is inside/edible, or what will soon become so, markets address the most sensitive of all locations of boundary and categorization, the body itself understood in terms of the contour defining what is inside and outside, and therefore what is body and not body, and what is natural and human. In food markets boundaries come into question, and anxiety is marked, where matter erupts, leaks, runs, for instance as blood or offal, or as the faeces, urine and sweat of terrified animals. There is also the rot and stench of decaying vegetable matter. In terms of meat markets and slaughterhouses, the propinquity of blood and water is characteristic: blood, the evidence of life, but also the sign of death, is perhaps the most sensitive instance of matter out of place and threatening. Water is invariably kept nearby for fear of this aberrant matter.39 It is the places where what is inside and outside meet that are particularly significant, the orifices of the body, animal and human. These regulate whether matter will be out of place or in place, hence anxiety about control over such orifices (as, in human terms, in the nineteenth-century ‘civic toilette’ in all its forms). Social, and racial, boundaries of all sorts are defined, and patrolled, by such control over the orifices of the body, a process of ‘erasing corporality’, in both the human and the animal body.40 Therefore, conceiving of the liminality of

Maps, blood and the city 111 markets as a realm of societal ‘freedom’, one in which the very nature of the social order is in question, one may see how these situations of blood, death and disorder brought into sharpest focus the practice of liberal freedom. The former situations denied and subverted, yet also agitated into practice the operations of political reason. One can begin to understand how the market could summon such horror in men like Bushnan and Hogg, and why the reform of markets was such a priority. The nature of the social order was threatened. As a site of exchange, markets were also often the sites of fairs, indeed the two were frequently indistinguishable. The coincidence of Smithfield Market and St Bartholemew’s Fair is an example. As locations of meeting and mixing, of misrule, disorder, and frequently of social inversion, such fairs partook of the liminality of the market in different sorts of form. Market places, especially in town and city centres, also always had a certain religious significance (marked by market crosses, or by the immediate proximity of places of worship). They had strong associations with punishment, as places where, for example, pillories were positioned, or where in some cases capital punishment was carried out. The old Smithfield can be compared with the new. The former was open, porous, a place where on market day crowds of children could be seen running in and out of the market cruelly baiting the animals.41 The new market was closed, a place, according to its architect, where ‘full command’ could be had.42 Smithfield was part of an integrated system of markets in the city centre, designed by the Corporation’s architect Horace Jones.43 Jones designed Leadenhall Market (1881), and Billingsgate Fish Market (1875), as well as Tower Bridge. The Smithfield site was itself made up of other markets designed by Jones, including flower, and fruit and vegetable markets. Smithfield was a highly controlled and closed environment.44 Its hours of opening and routines of functioning were minutely regulated: porters were licensed, its tolls minutely ordered, and its spaces meticulously planned.45 The blocks of shops within were all identical, with hygieneized washing, eating and w.c. facilities.46 The shops should have no blockages, projections, or hanging goods impeding the free circulation of goods and people. Hawkers and all other interlopers were expressly forbidden. The specially designed roof allowed light without glare and ventilation without rain. Nature was carefully controlled, at all times permitting the free flow of the elements. At the same time Smithfield was to the design of a French Renaissance palace. The great gates of the Market exemplified its symbolic meaning, excluding the outside but echoing in their grandeur the aristocratic and royal palace, though now a municipal palace emblazoned with the insignia of the City Corporation.47 Copenhagen Fields, Islington, the ‘Metropolitan Meat Market’, was where the slaughtering of animals took place after the reform of Smithfield. This was another sort of palace. It cost half a million pounds, and its space accommodated 7,000 cattle, and between 40 and 50,000 sheep, calves or pigs. As at Smithfield, its functions were minutely supervised: the killing of animals on a mass scale, and in what was very carefully designed as a ‘humane’ way, became something like a new science. Retail markets were similar in these respects to

112

Patrick Joyce

wholesale ones. The new type of Victorian municipal retail market, evident in every British town and city, was predicated upon severing the market from the streets and street life of the immediate surround. The old markets had been part of the town, street traffic running through them. Some of these markets continued, but the aim of the new, covered public markets of the nineteenth century was to break the association with the old urban milieu, which was seen as vulgar and demeaning, as well as architecturally uninspiring. The market halls of nineteenth-century Britain represented a massive wave of moral intervention in economic life, one finding form in almost every British town and city.48 However, the market was only one facet of a widespread municipal regulation of urban space. The present exploration of this sort of regulatory activity in the early-to mid-nineteenth century helps chart a defining moment in governance through the social.

Notes 1 For a fuller development of these questions and others related to governmentality and the social, see Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: The City and Modern Liberalism (Verso, London, forthcoming 2002). 2 Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago University Press, London, 1995) 25. 3 Poovey, op. cit., 28–9. 4 Poovey, op. cit., 29. 5 Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1986). 6 Stefan Collini, ‘Political theory and the science of society in Victorian Britain’, Historical Journal, vol. 23, 1980. 7 Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999) ch. 6, ‘Numbers’. 8 Bruno Latour, Science In Action (Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1987); ‘Visualisation and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands’, Knowledge and Society, no. 6, 1986. 9 The works of J. B. Harley have been seminal in these respects. See for example ‘Deconstructing the map’, Cartographia, 26: 2, summer 1989. 10 Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago University Press, London, 1997) 21. 11 Michael Biggs, ‘Putting the state on the map: cartography, territory, and European state formation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41: 2, April 1999. 12 Biggs, op. cit., 390–8. 13 Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997). 14 Edward Seymour, A History of the Ordnance Survey (Dawson, Folkestone, 1980), chs 1–9, for the inception and early history of the Survey; see also Sir Charles Close, The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey (David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1969 edn). 15 David Smith, Victorian Maps of the British Isles (Batsford, London, 1985) ch. 3. 16 Ibid. See also Sir H. James, Account of the Field Survey and the Preparation of the Manuscript Plans of the Ordnance Survey (1873). 17 J. A. Andrews, A Paper Landscape (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1975). 18 Arthur H. Robinson, ‘The maps of Henry Drury Harness’, Geographical Journal, June–December 1955. 19 Andrews, op. cit., A Paper Landscape.

Maps, blood and the city 113 20 J. B. Harley, ‘The Ordnance Survey Board of Health Town Plans of Warwickshire, 1848–1854’, in Richard Oliver (ed.) Ordnance Survey Maps: A Concise Guide for Historians (Charles Close Society, London, 1993). 21 H. Paterman’s Moral and Educational Statistics of England and Wales (London, 1849) is seen as a landmark in ‘social mapping’. 22 James Elliot, The City In Maps: Urban Mapping to 1900 (British Library, London 1990) ch. 5. 23 Mary Hamer, ‘Putting Ireland on the map’, Textual Practice, 3: 2, summer 1989. See also Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Visuality and Modernity (Harvard University Press, London, 1990). 24 Comparison of runs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city maps and plans bears this out, for example in the case of Liverpool – see Joyce, op. cit., The Rule of Freedom, ch. 1. 25 Michel Foucault, ‘Space, knowledge, and power’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader (Penguin, London, 1986) 244. 26 Mary Poovey, op. cit., Making a Social Body, 91; and see the two chapters on Manchester, namely ‘Curing the social body in 1832: James Phillips Kay and the Irish in Manchester’ and ‘Anatomical realism and social investigation in nineteenthcentury Manchester’. 27 Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination (Berg, Leamington Spa, 1986), ch. 6. See also his ‘Backstage’ in Michelle Perrot (ed.) A History of Private Life, vol. IV (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1990). 28 Thomas Osborne, ‘Security and vitality: drains, liberalism and power in the nineteenth century’, in Andrew Barry, Nikolas Rose and Thomas Osborne (eds) Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (University College Press, London, 1996). 29 John Hogg, London As It Is (London, 1837) chs ix, x. 30 Noelle Vialles, Animal to Edible (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984). 31 Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (Routledge, London, 1992). 32 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (Penguin, London, 1973). 33 Vialles, op. cit., Animal to Edible, ch. 1. 34 Thomas Laqueur, ‘The places of the dead in modernity’; paper presented to the ESRC workshop on ‘Rethinking the social’, Manchester, December 1998. 35 A. Corbin, ‘The blood of Paris’, in Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995). 36 James Stevenson Bushnan, The Moral and Sanitary Aspects of the New Central Market, as Proposed by the Corporation of the City of London (London, 1851) 15–16. 37 Thomas Gasprey, The History of Smithfield (London, 1852). 38 Seamus O Maitiu, The Humours of Donnybrook: Dublin’s Famous Fair and Its Suppression (Irish Academic Press, Dublin 1995). 39 Vialles, op. cit., From Animal to Edible, ch. 2. 40 W. Anderson, ‘Excremental colonialism: public health and the poetics of pollution’, Critical Inquiry, 21: 3, spring 1995; Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Filth and the public sphere: concept and practice about space in Calcutta’, Public Culture, 10: 1, 1997. 41 Bushnan, op. cit., Moral and Sanitary Aspects, 33. 42 W. J. Passingham, London’s Markets, Their Origins and History (London, n.d., 1930s?). 43 Horace Jones, On The New Metropolitan Markets (n.d.), and on Jones see Men of the Times (London, 1887). 44 Bylaws for Regulating the Metropolitan Meat and Poultry Market, Smithfield (London, 1869). 45 The Metropolitan Meat and Poultry Market: Descriptions of the Several Designs Sent In (London, n.d.).

114

Patrick Joyce

46 A Description of the Metropolitan Meat and Poultry Market Smithfield (London, n.d.). See also Publications Relating to the Proposed Central Cattle Market and the Smithfield Market Removal Bill 1851 (London, n.d., 1850s). 47 Op. cit., A Description of the Metropolitan Meat and Poultry Market, Smithfield. 48 James Schmiechen and Kenneth Carls, The British Market Hall: A Social and Architectural History (Yale University Press, London, 1999) especially part II, ‘The architecture and design of the public market’.

Part II

The new social Theory, practice and disciplines

7

Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social Bruno Latour

Le caractère bizarre et grimaçant de la réalité, visiblement déchirée de guerres intestines suivies de boiteuses transactions, suppose la multiplicité des agents du monde. (Monadologie et Sociologie, 93) Au fond de on, en cherchant bien nous ne trouverons jamais qu’un certain nombre de ils et de elles qui se sont brouillés et confondus en se multipliant. (Les Lois Sociales, 61)

In order to contribute to this volume on the ‘social in question’, I could have talked about what is known as ‘actor network theory’, or ANT, a deliberate attempt to terminate the use of the word ‘social’ in social theory and to replace it with the word ‘association’.1 But I have decided to share with readers the good news that ANT actually has a forefather, namely Gabriel Tarde, and that, far from being a marginalized orphan in social theory, our pet theory benefits from a respectable pedigree. As is written in the official history of the discipline, Tarde, at the turn of the nineteenth century, was the major figure of French sociology, professor at the Collège de France and the author of innumerable books, whereas Durkheim was, at the time, a younger, less successful upstart teaching in the provinces.2 But a few years later the situation was completely reversed and Durkheim became the main representative of a scientific discipline of sociology, while Tarde had been relegated to the prestigious but irrelevant position of mere ‘precursor’ – and not a very good one at that, since he had been forever branded with the sin of ‘psychologism’ and ‘spiritualism’. Since then, mainstream social theory has never tired of ridiculing Tarde’s achievement, and I must confess that I myself never looked beyond the dismissive footnotes of the Durkheimians to check what their rejected ‘precursor’ had really written.3 And yet, I want to argue in this chapter, through a close reading of his recently republished and most daring book, Monadologie et Sociologie (M&S),4 that Tarde introduced into social theory the two main arguments which ANT has tried, somewhat vainly, to champion:

118

Bruno Latour

(a) that the nature/society divide is irrelevant for understanding the world of human interactions; (b) that the micro/macro distinction stifles any attempt at understanding how society is generated. In other words, I want to make a little thought experiment and imagine what the field of social sciences would have become in the twentieth century, had Tarde’s – rather than Durkheim’s – insights been turned into a science. Or perhaps it is as if Tarde, who had a truly daring but also, I have to admit, totally undisciplined mind, needed a rather different century in which to be finally understood. It could be argued that a thinker of networks before their time could not transform his intuitions into data, because the material world he was interested in was not yet there to provide him with any empirical grasp. Things are different now that the technological networks are in place and many of Tarde’s arguments can be turned to sound empirical use.5 Whatever the case, what I really want to do is present to social theorists my rather disreputable grandfather – not for the sake of genealogy building, but because, on a few technical points of horrendous difficulty, Tarde possessed the solution we have been seeking in vain for so long.6 It is thus to a portrait of Tarde as a precursor of ANT that I want to devote this paper. Just to get a flavour of Tarde’s ideas, and to understand why he appealed so much to Gilles Deleuze,7 here is how Tarde presented his bold research programme in M&S (unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from M&S): I would naively say: Hypotheses fingo. What is dangerous in the sciences are not close-knit conjectures which are logically followed to their ultimate depths and their ultimate risks; it is those ghosts of ideas floating in the mind. The point of view of universal sociology is one of those ghosts that haunts the mind of present day thinkers. Let’s see first where it can lead us. Let’s us be outrageous even to the risk of passing for raving mad. In these matters, fear of ridicule would be the most antiphilosophical sentiment. (65) Is this not a good grandfather – the one who encourages you to think through as daringly as possible because there is nothing worse than half-baked ‘ghosts of ideas’? Is it not the case that most social science is constructed from those fleeting ghosts, neither theoretical nor concrete, but merely general and abstract? Instead of establishing sociology by means of a complete rupture with philosophy, ontology and metaphysics, as Durkheim will be so proud of doing, Tarde goes straight to these disciplines and reclaims them in his project to connect social theory with bold assumptions about the furniture of the world itself. The reader now begins to understand, I hope, why Tarde had not a chance in 1900 and why I am so thrilled to feel his genes acting in me, since I have never been able to decide whether I was a metaphysician or a sociologist. If I use extended extracts from Tarde in this chapter, it is to give his ideas a better chance to spread.

Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social 119

The strange specificity of human assemblages The shock of reading M&S is in the very first pages, since instead of talking about ‘the social’ as a specific domain of human symbolic order, Tarde begins with a research agenda, everywhere on the rise in the sciences, according to him, that he calls ‘monadology’: ‘The monads, Leibniz’s daughters, have come a long way since their father’ (32), he states in the first sentence of the book, just after having repeated in the exergue Hypotheses fingo. We are indeed very far from Durkheim. What is a monad? It is the stuff out of which the universe is built. But it is a strange stuff, since monads are not only material entities: they are ‘possessed’ by faith and desire – the verb ‘possess’, as we shall see at the end of this essay, takes on a great importance in Tarde. But do not expexct any spiritualism or idealism in this affirmation, since monads are also completely materialist: they are guided by no superior goal, no grand design, no telos. Each of them, much like Richard Dawkins’ genes or Susan Blackmore’s memes, fights for its own privately envisioned goal.8 Finally, monads lead to a thoroughly reductionist version of metaphysics, since the small always holds the key to the understanding of the large. ‘The main objection to the theory of monads is that…it puts, or seems to put, as much or even more complexity at the bases of phenomena as at their summit’ (69). But, here again, Tarde offers a very odd type of reductionism, since the smallest entities are always richer in difference and complexity than their aggregates or than the superficial appearances that we observe from a distance. For a reason we will understand later, the small is always also the most complex: ‘[the atom] is a milieu that is universal or that aspires to becomes such, a universe in itself, not only a microcosmos, as Leibniz intended, but the cosmos conquered in its entirety and absorbed by a single being’ (57, original emphasis). Or even more tellingly: ‘In the bosom of each thing, there resides every other thing real and possible’ (58). It is with this bizarre arrangement of apparently contradictory metaphysics that we have to familiarize ourselves if we want to understand why Tarde had so completely ended the social – or refused to begin with it.9 In the same way as Tarde refuses to consider society as a higher, more complex order than the individual monad, he refuses to take the individual human agent as the real stuff out of which society is made: a brain, a mind, a soul, a body is itself composed of myriad ‘little persons’, or agencies, each of them endowed with faith and desire, and actively promoting one’s total version of the world. Agency plus influence and imitation is exactly what has been called, albeit with different words, an actor-network. The linking of the two ideas is essential to understanding his theory: it is because he is a reductionist – even of a strange sort – that he does not respect any border between nature and society; and it is because he does not stop at the border between physics, biology and sociology that he does not believe in explaining the lower levels by reference to the higher levels. Such is the key difficulty: human societies are not specific in the sense that they could be symbolic, or made of individuals, or be due to the existence of a macro-organization. They seem specific to us for no

120

Bruno Latour

other reason than that, first, we see them from the inside, and second, that they are composed of few elements compared to any of the other societies we grasp only from the outside. Let’s go slowly here: to begin with, we have to understand that ‘society’ is a word that can be attributed to any association: But this means that everything is a society and that all things are societies. And it is quite remarkable that science, by a logical sequence of its earlier movements, tends to strangely generalize the notion of society. It speaks of cellular societies, why not of atomic societies? Not to mention societies of stars, or solar systems. All of the sciences seem fated to become branches of sociology. (58) Instead of saying, like Durkheim, that we ‘should treat social facts as a thing’, Tarde says that ‘all things are society’, and any phenomenon is a social fact. Nothing extraordinary or imperialistic here: this does not mean, as with Auguste Comte, that sociology must occupy the throne and rule over the sciences, but simply that every science has to deal with assemblages of many interlocking monads. The expression ‘plant sociology’ existed long before human sociology; ‘stellar society’ or ‘atomic’ is an expression one will find often in Whitehead; Bergson, Tarde’s successor at the Collège de France, would feel perfectly at ease with this sentence, and so would contemporary specialists in ‘mimetics’, albeit in a completely different context. Tarde’s idea is simply that if there is something special in human society it is not be determined by any strong opposition to all the other types of aggregates, and certainly not by some special sort of arbitrarily imposed symbolic order which will set it apart from ‘mere matter’. To be a society of monads is a totally general phenomenon, it is the stuff out of which the world is made. There is nothing especially new in the human realm. So where does the specificity of human societies come from? From two very odd features: if there is one privilege we have when talking about human societies, it is that we see them from the inside out, so to speak. ‘When we come to human societies…we feel at home, we are the true components of those coherent systems of persons called cities or states, regiments or congregations. We know everything that happens inside’ (68). Thus we can easily check that for the only aggregate we know well, no emergent superorganism takes over from the mesh of competing monads. This is the most clearly anti-Spencerian as well as anti-Durkheimian argument, and we must quote it at length to make the point clear: But, no matter how intimate, how harmonious a social group is, never do we see emerging ex abrupto, in the midst of its astonished associates, a collective self, which would be real and not only metaphoric, a sort of marvellous result, of which the associates would be the mere conditions. To

Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social 121 be sure, there is always an associate that represents and personifies the group in its entirety, or else a small number of associates (the ministers of a state) who, each under a particular aspect, individualize in themselves the group in its entirety. But this leader, or those leaders, are always also members of that group, born from their own fathers and mothers and not born collectively from their subjects or their constituency. Why would it be the case that the collaboration of unconscious nerve cells would be able to evoke out of nothing the brain of an embryo, while the agreement of conscious human beings never would have had this capacity in any social group? (68) The argument is so radical that any one in her right mind will recoil from it, but don’t forget the motto of Tarde’s epistemology: fear of ridicule is not a philosophical virtue. The only reason we believe in emergent properties for the brain of an embryo is because we don’t see the aggregates it links together from the inside. But in the case of human societies, we know for sure that there exists no moi collectif, since the representant is never a Leviathan, like Hobbes’ ‘mortal god’, but is always one of us, born from a mother and father and simply able to ‘individualize in themselves the group in its entirety’. If there is no macro society in a human group, there is none anywhere. Or to put it in an even more counter-intuitive way: the smaller is always the bigger entity. To make sense of it, we have to add the other feature that sets human society apart, one which appears even queerer at first: those assemblages are not only seen from the inside, they are also made of very few elements, compared to all the other societies. A polyp, a brain, a stone, a gas, a star, are made of much vaster collections of monads than are human societies. In a hilarious moment, Tarde compares the largest human society of his time, China, with any one of the others. What is a society made of only 300 million elements (the size of China at the time)? ‘An organism that would contain such a limited number of basic anatomic components would be inevitably located in the lowest degrees of vegetality and animality’ (64) (all emphases are original)! Any brain is made of more than 300 million elements, any speck of dust, any microlitre of gas. For most of the societies we consider, we have only statistical information averaging out billions of interactions, so we tend to find it obvious that for these there is a huge gap between the atomic element and the macroscopic phenomenon. But not for human societies which are made of so few entities: for these, to which we belong, we know for sure that every single macro factor is made out of determined pathways for which there exist thoroughly empirical traces. No one in human society can come and claim that, in order to go from one interaction to the next, you have to shift scale and go through a Society or any such Big Animal. Since for the only case we know well, human societies, the small holds the big, it must be the same, Tarde argues, for all the others, except we don’t have the slightest idea about how to reach the monad levels of stones, gas and particles without shifting scale. We embrace them only statistically.

122

Bruno Latour

The macro is nothing but a slight extension of the micro We are so used in the social sciences to speaking of levels of complexities, of higher orders, of emergent properties, of macrostructure, of culture, societies, classes and nation states, that no matter how many times we hear the argument, we immediately forget it and begin ranking local interactions from the smallest to the largest as if we could not think without stuffing one Russian doll neatly into the next.10 But Tarde is heterarchic through and through. The big, the whole, the great, is not superior to the monad, it is only a simpler, more standardized version of one of the monad’s goals which it has reached in making part of its view shared by the others. ‘Those beautiful coordinations (such as the Civil Code) must have been conceived before being put to execution; they must have begun to exist only as a few ideas hidden in a few cerebral cells before covering an immense territory’, he writes in Les Lois Sociales (a slightly more disciplined and better composed book published in 1898)(116).11 Tarde is so completely reductionist than even the standardization – so typical of macroscopic effect – is always brought back to the influence of one element from below – but ‘below’ is of course not the right metaphor. Here again we should go slowly. The first difficulty is to grasp how the big manages not to emerge out of the small but to foreground some of its features. Tarde’s answer appears pretty strange at first: If we look at the [human] social world, the only one we know from the inside, we see the agents, the humans, much more differentiated, much more individually characterized, much richer in continuous variations, than the governmental apparatus, the system of laws and beliefs, even the dictionaries and the grammars which are maintained through their activities. A historical fact is simpler and clearer that any mental state of any of the actors [participating in it]. (69) As in Stendhal’s novel, The Charterhouse of Parma, Fabrice at Waterloo fills a more complex world than the entire history of the battle that Napoleon has waged – and lost, as any Eurostar commuter like me knows too well. Tarde can be said to have invented microhistory many decades before its discoverers, in the same way as he invented ANT long before we had any inkling of what a network looked like, when he wrote in Les Lois Sociales (LS) this stunning research programme: In general, there is more logic in a sentence than in a talk, in a talk than in a sequence or group of talks; there is more logic in a special ritual than in a whole credo; in an article of law than in a whole code of laws, in a specific scientific theory than in the whole body of a science; there is more logic in each piece of work executed by an artisan than in the totality of his behaviour. (115 LS)

Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social 123 He goes so far, in his reductionism – or reverse reductionism, since the small is always more complex – that in M&S he uses the same argument on language, the holy place of structuralist explanations, the only indisputable case where the difference between langue and parole should be obvious – but not for him. People who speak, all with different accents, intonations, pitches, voices, gestures: here is the social element, the true chaos of discordant heterogeneities. But on the long run, from this confusing Babel, a few general habits will be outlined which can be formulated in grammatical laws. (74) Against any argument in terms of structure beyond or beneath speech acts, Tarde imagines a kind of sociolinguistics, of reverse pragmatics, in which the structure is only one of the simplified, routinized, repetitive elements of one of the locutors who has managed to include his or her local tradition into the general idiom.12 And there is nothing wrong with this standardization and extension, since it will immediately allow the monads to differ again, as he quickly adds, continuing the above-quoted sentence: In turn, those [grammatical laws,] since they allow many more locutors to speak together, will help them to find a specific turn of phrase: yet another kind of discordance. And those laws will succeed all the more so in diversifying the minds that they will have been better fixed and more uniform. (74) Macro features are so provisional and have so little ability to rule over occurrences that they only manage to serve as an occasion for more differences to be generated! Instead of a structure of language acting through our speech acts, the more structural elements float around in the shape of grammars, dictionaries, exemplars, the more they will allow speech acts to differ from one another! Nowhere has the branch of pragmatics dared to go so far as to say that the structure of language is one speech act among billions of others, a coordination tool that pushes even further the proliferation of differing locutions. The treatment meted out to language gives us an idea of what Tarde is going to do for the social. Instead of moving from, say, Goffman to Parsons, when going from face-to-face interactions to ‘bigger’ social structures, Tarde retains the same method for all levels – and anyway, there are no levels. Another long quote is necessary here, so odd is the argument at first. To grasp it, the reader should remember that the big is never more than the simplification of one element of the small: Let’s insist on this crucial truth: we are led to it when we remark that, in each of those vast regular mechanisms – the social, the vital, the stellar, the molecular – all the internal revolts that succeed in breaking them are

124 Bruno Latour provoked by an analogous condition: their components, soldiers of those various regiments, provisional incarnations of their laws, pertain to them by one aspect only, but through their other aspects, they escape from the world they constitute. This world would not exist without them; but they would subsist without it. The attributes each element owes to its incorporation in its regiment do not form its entire nature; it has other leanings, other instincts coming from previous enrolments; and some which derive from its own store, from its own proper substance, to fight against the collective power, of which it is a part, but which is only an artificial being, made only of facets and façades of beings. (80) This is an extraordinary picture of a social order constantly threatened by immediate decomposition because no component is fully part of it. Every monad overspills the artificial being of any ‘superior’ order, having lent, for allowing its existence, only a tiny part, a façade of itself! You can enrol some aspects of the monads, but you can never dominate them. Revolt, resistance, breakdown, conspiracy, alternative is everywhere. Doesn’t one have the impression of reading Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux? The social is not the whole, but a part, and a fragile one at that! Understandably, no position could be further from the professional reflex of the social sciences. As Tarde explains with some passion in Les Lois Sociales: It is always the same mistake that is put forward: to believe that in order to see the regular, orderly, logical pattern of social facts, you have to extract yourself from their details, basically irregular, and go upwards until you embrace vast landscapes panoramically; that the principal source of any social coordination resides in a few very general facts, from which it diverges by degree until it reaches the particulars, but in a weakened form; to believe in short that while man agitates himself, a law of evolution leads him. I believe exactly the opposite. (114 LS) To be a good sociologist one should refuse to go up, to take a larger view, to compile huge vistas! Look down, you sociologists. Be even more blind, even more narrow, even more down to earth, even more myopic. Am I not right in invoking Tarde as my grandfather? Is he not asking us to join what I have called ‘oligoptica’ instead of panoptica? Is he not advocating what I have called the ‘flat society’ argument? The ‘big picture’, the one that is provided by that typical gesture of sociologists – drawing with their hands in the air a shape no bigger than a pumpkin13 – is always simpler and more localized than the myriad monads it expresses only in part: it could not be without them, but without it, they would still be something. Far from being the milieu in which humans grow and live, the social is only a tiny set of narrow, standardized connections which occupies only some of the monads some of the time, on

Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social 125 the condition that their metrology be strictly enforced and upkept before being inevitably broken up by the inner resistance of the pullulation of infinitesimal actants. As soon as you leave those tiny networks, you are no longer in the social, but down in a confusing ‘plasma’ composed of countless monads, a chaos, a brew, one that social scientists will do anything to avoid looking straight in the eye.14 There was no way, it should be clear by now, that Durkheim and Tarde could reconcile their view of the social, even though they agreed to criticize Spencer. They both believed that Spencer’s biological metaphors were useless for understanding human societies, but for totally different reasons. Durkheim opposes Spencer because the sui generis human society is irreducible to biological organisms. Tarde opposes Spencer because there exist no organisms anyway: since all organisms are societies, human societies cannot be an organism, and certainly not a superorganism. This common rejection does not mean that our two forefathers agree, however, because of an argument that Durkheimians to this day have never forgiven Tarde for making: they have simply taken the explanandum for the explanans. Tarde expresses his surprise at Durkheim’s use of the word sociology with great politeness, but also with devastating irony, when he writes in LS: [My conception], in brief, is almost the reverse of that of Mr Durkheim. Instead of explaining everything by the so-called imposition of a law of evolution which would constrain larger phenomena to reproduce, to repeat themselves in some certain identical order, instead of explaining the small by the large, the detail by the big, I explain the overall similarities by the accumulation of elementary actions, the large by the small, the big by the detail. (63 LS) It is not only the case that Durkheim has taken society as the cause instead of seeing that it is never more than a highly provisional consequence, used as a mere occasion for monads to differentiate yet again, he also has made, according to Tarde, the more damning mistake of distinguishing social laws from the agents acted on by those laws. ‘We have just seen that the evolution of sociology has led it, here as elsewhere, to descend from the fanciful heights of vague and grandiose causes to the infinitesimal actions which are both real and precise’ (118 LS). As we saw in the earlier quote, Tarde cannot believe that ‘while man agitates himself, a law of evolution leads him’. There is no law in social theory that could differ from the monads themselves. It is this distinction between a law and what is subject to the law, no matter how obvious it is for the rest of the social sciences, that Tarde has dismantled with his monadology. This complete shift in epistemology is the last, but also the most arduous point I want to tackle in this chapter. But before getting his argument right, we have to understand why he too has made the study of science central to his argument in social theory.

126

Bruno Latour

Science studies as the testbed of social theory When Tarde wishes to present the best case of what he has in mind when analysing human societies, it is always the history of science that comes forward. He puts science studies dead in the centre of social theory, a good eighty years before they were invented! Is the reader now convinced that he is our ancestor and that I am not making up this genealogy simply out of fear of embracing an orphan theory? For all the other aspects of human societies, the paths that lead a monad to its spread (we would say the actor and its network) may be lost or erased through custom and habit. There is one exception, however, which makes it the most telling example for social theory, and that is the way scientific practice goes from one tiny brain in an isolated laboratory all the way to become the race’s common sense. The traceability of science is complete:15 As to the scientific monument, probably the most grandiose of all the human monuments, there is no possible doubt. It has been built in the full light of history and we can follow its development almost from its first inception until today.…Everything in it finds its origin in individual action, not only the raw material, but also the overall views, the detailed floor plans as well as the master plans; every thing, even what is now spread in all the cultivated brains and taught in primary schools, has begun in the secret of a solitary brain. (125 LS) In the same way that no one can claim that society is bigger than the monads for the human society we see from the inside, no one can claim for history of science that there exists a Zeitgeist somewhere, or a culture that could explain (away) why any innovation has spread from one place to the next. We might not be able to document all the moves that make human society coherent through influence, imitation, contamination and routinization, but we can document these moves for the unique case of the history of science, since we benefit from the high-quality tools of what we would call nowadays scientometrics. When a young farm boy, facing the sunset, does not know if he should believe his schoolteacher asserting that the fall of night is due to the movement of the earth and not of the sun, or if he should accept as witness his senses that tell him the opposite, in this case, there is one imitative ray, which, through his schoolteacher, ties him to Galileo. No matter what, it is enough for his hesitation,16 his internal striving, to find its origin in the social. (87–8 LS) We should not be put off by the notion of an ‘imitative ray’. Tarde’s vocabulary is a bit odd, but any reader of mimetics can replace imitative ray by any other more modern metaphor for mutation, kinship selection, reproductive

Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social 127 strategy and the like. We may also use the notion of an actor-network to account for the link between Galileo’s discovery and the farm boy’s hesitation. Nor should we be worried that we have traded a sociological theory for a psychological version, as if Tarde was appealing to individual scientists as innovators to make his point. Although this is what Durkheimians have tried to make him say, no sociology was ever further from psychology than Tarde’s.17 How can one make the author of the following stunning sentence the ancestor of methodological individualism? ‘In any one, if we look carefully, we will find nothing but a certain number of hes and shes that have blurred and confounded themselves through their multiplications’ (61 LS). Exactly as in ANT, whenever you want to understand a network, go and look for the actors, but when you want to understand an actor, go and look through the net at the work it has traced. In both cases, the point is to avoid the journey through the vague notion of society. This is why the word ‘scientific genius’ takes on under Tarde’s pen a very strange meaning: we are suddenly faced with a complete redistribution of agencies, not only into countless other scientists, but also brain states. What does it mean for us to say that any psychic activity is linked to bodily apparatus? Only that in a society, no one may act socially, may reveal themselves in any specific way without the collaboration of a great many other individuals, most of the time ignored. The obscure workers who, by the accumulation of tiny facts, have prepared the apparition of a great scientific theory by a Newton, a Cuvier, a Darwin, constitute in some sense the organisms of which those geniuses are the souls; and their work is nothing but the cerebral vibrations of which this theory is the consciousness. Consciousness here means the cerebral glory, in some way, of the most influential and the most powerful part of the brain. Left to itself, a monad can do nothing. (66) And this is the man who has been charged with the sin of psychologism, individualism and, even worse, spiritualism! The one who dared to reduce Newton’s mechanisms to the ‘gloire cérébrale’ of some brain states! Even Richard Dawkins, a militant defender of Allan Sokal’s epistemology, has not dared to reduce his innovations to the mutations of some parts of his brain which are fighting for supremacy: This is why any social production having some marked characteristics, be it an industrial good, a verse, a formula, a political idea, which has appeared one day somewhere in the corner of a brain, dreams like Alexander of conquering the world, tries to multiply itself by thousands and millions of copies in every place where there exist human beings, and will never stop unless it is kept in check by some rival production as ambitious as itself. (96)

128

Bruno Latour

‘To have or not to have, that is the question’ It is at this point that Tarde’s epistemology really begins to pay off. As is clear from the last quote, the agencies to deal with, the ones we really have to consider if we wish to explain something, are neither human agents nor social structures, but the monads themselves in their efforts to constitute unstable aggregates, what we would call actants or world-building entelechies. Science is not what allows us to study the monads from the outside, as if we were finding the laws of their behaviour, but one of the ways in which they spread and make sense of their world-building activity. Contrary to Leibniz’s monads, they are not connected by any preestablished harmony, and of course for Tarde, there is no God to hold together or pacify his specific brand of metaphysical Darwinism.18 (Leibniz) had to invent preestablished harmony, and for the same reason materialists have to invoke, to complement their erratic and blind atoms, universal laws or the unique formula to which all those laws could be reduced, a sort of mystical commandment that all beings would obey and which would emanate from no being whatsoever, a sort of ineffable and unintelligible verb which, without having ever been uttered by anyone, would nonetheless be listened to always and everywhere. (56) In this extraordinary sentence, Tarde sends both materialists and spiritualists back to the drawing board, since they both make the distinction between the actions of the agent and the laws that act on those agents. To speak of laws of nature which preside over the activities of blind atoms, is even more spiritualist than to endow those atoms with some will and purpose, since it implies that those laws are ‘listening to’ and ‘obeying’ some voice which has never been ‘uttered by anyone’. Materialists believe in the ‘mystical commandment’ because their epistemology divorces science from what actants themselves do when they try to make sense of their own aggregations. In a way, a good thirty years before Whitehead, Tarde tries to find a solution to the ‘bifurcation of nature’.19 Instead of having two vocabularies, one for the agent and one for the causes that make the agents act, one can make do with only one, on the condition of allowing the agent to concentrate the whole under some sort of point of view or folding:20 as I have already quoted, a monad is ‘a universe in itself, not only a microcosmos, as Leibiniz intended, but the cosmos conquered in its entirety and absorbed by a single being’ (57). The sciences – or more exactly the collective theories acting on their own by propagation from brain state to brain state – are also launching themselves on this conquest, but in so doing they don’t write the laws of nature, they add more differences to it. ‘In the bosom of each thing, there resides every other thing real and possible’ (58). We may now be better equipped to grasp the sentence from Monadologie et Sociologie which would have so much influence on Deleuze:

Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social 129 To exist is to differ; difference, in one sense, is the substantial side of things, what they have most in common and what makes them most different. One has to start from this difference and to abstain from trying to explain it, especially by starting with identity, as so many persons wrongly do. Because identity is a minimum and, hence, a type of difference, and a very rare type at that, in the same way as rest is a type of movement and the circle a type of ellipse. To begin with some primordial identity implies at the origin a prodigiously unlikely singularity, or else the obscure mystery of one simple being then dividing for no special reason. (73) But what will be the bridge allowing one to go from one difference to the next? Identity is ruled out. What then? Possession! In one of the most important sentences of his work, Tarde remarks almost in passing: So far, all of philosophy has been founded on the verb to be, the defining of which resembles the discovery of the Rosetta stone. One may say that if only philosophy had been founded on the verb to have, then so many sterile discussions, so many mental falterings, would have been avoided. From the principle ‘I am’, it is impossible to deduce any other existence than mine, in spite of all the subtleties of the world. But affirm first the postulate ‘I have’ as the basic fact, then that which is had as well as that which has are given at the same time as inseparable. (86) There goes Hamlet, as well as Descartes with his cogito and Heidegger with his Being qua Being, together with countless homilies about the superiority of ‘what we are’ above ‘what we have’. Quite the opposite, Tarde instructs us. Nothing is more sterile than identity philosophy, not to mention identity politics; but possession philosophy – and perhaps possession politics? – creates solidarity and attachments that cannot be matched. For thousands of years, people have catalogued the many ways of being, the many kinds of beings, and no one ever had the idea of cataloguing the various kinds, the various degrees of possession. Yet possession is the universal fact, and there is no better term than that of ‘acquisition’ to express the formation and the growth of any being. (89) If essence is the way to define an entity within the ‘to be’ philosophy, for the ‘to have’ philosophy an entity is defined by its properties and also by its avidity. There is no escape from Tarde’s logic: take any monad, and if you look at what are its properties and its proprietors, you will be led to define the entire cosmos, which would be impossible had you only tried to define the essence of an isolated identity.

130

Bruno Latour

This rejection of the philosophy of identity has one final consequence, which is of course crucial for us ANT sociologists: the status of non-humans, for which we have so often been criticized. The crossing of the boundary between humans and non-humans has raised many problems for our readers, and is often taken as the foundation stone on which our social theory should stand or fall. But Tarde offers, a hundred years in advance, a much sturdier solution to this problem, when he shifts attention from essences to properties. ‘The whole outside universe is composed of souls different from mine, but, in effect, similar to mine’ (44). This is not, in spite of the word ‘soul’, a spiritualist argument, but only a way of ending a hypocrisy that claims to say what nonhumans are – their identity – while meticulously abstaining from saying what they want – their avidity, possessions or properties. After Descartes, away goes Kant and his thing-in-itself: To say that we don’t know the being-in-itself of a stone or of a plant, and at the same time to continue saying that they are, is logically inconsistent; the idea that we form of those entities – and it is easy to show this – has for content our mental states, and since, if we empty those mental states, there is nothing left, either we say nothing more than this content when we affirm the existence of that unknowable substantial X, or we are in fact forced to confess that in pretending to say something else, we are saying nothing at all. But if the entity in itself is similar, in effect, to our own being, it can be affirmed, since it is no longer unknowable. (44) The logical impossibility that has been so vehemently criticized in ANT scholars – how can you impute will and belief to scallops, microbes, door closers, rocks, cars and instruments when it is always you the human that does the talking – finds in Tarde a radical but healthy solution: if you don’t want to share avidity and belief with the things you have, then you must also stop saying what they are. The accusation is upturned and the burden of proof shifted to the accusers. Abstain from the ridiculous solution of saying that things exist in themselves but that you cannot know them. Either you talk or you remain silent. But you cannot possibly speak and say that the things you speak about are not in some ways similar to you: they express through you a sort of difference that has you, the speaker, as one of their proprietors. What looks like an impossibility for the philosophy of identity, offers no difficulty for the philosophy of ‘alterity’. Possession is another way of talking about translation. After this all-too-brief presentation of some of Tarde’s arguments in the metaphysics of social theory, we may now understand why so much of ANT appears difficult, and why Tarde’s tradition is, so far, without real descendants: sociologists don’t want to be had.

Gabriel Tarde and the end of the social 131

Notes 1 For a review of recent discussions, see Law and Hassard 1999. 2 Mucchielli 1998. For a rather biased rendition of Tarde’s work see Milet 1970. 3 Tarde maintained a steady constituency in the United States because of his work on imitation, influence and media, and has been considered a founding father of communications studies. But this view has been maintained by completely obliterating his social theory and, above all, his metaphysics. 4 Published as an article in 1893 in Revue Internationale de Sociologie and recently republished as a volume (Tarde 1999a new edition). I will also use some passages of Tarde (1999b new edition). For writings in English, see Tarde (1969) and The Laws of Imitation, which has seldom been republished. 5 It can be argued that he needed the internet, since the possibility of following up interactions in a detailed way has become possible only very recently, see for instance Rogers and Marres (1999) which uses, without knowing it, a very Tardian methodology. 6 Mucchielli (2000), in a damning article against ‘Tardomania’, resents this use of an author who should be dead since, he argues, we are separated from him by such an infinite distance. But I don’t share Mucchielli’s historicism and consider that the best way to deal with dead authors is to resurrect them as if they were alive today to help us to think. 7 Who benefited much more from Tarde than is visible in the long note in Deleuze (1968: 104). 8 Blackmore (1999) does not mention Tarde, which is very unfair since mimetics is a simplifed version of monadology. Tarde, for instance, would never make the mistake of distinguishing genes from memes. See Marsden (2000). 9 This is very close to the notion of entelechy or actant I have developed (Latour 1988a), unfortunately without the benefit of Tarde. 10 I have tried it many times, from ‘Unscrewing the big Leviathans’ (Callon and Latour 1981) to a photographic essay (Latour and Hermant 1998) without managing to convince sociologists. Ethnomethodologists have also failed, being always brought back to a ‘micro’ definition of their method in spite of their clear commitment to looking at ‘macro’ building sites with the same ‘micro’ eyes (Hilbert 1990). 11 Tarde 1999a, new edition. 12 Ethnomethodology and the pragmatics that has come out of it would today be the only field of linguistics as daring as this: no structure, but lots of locally produced structuring effects without privilege over speech acts. 13 On the ‘big picture’ that is never bigger than the small, see Latour (1988). 14 On plasma, in addition to Latour and Hermant (1998) see Didier (2001). 15 This is why the internet seems to me such a Tardian technology: it allows any rumour, any news, any piece of information, any buying and selling to become as precisely traceable as science was a century ago through the writing of papers and reports and the painstakingly produced web of references and quotations. This is a further case of the general scientificization of societies. 16 Hesitation is a key element in Tarde’s sociology, being especially well developed in a stunning book on the anthropology of economics (Tarde 1902). 17 He is always very careful in making the distinction between ‘intra-psychology’ – the ones he does not deal with, and ‘interpsychology’ – which is a synonym for sociology. The reason why he uses this expression is exactly the same as that which forced us to use the term ‘actor-network’ to avoid the agent/structure dichotomy. 18 And needless to say that Tarde would make mincemeat of the liberal economics projected by mimeticians onto genetics and cultures in order to decide what constitutes a success. To spread your definition of what constitutes success is one of the metaphysical controversies for which monads compete. In here as elsewhere, he is more Darwinian than the neo-Darwinians.

132

Bruno Latour

19 Whitehead (1920), in a difficult but essential book, has used the same problem as that of the farm boy faced with two contradictory interpretations of the same sunset: for the key notion of event, see Whitehead ([1929] 1978). 20 For the notion of fold with special reference to Leibniz, see Deleuze (1988), translated as Deleuze (1993).

References Blackmore, Susan (1999) The Meme Machine, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Callon, Michel and Latour, Bruno (1981) ‘Unscrewing the big Leviathans: how do actors macrostructure reality’, in Knorr, Karin and Cicourel, Aron, Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro and Macro Sociologies London: Routledge, 277–303. Deleuze, Gilles (1968) Différence et Répétition, Paris: PUF. —— (1988) Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque, Paris: Minuit. —— (1993) The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, London: Athlone Press. Didier, Emmanuel (2001) ‘De l’échantillon à la population’, doctoral thesis, Paris: Ecole des Mines. Hilbert, Richard A. (1990) ‘Ethnomethodology and the micro-macro order’, American Sociological Review, vol. 55, 794–808. Latour, Bruno (1988a) Irreductions: Part II of The Pasteurization of France, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1988b) ‘A relativist account of Einstein’s relativity’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 18, 3–44. Latour, Bruno and Hermant, Emilie (1998) Paris, Ville Invisible, Paris: La Découverte/Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. Law, John and Hassard, John (1999) Actor Network and After, Oxford: Blackwell. Marsden, P. (2000) ‘Forefathers of memetics: Gabriel Tarde and the laws of imitation’, Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission. Milet, Jean (1970) Gabriel Tarde et la Philosophie de l’Histoire, Paris: Vrin. Mucchielli, Laurent (1998) La Découverte du Social: Naissance de la Sociologie en France, Paris: La Découverte. —— (2000) ‘Tardomania? Réflexions sur les usages contemporains de Tarde’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, vol. 3, 161–84. Rogers, Richard (2000) Preferred Placement Knowledge Politics on the Web, Maastricht: Jan Van Eyck Akad. Rogers, Richard and Marres, Noortje (1999) ‘Landscaping climate change: mapping science & technology debates on the World Wide Web’, Public Understanding of Science. Tarde, Gabriel (1902) Psychologie Economique, Paris: Félix Alcan. —— (1969) On Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers, ed. Terry N. Clark, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— (1999a) Les Lois Sociales, new edn, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. —— (1999b) Monadologie et Sociologie, new edn, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond. Whitehead, Alfred North (1920) The Concept of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1978) [1929] Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, New York: Free Press.

8

The place of space in the study of the social Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan

A conception of space as a naturally given, grid-like platform for human conduct has become a notion that critical investigators can neither completely live with nor without. Although a ready tool for conceiving the spatial dimensions of human practice, it is also a recently invented and problematic metaphor. Cultural historians of the invention of space as an abstract framework of extension have shown that pre-modern thinkers were not prepared to imagine that qualitative settings of life could be suspended in a homogeneous medium or system of points. The ancient Greeks, for example, disassociated the three-dimensional coordinates of Euclidean geometry from the physical volumes of daily experience.1 Not until the seventeenth century did Europeans consider it reasonable to reduce concrete volumes to a homogeneous system of points. Today, by contrast, geographers, historians and sociologists ask how modern social life generates and is constituted by such frameworks of abstract space. Mary Poovey clarified this modern notion of space by analysing it as isotropic (as everywhere the same) and as reducible (or already reduced) to a formal (that is, empty) schema or grid.2 It establishes a featureless, purely extensional arena for action apart from its occupation by an embodied agent. Poovey, as well as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey and Edward Casey, have endeavoured to show how a confluence of events – including acceptance of the Cartesian worldview, new bureaucratic states, and homogenizing flows of commodity exchanges – sponsored the emergence of abstract space in practice.3 Yet, in our view, these prominent and inspiring inquiries into abstract space as an empirical phenomenon have not stimulated corollary reflection on the concept’s status as a metaphor in the social sciences. No doubt abstract space ‘happened’ in Europe in the course of the seventeenth century – it became an everyday premise for scientists, army officers, administrators and real estate surveyors. The concept has become so taken for granted, however, that critical investigators still treat it as automatically applicable to socio-historical inquiry due to its expression of natural reality. For example, recent debates about state centrism, forms of territorialization, and global re-scaling have turned on the social parcelling of abstract space rather than on the imaginary functions of abstract space as such.4 To disentangle the dual status of the concept of abstract space – as an historically operative component of social practice and as a purely

134

Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan

analytic fiction – we will retrace the procedures by which a notion of abstract space became indispensable to modern Western theories of the social and to many vindications of modern knowledge-making. To illustrate the value of these concepts for the practice of research, we uncover crucial misinterpretations of evidence in contemporary sociology that have resulted whenever researchers move from abstract space as a mere metaphor towards assuming it also reflects the essence of spatial processes. We move past the simple critique that all notions and practices of space are constructed, to find that even purportedly critical analysts of the social rely on unquestioned presumptions regarding the relationship between space and the social. To illuminate abstract space’s status as metaphor, it is useful to juxtapose it with place, the prevailing approach to the spatial until the early modern era.5 In the idea of place, the presented loci are defined by the layout of a setting for practice, including the apertures, connections, inclines, or dividers in the built or natural environment. This qualitative, historically specific configuration has a systematic relation to the bodies of the agents who participate in the creation of that place and whose actions proceed through time. Like abstract space, place should be appreciated both as an empirical happening and as an analytic device. Place as happening grasps individuals’ rootedness in locale and the dependence of their memory on the particularities of the physical and cultural environment.6 As an analytic device, place refers to the circumstance that agents are not merely located at a simple point in a grid, but occupy and define the world through the unfolding of practice. Whereas the category of space as pure extension may be intrinsic to the mind, perceptible regions in the lifeworld can be identified only by way of the body. Areas (over here and there) and directions (forward, across) are definable in practice based only on the prior orientation that the bilateral make-up of our body provides.7 As Immanuel Kant argued, even a representation of over here and there, such as that of a map, can be positioned for use only if we in some way grasp it in relation to our right and left hands or the front versus back of our body.8 As an analytic device, place suggests that our orientation in the world is constructed out of the order of the body in situ. By contrast, the theory of the social uses the trope of abstract space to reduce human practice to disembodied intellectual and formal transactions.

Abstract space as a device for constituting the social The dominant concept of the social in use today derives from the theorists of the eighteenth century who built it on a concept of abstract space imported in part from aspects of natural science. To be sure, the spatial underpinnings of the social are usually overlooked in favour of overt moral themes. The concept of the social marked the enigma that agents follow their own character or goals within the conventions of a setting while they do not singly or collectively command the pattern of interaction they create. To the contrary, the aggregate outcome is more perfectly arranged than any individual could have intended.

The place of space in the study of the social 135 This problematic of the social organized not only Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, in which an invisible hand providentially calibrates individuals’ creative labours, but the works of David Hume and Adam Ferguson as well.9 The social therefore entailed both a mode of individual conduct and an emergent order that was almost godly in its superiority to human planning. The social consecrated autonomous action by individuals who were stripped of the constraints of tradition and the restraints of exclusivistic social solidarities.10 Perpetual, autonomous action by individuals in the open, abstract space of the public order comprised the energy of development. Theorists constituted the social by carrying out three operations, each of which depended essentially on abstract space. First, analysts reduced the practices that unfold through concrete sites of the lifeworld into generic unit acts that are merely formal and relational, and that were therefore inserted into space by simple location in a plane or shared arena. Since the unit acts were not embedded in space by their material and corporeal features, they were rendered independent of the lived topography of any place (and did not unfold processually in experience). Smith, for example, detaches both the act of labour (the self-acquisition of vendable wares) and the act of exchange from any particular kinds of physical execution. He recasts labour as an unobservable, homogeneous element that is defined relationally through circulation among networks of exchangers. In sum, Smith situates agents by their exchanges with each other in abstract space, rather than by their practice at a site.11 This positioning of action as a set of formal relations on a platform is preliminary to the second operation for theorizing the social, envisioning an analytically closed container. Since the agents’ actions are defined only relationally, an ideal arena of space must be partitioned for those relations to cohere. Only through this analytic closure of region can a providential order emerge. Analysts of the social therefore sought to hypostasize a bounded arena and, as it happened in Britain and France, the nation state came readily to hand. The problematic of the social required as much as it reflected the hypostatization of the nation state. Finally, analysts call on a notion of abstract space to imagine that individuals interact in an empty, transparent medium. That premise is requisite for imagining that every action, a sheer figure, is intelligibly and systematically connected to the others. Space becomes a medium of exchange rather than a place for use. It is this formulation that we find not only in Smith and his contemporaries, but also, in modified form, in contemporary studies of the social world. The prevalence of these three operations makes plausible an historical continuity between the theorists of the social in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the leading empirical investigators of the social in the present day, a point to which we will return.12 A brief look at the work of Emile Durkheim illustrates how the three operations of the social – creating unit acts, encircling space, and emptying space – remained central to classical sociological theory. In The Division of Labour, the enigma of the social cannot emerge in traditional communities, where no

136

Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan

individual could conduct themselves independently. In these traditional settlements, individuals automatically followed shared prescriptions aimed directly at achieving a collective structure based on cultural uniformity and spatial proximity. Durkheim used a metaphor of clumpy, sponge-like space – an alveolar system – to characterize the traditional settlement of territory. The fraternities to which individuals belonged were concentrated around small foci and separated by cultural and territorial vacuums.13 Within these foci, the environment was essentially concrete because individuals were equally close to influential landmarks.14 Thus ‘the whole tribe, provided it is not too extensive, enjoys or suffers equally the advantages and inconveniences of…a particular river or spring’. But as interchanges connect diverse places, ‘the common consciousness is itself forced to rise above all local diversities.…There is no longer [a] question of…this spring, but these springs; not this forest, but forest in abstracto’.15 Members of a society come to share not a common experience, but a common representation of an abstracted experience, disengaged from a specific time and place. So long as collective life was attached to place and topography – so long, that is, as space was defined by agents’ identical relations to landscape rather than their differential relations to each other – no impetus for an intensified division of labour could exist. Only with the introduction of a sufficiently large, homogeneous arena that formally situated each agent in relation to all others, could the systemic principles of occupational differentiation and integration come into play. Society, Durkheim summed up, became general and its morals came to dominate more the available space.16 In Durkheim’s account, as in that of other sociological philosophers of history, the emergence of action patterned by the logic of the social follows upon the emergence of abstract space as a determinant reality in history. Durkheim creates the requisite closed container by arguing that the current borders between states are elemental and unalterable, since social interchange in each province exists only as part of an entire system, the nation.17 For the final analytic operation – envisioning territory as an empty, transparent medium – Durkheim frequently asserts that the natural landscape does not intrude upon the logic of social space. For example, he argues that variation in soil, climate, and other environmental endowments does not lead to economic specialization except as commanded by the autonomous moral principles of the division of labour.18 The division of labour attaches individuals to distant counterparts by formal interdependency in the social system, and disengages individuals from their physical places of life and residence.19 Most specifically, Durkheim argues that the sale of land and the transformation of sites from the often sacred places of collective tradition to indifferent, interchangeable bases of action is requisite for the emergence of a social system. So long as law and morals make the inalienable and indivisible nature of immovable property a strict obligation, he said, the conditions necessary for the division of labour cannot yet exist.20 Durkheim consecrates abstract space as an intrinsic product of history rather than a perspectival experiment.21

The place of space in the study of the social 137

The place of space in history Even critical histories of the rise of abstract space as a construct – and of its purely operational realism – have unintentionally embedded the concept more deeply into our practices of research. The celebrated Henri Lefebvre, for instance, describes abstract space as a product and weapon for state-led projects to dominate nature and to transform the environment into a simple medium for capitalist exchange. In his view, the more nearly the state approaches its goal, the more space becomes thoroughly abstract. This process necessarily obliterates what he calls absolute space, the kind of place that has not been relativized by functional exchange, and that remains rich with face-to-face interaction, unique meanings, and cyclical rather than linear time.22 In Lefebvre’s account, the privately owned Roman villa heralds the onset of abstract space, and subsequent history concerns the increasing domination of abstract space over absolute space. Lefebvre makes an assertion with which few social analysts could disagree – that space must be ‘more than the passive locus of social relations, the milieu in which their combination takes on body, or the aggregate of the procedures employed in their removal’.23 But he locates the value of his insight in a successful interpretation of the real conditions of social organization, and the historical ascendancy of abstract space over the specificities of place. By viewing abstract space as a reflex of the actual functioning of a naturalistic system of capitalism, Lefebvre interprets the metaphor of abstract space as a by-product of the real, and thus shares the classical move of equating abstract space with modernity.24 By insisting that abstract space has only a nominal status, we believe we are better able to specify its entry into historical process. Narratives that explain the emergence of abstract space by independent developments in the social infrastructure (like those of Durkheim and Lefebvre) grant formative influence to objective processes such as state centralization and the scope of markets and communications. In such accounts abstract space is an objectively real platform of institutions that are expansive and homogeneous. In our view, however, abstract space plays a role in history in part as an imaginary convention. For example, in some accounts the rise of the nation state and of integrated national markets is supposed to have supplied the real infrastructure for the idea of a large, interdependent social system and therefore for abstract social space. Yet we would reverse the reasoning, and make the convention of abstract space cause as much as effect. Drawing on Poovey’s evidence in this volume (Chapter 3), we suggest that the development of the nation state and of its market networks depended – the other way around – on the imagination of abstract space and on theories of the social that could reify the nation as a closed container and legitimate it as a self-regulating system. When relations in a closed space seemed to exhibit a providential order – the work of an invisible or divine hand – the legitimacy of the national market and state that enabled that order to reveal itself received a powerful reinforcement.25 Other social reductionist accounts of the rise of abstract space appear equally simplistic when tested against the historical record. For instance, some theorists

138

Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan

explain the rise of abstract space in Europe as a product of the cartographic techniques of administrators who sought to map and homogenize territory for rational administration.26 Here, too, we ought to reverse the direction of causality. Studies of state-building suggest that the cultural techniques of singlepoint perspective, which projected space as a pregiven framework for what it contained, were requisite for rulers to map territory from a central, fixed viewpoint. Historical analysts have concluded that the linear projections of single-point perspective were therefore a cultural precursor and precondition of the nation state’s spatial organization of sovereignty.27 Even as part of the phenomena of history, therefore, abstract space has a nominal status as part of practice on the ground. Although a narrative based on intellectual or cultural determinism would be as facile as one based on social reductionism, the evidence encourages us to consider how the concepts of abstract space and theories of the social followed their own intersecting logics. Abstract space in social thought emerged as part of larger intellectual endeavours, not as a mirror of institutional functioning or demographic transformation, and continues to be a significant component of social inquiry.

Evidentiary fallacies of abstract space Compared to classical theorists of the social, many contemporary sociologists begin by accentuating the conventional status of abstract space. They thereby clarify the conceptual necessity (or at least the convenience) of the joining of abstract space and the social. Harrison White, perhaps the preeminent sociologist of networks, called attention to this fusion of space and the social as a chicken-and-egg conundrum.28 Before relations between agents can be formalized in a network, White concluded, we require a notion of social space – of the shapes and surfaces that predetermine possible locations and ties. In his view, such space may even be curved or non-linear. Yet we believe that if abstract space is thereby accepted as constitutive of the social as an object of history, it inevitably leads to the misconstrual of evidence. The missteps that occur are well typified by reconsidering a hard-nosed case study. Roger Gould’s influential Insurgent Identities ranks among the best exemplars.29 Gould compares the influence of the urban social environment on two of the most celebrated revolutionary engagements in history, the June Days of Paris in 1848 and the Commune of 1871. His network analysis is more than a fascinating exercise: Paris’ monumental uprisings remain critical for assessing the role of the liberal capitalist city as a fashioner of struggle for political transformation. To explain the origins of these uprisings, he begins by contrasting the class ‘compositions’ of the arrondissements (a figure for aggregations in areal space) that participated heavily in the insurgency with those of the arrondissements that remained relatively inactive. In doing so Gould treats the neighbourhoods of Paris as a homogeneous medium filled with individuals of varying socioeconomic characteristics. Then he calculates the composition of areal units by the number of working-class individuals. He infers that the social density of

The place of space in the study of the social 139 workers in abstract space creates supportive social networks, the prerequisite for their participation in revolutionary action. In particular, his statistics from the June Days of 1848 show that workers on the whole were far more inclined to join the uprising than nonworkers; but workers who lived in the most exclusively working-class districts (above all, the eighth and twelfth arrondissements) were even more likely insurgents than workers in areas with mixed populations.30 In keeping with the logic of abstract space, however, the action has simple location on a grid and does not extend through concrete places to unfold in time. Instead, analysis pivots on two static photographs: of the distribution of workers in linear space the instant before revolt, contrasted with the distribution of arrestees at the revolt’s end. The cultural organization and temporal flow of the practices of street insurgency in 1848 are disregarded as independent sources of variation in the intensity of battle. Gould’s euphemism for combat in the cannon’s mouth – ‘participation’ – creates a generic ‘unit act’ with simple location, whereas the rebellion came to life through the techniques of organizing barricades at street intersections, squares, and thoroughfares. What were the repertoires for using space to erect and defend a barricade? By what contingent process was such know-how passed on and applied? In the hour of conflict, how was the process of recruiting individuals to barricades enacted through the neighbourhood? His conclusions about the power of the social in zones that are each treated as a tabula rasa are easily challenged, then, by considering the unfolding of action in place. At ground level, the rebellion came to life through the techniques of organizing barricades at street intersections and squares. After 1830, memory of the precise locations of barricades in past Parisian insurrections served as a script for reconstructing them in renewed political crisis. Residents erected barricades at corners that were important in local revolutionary memory but that sometimes were disadvantaged from the viewpoint of lines of fire and communication. Since barricades were frequently constructed by residents living adjacent to the sites, the memory of how they were built and how they connected to nearby passageways facilitated their reappearance in the identical place as if by magic.31 Neighbourhoods more intensively saturated with this past history in place (such as the eighth and twelfth arrondissements) offered the impetus and resources for more intensive mobilization in the political crisis. To be sure, streets do not transmit memory on their own. The preservation of inherited lore flows through networks of communication. Yet this inherited lore constitutes a resource for mobilization in its own right, and the sudden triggering of new cooperative networks to do the dramatic work of barricade building depended on the physically anchored culture of buildings and street – that is, it depended on ‘place’. Attributing the key correlation for 1848 (that between the composition of districts that were historically commanded by workers and the rates of worker participation) to networks alone is not only spurious reasoning, but a logical error built into the concept of abstract space:

140

Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan

the concept installs a tabula rasa by reducing the long unfolding of what Alfred North Whitehead termed a ‘total event’ to simple locations in the immediate, physically measured present.32 The reduction of action in abstract space also attributes a false power to social networks, by ignoring the variation in patterns of revolt that derived from the temporal flow of practice at concrete sites. The maintenance of barricades and recruitment to them depended on the initial balance of power on a neighbourhood block and the contiguity of that block to other blocks successful in the uprising. As Tocqueville’s colourful memoirs remind us, in more heavily working-class areas, where the initial testing of forces proved favourable to workers, insurgents required pedestrians who encountered barricades to add paving stones or other materials to the barrier before receiving permission to walk on.33 Giving passers-by this intermediary level of engagement allowed them to try on the role of insurgent before joining up. Workers who were isolated in bourgeois neighbourhoods were less likely to be mobilized due to the swift dismantling of barricades in their immediate vicinity, independent of the antecedent structure of these workers’ social ties in space.34 Only a model of politics that reduced insurrection to the mental decision of each individual to participate – to vote, so to speak, in abstract space – could have overlooked the variable constitution of practices by place and by temporal process. Explanations of insurrection in 1848 based on place are logically preferable because they account for the precise sites of the uprising. Above all, explanations based on place are immediately and constitutively linked to the physical execution of insurrectionary practices, whereas diverse social networks in space (which Gould postulated rather than measured) represent a chronologically and situationally more remote background condition.35 The empirical faux pas we uncover here – treating space as a dehistoricized platform and ignoring the constitution of practices by place – are endemic to sociological studies of urban life and of state organization.36 Should the entire concept of the social, then, be jettisoned due to its reliance on dubious reductions of abstract space? Eradicating abstract space from theory is not necessary if the difference between space as nominal tool and as an ultimate substance of historical process is kept in view. Nor is it possible to banish abstract space from analysis, due to the functioning of global economic and cultural networks today that use it as their premise. Critical geographers such as David Harvey suggest that abstract space is a second nature that comes to life through capitalist practice. In a particular epoch of commodity exchange, across all cultural and geographical locales, it acquires an operational realism that we need to analyse rather than either deny or take for granted.37 For this task of criticism it is crucial to unravel the whole cloth of logic that led analysts to reify abstract space as a transhistorical category in the first instance. We need to look beyond the single thread of how it served the problematic of the social. Above all, reifying abstract space as a substance has been pivotal to the undertakings of much of modern Western philosophy and science at large.

The place of space in the study of the social 141

Abstract space and reason We can illustrate the central epistemological problem that abstract space solved for modern inquiry by considering its role in Kant’s extraordinary essay of 1784, ‘What is enlightenment?’. Kant portrays intellectual advance as a process of learning to judge for oneself. But he also contends that the individual in isolation cannot move beyond accustomed habits of deferring to the ready advice of appointed authorities. ‘Only an entire public together can undertake to disseminate the spirit of rational respect…for the duty of all men to think for themselves’.38 In the Critique of Pure Reason, of course, Kant had appealed to this public as a kind of law tribunal that would correct the steps of inquiry.39 In that epochal work, Kant had to throw into question the natural self-sufficiency and transparency of reason for the sake of critiquing it. Kant also jettisoned the dominant pre-modern trope for thought, that of solitary, silent communion with God.40 The operation of reason, no longer transparent to the individual, became public and social, developing through the evaluative know-how of an epoch.41 This fateful shift in the foundation of knowledge took place across multiple fields of inquiry. In the natural sciences, for example, it was played out in early controversy over the novel status of laboratory findings. Shapin and Schaffler have shown how scientific inquiries after the seventeenth century came to depend less upon universal experience and deductive reasoning, each verifiable by the solitary individual. Instead, inquiry relied upon experiments sequestered in specially equipped theatres. To qualify the resulting findings as genuine knowledge, scientists developed collective institutions for ‘virtual witnessing’. That is, they developed conventions of reporting, portraying and publishing that enabled scholars to accept the laboratory trials as knowledge even if these were not personally glimpsed or replicated. ‘Virtual witnessing acted to ensure that witnesses to matters of fact could effectively be mobilized in abstract space, while securing adequate policing of the physical space occupied by local experimental communities’.42 Knowledge became authentic through transmission in an ideal social domain.43 But if genuine knowledge is transcendent and objective, how can it depend upon a wordly public and a contingent traffic in ideas? Western philosophers called on abstract space to address this dilemma. In Kant’s view, voluntary action and free intellectual reasoning cannot take place in any concrete place of collective assemblage: neither in the lecture hall nor in the municipal assembly. In these tangible locales, individuals become pliable members of collective institutions. By contrast, a person who speaks as a scholar through his writings to his actual public, namely the world at large, ‘enjoys an unlimited freedom to exercise his reason and to speak in his own person’.44 Kant creates independent, freely reasoning agents by removing them from any locale and by placing them in an abstract public sphere of the written and published word. The exercise of reason via print is free because the physical situations of author and reader are irrelevant. The public the author addresses is not a geographically bounded audience; it is, in Kant’s words, simply the ‘world at large’ or the reading world.45

142

Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan

The creation of abstract space in this way solved the epistemological puzzle of imagining that genuine knowledge was both social and transcendent. It enabled Kant to conceive a social infrastructure of reasoned communication that was not contaminated by the particularity of place or by the domains of corporeal or arbitrary political necessities. Kant’s public space did not demarcate distances between individuals, but established a blank common ground on which all could meet. Classical sociology explored the conditions necessary for such a public space to come into its own. Durkheim posited a divide similar to Kant’s between traditional non-voluntary action in place, where thinking is bound by local, particular categories (mechanical solidarity) versus contemporary voluntary action in abstract space, where thinking calls upon universal, general categories (organic solidarity). ‘Religious beliefs in less advanced societies carry the imprint of the soil upon which they are formed’, Durkheim wrote with a graphic accent on the spatial anchor. ‘Today, the truths of science are independent of any local setting’.46 Detachment from one’s locale and orientation towards functional counterparts in a far-reaching division of labour in abstract space marked the contemporary era of objective science. Once key components of Western science and philosophy acknowledged their constitution by a collective process of enlightenment and public examination, they required a notion of social interaction in abstract space to vindicate not only the generality of their categories.47 They also required the invention of a developmental history that proceeded out of interaction in limited, concrete locales and moved towards exchanges in abstract space so as to sanctify the incomparable character of modern knowledge-making. Not just the problematic of the social, therefore, but the epistemology of modern, publicly secured knowledge converted abstract space from a pure construct and normative ideal for rational communication into the essence of a natural historical process.48 We believe that recent studies of the constitution of knowledge by place offer a crucial counter-perspective that highlights the questionable status of abstract space. From the perspective of place, knowledge is constituted by spatial arrangements because it acquires its meaning, reference, and authority through the design of the local setting in which it operates. Many recent researchers have hesitated to take on abstract space as a premise of inquiry, and instead turn to a historical specificity of place. Works that illustrates the breadth of this important trend, and that offer a suggestive antidote to some of the methodological troubles that accompany the presumption of abstract space, include Chandra Mukerji’s research on the material culture of the centralizing French state; Mark Traugott’s recovery of the cultural repertoires of barricade building in revolutionary Paris; and Oleg Kharkhordin’s analysis of the techniques of the self in Soviet Russia.49 Investigators pursuing this path of inquiry have followed two basic strategies to show how knowledge that seems built into the form of social relations in an abstract realm (projected by the analyst) can be reinterpreted as products of the concrete designs of place. First, as anthropologists have long demonstrated, the comprehensive layout of buildings and settlements brings corresponding codes or categories to life.

The place of space in the study of the social 143 This approach, illustrated by Lévi-Strauss’ view of the circular villages of the Bororo as well as by Clark Cunningham’s elegant analysis of the Antoni house, establishes a paradigmatic relation between knowledge and place.50 Nowadays historians are moving out from pre-literate culture to contextualize the most generic and widespread categories of our own era as well. In Capital, of course, Marx called on a theory of the social to show how human labour assumed the form of an abstract substance. In his model of the fetishism of commodities, for example, he postulated a society of private, independent commodity producers who met only in the moment of exchanging their products in abstract space.51 Turning to the place where workers executed and exchanged their labour suggests more concretely that definitions of labour as an abstract substance were defined and transmitted through the spatial configuration of work. In nineteenthcentury German factories, floor plans laid priority less on reinforcing a building’s perimeters than on sequestering workers within the room where they actually put their body to task. Factory design in Germany thereby defined the conveyance of abstract labour in the form of labour power. In Britain during the classical era of the factory, a fortress design emphasized the conveyance of labour in finished products. Comparative analyses of the minutiae of architecture reveal how a general, putatively objective category of capitalist thought – labour as a kind of substance – took shape through local differences in practices in place.52 As a parallel example, Miles Ogborn suggests that our understandings of ‘private’ and ‘public’, pivotal for modern-day culture, were moulded in part through such quotidian issues as how streets that connected private homes and public circulation would be paved and maintained.53 A second broad strategy establishes an ironic rather than a paradigmatic relation between knowledge and place. This strategy asserts that the components of science and philosophy depend for their meaning and reproduction on the surreptitious design of places that contravene these explicit principles. Much of the work of Michel Foucault is a definitive example of this approach. In Discipline and Punish Foucault contends that noisy Enlightenment discourse, with its emphasis on contractual, juridical and egalitarian relations among political subjects, derived its credibility from insidious practices that constituted those subjects. Foucault analyses place as a visual field and collection of spatial implements designed to turn individuals’ bodies into objects of surveillance and of subtle control. The spatial configurations of contemporary institutions – workplaces, prisons, schools and hospitals – enable knowledge-bearing elites to impose relations of power that are asymmetrical, scrutinizing and indirectly coercive. Yet these spatial apparatuses, by focusing on the calculable interior of each individual, also make real the concept of an individual rational soul, the basis of the proliferating discourses of freedom and social contract. ‘The disciplines, real and corporeal’, Foucault argued, ‘constituted the foundation of the liberties, formal and juridical’.54 Foucault’s provocative sketch has driven a surge of research into the built environment, though not because of the platitude that practice contradicts ideals.55 The stakes are higher: the epistemological dependence of immaculate philosophy on its dirty opposites.

144

Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan

Foucault suggests that the human subject does not have a simple location in space, but is constituted by and inseparable from oppressive spatial instruments of place; that ideals come to life through the body; that universalistic philosophy remains dependent for its meaning on the material specificities of locale; and, finally, that scientific concepts are indeed public, but not in abstract social space, only in the local sites of surveillance and bodily domination. This work has been taken up by thinkers like Charles Rosenberg, who contended that the experience of nineteenth-century hospital architecture, not experiment, subtly manufactured belief in atmospheric notions of infection.56 What empirical support do these radical propositions enjoy? Historians and sociologists of science have followed Foucault’s lead by studying scientific practice at particular sites, and how agents generalize local findings. They have determined that experiments and procedures that are ostensibly defined independently of any particular social context, ironically depend upon local know-how and architecture in research sites. A bold illustration comes from Myles Jackson’s study of Joseph von Frauenhofer’s laboratory for diffraction gratings in Napoleonic Bavaria. Von Frauenhofer’s unique lab procedures were confined by the layout and contemplative rituals of the Benedictine cloister he purchased for his research site.57 In contrast to Foucault’s emphasis on domination, however, these more detailed studies have underscored how configurations of place shape knowledge by establishing protocols for its acceptance and by widening trust.58 Unlike the classical theories of the social, these new studies of knowledge-making in place suggest that the local is not always a danger to generalizable science, and sometimes is a resource for fabricating it.

Conclusion Many before us have made a distinction between space and place, but nearly always as descriptions of the real make-up of empirical systems, not as nominal artifices of inquiry.59 We maintain that neither space nor place is simply something that happens out in the world, but rather that both are methods that social analysts apply in setting out to study the world. Above all, we do not suppose that place is restricted to small-scale, face-to-face interaction, or space to social networks and macro-level circuits. The distinction between space and place is not a re-encoding of the micro-versus-macro debates or lifeworldversus-system debates in sociology. We can apply the perspective of place to appreciate how space happens in history, and the perspective of space to understand how place happens. For example, Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s celebrated study of travellers’ positioning and experience of the body in nineteenthcentury railway carriages applies the perspective of place to circulation in space. It recasts the creation of a new kind of abstract social landscape in which the coordinates are simply travellers’ experience of perpetual commercial traffic in parcels, both human and inert.60 Conversely, James Holston’s landmark study of Brasilia starts from the perspective of the positions of individuals in homogeneous, interchangeable spaces, and concludes by illuminating the unforeseen

The place of space in the study of the social 145 historical creation of tradition-filled place.61 Here, the birth of an entire city is premised on administrators’ modernist faith in the power of abstract space, made real, to create an ostensibly egalitarian society. Holston’s contrasting of the plans for the city with daily life decades later offers a provocative account of ‘unruly’ subjects who mould abstract space to fit their own habits, rather than the other way around – the imposition of order through the clean lines and visible coordinates of the master plan. In the current state of play, then, the strategic choice for researchers is not whether to accept the reality of space versus that of place, but how to articulate their relations as both potentially complementary constructs and as historical occurrences. In this interplay, theories of the social remain figures of fictional space. The relations between space and place that we are trying to highlight for socio-historical research today have always played an unacknowledged role in the tournaments of science. Whereas some, such as Newton, used mathematical analysis to reduce and homogenize phenomena in abstract space, other pioneers, such as Robert Boyle, supposed that careful observation of the texture of everyday phenomena would show how each comprised its own local sphere of particles and motions. Steven Shapin’s review of natural science has shown how the two outlooks have historically intersected.62 To assume that science has sponsored a uniform view of the spatial, or, more generally, that the modern era acknowledges only abstract space, is to overlook genuine complexities of practice. As Ian Burney has made pains to point out, these two strains of scientific practice refute a monolithic notion of science – natural, social and otherwise – as seamlessly abstracting.63 Indeed, we take the resonance and exemplary status of studies that probe the relations between place and space as a footing for our agenda. The seriality and interchangeability of modern places – lines of cells, columns of desks, formally equivalent positions – produced segmented, immobile, frozen space.64 Foucault suggests in short that the design of place can link persons and materials into larger networks – into a social system, if you will, in abstract space. By applying the prospect of place to modern space, he reverses the valences of classical social theory: in his example, the abstract social space of modernity arises from corporeal fixity (not mobility); from surveillance (not from the decline in collective scrutiny); from the concretization of power in place (not from detachment from setting). Historians and sociologists are adopting comparative methods to expose to empirical trial many of Foucault’s specific hypotheses – tracing, for instance, whether differences in spatially organized surveillance correlate with differences in the forms of modern individuality.65 But Foucault’s work also illustrates the exciting issues that remain: can we explain the configuration of place without invoking larger macro-level forces as determinants that use place as their instrument? Must we analyse place as an embodiment of material culture, or can place become purely an invention of the collective imagination? What forms can agency assume if we see the place-world and the body as primary constituents of action, not just as scenes or instruments for agents’ minds?66

146

Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan

The tantalizing question is how investigators will continue to link their appreciation of embodied action unfolding in place to encompassing interchanges in networks or systems. It is premature to specify all the strategies for making this link, but promising experiments are at hand. Patrick Joyce’s recent work on the spatial manufacture of the bourgeois city suggests that the configuration of place (from the layout of streets and buildings to the organization of sanitation) is literally the material ground for creating self-regulating individuals. He offers a model of how the normative ideal in eighteenth-century theory – a liberal order of civil exchange – relied in nineteenth-century practice in Britain on configuring the places to which individuals learned to relate their bodies. Unlike Foucault’s model, in which place eliminates genuine movement and appears to strip agents of creativity, Joyce’s research shows how place also has an enabling function, encouraging individuals to develop the self-monitoring selves that make up a liberal society. By an analogous logic, Sudipta Kaviraj’s fascinating work on India reveals the consequences for concepts of the civic body and of social action, when cities develop with weak corporate controls over the design and use of space outside the home. Kaviraj suggests that the streets in Calcutta, rather than serving as a theatre for practising self-regulation in the open spaces of the ‘public’, encourage subjects to express class resentment in open spaces as private individuals.67 Kaviraj’s study reverses Foucault’s emphasis on place as an arena of authoritative, state-sponsored control. Yet both Joyce and Kaviraj show how place defines the very substance, not simply the scope, of social networks. In addressing these issues, we expect that historical investigators will broaden the scope of cultural theory to consider analytic philosophies of science and practice.68 The methodological difficulties we face in relating practice to the spatial were glimpsed by analytic philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century.69 In particular, Whitehead argued that natural scientists’ assumptions about space comprised a stunning example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.70 Whitehead contended that when we reduce space to a metric background, we inscribe positions separate from the processes we apprehend. He emphasized that it is more legitimate to examine total events in which space is a variable attribute of complex entities and of our experience of them. In abstract space, by contrast, things occupy a point that locates them apart from their essential processes and features, and apart from the flow of time. In actuality a happening has this kind of simple location, Whitehead explained with a subversive analogy, only in the same way that a person’s face fits on to the smile that spreads over it.71 We hope here to have propelled further discussion of the paradoxical relations between the smile and the face.

Notes 1 For a breathtaking account of the disjuncture between geometry and physical experience in Greek antiquity, see Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1954) 24.

The place of space in the study of the social 147 2 Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 17, 29. 3 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 4 Neil Brenner, for example, begins a critique of the use of abstract space, but does not extend it beyond criticism of the state-centrism of recent work on globalization ‘Beyond state-centrism? Space, territoriality, and geographical scale in globalization studies’, Theory and Society, 28 (1999). 5 The Fate of Place, 133–5. For bibliographical references that develop the distinction between place and space, see J. E. Maplas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 21ff. For sources on the revival of place since Heidegger explored the distinction, see Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) 316. For an encyclopaedic effort to analyse configurations of place in the built environment, see Bill Hiller, Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 6 For an analysis of how collective memory remains attached to concrete places in contemporary urban life, see Jennifer Jordan, ‘Building culture: urban change and collective memory in the new Berlin’ (Ph.D. Diss., University of California, San Diego, 2000). 7 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999) 30–1. 8 ‘Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden in Raume’, in Immanuel Kant, Vorkritische Schriften bis 1768 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963) 996. 9 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976) vol. I, 477; Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (8th edn, Philadelphia, 1819) 221–2; on David Hume, see Poovey’s discussion in ch. 3 of this volume. 10 On the blank ‘social space’ that offered ‘common ground’ to all individuals in the eighteenth-century theory of the social, see Allan Silver, ‘ “Two different sorts of commerce”: friendship and strangership in civil society’, in Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (eds) Public and Private in Thought and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 54–5. 11 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I, 41, 112. 12 On continuities between the eighteenth-century theorists of the social and the sociologists of networks today, see ‘ “Two Different Sorts of Commerce” ’, 67 n63. 13 The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, 1984) 201. 14 The Division of Labor, 229. 15 The Division of Labor, 230. 16 The Division of Labor, 230. 17 The Division of Labor, 104. 18 The Division of Labor, 207. 19 The Division of Labor, 241. 20 The Division of Labor, 227. 21 For parallels in the work of other classical social theorists, see Jennifer Jordan, ‘The “forest in abstracto”: land and modernity in classical social theory’, paper to the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, 1998. 22 The Production of Space, 287, 307. 23 The Production of Space, 11. 24 The Production of Space, 307.

148

Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan

25 See this volume, pp. 152–4 26 The Production of Space, 285. 27 See John Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and beyond: problematizing modernity in international relations’, International Organization, 47, 1, winter 1993, 159. 28 Harrison C. White, Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 311. 29 Roger Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 30 Insurgent Identities, 53. 31 Mark Traugott, ‘Les barricades dans les insurrections Parisiennes: rôles sociaux et modes de fonctionnement’, in La Barricade: Actes du Colloque Organisé les 17, 18, et 19 Mai 1995 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997) 74; Laurent Clavier and Louis Hincker, ‘La Barricade de Juin 1848: une construction politique’, in La Barricade, 212. 32 See note 69 below. 33 Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970) 140. 34 On the relative absence of circulation of workers between districts, see Clavier and Hincker, ‘La Barricade de Juin 1848’, 212. 35 None of these three evidentiary misconstructions would be remarkable if Gould’s study included statistical evidence about workers’ social networks in 1848. One might expect data on the distance between individuals’ places of work and their residences; data on whether individuals’ ties at work really spilled over to other realms of sociality; or information about social bonds, measured, say, by marriage records, the homogeneity of bar clientele, or the make-up of neighbourhood clubs. 36 For urban sociology, see Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Massey and Denton argue that spatial segregation promotes growing divergence in black versus white speech patterns by reducing interracial interaction. The authors thereby reduce cultural practice to a generic act – ‘communication’ – among individuals who have simple location in areal regions, the census tracts (163). 37 David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000) 57–60. 38 ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’, in Was ist Aufklärung? Aufsätze zur Geschichte und Philosophie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994) 56. 39 Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1990) 7, Axi. 40 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 15–16. 41 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 7, Axi. 42 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffler, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 336. 43 Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 106–8. 44 Was ist Aufklärung?, 58. 45 Was ist Aufklärung?, 57, 58. 46 ‘Morphologie sociale’, L’Année Sociologique 1898–1899 (Paris: G. Baillière, 1900) vol. 3, 557. 47 Habermas continues this separation of knowledge from the social dynamics of place with his notion of ‘autonomous public spheres’ for reflective discussion in rationalized cultures. See, illustratively, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990) 325, 365. 48 For another example from classical sociology, see Georg Simmel, ‘Ueber räumlichen Projektionen socialer Formen’, Zeitschrift für Socialwissenschaft (Berlin: George Reimer, 1903) vol. 6, 297.

The place of space in the study of the social 149 49 Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Traugott op. cit.; Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 50 Clark E. Cunningham, ‘Order in the Antoni house’, in Rodney Needham (ed.) Right & Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) 204–38. Lévi-Strauss’ dissection of the ground plan of Bororo villages is especially compelling because of comparative evidence isolating the effect of the circular configuration of place. Persons who were forced to live in rows of parallel dwellings rapidly lost touch with native religion. The religious system was so complex, LéviStrauss concluded, it could live only through ‘the schema made patent in the lay-out of the village’. Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955) 250. 51 ‘Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products’. Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1980) vol. 1, 73. 52 Richard Biernacki, The Fabrication of Labor (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995) 128–43. That the supposedly abstract form of socialist conceptions of labour refracts through place and is transformed, surprisingly, into individualism and entrepreneurship. The Object of Labor: Commodification in Socialist Hungary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 53 ‘The street’, in Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York: Guilford Press, 1998) 75–115. 54 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) 224. 55 For a more scholarly survey of the architectural designs that Foucault only glossed, see Thomas Markus, ‘Buildings for the sad, the bad and the mad in urban Scotland, 1780–1830’, in Thomas Markus (ed.) Order in Space and Society: Architectural Form and its Context in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1982) 25–114. 56 Charles Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System (New York: Basic Books, 1987) 138–9. 57 Myles W. Jackson, ‘Illuminating the opacity of achromatic lens production: Joseph von Fraunhofer’s use of monastic architecture and space as a laboratory’, in Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (eds) The Architecture of Science (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999) 141–63. 58 For a survey, see Steven Shapin, ‘Placing the view from nowhere: historical and sociological problems in the location of science’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 23, 1998, 5–12. 59 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995) 123. 60 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986) 194. 61 James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 62 The Scientific Revolution 49, 116. 63 In his critique of Poovey’s reading of science and medicine, Burney concludes that science is not as abstract or abstracting, as homogeneous or homogenizing, as Poovey asserts. She fails to turn her sophisticated tools of critique to the domains of science and medicine and, worse, in his view, she bases much of her analysis of the ‘social body’ on an improperly seamless vision of modern science. Ian Burney, ‘Bone in the craw of modernity’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 4, 1, 104–16. 64 Surveiller et Punir, 198, emphasis added. On the creation of ‘collective, homogeneous space’, see Michel Foucault, Naissance de la Clinique: Une archéologie du Regard Médical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963) 198. 65 Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) 113–15.

150

Richard Biernacki and Jennifer Jordan

66 For a promising sketch of such a theory, see Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 161–3, 167–70. See also Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: The City and Modern Liberalism (London, Verso, forthcoming 2001). 67 ‘Filth and the public sphere: concepts and practices about space in Calcutta’, Public Culture, 10, 1, Fall 1997, 111. 68 For illustrations, see John Dewey’s assessment of how the relations between science and practice define contemporary issues for cultural theory in The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: Minton, Balch, 1929); and Elizabeth Ströker, Investigations in Philosophy of Space (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 1987). 69 Durkheim attacked the American pragmatists’ conclusion that abstract space is a construct, not an objectively given truth, as a threat to the foundations of sociology. See Emile Durkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 41, 53, 91–2. 70 A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938) 66. 71 Science and the Modern World, 89.

9

The spaces of clock times Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

Introduction We started to work on the book that is now called The Measured Heart more than ten years ago through one of those fortuitous coincidences that characterize academic life: we happened to bump into each other on the stairs and both – rather grumpily – expressed our mutual amazement at a statement made by E. P. Thompson in his then latest book – Customs in Common (1991) – which found Thompson arguing that since his seminal 1967 article ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, ‘while interesting new work has been done on the question of time, none of it seemed to call for any major revision of my article’ (viii). We therefore decided to embark upon just such a major revision – using the interesting new work which had been done on the question of time. In this task we were aided by another fortunate coincidence. For, at about this time, a whole raft of work which had been going on in the social sciences was coming to fruition, a way of understanding the constitution of societies which we might call ‘lighter touch’ (see e.g. Dosse 1999; Thrift 1996; 2000). Instead of conceiving of societies as stamped out by social structures through a set of more or less formal correspondences, this way of understanding conceives of societies as loose formations of practices which are alignments of the human and nonhuman translated into particular kinds of engagement with the world. Instead of conceiving of societies as just remorseless circuits of social reproduction, this way of understanding conceives of society as a set of flickering horizons of ‘experience’ in a state of continual becoming without any resolution. Instead of conceiving of societies as fired by identity and contradiction, this way of understanding makes room for the distribution of differences through the emergence of manifold spaces and times. In other words, this was a more modest approach to understanding the social which depended upon a ‘philosophy of epistemological detail’ (Deleuze 1994: xix), the foregrounding of tacit knowledge (Rheinberger 1997), and ‘knowing interestingly’ through the development of rich and original articulations (Latour 2000). Thus, rather as proponents of new historicism like Gallagher and Greenblatt (2000: 19) would have it,

152

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift Each time we approached that moment in the writing when it might have been appropriate to draw the ‘theoretical’ lesson, to scold another school of criticism, or to point the way toward the paths of virtue, we stopped, not because we’re shy of controversy, but because we cannot bear to see the longer chains of close analysis go up in a puff of abstraction. So we sincerely hope that you will not be able to say what it all adds up to; if you could, we would have failed.

Histories of practices Fine words. But such a stance is much easier to proclaim than write, and it has taken us more than ten years to produce a theoretical/empirical account with which we feel reasonably happy, a book consisting of a set of histories of clock time in England between 1300 and 1800. The book has proved particularly difficult (though also particularly enjoyable) to write, for at least three reasons. First, there was the overwhelming dominance of E. P. Thompson’s paper ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, which for many seemed to have provided the definitive historical account beyond which there was no need to go. Second, there was the problem of how to understand ‘clock time’ itself; what was ‘it’?: a mode of time ‘consciousness’ (implying a psychologistic perspective); an inauthentic time gradually deadening the world (implying a Heideggerian or even Marxian perspective); a time of practico-inert beings becoming animated and also animating the networks in which they exist (implying an actor-network perspective); and so on. Third, there was the problem of sources. Clock time, by its nature, is not much remarked upon. It is all but extra-archival. Witnesses are silent. Records rarely exist. In particular, we wanted to know how clocks were used in the practices of everyday life. On this aspect of clock time witnesses seemed all but mute. The extant literature surmounts this problem by a mixture of ungrounded anecdote, literary sources which are nearly all heavily rhetorical, and consequently need greater care of interpretation than they have usually received, and a few generalities gleaned from Thompson – and le Goff and Landes – which echo endlessly around, often seeming to confirm one another. To counter this tendency, we had to invest large amounts of time in work in the primary sources, of which the most important have been: probate inventories, court depositions, churchwardens, parish and borough accounts, directories, diaries and journals, newspapers, and antiquarian compilations. In this paper, we want to problematize writing on clock times by considering some of the practices of clock time. Notice straightaway the focus on practices: we are interested less in what is meant by actions – an approach with too many humanistic resonances – than in what actions do. We are particularly interested in everyday practices, the accumulation of small differences upon which larger events often hang. But the mention of the term ‘everyday’ (with its own temporal implications) brings us to a further problem. For the invocation of the everyday in history, as in other disciplinary contexts, brings with it a legacy of expectations. The

The spaces of clock times 153 ‘everyday’ has been a topic of importance in its own right in history since at least the writings of the Annales School and, after Thompson’s (1968: 13) attempt to rescue the common people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, it has taken on a political charge as well. There have, of course, been a number of highly successful models of how to breathe life into the everyday and with it to import ‘the human dimension, for one thing; local variation, for another; the fact that societies consist of women as well as men, for a third’ (Blackbourn 1998: 114). One model is to take a limited and specific historical event, usually dramatically transgressive, and attempt to unpack and impute its meanings. This is the domain of, for example, Carlo Ginzburg’s (1980) The Cheese and the Worms and Natalie Zemon Davis’ (1983) The Return of Martin Guerre. But this model is more than usually beset by problems of inference which are often overcome by sheer good writing. For example, although Davis writes very openly about problems of evidence, she also achieves the effect of plausibility by implicit rhetorical strategies. One recurring pattern is a paragraph in the subjunctive that is rounded off with a ringing indicative which has the effect of overriding all that carefully expressed doubt. (Blackbourn 1998: 116) Similarly, Ginzburg’s rhetorical devices – short episodic scenes (or ‘takes’), sudden shifts in the time sequence, the repetition of uncontextualised phrases as leitmotifs – depend on withholding information from the readers, then suddenly disclosing it. Davis places her characters’ psychological motivation at the centre of her narrative, constantly echoing fictional forms. (Blackbourn 1998: 119) Another model is to take a place and fill it out, as in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s (1978) Montaillou. Such a model, through the accumulation of small events, can produce that spirit of place which so many historians have wanted to conjure up. Then the third model is an attempt to meld these two models together, by producing an account which concentrates on an event but shows how it is born out of a place and cannot be separated from it. For example, Blackbourn’s (1993) Marpingen, a study of popular beliefs in nineteenth-century Saarland, sets out to enact a transgressive event (apparitions of the Virgin Mary) within a very definite context which, to a degree, motivates it. Each of these models is a remarkable one. Though sometimes marred by sentimentality, a certain lack of ambiguity concerning the motives of those brought ‘back to life’, and a tendency to paint characters as victims, their power cannot be gainsaid. They are clearly able to conjure up those alternative territories that ‘bleed out from within and around the repetitions and cycles of [day-to-day] life’ (Seigworth 2000: 255). But, at the same time, these were not

154

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

models that we could easily follow, because their attempts to perforate and puncture the historical grand récit by producing a different texture of signification tend to omit the non-human dimension. Given our subject – clock times – we could not afford to take that course. Most social history writers have, until quite recently, not so much avoided as taken the object world for granted, have assumed it can be encompassed in aggregate trade and property statistics, or have left it to a specialized subfield, like the history of science. This is no longer an adequate response. The object world is, in part because it has been problematized and in part because ‘technology’ is now so much a part of our lives, becoming an important part of historical endeavour; witness, for example, the recent outpouring of books on consumption (e.g. Brewer and Porter 1993; Jardine 1997), the increasing interest in the history of sources as objects in their own right (e.g. Clanchy 1993; Chartier 1997) or the postcolonial interest in colonial trade (Thomas 1991). The models for considering an object world in which objects ‘become persons’ (Gell 1998) are, of course, various. At least four come to mind. One is the long anthropological tradition which has been forced to take objects seriously from its inception. A second is the archaeological tradition which has been similarly bound. A third is work in art history, which increasingly interacts with the first two. A fourth is the growth of approaches based in the sociology of science, like actor-network theory. How, then, to take the clocks in clock time seriously? The clocks nestling in the corner of parlours, going unremarked in the din of taverns, chiming from the towers of churches, beginning to be found, as watches, attached to clothing? There were three problems we had to overcome. One was how to think objects. In the end, we plumped for the kind of asceticism suggested by approaches like actor-network theory. In such an approach, objects are elements of networks which stress the principle that no particular kind of actor should be prioritized. Thus clocks have an effectivity which is born out of the networks into which they have been inserted. Then, in turn, we needed to identify the exact effectivity that the constituent elements of actor-networks can have – even ‘actants’ cannot escape what they are composed from. Therefore, rather more than actor-network theory usually does, we needed to emphasize the importance of bodies. One might, of course, argue that in recent work on the body, what we see is the ‘becoming-object of the subject’ (Boyne 1998: 62) but certainly we had to recognize that objects interact with one another and with bodies in ways which depend upon the different capacities of bodies to produce and arrange that interaction (as well as viceversa). We needed, in other words, some notion of differential skills as continual, more or less successful responses to ever-changing conditions (Ingold 2000). And, then, third, there were the questions of what devices themselves demand of bodies. Thus early clocks quite clearly demanded considerable attention to keep going; all kinds of often quite complex actions needed to be carried out regularly. Later clocks quite literally incorporated many of these actions into the machinery of the clocks themselves (Figure 9.1).

The spaces of clock times 155

Figure 9.1 Reducing human involvement in the operation of clocks. Fourteenth-century

clocks required continual human activity; by the seventeenth century several facets of human activity were less intense

If the clocks were problematic, so was time. It is received wisdom in the contemporary literature on time that time is heterogeneous, the composite effect of many different networks doing many different things to many different drums. However less attention is given to how these multiple times interdigitate, echoing backward and forward amongst each other. That they do is usually simply taken for granted. Yet our research on many of the networks that employed clocks in the period between 1300 and 1800 suggested not only that clocks were being used in many different ways – from the increasingly precise timekeeping required by the Royal Navy (driven by an ecology of devices as diverse as sandglasses, chip logs and quadrants) to the carefully judged procedures of many industries – but that these networks were also being brought together temporally in three ways. To begin with, the sheer density of clocks should not be underestimated. We estimate the number of clocks in England in c.1700 as approaching 200,000 (comprising between 3,000 and 5,000 ‘public’ clocks on churches, town and market halls, exchanges, gates and almshouses; plus over 150,000 ‘private’ domestic clocks and watches; plus several thousand clocks inside ‘quasi-public’ buildings, such as inns, alehouses, meeting rooms, workplaces, and suchlike). Then, there were increasingly effective discourses concerning the importance of exactitude which give a boost to the cause of clock time across a number of social arenas. These values of precision, and a corresponding trust in representations of exactness-like number, become general. The values of precision took a variety of forms, from a growing trust in number; to a more general fascination with numbers and notions of numerical representation with roots as varied as science, astrology, religion and trade; and to new uses of calculation in play, as well as in ‘serious’ activities. Last but not least, spaces came into existence in which numerous clock-using networks were intercalated. Clock time itself, of course, implies space – the

156 Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift spaces of local time, mean time, acceleration, and so on. Clock time also gains its power from its ability to coordinate and time quite different spaces. And clock time is concerned with the labour required to move from one position to another. That each hour, minute and second comes to seem as though it does not have to be negotiated but simply slides by, is the result of the density of intermediaries. (Latour 1997). In order to cope with the sameness of this variety, and the variety of this sameness, we therefore gradually distilled our thoughts into three main areas of enquiry into the history of clock time (Figure 9.2). The first of these forms of enquiry is discourses, especially of measurement and precision. The second line of enquiry is spaces, most especially urban spaces in which various networks are forced together and become tightly knit, so sharing the same times. The third line of enquiry is particular communities of practice, communities within which clock time is used in specific ways to specific ends. In turn, each of these three lines of enquiry has been passed through three different elements of clock time. First, and most obviously, there is the ‘ecology of devices’ (Hutchins 1995) through which discourses, spaces and communities of practice were ‘timed’. These would be very varied, including not only clocks but also all manner of other timekeeping devices – sundials, pocket dials, sandglasses, bells, astrolabes, and so on. Second, there were the embodied practices which increasingly incorporated clock time. As practices as diverse as music, dance, military drill, and a host of other activities began to bow to clock time, so we are able to see clock time being literally incorporated into everyday bodily stances and gaits. Then, third, there are skills. We consistently looked for evidence of differential timekeeping skills in the devices, space and communities of practice we examined. Each of the skills of time is distributed in communities like a map; not everyone knows them equally or practices them equally well. This is not just a matter of experience, but of talent and aptitude. There are limits to the degree to which drills can compensate for, for example, lack of dexterity. Ecology of DEVICES

Embodied PRACTICES

DISCOURSES of measurement and precision

Urban SPACES (multiple communities)

COMMUNITIES of practice

Figure 9.2 Components of this research project.

Timekeeping SKILLS

The spaces of clock times 157

Practices of everyday time In the remainder of this paper, we will try to follow through some of these points by summarizing some of the material provided in much greater length and detail in the forthcoming book. It is not our aim here to provide more than a set of indications of the arguments we make and the kinds of material that we have gathered. But we hope to communicate at least a flavour of our approach and findings by considering, first, our work on clock times in Bristol; second, how many and what kind of timekeeping devices were available; third, the means by which various forms of clock time precision were ‘translated’ between communities; and last, the different forms and usages of clock time precision in everyday life. Places as complexes of temporal communities In this first section we mainly call on material from our study of clock times in Bristol from the middle ages to the late eighteenth century. Throughout the period, the city accommodated numerous overlapping sets of people using clock times in the conduct of various activities. Some of these were the sorts of activities familiar from the literature on time discipline: the conduct of Christian life, ranging from the daily timetables of the numerous mediaeval religious houses, to the timing of services and celebrations in some eighteen parish churches; the regulation of trading at markets and wharves, with rights to buy confined to household, retail customers until after a given time had been signalled, and the like; the restriction of production to set hours, either as part of protecting craft guild monopolies, or because of genuine concerns with the quality of goods produced outside daylight hours; and attempts to maintain public order through curfews, control of alehouse opening hours, and so forth. Other uses of clock time were also disciplinary, but are much less prominent in the previous literature: clock time played an important role in both grammar and elementary schools from at least the early fifteenth century (obviously, long before E. P. Thompson’s emphasis on early nineteenth century schools as initiating the inculcation of clock time amongst children). Not only was the school day organized in terms of clock time, but significant elements of education, such as translation exercises, commonly included references to clock times and daily routines, in very matter-of-fact ways. Civic and county administration was another potent source of instructions couched in clock time, affecting not only the middling householders and local elites who sat on juries, but a much broader cross-section of the (male) population for musters, and similar occasions. Likewise, the organization of festivities and recreations frequently drew on clock times. In part, there was a public order dimension to large crowd events, whether wrestling matches, baitings, hangings, or the distribution of doles on civic holidays or parish anniversaries. From around 1550, the state-organized postal service required the endorsement of official communications with the time at which it passed through the hands of postmasters en route, in Bristol as in nearly two hundred other posttowns.

158

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

However, it would be grossly misleading to tie uses of clock time to disciplinary activities per se. A few examples will suffice. Very many small-scale and low-key leisure or recreational activities were arranged with reference to clock times. The entertainment of friends with celebratory meals on birthdays or anniversaries provides examples, as do funerals, and so too do meetings of clubs or societies, from angling clubs to meetings of literary and philosophical societies, from clubs of bell-ringers to those comprising natives of Cork. More generally, much informal face-to-face contact was arranged in terms of clock time, whether meetings to inspect or hand over goods, to pay debts or to settle wagers. After all, we would argue, it was precisely such personal contact which had most to gain from clock time: time and coordination were important for international merchants, but it’s hard to argue that clock time was any less relevant to the latter than it was to lovers arranging a tryst, or a suitor meeting his prospective in-laws. Times appear quite regularly in connection with gambling: bets on horse racing, for example, concerning the time taken to ride a given course, not simply whether one horse would beat another. Clock times also frequently appear as an element in narrating accounts of events. Such accounts take various forms. Witnesses’ depositions in court cases make ready use of clock times in describing how crucial events occurred, and to some extent temporal specificity seems to have been recognized as a potential indication of careful (and credible) evidence. But clock times are also found in several different types of letters, in autobiographical and biographical writings, and other descriptions which lacked a similar pressure to provide ‘objective’ indications of the truth of one’s account. The use of clock times in giving accounts of births and deaths was especially entrenched, and appears in various sources and circumstances, as an integral part of the practice of thinking about those vital events; the timings of funerals are among the circumstances in which the earliest uses of words like ‘precisely’ and ‘exactly’ are used to emphasize clock times (the earliest evidence here being from the mid-seventeenth century). We term the various usages of clock times (as practices which were deemed apposite in given circumstances) by larger or smaller groups of people, ‘temporal communities of practice’. Some communities we see as highly specific (e.g. astronomers, astrologers, mathematicians), others as less narrow and quite strongly applied in orientation (e.g. mariners, the military, civic officials, shipowners, shoemakers), and others as very extensive indeed (e.g. ‘the urban public’). Obviously, these communities are not mutually exclusive, and a person might be part of many such communities, both because of people’s multiple activities as parts of different communities of practice, and because different communities shared interests (e.g. the shared interest of astronomers and mariners in navigation). Having emphasized the number and diversity of ways in which clock times were put to use in late mediaeval and early modern Bristol in the remainder of this section, it is also important to underline that clock time was not a simple

The spaces of clock times 159 matter of the stimulus of the clock producing a homologous social response. A series of theoretical/empirical points needs to be made. The first point to make is that, though our focus has been clock time, we are not claiming that clocks necessarily caused the sorts of temporal orderings that we have described being undertaken. Many practices, both disciplinary and informal, had earlier incorporated notions of time and timing, through a mixture of environmental cues (solar position, perceived qualities of light or dusk, and so on) and the unequal (seasonally variable) ‘hours’ of the Christian liturgical day. Some such uses continued alongside the use of clock time, but we place most stress on the rapidity with which clock time was seized on and incorporated within those existing practices (and institutions). Clocks did not create senses of time, then, but they were taken up as a convenient and accessible tool in making existing practices more effective, in the process providing much of the language within which senses of time were expressed and communicated. Second, our use of ‘community’ of practice refers to communities as networks of contacts and shared practice. It is intended to convey a degree of bounding at any particular time, but without any sense that membership of one network precludes simultaneous membership of others. As must be evident, notions of such communities have generally been deployed in regard to relatively specialized groups, so we feel some uncertainty about extending it to what we term an ‘everyday public’ community. Third, it is vital to escape the strong sense of unidirectional change found in narrations of horological history as the genealogy of ‘the modern clock’. On the contrary, over time, particular communities of practice contracted and withered. Among large-scale, long-run societal changes, for example, the declining influence of religious houses saw a significant diminution in the circulation of associated temporal practices. At a smaller scale, highly specialized practices or skills might be (almost) completely lost. Such was the case at sea, where various complex navigational practices and skills were made redundant as instrumental technologies changed; and with several of the ways in which clockmakers attempted to communicate precision, when more accurate clocks became widely available in the late seventeenth century (e.g. Figure 9.1 p. 155). Fourth, coherence among communities of practice was contingent rather than necessary. In other words, quite different practices co-existed, over long periods, in Bristol as elsewhere. Thus reckoning in unequal hours continued through the fourteenth- and early fifteenth centuries, alongside growing use of mechanical clock-derived equal hours. One irony was that unequal hours continued in use for some prosaic purposes even after several religious buildings acquired mechanical clocks and adopted equal hours reckoning. Having originally made opportunistic use of church-based time-signals, they had acquired, as it were, a life of their own, as the ways in which other activities ‘had come to be done’. So in contrast to the horological literature’s search for ‘the sense of time’ in a given time and place, as a coherent whole, our point is that there was (normally) no such thing. Rather there were several coexisting practices of temporal reckoning, only some of which used clocks

160

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

(and might use clocks in various different ways). This proliferation of practices meant that ‘the sense of time’, thought of as a whole, was rather less than the sum of its parts. But so far as can be judged, this plurality of (partial) clock-time practices does not seem to have been experienced as incoherent by Bristolians. Fifth, we have placed unusually heavy emphasis on ‘everyday public’ practices as the central component of our account of times, compared with previous writers. The usual assumptions equate ‘specialized’ not only with ‘sophisticated’ and ‘advanced’, but also with ‘generative’. On that view, all new temporal practices originate within specialized communities, from which they spill over or diffuse into society more widely. Sometimes this is unarguably the case, but only sometimes. We do not see ‘everyday’ as synonymous with ‘unskilful’ or, necessarily, with ‘derivative’. The very generalized community of the ‘everyday public’ used clock time in a variety of relatively precise and sophisticated ways (e.g. everyday arrangements hinging on meetings-in-person, and face-to-face contact) compared with, for example, the international mercantile community (for whom written communications played a key role). Of course, time was certainly important for international merchants, and they used time and new temporal instruments, such as bills of exchange and other credit devices, with some precision. But this was not a precision of clock time as such, it was a precision of coordination over a timescale of weeks to months, rather than hours and minutes. This last point highlights another common but unexamined assumption about senses of time, namely how commonly it has been taken for granted that different scales of time-sense (precision; times of day; seasonality; life cycles; histories; cosmologies) co-vary as facets of a general time competence. This is reminiscent of longstanding assumptions (and disputes) regarding ‘general intelligence’ in IQ testing, and whether ‘measurements’ of linguistic, verbal reasoning, mathematical and spatial performance are, or are not, revealing facets of ‘general intelligence’, as an attribute of peoples or ethnic groups. In the case of time-senses and competencies, there is no necessity to see sophistication at one scale as having any implications for sophistication at other scales. And specifically, the ‘everyday public’, in our view, was relatively sophisticated regarding clock time, compared with other scales. Documenting the everyday Exploring our view of the everyday public ‘community’ as relatively sophisticated with regard to clock time is considerably impeded by the dual problems identified previously: that such things were rarely committed to writing; and that in any case very little documentation has survived. Particularly acute here, and sharply brought out by an explicitly retrogressive approach, is that the range of documented activities narrows sharply as we move back from the eighteenth century. Evidence for early uses of clock time is dominated by official documentary sources of one sort or another, and they deal overwhelmingly, and

The spaces of clock times 161 in a normative way, with regulatory activity, whether prescriptive or the product of (in a broad sense) policing. So sixteenth-century uses of clock times appear mainly in disciplinary contexts, compared with the eighteenth century, but this largely mirrors the respective ranges of source materials for those times. As a result, considerable interpretative weight rests on a relatively limited volume of exceptional types of early material. Here we briefly illustrate one element of the multi-stranded approach set out in the first part of the paper, namely the ecology of timekeeping devices, and the density of the temporal infrastructure. We can, of course, barely scratch the surface of the topic, but it is still worth asking: just how common were mechanical clocks, other clock-time keeping devices, and the skills involved in making, maintaining and (not least) ‘reading’ them? Taking the numbers and distribution of timepieces as central to an ecology of devices, it needs straightaway to be emphasized that E. P. Thompson, whilst quite correctly recognizing the lack of information then available, nevertheless massively underestimated the density of the temporal infrastructure in several ways: It is by no means clear how far the availability of precise clock time extended at the start of the industrial revolution.…there were plenty of watches and clocks around by 1800. But it is not so clear who owned them. (Thompson 1967: 56–97) Thompson was sceptical that pre-industrialization labouring people, or any but the ‘best-paid’ artisan, could have possessed timepieces, and hence lacked access to precise clock time. But the situation was changing in the last decades of the century.…There were a lot of timepieces about in the 1790s.…Indeed, a general diffusion of clocks and watches is occurring (as one would expect) at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of labour. (Thompson 1967: 56–97) On the contrary, it is now clear that a very substantial ‘general diffusion of clocks’ had occurred between 150 and 200 years earlier. This involved households of widely varying wealth, in both town and country. Surprisingly, given their greater cost, and the consensus view that the ownership of clocks required people already to have been socialized into the time-disciplines of factory work, clocks diffused more rapidly than many of the other ‘new consumer goods’ of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and their distribution showed a much smaller gradient with ‘settlement status’ than did most such goods, which is damaging to assertions of the distinctively urban character of early modern clock time (Figures 9.3 and 9.4). Too great an emphasis on private clocks constitutes one of the most significant

162

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

Figure 9.3 Increasing percentage of ownership of clocks and watches in probate inventories. a) Bristol 1700–1749, by total value of inventoried property b) East Sussex in the 1710s and 1730s

defects of the horological literature as socio-cultural history. For all their later dominance, domestic clocks had not been the main sources of clock time information over the preceding centuries. That role had been filled by public clocks of various sorts. Some attention has been paid to early cathedral and palace clocks, but far more important as general timing resources were clocks in parish churches, and in town and market halls. Again, we can demonstrate this for both Bristol, and the whole of England, based on a comprehensive analysis of accounts for just over 1,000 parishes between the 1390s and the 1690s (Figure 9.5). Bristolians did not need to own clocks to know the time. The majority of Bristol’s parish churches contained clocks (Figure 9.5) and, by 1640, they provided widespread coverage of the city with hour-signalling using bells

The spaces of clock times 163 Figure 9.4 Percentage of ‘middling sort’ inventories with selected consumer durables 1675–1725 (data from Weatherill 1988) for different urban/rural locations. Note the subdued gradient for clocks and watches (heavy line) compared with (top to bottom) cooking pots, looking glasses, window curtains, tea and coffee equipment, knives and forks.

Cathedral

Clock in St Augustine’s Abbey, dissolved c.1540 to become the cathedral. Cathedral clock bell marked time for Bristol Cathedral School, both pre- and post-reformation All Saints No clock in accounts (start 1446, but none after 1661) St Ewen No clock in accounts (start 1454, but none after 1639) St Nicholas Accounts destroyed in 1940 bombing. Extracts 1520–1727, made c. 1906, include; striking clock present before early fourteenth century, when St Nicholas’s clock was routinely identified as indicating trading hours for the adjacent market and wharves Christ Church Clock from earliest accounts in 1531 to past 1700, series of elaborate chiming clocks with ‘jacks’ (armoured human figures) striking a bell St John Baptist Clock from earliest accounts in 1532 to past 1700. Chimes added in the 1570s. Ringing of daybell curfew from 1620s–1650s St Mary Redcliffe Clock from earliest accounts in 1532 to past 1700. A clock dial from 1590s. Chimes added in 1690s. Payments for ringing daybell and curfew St Thomas Accounts from 1544. Clock with exterior dial from 1596 St Werburgh No mention of church clock in accounts 1548–1700, but payments for ringing of set hours from 1580s to 1670s (implies that clock time avaliable to the men paid for the specified ringing) Ss Phillip & Jacob Accounts from 1564, clock installed in 1670s, dial in the 1690s Temple Accounts from 1582, clock installed in the 1650s Figure 9.5 Summary of evidence in churchwardens’ accounts for church clocks in Bristol.

164

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

(Figure 9.5). The extent to which people registered and relied upon aural time indications is evident from many anecdotal accounts of specific events, and was nicely caught by a correspondent in 1772 who, deploring the inconsistent chimes of St Philip and St Mary Redcliffe compared with St James and St Stephen, asserted the importance of quarter-hour bells in providing ‘a constant monitor of time to all the inhabitants of the four quarters of the city’ (Barry 1984). Visual signalling with dials and hands emerged only slowly. The functional orientation of visual signalling is indicated by the orientation of visible exterior dials: typically these faced towards the centre of the city and/or towards the docks. Several secular public buildings also featured clocks, often as prominent elements of architectural design, including the Exchange, the Assembly Rooms, market halls, the Council House, and Colston’s Hospital. And sundials provided both information to set clocks, and an additional source of clock time. Yet other public clocks were located inside public buildings, including several churches, the Exchange and the Assembly Rooms, though pictorial evidence for interiors is quite sparse. Another vital group of clocks were those in inns, taverns and alehouses. Not all licensed premises had clocks, but licensing hours made the time of relevance to both proprietors and customers, and to the City authorities. Innkeepers’ probate inventories suggest that most licensed premises had at least one clock, usually plain, in their taprooms. Though not specific to Bristol, drawings of alehouse interiors also suggest that clocks were a common feature, and so do references to clocks in plays and other literature. This matters because of the quite enormous numbers of licensed premises in Bristol, as in other port towns. Early

Figure 9.6 Public clocks in English parish churches, 1500 – 1700. a) Clocks in urban and rural parishes, excluding London; b) Clocks in urban parishes: single and multi-parish towns.

The spaces of clock times 165 eighteenth-century Bristol contained what today seems a massive number of inns, taverns and alehouses: between six and seven hundred in total, or eighteen licensed premises per thousand inhabitants. In any case, clock time information was not derived only from timepieces, be they clocks, sundials or bells. Routines of urban life, and the hubbub of everyday activities, themselves provided many time cues, from which clock time could be inferred with reasonable accuracy and circulate into other urban timed spaces. Any event with a known starting or finishing time (church services, civic processions, market activity, working days, leisure events, and so forth) provided temporal information merely by happening. One clear example concerns communications, and the timetabled post and passenger coach services linking Bristol to other towns, and to its hinterland, with timetabled departures to London, Bath, Birmingham, Exeter, Portsmouth, Weymouth and South Wales. By late in the eighteenth century, at least six operators ran nearly fifty daily services to major towns, mainly from city centre inns. Departure times throughout the day were both advertised and observed (unsurprisingly given their publicity’s focus on speed, punctuality and comfort as competitive criteria). Since transport services were not merely functions at points, but activity along routes, they provided temporal information to various parts of the city as departing coaches moved through the streets. The variety of termini and routes created a considerable geography to distributed time cues of this sort. The carriage of information also produced intra-urban time cues, especially through postal services. These were organized from the principal Post Office near the Exchange, through seven out-offices, each open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. These were the nodal points from which deliveries were made to all parts of city and suburbs three times a day, with men setting out on delivery rounds at 8.30 a.m., 12 noon and 5.30 p.m. These were also the times at which non-local mail was taken to the central Post Office for onward carriage. Both economic activities, and social status, were spatially uneven across the city, so there was again a considerable geography in this dimension of temporality. Movements of people and information within the city generated or reinforced awareness of clock time in yet other ways. Various commercial services were available for the hurried, the late, the unfit, the merely disinclined to walk, and for the sending of messages, including the hire of light (hackney) coaches. Their hire costs depended on time, rather than distance. Late in the century passengers paid one shilling for the first forty-five minutes; sixpence for the next fifteen minutes, and sixpence for each subsequent twenty minutes. At these rates, hire coaches clearly catered for the relatively well-todo, and this is borne out by the distribution of coach stands in the better-off areas. These examples all involve temporal cues, indirect signs of clock time, flowing from particular timed spaces into the urban environment more generally. Once disseminated, whether intentionally or not, they were then available

166

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

for other uses, whether general and everyday, or highly particular and specialized, for which they were not principally intended. And as with coach services, not only did the movements of postal workers and post coaches provide indirect time cues, but the fixed departure and delivery times were reference points for other activities geared to the dispatch or receipt of goods or information. The timing of posts was particularly important for offices or businesses coordinating their activities with partners or clients. Using mail services was also partly a matter of practical temporal knowledge about the service provided. For example, since letters for carriage outside Bristol had to be handed in by half an hour before the relevant mail coach departed, knowledge of the time was necessary to use the communications system to best advantage. The values of temporal precision Another element that we consider at length in the book is the different uses of temporal precision found amongst different communities of practice. What counts as a valid expression of temporal precision often varied dramatically according to community of practice, as expressed in the use of specialized instruments, the means of calculation and the structure of the environment. In turn, we find that different apprehensions of precision are ‘translated’ between different communities of practice. The example we have chosen in this section concerns the translation between two communities of practice: one, the astronomical community, which was committed to highly accurate measurement; and the other, the navigational community, which had evolved techniques and instruments which, though often rough and ready, worked well enough in practical contexts. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, undeniable advances in the precision of astronomical observations, in predictions of celestial movements, in mathematical techniques and auxiliary devices (such as trigonometrical and logarithmic tables), and hence in theoretical abilities to determine longitudinal positions, had been achieved by the international astronomical community. However, their very success had been based on relatively specialized methods which drew them apart from the temporal community of mariners who performed navigational tasks on board ships. The devices used by the two communities diverged. Features which had practical merits for one community offered no attraction, and perhaps even significant disadvantages, to the other, consequently inhibiting the ‘travel’ of precisions between them. In particular, the priorities of abstract accuracy and practical utility varied greatly between astronomical and navigational communities. Improvements in accuracy had very different effects on communities in differing circumstances (for example, oceanic navigation imposed a need for [nearly] continuous observation in ways that land-based surveying and cartography did not). Such differences in contexts had major implications for the channelling of practices,

The spaces of clock times 167 instruments and knowledges among different temporal communities, and could create ‘translation problems’ among communities in which practices were diverging. In particular, new needs arose for more accurate observatory methods to be tailored for non-expert audiences (e.g. mariners, explorers on land). Here, we highlight the two main strategies through which attempts were made to reverse the divergence of temporal communities, by considering how practices of precision were made more transferable from the highly skilled communities of master instrument makers or astronomical mathematicians in the specialized environments of their workshops, studies and observatories, towards and among more ‘applied’ communities of precision-users, such as navigators on ships. Making precision feasible for navigators required fundamental rearrangement of observatory networks of highly specialized people, instruments, techniques and discussion, into a form where similar results could be obtained by solitary members of ships’ crews. The first strategy was therefore to convert calculation of position from a highly complex observatory skill into a precise and explicit performative routine, in which mariners with limited mathematical skills could be drilled. Very complex and demanding procedures were restructured into reliable, learned routines consisting of many small, clear stages, using pre-printed forms and auxiliary tables. Such routines took several hours to perform, eventually producing a precisely calculated location. While overall, the navigational community was heavily ‘practical’ in its orientation to methods that worked in non-observatory conditions, it was not exactly de-skilled, and demonstrates how extremely complicated practices could be turned into structured performative routines. The second strategy, eventually made reliably operational towards 1800, was to reduce the skills required by absorbing as many functions as possible ‘into the device’. This was the marine chronometer, a clock that needed no human intervention during a voyage, other than being looked at (Figure 9.7). In turn we can suggest that these strategies illustrate how practices were modified on their translation between communities of temporal practices, not just through the internal logic of developments within one particular community. Everyday precisions The final point we want to make concerns empirical precision in everyday life. Our point here is that – over and over again – we find examples of cases and precision which are usually dependent upon context. There is no general rule about the uses of precision. In particular, as in everyday life now, timekeeping technology is often ahead of the need for accuracy. But every now and then, as the situation dictates, that accuracy is called upon. To broach this topic, we will concentrate on just one out of many examples we are able to deploy, a man named Samuel Jeake from the Sussex port of Rye (born 1652, died 1699). Jeake was a prominent nonconformist and merchant

Figure 9.7 Time determination as a performative routine: calculation sheet establishing a longitude observations, 1782. Source: Andrewes, ed. (1996), 157.

The spaces of clock times 169 of the town, whose life and views are unusually well documented through the survival of many of his business records; several volumes of diary and autobiography; some correspondence; many appearances in legal, town and church records; and the records of national institutions with which he was involved, including the Royal Society and the Bank of England. In many ways, Jeake was a polymath of a type relatively familiar in late seventeenth-century England: active in the worlds of trade, science and religion, and widely read across all these areas. Like other early members of the Royal Society, he saw no contradiction in his simultaneous interests in God, science, and alchemy. But where Jeake stands almost alone among well documented seventeenthcentury English people is in the extent and forms of his practical work in astrology. Many of Jeake’s activities – trading, investments, science – involved an ability to handle times, but few of his references to personal, commercial or civic events descend much below the level of the hour in specifying times of day, and then only to half- and quarter hours, or to imprecise forms like ‘a little after a quarter past ten o’clock’. His strongest impulses to temporal precision, in both times and durations, came from astrology. Above all, he was preoccupied with empirically establishing a scientific personal astrology (just as John Goad was attempting to produce a scientific astrology of the weather). Precision was central to Jeake’s use of astrology in interpreting events in his life as shaped by quantified aspects of planetary positions, interacting with divine intervention. Precise timing of such events was essential for identifying and refining the influences of particular planets, so as to identify divine influence. The most striking example involved Jeake’s search for patterns in around 150 ague attacks afflicting him between 31 August 1670 and 2 May 1671. He

Figure 9.8 The marine chronometer: the time-keeping network of Figure 9.1 compressed within a device, without ongoing human activity.

170

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

recorded their times to specific minutes, with very little approximation or rounding. Times involving whole, half- or quarter hours account for only just over 10 per cent of the times recorded (Table 9.1). In contrast, his specifying of times relating to business, religious and social life was very much less precise. Our point here is less that Jeake’s times were necessarily accurate, than that he viewed such precision as real enough to make detailed timings worthwhile. The corollary is that his less careful regard for the exact number of minutes past an hour in other contexts does not imply that he was unable to be more specific. He just did not choose to be specific on those occasions. Many other examples, from the late fifteenth- through early nineteenth centuries, likewise show considerable selectivity in the use of precision, and the problematic status of inferences that people who did not express times precisely were unable to do so.

Concluding discussion One of the most common reactions to our work is one of frustration. So we have set aside grand narratives like those of Thompson (1967), with their pleasing narrative curve through history (cf. Glennie and Thrift 1996). What, then, is our historical spare tyre that can be wheeled on as a replacement, the narrative that will get things up and running again? Audiences become frustrated when it becomes clear that we are not in that game. But there are reasons for our reticence. Clock time skills and practices are part of more general everyday skills which historians have often tried to access. Clearly, as we have argued in this paper, this is a difficult thing to do, especially if we are not just to regard these everyday skills and practices as the recovery of folk customs, with a patina of olde worlde charm. In particular, if we are to regard these skills and practices as having important elements of improvisation and play, and therefore as one of the chief sources of renewal of social systems, then studying everyday practices and skills becomes central; everyday practices and skills are, in a sense, a motor of history. Table 9.1 The variable precision of Samuel Jeake’s diary entries, 1670–1672: his ‘Critical Register of Several Paroxysms’ compared with other entries Time Relative to Hour On hour Half-hour Quarter-hour 10, 20, 40, 50 5, 25, 35, 55 Others Totals

CRSP

%

Other

%

8 11 7 4 6 106 142

5.6 7.7 4.9 2.8 4.2 74.6

98 21 15 9 0 16 159

61.6 13.2 9.4 5.7 0 10.1

Source: Hunter and Gregory (1988), 85–250.

The spaces of clock times 171 However, we need to be careful. For when writing about these practices and skills of the past, we cannot write about a solid block of ‘folkways’ (Fischer 1989) or even necessarily a romanticized set of tactics of resistance, in de Certeau’s sense. Everyday life in the past does not, cannot, add up. Four reasons come to mind. First, everyday life is distributed, spatially and temporally. It is not a centred object which can simply be opened to the gaze but can only be approached by moving around its spaces and times. Second, everyday life does not always work. Much of its to-and-fro consists of ‘mistakes’ (though, of course, what are successes and errors often become apparent only long after the original action, or are judgements of historians). Third, much of everyday life is unspoken and unwritten. The rhythmic texture of gesture, glance and a sudden intake of breath, the experience of touch, sound and smell, the skilled responses to transient moments that turn out to have been crucial – this is the constantly extending horizon of banality in which everything is both ordinary and unique (see e.g. Smith 1999). But though we have known that this horizon was there, until recently our registers of communication have proved unequal to the task of representing it. Fourth, it is clearly impossible to recover all the practices of the past. Some practices will stay lost. In other words, any study of everyday life in the past must be incomplete, both because of the object being studied, and the ‘documentary’ means by which it can be studied. Given this incompleteness, it seems to us that the most fitting way to study the practices of the past is as a set of symptoms or clues whose reading requires a mixture of deduction and intuition. This is a favourite meditation of many currently popular authors – Derrida, Deleuze, even the Foucault of ‘The life of infamous men’ (1979) all come to mind. But we prefer to end with the thoughts of that remarkably prescient historian, Carlo Ginzburg. For Ginzburg, ahead of his time to the extent that many of his thoughts are only now coming into focus, what we require is to generate a ‘conjectural knowledge’ which allows the craft of history its place by applying an ‘elastic rigour’. Though such a notion is slippery, it is worth ending by quoting Ginzburg at length. doubts creep in as to whether (naturalistic) rigour is not perhaps, both unattainable and undesirable, because of the form taken by knowledge most closely bound up with everyday experience – or to be more precise, with every context in which the unique and irreplaceable character of its components seems critical to those involved. It was once said that falling in love meant over-valuing the tiny ways in which one woman, or one man, differs from others. This could of course be extended to works of art or horses. In such contexts the elastic rigour (to use a contradictory phrase) of the conjectural paradigm seems impossible to eliminate. It’s a matter of kinds of knowledge which tend to be unspoken, whose rules, as we have said, do not easily lead themselves to being formally articulated or even spoken aloud. Nobody learns how to be a composer or a diagnostician simply by applying the rules. With this kind of knowledge there are func-

172

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift tions in play which cannot be measured, a whiff, a glance, an invitation. Until now we have carefully avoided this tricky word, intuition. But if it’s going to be used, as another way of describing the instantaneous running through of the thought process, then we must make a distinction between low intuition and high. Ancient Arab physiognomy was based on ‘firasa’: a complex notion which generally meant the capacity to leap from the known to the unknown by inference (on the basis of clues). The term was taken from the vocabulary of Sufi philosophy; it came to be used both for mystic intuition, and for the kinds of penetrating shrewdness which were attributed to the sons of the kings of Serendippos. In this second sense, ‘firasa’ is nothing more nor less than the organ of conjectural knowledge. This ‘low intuition’ is rooted in the senses (though it goes beyond them) – and as such it has nothing to do with the extra-sensory intuition of various nineteenth and twentieth century institutions. It exists everywhere in the world without geographic, historical, ethnic, gender or class exception, and this means that it is very different from any form of ‘special’ knowledge, which is always restricted to an elite. (Ginzburg 1980: 28–9)

We read Ginzburg as having three aims. One is simply to make visible a number of facets of practices which heretofore have been neglected. Another is to suggest that these facets of practices are also crucial elements of ‘the historian’s craft’, a craft-knowledge in the sense of ‘an intuition built up from experience’. Such facets of practices have begun to be recognized as important to studies of modern everyday life, but they remain to be recognized over much of history. For example, historical work on bodies has initially focused on the social or cultural inscription of bodies, with, as yet, comparatively little work that addresses issues of skills rooted in embodied practices. And third, Ginzburg attempts to extend the range of what can be theorized, by questioning what is to be regarded as theoretical. In turn, it might be argued that expectations of what theory can do need to be, as it were, recalibrated. There are some things that cannot be solved in the domain of theory, as normally conceived. In this sense, we believe that our paper has interesting points of overlap with other recent work, with its interest in going beyond discussions of theory ‘from the inside’. We are, in other words, looking for theory not ‘to explain more’ (as those frustrated audiences may have envisaged), but ‘to talk about a wider range of things’ (Osborne this volume: ch. 10) arising out of the recognition that we live in a pluralistic universe to which we must continually add. ‘Reality may exist distributively, just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that possibility I do insist’ (James 1996: 328). All this said, though we might not want to close off the chains of close analysis, still we do not think we have finished where we started. As we have followed these chains, so we have come across some findings which we believe are eloquent and which we will conclude with: first, the early onset of a general

The spaces of clock times 173 awareness of clock time, as evidenced by not just the number of clocks in late mediaeval and early modern England but many other indexes as well; second, the variable nature of what counts as ‘clock time’, and the way in which various timekeeping technologies are continually redistributed to support that variable constitution; third, the fact that most facets of what we now call clock time had become naturalized well before the industrial revolution, and that consequently the imbrication of a sense of clock time in the general population is not an aspect of this process; fourth, the degree to which clock time is used according to activity, that in use it is a highly variable standard and this is in many ways the reason why it has been so generally adopted. So what, then, was so remarkable historically about clocks? We think that it was that they are one of the first examples of a systematic cognitive apparatus outwith the body and that, in this sense, what was remarkable about them was their ability to extend cognition out into the world – and to bring this world within cognition. They were some of the first thinking machines.

References Andrewes, W. (ed.) (1996) The Quest for Longitude, Cambridge MA: Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. Barry, J. (1984) ‘Social and cultural life in Bristol’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Oxford. Bennett, T. (1998) Culture: A Reformer’s Science, London: Sage. Blackbourn, P. (1993) Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany, Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——(1998) ‘The Madonna of Marpingen: a likely story’, Common Knowledge, 7, 112–22. Boyne, R. (1998) ‘Angels in the archive: lines into the future in the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres’, in Lash, S., Quick, A. and Roberts, R. (eds) Time and Value, Oxford: Blackwell, 48–64. Brewer, J. and Porter, R. (1993) Consumption and the World of Goods, London: Routledge. Chartier, R. (1997) The Order of Books, Cambridge: Polity Press. Clanchy, M. T. (1993) From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell. Davis, N. Z. (1983) The Return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition, New York: Columbia University Press. Dosse, F. (1999) Empire of Meaning: The Humanisation of the Social Sciences, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fischer, D. H. (1989) Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in North America, New York: Oxford University Press. Foucault, M. (1979) ‘The life of infamous men’, in Foss, P. and Morris, M. (eds) Power, Truth, Strategy, Sydney: Feral. Gallagher, C. and Greenblatt, S. (2000) Practising New Historicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ginzburg, C. (1980) The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Glennie, P. and Thrift, N. J. (1996) ‘Reworking E. P. Thompson’s “Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism” ’, Time and Society, 5, 275–300.

174

Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift

Hunter, M.S. and Gregory, A. (1998) An Astrological Diary of The Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1652–1699, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hutchins, E. (1995) Cognition in the Wild, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Ingold, T. (2000) ‘Tools for the hand, language for the free: an appreciation of LeroiGounan’s Gesture and Speech’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Science, 4, 411–53. Jardine, L. (1997) Wordly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, London: Macmillan. James, W. (1996) A Pluralistic Universe, Lincoln NB: University of Nebraska Press. Latour, B. (1997) ‘Trains of thought: Piaget, formalism and the fifth dimension’, Common Knowledge, 6, 170–91. ——(2000) ‘Good and bad science’, paper available at www.ensmp.fr/PagePerso /CSI/Bruno_Latour.html/Articles/77-GERG.html. Le Roy Ladurie, E. (1978) Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1329, London: Scolar Press. Osborne, T. (1999) ‘The ordinariness of the archive’, History of the Human Sciences, 12, 2, 51–64. Rheinberger, H. (1997) Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Seigworth, G. J. (2000) ‘Banality for cultural studies’, Cultural Studies, 14, 227–68. Smith, B. R. (1999) The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, N. (1991) Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1967) ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’, Past and Present, 38, 56–97. ——(1968) The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1991) Customs in Common, London: Merlin Press. Thrift, N. J. (1996) Spatial Formations, London: Sage. (2000) ‘Afterwords’, Environment and Planning D. Society and Space, 18, 213–55.

10 History, theory, disciplinarity Thomas Osborne

To future historians of disciplinarity these times of ours will no doubt appear obsessed with the diagnosis of endings, crises and renewals. This is as true of the discipline of history as it is of anything else. Whilst it may be that a state of crisis is itself endemic to progress in the historical disciplines – certainly, it is difficult to think of a time when the discipline of history has not been perceived to have been in crisis – there are some issues that are worth addressing with regard to the current disciplinary conjuncture: in particular, the specific question of the status of social history ‘after the social’ and the question of the threats that postmodernism, social theory and the ‘linguistic turn’ may be said to pose to history as a discipline. At least insofar as the discipline of history is concerned, my aims in discussing these issues are deflationary: there are interesting things going on, but the only crisis worthy of the name is in the realm of theory, not history.

1 Is postmodernism really such a threat to the discipline of history? I think that it may be an error to assume that what goes by the name of the linguistic turn or the postmodernization of history is such a dramatic coupure in the very identity of the historical project, or even less a threat to the integrity of the discipline. An advance, perhaps (that is up to practising historians themselves to decide, for after all, as Michael Oakeshott demonstrated, historians make their own epistemology) but not necessarily a threat. As to whether there is even such a thing as the postmodern is another matter. The whole debate here has been dramatized to a ridiculous point, such that we might even be forgiven a certain scepticism as to whether postmodernism can ever have been said to exist as a coherent movement except in the imaginations of its enemies (Osborne 1998: 6–7). The perceived threat of postmodernism is experienced, it seems (in Britain at least, which is the focus of my remarks) especially from within that erstwhile avant-garde sub-discipline of social history. The debate over the identity and destiny of social history has been vigorous over recent years (see Joyce 1995; and more generally Jenkins 1997). As Joyce comments, much steam on a political, ethical and disciplinary level has been generated on the terrain of what is

176

Thomas Osborne

really quite a complex methodological debate (Joyce 1998: 210–11); and perhaps this has something to do with the very ‘erstwhileness’ of social history’s avantgarde status; the fear, no doubt, that one form of avant-garde has been replaced by another. Some may take a hard-headed satisfaction in the self-image of incorruptibility generated by a sense of oppression from without. But a better tack for social historians and those interested in social history may be, rather, to de-dramatize the terms of the debate between postmodernism and the discipline of social history itself. There are several ways of doing this, some of which will be only very briefly rehearsed here. We can attempt to detach the vocation of social history from a specifically political worldview. The history of social history itself needs to be reconstructed less in terms of its political vocation than in terms of what might be called its ‘ethical’ vocation. The sensitive nature of the debate between social historians and their perceived postmodern enemies over recent years no doubt stems especially from the very close link between social history and specifically socialist political projects. But in fact this is perhaps to overestimate the political coherence even of the original project of social history, a project which no doubt owed more to a certain kind of epistemological ethic centred upon an essentially ‘open’ class of objects, that had in common the fact that they were excluded from what was then the usual – itself essentially political, that is, ‘sovereign’ – conception of history. To take the label of social historian was above all an ethical statement, not a political one; or at least it was ethical before it was political. Of course, what would be required to demonstrate this would be a full-scale epistemological history of social history itself; what such a history might show would be less a set of determinate positions – least of all determinate political positions – that would make up the identity of social history, so much as, on the one hand, an epistemic ethic focused on extending the boundaries of what should actually count as ‘historical’ (to include, for example, all those hitherto hidden for one reason or another from the ‘legitimate’ sovereignty-centred historical gaze); and on the other a series of ‘central case’ works and themata which enjoyed an exemplary status, most notably, in terms of works, The Making of the English Working Class. In this sense, the project of social history could be defined more as an epistemically and disciplinary ethical outlook than as a substantive set of given positions. And this means that, were one to acknowledge a crisis in one particular political vocation of the social historian, this would not ipso facto make the vocation of social history – which could be attached to a range of political and other kinds of project – redundant. We can attempt to de-dramatize the idea of the postmodern itself. The irony here is that in fact an empirical investigation of the original successes of the project of social history could very easily be thematized around postmodern criteria. One might have recourse here to J-F. Lyotard’s famous thesis in The Postmodern Condition: no grand narratives certainly, but a series of narratives nonetheless (Lyotard 1984). That, surely, is exactly what social history consists of. To take, again, only the most famous example, The Making of the English Working Class is specifically constructed by Thompson as the opposite of a tele-

History, theory, disciplinarity 177 ological history of class evolution, but as something like a local narrative documenting the contingencies of one particular episode in the history of class formation. Here, that is for Lyotard, postmodernism is conceptualized on the basis of an opposition not to rational explanation as such, but more specifically to Parsonian-style sociology: hardly, one would think, the strictest criterion for allegiance. Even E. P. Thompson would have been an enthusiast for this particular kind of postmodernism. Alternatively, adapting the language of Gilles Deleuze, one might say that social history posed against the molarity of ‘legitimate’ history a certain mobile and molecular understanding of history; opening up the historical stage to questions of the working-class, women and gender, race and ethnicity and, in later years, to all kinds of other groups, interests and perspectives. Thus social history was itself originally postmodern: representing a kind of line of flight, even a form of delirium, away from ‘legitimate’ approaches centred on narrow if exciting issues of sovereign power (kings and queens, constitution and people). And if that project itself now seems ‘exhausted’ to some, this is not necessarily because social history has succumbed to some definitive point at ‘the end of the social’ or concerning the supposed impossibility of historical realism, but because the project of social history has, in effect, succeeded in dismantling the certainties of the citadel; it has, in the sense of its ethical vocation, done its work and is a ‘victim’ more of its own tendencies and achievements than of some malign external postmodernism. We can, additionally, endeavour to cast doubt on the very idea of the eclipse of the social. This term, one would think, possesses what ought to be a quite specific and hence limited reference: the eclipse of the social sphere as a terrain of governance. A key issue here is the status of liberalism. Nineteenthcentury liberal mechanisms of government posited a social sphere that was ideally to be autonomous from the incursions of the state. The autonomy of this social domain was in eclipse at least by the time of the New Liberalism at the end of the century: when, in a lineage that extends through to Beveridge and the welfare state, the social itself became linked into state governance. Some have argued that neo-liberalism abolishes the social as a terrain of government, seeking to govern increasingly by other means (Rose 1996). In that sense, after neo-liberalism, we may indeed be, for better or worse (and doubtless worse), beyond the social. But to move from discussions of the eclipse of the centrality of the social as a terrain of governance to the claim that there is no longer such thing as the social in an analytic – or even a moral – sense is simply to succumb to a category mistake. The idea of the social for social history, for instance, was never tied simply to regimes of governance. One might argue instead that the notion of the social for social historians themselves was never a fixed category (invoking hard and fast philosophies of history); its use was always in its malleability and its promiscuity; the fact that it was always more of a weapon than the object of a monolinear narrative; always mobile rather than static, a line of flight rather than a point of termination. And for those for whom it was indeed a point of termination or a doxa, so much the worse for them.

178

Thomas Osborne

This may mean that we should reconsider the crisis in social history: that to be critical of certain traditions or perspectives within social history, or to want to move social history into new domains – such as those associated with French thought on memory, with the concept of the archive, or with mutations in sociability, identity and citizenship – is not necessarily to make a judgement about social history as a political or intellectual vocation; it is to continue doing social history by other means.

2 On the other hand, if social history was already, and even from the very beginning, postmodern, it seems somewhat misguided to berate that form of history, as some postmodernists and ‘theorists’ – though certainly not all, and perhaps least of all from within social history itself – have been tempted to do, for its epistemological naivety. On the contrary, what has been naive has, perhaps, been the resort to epistemology within postmodernism itself. Since all disciplines – certainly those in the human and social sciences – are governed by norms that are not just ‘scientific’ but ethical, social, political, epistemic, stylistic, etc., one is saying absolutely nothing intrinsically critical of any discipline by merely illustrating that this is the case. Hence what some imagine to be a so-called ‘critique’ of social history by postmodernism has always been something of a non-issue, simply because epistemologically speaking it is entirely and utterly inconsequential (if not, for all that, always uninteresting). For instance, the attempts to account for the ‘discourse of history’ from a structuralist or poststructuralist point of view have absolutely no epistemological consequences for the practice of history itself. To take only what has often been regarded as the locus classicus of this position, Barthes’ essay on the discourse of history is concerned with the mode of presentation of history, with history-as-writing, and its relations with fiction. Nowhere does Barthes say that history is fiction. It is true that at the end of this essay Barthes points to a certain circularity in the positivist historian’s armoury of ‘fact’, claiming that this involves a paradox insofar as although fact never has anything but a linguistic existence everything happens in historical reason as if this linguistic existence were but a pure and simple copy of another – non-linguistic – existence, the ‘real’ (Barthes 1986/1967: 138). Yet there is likewise a kind of circularity in Barthes’ own account, in that his critique – it certainly is a ‘critique’ – seems like a criticism; yet the entire premise of his semiological approach is that all forms of discourse use rhetorical means, such that historical reason cannot be damned for its realism – otherwise one would be able to damn any form of discourse qua discourse – but only analysed in what is itself, in effect, a positivist, i.e. ‘noncritical’ spirit of critique. As we shall see (in section 4 below), these remarks hardly exhaust what can be said about the inter-relation between history and the presuppositions of language, but they do suggest that the postmodern critique of history via some kind of supposedly definitive ‘linguistic turn’ is somewhat over-dramatized and overstated. This, however, is by no means to

History, theory, disciplinarity 179 dismiss such a critique, but only to re-configure our understanding of it. The aim, as the ethnomethodologists would say, is ‘re-specification’ rather than denunciation (see Cabrera 1999). For the ‘linguistic turn’, or whatever we are to call it, seems to be far more concerned with pushing social history into new domains and new questionings, that is, with pushing social history forward, than it is with merely constructing a negative and superior criticism of the ‘errors’ of the past.

3 Then there is the question of theory itself. Historians often regard the theorizing disciplines – to which we shall give the generic if rather arbitrary term ‘social theory’ – as a threat to their territory. Attempts to reconcile the two, at least in Britain, have not met with remarkable success; certainly nothing to match the tense but vibrant interchange between the social sciences and history that have characterized postwar France or the takeup of cultural history in North America (see Revel and Hunt 1995; and Biernacki 1999 for an excellent account of the specifically north American culturalist ‘moment’). Is not social theory by its very nature an attack on the ideal of the empiricist, archival discipline of history? That depends upon the kind of social theory in question. Today, even after all these years of assimilation, there is still a certain amount of breathless talk about continental social theory, postmodern, poststructuralist social theory and so forth. I think such talk can be a little misleading; it draws the lines in the wrong places; not least because postmodernism hardly heralds the triumph of theory. On the contrary, the irony is that so-called postmodernist ‘theory’ often tends towards the ‘empiricist’ in its concerns. A more interesting – that is more complicated – way to think about this phenomenon is in terms of what might be called ‘postfunctionalism’: a movement that would complicate things because it would include both modernists and postmodernists in its ranks; that is some but not all of each. So what came before postfunctionalism? Perhaps until the mid-1970s, almost all social theory of a generalizing kind was functionalist or crypto-functionalist in orientation. The point about functionalist forms of theorizing is that they can occupy an evolutionary or systemic space of explanation without encroaching onto the disciplinary domain of empirical history per se. A good example of this would be G. A. Cohen’s reconstruction of historical materialism which entailed (in chapter 9 of his book) a sophisticated defence of functionalism (Cohen 1978). Functionalist social theory was not a discipline of the archive; it was not necessarily opposed to the historical facts, but did not use them as a principle of explanatory coherence. This kind of theorizing was – if more often evolutionary as opposed to historical, at least – hardly a threat to the historical calling. The work of Talcott Parsons comes to mind; or that of Luhmann, Habermas or even the late Ernest Gellner. When Parsons wrote of history it was in systemic and evolutionary terms. But also some postmodernism has links with the style of functionalism. I am thinking of the work, above all,

180

Thomas Osborne

of Zygmunt Bauman which, for the most part, interesting though it is, does not tend to encroach upon the discourse of history. Bauman is an epochalist: his epochs of modernity and postmodernity are at once intellectual, social and apparently totalizing (see for instance Bauman 1987). Bauman’s work has a lively theoretical range and is animated by a great synthetic intelligence; but, in its very epochalism, it could not be, and does not apparently intend to be, mistaken for history. So functionalism, from the perspective of history writing, may be a bad thing but it is not actually a threat; more an irrelevance, a subject – Lawrence Stone notwithstanding – more for common rooms than articles and books. Postfunctionalism, on the other hand, abolishes the idea of the epoch, which is to say the idea of social totality; which is, in turn, to say that it abolishes any hint of sociologism. In fact, it is not really the ‘social’ as such which is in crisis so much as sociologism more generally, and above all any sociologistic functionalism: and this may be more of a problem for the varieties of theory than it is for social history, not least in that it may herald a return to a kind of neo-positivism of approach, one that itself may brush closely against the grain of styles of existing history (see McLennan 2000). Postfunctionalism is not necessarily recent: perhaps, quirkily enough, it even pre-dates functionalism itself. The emblem of postfunctionalism in this sense would be the reclamation of the legacy of Max Weber from the Parsonian interpretation (Hennis 1998). Weber is now increasingly thought of not as a historical sociologist or ‘scientist of society’ so much as an ethical thinker and a theorist of modernity whose great problem, or ‘central thread’, was with something like an anthropological question: the specificity of ‘man’ as a kulturmensch in the specific conditions and life-orders of modernity. Now of course this version of Weber might be said to represent an extreme form of anti-functionalist social theory; that is, forms of social theory that have done away with recourse to founding categories of ‘society’ as forms of explanatory legitimation. But in fact we can see similar trends more or less across the board in the current revival of social theory, at least in Britain. Postfunctionalism is not necessarily postfoundationalism. The work of Anthony Giddens might be a case in point. Giddens may not be a postmodern social theorist, but he is certainly a postfunctionalist one (see Giddens 1976). His emphasis on concepts such as risk and trust could be said to be an attempt to find mobile concepts that are capable of moving between objective and subjective registers, thus avoiding any absolute sociological foundationalism. Similarly, with the work of the historical sociologist Michael Mann (e.g. Mann 1986; Barry 1993), although his work is rooted in quite mainstream sociological theory, and indeed owes something to Parsons and even Althusser, Mann’s historical sociology is not evolutionary, functionalist or comparative, but sensitive to issues of chance and contingency, and hence written largely in narrative as opposed to theoreticist, comparativist or sociologistic form. Mann himself does not resort to the category of ‘society’ as a principle of explanation, and so is removed from any form of sociologism. For Mann, certainly no postmodernist, society does not exist; instead we have series of overlapping power networks that

History, theory, disciplinarity 181 criss-cross the spaces of history. Another figure worthy of mention in this context would be W. G. Runciman, who has complicated things interestingly by attempting to rescue a certain evolutionary perspective from within a broadly empiricist framework. This is clearly social theory, but it is also something like history too (on Runciman see Anderson 1992). And then another example would of course be Michel Foucault. He is an interesting case in point, if only because of the extraordinary way in which his importance has been misunderstood, or at least understood diversely across a range of camps. Of course, inspirational thinkers like Foucault will have many interpreters. For the North Americans as well as some French historians he appears to be a culturalist thinker of like import to someone like Geertz (Goldstein 1994; and for Geertz’s influence, Biernacki 1999). In Britain Foucault is seen rather differently; more often as a threat to history: that is, as a social historian who has gone wrong. This seems to me to be a mistake. Foucault was in no way either an aspirant social historian or a sociologist, still less a postmodernist. He was something like a postfunctionalist however. In spite of the sociologizing of Foucault’s oeuvre – as when some radical criminologists and others classified Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as a crypto-functionalist text – his work is best seen as being oriented to the genealogical question of the present in a way that quite specifically dissolves epochs and totalities. He produced case-studies – ‘effective histories’ in the Nietzschean term – that, as with Max Weber, in their concern with the varied production of forms of human subjectivity in the present owed more to questions of philosophical anthropology than to the science of society. Moreover, such case-histories could not have been at a further remove from evolutionary or developmental forms of sociologism; after all, the point about genealogy is that it works backwards from the present. What we have in Foucault is far from a contemptible attitude to ‘the facts’, and the genuine admiration for Foucault’s work amongst French historians should not be taken lightly (see Gordon 1990). Not that Foucault was exactly a historian. His approach to history was hardly an innocent one. Some of his ‘works’ such as I, Pierre Rivière, Les Machines à Guérir, and Herculine Barbin, merely for the most part reproduce verbatim material that Foucault and his collaborators had found in the archives. Yet there unquestionably is something like an ironic, or rather an aesthetic, attitude to historical data in Foucault’s work. But this is less a postmodern strain of thought than one deriving from a particular philosophical anthropology: it has less to do with Foucault’s attitude to ‘the facts’ than his conception of the object of his study. Foucault was not interested in societies so much as capacities: his gaze was, in this sense, always (philosophically and historically) anthropological before it was sociological (see on this, Osborne 1998: ch. 5; Honneth and Joas 1988). His concern was with a history of human ontologies; the capacities humans have cultivated in themselves and others, the capacities through which humans have been governed and through which they have governed others (see for example Foucault 1998). This may be why attempts to impose forms of sociologism on Foucault always seem like such an assault, only equalled by those which seek to make him out to be some kind of irrationalist postmodernist in orientation.

182

Thomas Osborne

The recent literature on ‘governmentality studies’, as it has mushroomed in Britain and Australia, would seem to be a case in point, at least in relation to some of these tendencies. The specific question of liberalism and the ‘social’ has been to the fore here, and in spite of all the interesting work that this perspective has managed to open up, this has led both followers and critics of Foucault to take up some rather meaningless battle-lines, both seeming to assume on occasion that Foucault was attempting to produce some kind of sociology of liberalism. Foucault’s particular interest here was, as Nikolas Rose has argued, rather, deliberately untimely. It was to investigate and make problematic, as it were, against the very ‘obviousness’ of liberalism, the novelty of liberalism as a peculiar technology of freedom. What was at stake here was not to show that ours were or are ‘liberal societies’, but to show that there was a positive governmental logic to that political rationality we call liberalism. Far from being a retreat from the notion of governance, early liberalism embraced merely a novel model of governance, one which made a governing virtue of freedom itself (Foucault 1989; Gordon 1991; Osborne 1998: 132–3). The point was not to endorse liberalism, and still less to advocate liberal or (even still less) neo-liberal conceptions of freedom, but to indicate the extent to which freedom itself came to be regarded as a human capacity amenable to formulae of rule; that is, how freedom became a practical resource as opposed to merely an abstract aim of rule (see on this Rose 1992). As ever in Foucault, the invocation of a neologism – governmentality – was intended specifically as a diagnostic instrument; to mark a differentiation of a certain form of the present from the past: not to reduce the present to a determinate historical or sociological configuration, as when some theorists today write glibly about ‘modes of government’. Indeed, some recent work in the industry of literature on governmentality appears to impose a veritable evolutionary logic on the history of governance: passing from the sociologistic stages of ‘police’, to liberalism, to welfarism to neo-liberalism in a mechanical way. In contrast to this, the notion of governmentality was always best employed sagitally; that is, as something other than an instrument of commentary but as something in the manner of a modest if provocatively effectual conceptual lever, a way of producing new images of thought which disrupt certain received ways of thinking, dismantling some, renewing others. Instead of conceptual empire-building, what should be at stake in this kind of work is really a deliberate provisionality. Here, the sense of untimeliness, of anthropological disruption, is everything: what is at stake is a speculative reflection on the government of our capacities, not a general set of textbookable propositions about the functioning of society. That is why it would be doing a certain amount of violence to the uses of this literature were such contributions to be routinized in the name only of an all-too-timely sociologistic pedagogy, that is, to become part of a ‘school’, an ‘approach’, a calculus of narrowly political opinion, or – worse – an instrument of ‘theory’. So much for Foucault. Perhaps his legacy is exceptional. But the disputes over this legacy will not be worked out in the domain of theory, not least because what is at stake overall in postfunctionalist kinds of thinking – at least when their problematics are understood adequately – is not really theory in any case. There is no

History, theory, disciplinarity 183 new ‘paradigm’ here, not even the tepid gesturalism of ‘interdisciplinarity’, but at best what might be called, rather, a certain paradisciplinarity. Theory is no longer autonomous; it has become paradisciplinary and, in that sense, not really theory at all. The works of the postfunctionalists, diverse as they are, are not products of a discipline; it is more like what Deleuze would call a line of flight, a way of escaping to somewhere else, a provocation. Postfunctionalist views are united by no more than their difficult habitation of a kind of non-place, a peculiar view from nowhere, seeking deliberately to be uncoded by functionalism or foundationalism. At most, we should see such forms of social theory not as part of a coherent and single enterprise, but rather as playing a kind of parasitic role in relation to other disciplines, but especially history, with which it shares its concerns with time and human agency. This parasitism is not a by-product of theory, but is better seen as being constitutive of it; hence nor should it be regarded simply in a negative sense but as, potentially at least, a productive, deliberately untimely parasitism. Now, of course, this means that such forms of postfunctionalism immediately become more threatening to social history not because they are ‘theoretical’ but because they are quite relaxed about embracing a kind of empiricism or happy positivism, a sensibility, however ironic, to the archive. For the first time, what used to be called ‘theory’ comes to seem relevant to historians. It is precisely its apparent relevance that appears to make it threatening. But this relevance is really, as we shall see, more of an opportunity than a threat. Because if there is a crisis here, it is not least within the idea of theory itself. It is not that theory is stampeding over the empirical delicacies of the history, it is rather that the very idea of theory has more or less imploded. Social theory is increasingly akin to an ethos without a content; consigning itself ever more to commentary upon commentary, whilst postfunctionalism has opened out a space of indeterminacy for those who would wish to speculate outside theory but parasitically in fields that until now have seemed to belong to others. The point is, in fact, that social historians, instead of bemoaning this situation, might do better to seize upon it for themselves; to seek to impose their own ways of doing things, their own empirical sensitivities, on these evolving domains of interest.

4 It should be said, however, that these rather sceptical remarks about the import of theory are not meant as a denial of the claim that there are important theoretical issues at stake in the pursuit of history in general and social history in particular. In what remains I shall discuss some limited aspects of what issues there are for social historians: the first issue (this section) is more or less perennial to history as a discipline, involving the question of social history and the status of discourse; the second (in section 5) has to do with the current conjuncture – the economy of ‘credibility’ – in which historical reason nowadays finds itself.

184

Thomas Osborne

What of history as a discourse? Is history discursive or is it generically outside discourse? Again, we need to be deflationary about this. There is an epistemological aporia here to be sure, but this is just a condition of the historical enterprise rather than a crisis unique to the current conjuncture. History is not least a form of writing, of thought, of concepts. But is the terrain of history extra-conceptual or is it already conceptual? Many pages in historiography have been devoted to this topic, and the full extent of this literature can scarcely be addressed here. To take one well known example, Gareth Stedman Jones has interrogated the relations between social history and intellectual history, castigating Michel Foucault for remaining in his ‘overall vision of society and politics’ (something which, incidentally, Foucault the philosophical anthropologist manifestly did not possess) a materialist and hence a determinist in retaining a distinction between discursive and non-discursive practices (Stedman Jones 1996; cf. Cabrera 1999 for an illuminating reply). To escape determinism of this kind, Stedman Jones recommends that the historian embrace a linguistic approach, an historicism of concepts that would break equally decisively with Marx as much as Foucault. At least this is a consistent line: yet it is, perhaps, to misread the relevance of Reinhart Koselleck’s work to this question. In a characteristically brilliant essay, ‘Begriffsgeschichte and social history’ (in Koselleck 1985), Koselleck if anything complicates our understanding of this question. For Koselleck the historiographical tension between discursive and non-discursive moments only reflects a deeper tension within the social formation itself. ‘A “society” and its “concepts” exist in a relation of tension which is also characteristic of its academic historical disciplines’ (1985: 74). For Koselleck the history of concepts can indeed be an aspect of social history, for instance when it concerns the changing semantics of Neuzeit, ‘a semiotic struggle for the definition of political or social position’ (1985: 78–9), but equally the historical analysis of concepts can also be autonomous from the materiality of the social sphere because it traces diachronies – for instance the changing notions of civil society – which are not simply reducible to the state of social relations at any particular time. Because of this, Koselleck insists that there exists between concept and materiality a tension which now is transcended, now breaks out afresh, now appears insoluble. Between linguistic usage and the social materialities upon which it encroaches or to which it targets itself, there can always be registered a certain hiatus. The transformation of the meaning of words and the transformation of things, the change of situation and the urge to rename, correspond directly with each other (1985: 85). Koselleck is resolute that this aporia, the tension between social history and the historicity of concepts, is not incidental but integral to the enterprise of history itself. He turns it, in effect, into something like an aspect of our anthropological fate, albeit one exacerbated by the circumstances of modernity. The historian cannot solve the question either way, but must pursue the aporia from problem

History, theory, disciplinarity 185 to problem; better not to resolve it through fiat but to treat it as ‘a productive tension, pregnant with knowledge’ (1985: 88). Koselleck, it is true, somewhat muddies this conclusion at the close of his reflections, arguing for a kind of mutually reinforcing alliance between social history and Begriffgeshichte, the historical analysis of conceptuality. This happy vision of co-disciplinarity somewhat underplays the sense of an ‘essential tension’ pertaining between the two, which indeed is not really a tension pertaining between separate enterprises at all, but is rather a ‘folding’ of emphases internal to each discipline over and into each other: there is always an element of conceptual reflexivity in any endeavour of social history, just as there is always a material or performative force to be considered in the analysis of concepts. My point is that the dispute between actuality and concept is endemic to the historical enterprise qua historical enterprise. It is an aporia, not a soluble ‘tension’. But it is also in fact part of the very subject matter of history. Work on this aporia is what historians do. Social historians have too often regarded the intrusion of the historicism of concepts into their researches as an alien, idealist or postmodernist threat to their endeavours: but that is to mistake particular styles of dealing with this aporia between actuality and concept and the fact of the aporia itself. Too often historians are merely reluctant to acknowledge its existence. Better to work it through; to address it as a question. Stedman Jones’ own earlier work on Chartism was a fine example of how these difficulties can be addressed, ‘acknowledged’ as the philosophers might say, but hardly resolved, in the process of research. Here Chartism emerged as a determinate ‘political’ language to be sure, but one which brushed precisely against the grain of the social circumstances of the time; a tension which was unquestionably an aspect of the very force of the Chartist movement; such that in some senses its vibrancy and purchase derived from the fact that it was ‘out of its time’ (Stedman Jones 1993).

5 A further issue concerns the constitution of credibility in social history, which is to say the epistemic legitimation of the discipline itself. Again, a certain deflationary attitude to current anxieties, and even perhaps a certain optimism, would be the best counsel for social historians. One might say that history owes its claim to credibility as a discipline not upon any narrow epistemological status (‘empirical method’) but to a site of visibility and enunciation: what the late, lamented Irving Velody used to call simply the ‘archive’. It is not an exaggeration to say that the idea of the archive is what has made history possible as a distinct discipline (Velody 1998; Derrida 1995; Osborne 1999; and the particularly incisive article by Cousins [1987]). At the end of the day, the historian’s credibility reduces to his or her expertise amongst the documents in the archive. This is as true of social history as it is of any other branch of the discipline. Yet in a sense, we are indeed at something of a mutation in this notion of the archive as a principle of anchorage and credibility. This is not down to the subversive effects of the musings of

186

Thomas Osborne

theorists, of Barthes or Hayden White. It is true that in meta-historical terms, theorists and others have been arguing that the archive is not an innocent space; that what were once thought to be documents are in fact monuments; that archival deposition is motivated and not accidental; that the reach of the archive is not the same as the reach of the actual past; that there is a rhetoric of the real in history rather than merely a recounting of it. Of course. But one could say that this has been the state of affairs for a long time. Foucault, for instance, wrote of the distinction between monuments and documents some thirty years ago; and he noted that such scepticism about the status of documents had long been an aspect of historical method (Foucault 1972: 6–7). Certainly, doubts about the innocence of the archive have long been available. Indeed they are axiomatic – again, integral rather than incidental – to historical method understood as a form of criticism. For it is because the historian doubts that he or she must criticize. History is in fact generically a critical discipline. Paul Ricoeur has written some evocative pages on this subject. The best documents are ‘un-motivated’; ‘the most valuable traces’, writes Ricoeur, ‘are the ones that were not intended for any information’ (Ricoeur 1988: 117); whereas motivated traces are not so much documents as monuments. But of course there is no such thing as the unmotivated trace; in a sense, as historians well know, all documents are monuments; which is why history has to be a critical discipline (cf. François 1995: 147–8). But, again, as Ricoeur shows, history is also critical in a wider sense, that is, as a vocation. This is because history is itself an ethical matter, a matter of obligation, of debt. Ricoeur comments: ‘As soon as the idea of a debt to the dead, to people of flesh and blood to whom something really happened in the past stops giving documentary research its highest end, history loses its meaning’ (Ricoeur 1988: 118); all history is, then, about enlarging the scope of collective memory and is therefore always a critique of whatever traces have been left and the instituted powers that have been responsible for such deposition. In this sense, history – whether social history or whatever – tends generically towards the critique of power. ‘For history has always been a critique of social narratives and, in this sense, a rectification of our common memory. Every documentary revolution lies along this trajectory’ (Ricoeur 1988: 119; Hartog 1995). There is no reason whatever why this critical vocation of history should be brought to an end by the dictates of epistemology or by theorizing of any kind. And if it is the case that the waning in confidence over the explanatory overcoding of the past – Marxism, deductive evolutionism, functionalism – has helped to make a certain archival reflexivity less contentious, even the norm amongst historians, then this does not in itself amount to anything quite so dramatic as a post-archival situation; rather it is a situation where people are ever more conscious of the problematic presence of the archive itself: in short, not a crisis but a great opportunity for history. So on the one hand, there has been in the social history of recent years a proliferation in the statuses of the archive. One thinks, for example, of the work of the late Raphael Samuel: for

History, theory, disciplinarity 187 him all sorts of things become amenable to the archival gaze of the historian; old photographs and cinema, the Tower of London and the history of rambling (Samuel 1995; 1998). Samuel was no postmodernist, yet texts more obviously marked by postmodernism, such as Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties or Paul Veyne’s work on Greek myth, might also be considered less as an attack on the idea of archival truth than as an extension of the idea of the archive – and hence, to be sure, of truth itself (Schama 1991; Veyne 1988; and also on the history of truth, the excellent work of Shapin [1994]). On the other hand there is the growth of a kind of archival reflexivity, not necessarily of a pretentious postmodern kind, but rather of the sort that sees the existence of the archive as itself worthy of critical interrogation, partly on the basis of a questioning of the pleasures of archives, partly on the basis of an archaeology of the very idea of the archive, the different kinds that have existed and the varied uses to which they have been put (see especially Steedman 1999, which builds on earlier reflections; and also Richards 1993; Joyce 1999; le Goff 1992; and the brilliant book by Pomian [1990]). Another feature of this mutation concerns what could be termed the futurity of the archive. Of course the archive was always a machine of futurity anyway; archives are envoys to posterity. But a key aspect of the archive’s classical status was that its future was unproblematic: archives deposited data for posterity from one generation to another such that there was a certain continuity across generations. Yet we live in an age when our own envoys to posterity are both multiplying and destabilizing themselves. Gone is the paradigm of dusty documents with a physical presence in vaults and libraries. Today the document is giving way more and more to the trace. With the proliferation of electronic media, who knows where the archives of the future will begin or end? If the classical archive was dogged by the problem of selection; the suspicion that documents were monuments; then the archives of the future will be plagued both by a certain excess of information and also by the suspicion that their contents may not have remained stable since the trace does not have the physical presence of the document. The enhancement of forms of media and technology for storing data, and media for communicating – and erasing – data (such as Derrida’s example of e-mail) all have effects on the integrity of archival reason. As Derrida says: electronic mail today…is transforming the entire public and private space of humanity.…It is not only a technique, in the ordinary and limited sense of the term: at an unprecedented rhythm, in quasi-instantaneous fashion, this instrumental possibility of production, of printing, of conservation, and of destruction of the archive must inevitably be accompanied by juridical and thus political transformations. (Derrida 1995: 18) Mutations in the state of the archive today – which is to say the archives of the future – mean that the innocence of an archival empiricism or positivism is now

188

Thomas Osborne

an impossibility more or less as a practical and obvious fact. This is not a case of modernist or postmodernist approaches to history; it is a case of all forms of history coming up against a recognition that the archive is not only not an innocent space but that it is an unlimited space; unlimited in its extent and unlimited in its potentiality for transformation. Where this leaves history as a discipline is – or will be – another matter. On the one hand, one may expect a greater attention to newer and wider time-frames, a widening of ambition beyond the confines of traditional academic history, that is precisely beyond limited conceptions of the archive (see for an extreme, popular example Tudge 1995). This may well involve closer relations between history and the natural sciences, which in turn would entail recognizing the extent to which so many branches of natural science are themselves historical; astronomy, climatology, ecology, evolutionary biology, geology, palaeontology (Diamond 1997: 424). On the other hand, social historians may want to move further into that liminal zone between theory and history; towards culturalist forms of history of various kinds, for example. But equally, they might choose to remain as social historians. And why not? After all, the ethical discipline that is historical criticism might make out a case for its being of ever greater relevance in this age of multiple interpretations; and there is no reason why it should no longer do so through social history as well as other kinds of history. One reason for this is that social history’s close attention to the archive makes it the ideal laboratory for exploring questions and teaching issues of archival consciousness and reflexivity more generally; social history would be understood, in this sense, as a kind of moral or civic pursuit as well as an intellectual one. Another reason is that social history is well placed to explore both the ways in which our sense of the past – and hence of the present – is governed, in particular by way of the discourse of heritage, and the ways in which notions of the social might still be furthered, for it is not least on the basis of a reflection on our past that we make not just the actual future but our very ideas of futurity. The former task is already well underway; not so the latter. But if there is a solution to the problem of the ‘death of the social’, in the limited sense that this should be understood, it can only be answered on the basis of another conception of the social. Social historians are brilliantly placed to address this question. F. W. Maitland was a historian who influenced the tradition of guild socialism on the basis not least of his historical researches; here is an example of a historical form of thought impacting directly on political culture. Today there may be a need, similarly, to explore in as much detail as possible the alternative forms of association that have existed in the past, as a way ‘after the social’ of retrieving the social in the name of another ideal of what the social might mean (see e.g. Hirst 1994). From social history to associational history, perhaps? In any case, only theorists need despair. The so-called crisis of history may someday be regarded as no more than a crisis of will. It may be that history, as the central discipline of the archive, will be uniquely placed as a site of reflection on the very status of archival politics, our archival lives, the traces that govern us and which will come to determine who on earth we have been.

History, theory, disciplinarity 189

References Anderson, P. (1992) ‘W. G. Runciman: a new evolutionism’, in A Zone of Engagement, London: Verso. Barry, A. (1993) ‘The history of measurement and the engineers of space’, British Journal of the History of Science, 26, 459–68. Barthes, R. (1986) ‘The discourse of history’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley: University of California Press. Bauman, Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Postmodernity and Intellectuals, Cambridge: Polity. Biernacki, R. (1999) ‘Method and metaphor after the new cultural history’, in V. Bonnell and L. Hunt (eds) Beyond the Cultural Turn, Berkeley: University of California Press. Cabrera, M. (1999) ‘Linguistic approach or return to subjectivism?’, Social History, 24, 1, 74–89. Cohen, G. A. (1978) Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cousins, M. (1987) ‘The practice of historical investigation’ in D. Attridge, G. Bennington and R. Young (eds) Post-structuralism and the Question of History, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Derrida, J. (1995) Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Diamond, J. (1997) ‘The practice of historical investigation’ Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 12,000 Years, London: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock. ——(1989) Résumé des Cours, Paris: Vrin. ——[M. Florence] (1998) ‘Foucault’, in J. Faubion (ed.) Michel Foucault: Essential Works 1954–84, Harmondsworth: Penguin. François, E. (1995) ‘Les “trésors” de la Stasi ou le mirage des archives’, in J. Boutier and D. Julia (eds) Passés Recomposés, Paris: Autrement. Giddens, A. (1976) ‘Functionalism: après la lutte’, in Studies in Social and Political Theory, London: Hutchinson. Le Goff, J. (1992) History and Memory, New York: Columbia University Press. Goldstein, J. (ed.) (1994) Foucault and the Writing of History, Oxford: Blackwell. Gordon, C. (1990) ‘Histoire de la Folie: an unknown book by Michel Foucault’, History of the Human Sciences, 3, 1, 3–26. ——(1991) ‘Governmental rationality: an introduction’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf. Hartog, F. (1995) ‘L’art du récit historique’, in J. Boutier and D. Julia (eds) Passés Recomposés, Paris: Autrement. Hennis, W. (1988) Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, trans. K. Tribe, London: Allen & Unwin. Hirst, P. (1994) Associational Democracy, Cambridge: Polity. Honneth, A. and Joas, H. (1988) Social Action and Human Nature, trans. R. Meyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenkins, K. (1997) The Postmodern History Reader, London: Routledge. Joyce, P. (1995) ‘The end of social history?’, Social History, 20, 1, 73–91. ——(1998) ‘The return of history: postmodernism and the politics of academic history in Britain’, Past and Present, 158, 207–35.

190

Thomas Osborne

——(1999) ‘The politics of the liberal archive’, History of the Human Sciences, 12, 2, 35–49. Koselleck, R. (1985) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition, trans. B. Massumi and G. Bennington, Manchester: Manchester University Press. McLennan, G. (2000) ‘The new positivity’, in J. Eldridge et al. (eds) For Sociology: Legacies and Prospects, Durham: Sociology Press. Mann, M. (1986) The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osborne, T. (1998) Aspects of Enlightenment: Social Theory and the Ethics of Truth, London: UCL Press. ——(1999) ‘The ordinariness of the archive’, History of the Human Sciences, 12, 2, 51–64. Pomian, K. (1990) Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. E. Wiles-Porter, Cambridge: Polity. Revel, J. and Hunt, L. (eds) (1995) Histories: French Constructions of the Past, trans. A. Goldhammer et al., New York: New Press. Richards, T. (1993) The Imperial Archive, London: Verso. Ricoeur, P. (1988) Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rose, N. (1992) Towards a Critical Sociology of Freedom, London: Goldsmiths’ College. ——(1996) ‘The death of the social’, Economy and Society, 25, 3, 327–56. Samuel, R. (1995) Theatres of Memory, London: Verso. ——(1998) Island Stories, London: Verso. Schama, S. (1991) Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations, London: Penguin/Granta. Shapin, S. (1994) A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-century England, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stedman Jones, G. (1993) Languages of Class: Studies in Working Class History 1832–1982, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(1996) ‘The determinist fix: some obstacles to the development of the linguistic approach to history in the 1990s’, History Workshop Journal, 42, 19–35. Steedman, C. (1999) ‘The space of memory: in an archive’, History of the Human Sciences, 11, 4, 65–84. Tudge, C. (1995) The Day Before Yesterday: Five Million Years of Human History, London: Pimlico. Velody, I. (1998) ‘The archive and the human sciences’, History of the Human Sciences, 11, 4, 1–16. Veyne, P. (1988) Did The Greeks Believe in their Myths?, trans. P. Wissing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

11 Cultures of inquiry and the rethinking of disciplines John R. Hall

Across the social sciences, history and the humanities, approaches to research often seem highly disparate. On one front, for example, sociologists Edgar Kiser and Michael Hechter seek to defend the project of general social theory in comparative and historical sociology. Arguing that idiographic approaches and recent trends towards induction play into charges of superficiality, they promote the search for causal mechanisms through the deductive use of general theory. From a different direction, consider historian Natalie Zemon Davis’ book, The Return of Martin Guerre. Davis reexamined old accounts about a village in the south of France, where one day in 1556 there appeared a man who said he was the husband of a woman named Bertrande. Martin Guerre had disappeared years earlier, leaving behind his wife of nine years and a newborn child. The man recounted the reason for his disappearance – he had gone off to war – and the village people welcomed his return. Bertrande took him into her arms. But eventually the Martin Guerre who shared a bed with Bertrande lost favour, and came to be confronted in court with the return of the real Martin Guerre. Did Bertrande know from the beginning that she was accepting an impostor for her husband? Davis has woven a story of complex truths submerged in contending agendas of disguise. In the bargain, she reminds us that secrets and lies make social ‘reality’ a many layered thing.1 As these two examples suggest, it is possible to produce radically different kinds of sociohistorical knowledge. Kiser and Hechter promote inquiry into causal mechanisms, whereas Davis’ account suggests that even detailed knowledge of the social is tentative, incomplete, and doomed to remain so. How are these and competing claims about inquiry to be understood – in their own terms, and in relation to one another? What are the possibilities of dialogue between them in pursuit of knowledge? These questions deserve consideration within a broad terrain that encompasses the social sciences, history, and the humanities. In the latter part of the twentieth century, that terrain – sociohistorical inquiry – became the locus of strong movements towards rethinking relationships among disciplines and interdisciplinary agendas.2 Yet contentions about the status of sociohistorical knowledge have tended to undermine such movements. Today, any project of understanding inquiry faces circumstances in which the philosophical

192

John R. Hall

examination of claims to knowledge – epistemology – has been challenged by accounts of knowledge as a social construction subject to political and other extra-scientific influences. Yet social constructionists have not found it easy to move beyond general claims, to describe the specific cultural rationales that inform alternative constructions of knowledge. Nor have the social and historical critiques easily avoided circular problems of reductionism. When they focus on the conditions under which knowledge is produced rather than whether it is valid, such approaches fail to account for the significance of knowledge itself, and fall into the performative contradiction of delegitimating their own accounts. Contemporary controversies over knowledge derive in no small part from the vexing problem encountered by Immanuel Kant – that pure reason cannot contain inquiry concerning sociohistorical matters within its boundaries. As Kant understood, sociohistorical knowledge cannot be established entirely within the realm of ‘pure reason’, for human affairs conflate moral, intellectual, and empirical issues.3 It is thus necessary to supplement Kant’s critique of pure reason with a ‘critique of impure reason’. As a contribution to that critique, the present chapter describes a ‘Third Path’ that leads beyond objectivism and relativism to an understanding of sociohistorical inquiries in cultural terms – as structured practices with roots in shared discursive resources that both facilitate and constrain pluralistic communication about the sociohistorical world. My discussion proceeds in four movements: 1 2 3 4

a consideration of the standoff between ‘objectivism’ and ‘relativism’; a sketch of the method of ‘hermeneutic deconstruction’ that I use to identify four sociohistorical ‘forms of discourse’; an overview that depicts alternative ‘practices of inquiry’ as hybrid concatenations among the four forms of discourse; and an extended exploration of one practice of inquiry – historicism.

By way of conclusion, I reflect upon the implications of acknowledging the coexistence of alternative cultures of sociohistorical inquiry for disciplines, interdisciplinary projects, and the academic reorganization of the humanities, history, and the social sciences.

From the foundations of knowledge to the cultures of inquiry By investigating cultures of inquiry, I mean neither to exoticize inquiry in the domains of its distinctive academic subcultures (microeconomics, ethnomusicology, Asian studies, and so forth), nor to essentialize Culture as a mysterious overarching spirit of Academe. Instead, I take inquiry to be cultural because it depends upon historically embedded and socially practised activities of cultivating the soil from which knowledge is produced. Clearly, distinctive cultures of inquiry can be identified in diverse research programmes, disciplines, interdisciplinary research agendas, and critical projects. But in the interests of

Cultures of inquiry 193 promoting a methodological debate about the inclusive domain of sociohistorical inquiry, I do not focus on local cultures of inquiry in their substantive specificities. Instead, I show how diverse methodological cultures are intimately connected by their alignments and oppositions to one another. Other investigators have studied the social, political and economic contexts of everyday sociohistorical research practices. But surprisingly little attention has been given to an additional characteristic: inquiry involves researchers, their audiences, and sometimes wider publics in the production and deployment of meanings. This characteristic implies that it should be possible to identify ‘cultural logics’ at work in the conduct of research. Rather than treating issues of methodology as matters of philosophical debate, this approach assumes that logics of inquiry, like cultural logics elsewhere (for example, in religion), are a bit messy, resistant to thorough-going rationalization, and open to challenge from other cultural standpoints. On the basis of this assumption, it is possible to shift Max Weber’s verstehende (or interpretive) method of cultural analysis from the investigation of meanings in the wider sociohistorical world towards the study of meanings in sociohistorical inquiry itself. This inquiry into inquiry provides substantial evidence that disciplinary boundaries are woefully outdated, and suggests concrete ways in which the institutional circumstances of sociohistorical inquiry and education can be restructured. In many ways, the Methodenstreit of our day revisits the Methodenstreit of the late nineteenth century, itself shoved aside by the political triumph of positivism. Our contemporary Methodenstreit sometimes is framed as a standoff over modernism and postmodernism, or objectivism and subjectivism. But I will argue that this standoff is arbitrary. After all, such binary distinctions are themselves modernist, and they may distort our ability to understand knowledge. Inquiry is faced with a false choice – either formulate a single general account of knowledge that reasserts some solid way of connecting representations and their referents, or succumb to the bedlam of texts. Paradoxically, however, any effort to transcend the oppositions on some general basis would simply replicate the totalizing and purifying impulses of modernity. Unfortunately, reactions against Reason, against theory, and against representation sometimes fit this pattern: they become uncritically infused with the very modes of thought that they reject. It is too easy to reinvent modernist totalization through its destruction, by totalizing relativism via some critique of Reason or essentializing the world as a text. In these admittedly pragmatic calculations, the binary oppositions – between modern and postmodern sensibilities, between Reason and relativism, between science and its Other – seem overdrawn. We live in a world where, difficulties notwithstanding, inquiry is practised and claims of knowledge are made. Each in its own way, either relativism or a monolithic Reason, subverts critical inquiry – defined as the willingness to call into question any assumption, theory or hypothesis. The Third Path to knowledge is deeply connected both to modernist inquiry and to postmodern critique, but it moves beyond both. It requires a new

194

John R. Hall

understanding of binary oppositions. Modernism, as Bruno Latour has observed, thrives on an odd contradiction: the assertion of sharp distinctions in principle, whereas in practice, its inquiry often depends on the construction of ‘hybrids’ to connect the very things that the ideology of science must analytically distinguish – the vacuum and the machinery used to produce it, for example.4 In the realm of sociohistorical inquiry, there is an analogue to Latour’s account of natural science and its objects – namely the possibility of examining hybrid relationships across putatively ‘pure’ regions and objects of inquiry. Friedrich Nietzsche once suggested that ‘History must solve the problem of history, science must turn its sting against itself’.5 But reading Latour suggests that Nietzsche needs revision. Neither science nor history is up to the task of self-study, for they are already hybrids, deeply interfigured with each other. Historians once claimed to proceed without theory, but they are now much more ambivalent about this point. Economists used to assert the neat boundaries of their discipline, but those boundaries seem less sharp today. Literary criticism – is this not a hybrid activity too? The Third Path proceeds by using a hybrid inquiry to identify the hybrid practices of inquiry. This route depends on understanding inquiry as conducted through meaningful social discourse. The implication that this route brings into view is striking: choices between the routes of science and interpretation, history and theory, objectivism and relativism, are more illusory than real. Even radically opposed methodologies for creating knowledge, it turns out, are only relatively autonomous of one another. This claim can be elaborated by considering inquiry’s alternative methodological practices and their relations to what I will call ‘forms of discourse’. In my view, virtually all inquiries about the social world are amalgams that combine the resources of four different kinds of discourse – value discourse, narrative, social theory, and explanation/interpretation. But despite the near ubiquity of these formative discourses, it is obvious that not all research combines them in the same way. For instance, one researcher may try to keep value judgements completely separate from research, whereas another’s value stance entirely permeates empirical analysis. Differentials like this one suggest that it ought to be possible to identify the cultural logics of methodological practices by detailing various ways in which such practices thread together the four forms of discourse.6

The hermeneutic deconstruction of discourse Overall, the Third Path shifts away from considering knowledge through a purely philosophical practice of epistemology, towards a broadly Weberian method of ‘hermeneutic deconstruction’ – a hermeneutic supplementation of deconstruction – that I use to examine research practices as cultural bricolages of discourse. This approach tempers the critical power of deconstruction to expose ellipses and contradictions of discourse with the reconstructive power of hermeneutics to tease out meanings in their cultural coherence. As a way of analysing inquiry, hermeneutic deconstruction takes inspiration

Cultures of inquiry 195 from social epistemology, the sociology of knowledge, feminist theory, rhetoric, pragmatism and critical theory. The central analytic practice is to explore the meaningful character of inquiry by developing Weberian ideal types – sociohistorical models of patterned meaning complexes – to use in the interpretation of inquiry as cultural practice. The project might be thought of as a Foucauldian archeology of knowledge or a substantive Lyotardian study of discourse, reflexively directed towards inquiry.7 Using the method of hermeneutic deconstruction, it becomes possible to examine the four forms of discourse that, I theorize, collectively structure practices of inquiry. For each form of discourse, inquiry today confronts both legacies of historical development as well as characteristic philosophical, theoretical and rhetorical problems which researchers address in conventional (or sometimes innovative) ways. In the first place, discourse on values frames research projects, and in turn, inquiry conducted through one frame or another claims to offer knowledge of value about the sociohistorical world. Whatever the claims for inquiry within any particular resolution of the value problem, however, a diversity of viable yet mutually contradictory value bases of inquiry coexist (see Table 11.1). The second formative discourse, narrative, is equally contested, but in different ways. There are two broad issues: first, the question of how structural characteristics of narrative discourse shape both inquiry and life more generally; and second, the issue of how narrative can be used as a methodology for research. Methodologically, it is important to differentiate between narratives that are centred ‘intrinsically’ – in the meaningful actions of people prior to inquiry’s narration, versus ‘extrinsic’ narratives that obtain their coherence in ways that are decisively based on the ex post facto activities of inquiry itself. In turn, considering theory requires a ‘theory of theorization’. In the strong sense of the term, discourses of social theory involve efforts to make sense of sociohistorical phenomena on one or another general basis. Thus defined, any theory depends on some strategy of concept formation. Here, just as there are diverse plausible Table 11.1

Basis of object of enquiry

Projects of explanation according to value assumptions concerning the constructed object of inquiry and criteria for adjudication of alternative accounts concerning them Criteria of adjudication

Value/theory relative Objective

Source: Hall 1999: 70

Universal

Value/theory relative

Value-neutral explanation

Interpretive explanation

Objective explanation

Value-objective explanation

196

John R. Hall

approaches to value discourse and narrative, theoretical discourse can conceptualize sociohistorical phenomena in multiple viable ways that cut across one another (see Table 11.2). In brief, concepts can be formed in ways that theorize: (1) meaning structures, (2) formal structures, (3) network systems, or (4) institutional/functional systems. Some readers will interject that none of these discourses is really autonomous from the others. This is my view as well. To take an example that I pursue at length in Cultures of Inquiry, value discourse, narrative, and social theory lay certain claims on the fourth form of discourse – explanation and interpretation. As Table 11.1 suggests, divergent resolutions of the value problem yield manifold projects in which explanation or interpretation might operate. Furthermore, both narratives and social theories can yield explanations and interpretations in their own terms. However, ‘partialling out’ valuational, narrative and theoretical claims still leaves a ‘core’ discourse of explanation and interpretation. For this discourse, it is precisely scientists’ concern to differentiate explanation from ‘softer’ approaches such as interpretation which suggests a broad and contested terrain. In the most general sense, its discourse is concerned with offering accounts of sociohistorical phenomena and adjudicating among competing accounts. Both explanatory and interpretive discourses link diverse inquiries by weighing arguments, from whatever quarter, on whatever grounds, with bases in theory, narrative and contingency, so that the Table 11.2 Four approaches to theoretical discourse with associated types of case-pattern concepts, according to subjective meaning adequacy and basis of concept formation, with type of analytic-element relation used to specify case-pattern concept listed in parentheses BASIS OF CONCEPT FORMATION

Present BASIS IN SUBJECTIVE MEANING ADEQUACY

Structural

Systemic

Hermeneutic approach

Interchange approach

IDEAL TYPE (meaning elements)

(exchange/interchange)

Formal/structural approach

Dialectical/functional approach

FORM

FUNCTIONAL/DIALETICAL SYSTEM

(causal/conditional)

(functional/dialetical)

Absent

Source: Hall 1999: 127

‘MARKET’ SYSTEM

Cultures of inquiry 197 weaker arguments can be dismissed and stronger ones set against each other. Even if no account would ever be complete or fully adequate in epistemological terms, efforts at formulating and assessing accounts ground whatever sense we make of our world. Overall, as with the discourse of interpretation and explanation, each of the other three formative discourses reaches limits beyond which its problematics become articulated with other forms of discourse – values in relation to explanation, theory as an axis of narrative, narrative in its value structuration, and so forth. This assertion – the basis for which I have only sketched here – in turn raises an important question: what are the relations between forms of discourse and methodological practices of inquiry?

Discursive hybrids of methodological practice My central thesis is that sociohistorical research cannot be carried out wholly within the unalloyed logic of any single one of the ‘pure’ formative discourses that I have sketched. To the contrary, actual inquiries depend on hybrid practices that involve extra-logical mediations among different formative discourses employed in relation to one another. That is, any given inquiry draws together value discourse, narrative, social theory and explanation or interpretation. Therefore, it should be possible to identify alternative methodological practices of inquiry as discursive hybrids that articulate relationships among formative discourses. Pursuing this thesis, it becomes possible to see how the four formative discourses are differentially linked in eight alternative methodological practices of inquiry. To theorize these methodological practices typologically, I specify two axes of variation. First, I assume that each form of discourse, though it could not serve as a completely self-contained practice of inquiry, can serve as the ordering basis for a practice of inquiry centred on its discourse. Second, I invoke a long-standing distinction in the interdisciplinary engagement of history and the social sciences, namely, that of positing a difference between the interest among social scientists in theorization relevant to generalizing (typically in relation to multiple cases), compared to historians’ typically more thorough-going particularizing orientation towards comprehensive analysis of a single phenomenon. These two axes yield a basis for defining a typology of methodological practices (see Table 11.3). Among the eight methodologies, four generalizing practices are oriented towards research intended to apply across multiple cases (even if only a single case is the focus of a given inquiry). These practices are (1) universal history, (2) the application of theory, (3) analytic generalization, and (4) the development of contrasts through comparison. In turn, four particularizing practices are oriented to the conventional task of histories, ethnographies, and other idiographic studies, namely, the comprehensive analysis of a single object of inquiry. They are: (5) situational history, (6) specific history, (7) configurational history, and (8) historicism. Taken together, the eight practices offer a set of

198

John R. Hall

Table 11.3

Practices of inquiry, specified in terms of dominant discourse that orders the four forms of discourse in the practice, and orientation of the practice towards inquiry Dominant discourse that orders four forms of discourse

Orientation toward inquiry

VALUES

NARRATIVE

THEORY

EXPLANATION/ INTERPRETATION

GENERALIZING

Universal history

Theory application

Analytic generalization

Contrast-oriented comparison

PARTICULARIZING

Situational history

Specific history

Configurational history

Historicism

Source: Hall 1999: 178

benchmarks for understanding sociohistorical inquiry as an encompassing methodological domain. However, none of the eight practices is epistemologically ‘pure’ in its logic. Instead, they are hybrids that cobble together the four forms of discourse in culturally meaningful ways. To show that this is the case, and to show how acknowledging methodological hybridization yields implications for disciplines and interdisciplinarity under contemporary conditions, let us examine one of the eight ideal typical practices – historicism – in some detail.

An example: historicism as a practice of inquiry Max Weber and others of his generation consolidated their practices of inquiry in response to the late nineteenth-century Methodenstreit – itself in part a critical reaction to Leopold von Ranke’s ‘scientific history’. Ranke’s approach must be understood as ‘historicist’ for anyone who, like Weber, seeks to establish a strong working relation between social theory and historical inquiry. To be sure, Weber himself was a historicist, but this is true only in the broad sense that Weber refused to subordinate history to natural-science models of inquiry. Ranke’s solution exemplifies historicism more precisely defined – as a distinctive practice of inquiry that treats the origins, genesis and unique character of specific sociohistorical phenomena in empiricist, self-referential and seemingly antitheoretical terms. A central puzzle concerns how Ranke could embrace both a commitment to ‘scientific’ history and a belief in a divine Guiding Hand that manifests itself in the currents of each epoch’s history.8 To address this question is to reflect on what ‘historicism’ could mean, thereby helping to locate historicism as one of four particularizing practices of inquiry, by identifying the relationships among the four forms of discourse that specify it. In turn, reflecting on exemplars of historicism as a cultural practice of inquiry shows how the practice simultaneously structures debates about divergent substantive arguments, research agendas, and intellectual progress, while finessing consideration of theoretical and methodological issues that might lead to greater reflexivity in inquiry. Historicism is a rich term that has been subjected to multiple and highly contradictory definitions. The greatest confusion stems from Karl Popper’s unfortunate use of the term in The Poverty of Historicism, a confusion exacer-

Cultures of inquiry 199 bated by his eminence. The target of Popper’s dissatisfaction seems to have been any approach that theorizes history, most particularly Marxism. But this usage confuses historicism – in its range of meanings for historians – with universal history as a practice that totalizes history within an overarching theoretical framework.9 Popper aside, historicism can be understood by typologically locating Ranke’s approach as a coherent practice of inquiry, specified as an approach grounded in the discourse of explanation and interpretation, articulated in relation to the discourses of values, narrative, and social theory. Basically, Ranke sought an empirically clarified narrative, and he shunned theoretical generalizations. Nevertheless, he could not avoid value-based and theoretical issues: he simply tried to resolve these issues in ways that gave primacy of position to the trademark of historicism – the formulation of an explanatory and interpretive account that treats its sociohistorical object as unique. Two different Rankes have their own histories – one German, the other American. As both Georg Iggers and Peter Novick have shown, American historians through the 1950s tended to embrace Ranke’s creed of reconstructing what actually happened, wie es eigentlich gewesen, as the foundation of a scientific history that would avoid metaphysics. However, this was a creative misreading of Ranke’s position. It is worth recalling that Ranke reacted against eighteenth-century German enlightenment theoretical models of historical process. He wanted to avoid any systematic theoretical scheme. Nevertheless, he understood that writing history required more than stringing together analytically established facts. For this reason, in contrast to the Americans, Ranke’s German audience – both supporters and opponents – saw Ranke as seeking to uncover history’s coherence. Sometimes understood as the Idea or Spirit that animates surface events, this coherence has more recently been dubbed by structuralist historian Christopher Lloyd as either an ‘idealist emanation’ or ‘sociocultural evolution’. Thus, for Friedrich Meinecke, German historicism of the nineteenth century offered the idea of the inimitable, unique individuality which develops according to its own vital laws and which cannot be comprehended by means of logical thinking, let alone through the mechanistic law of causation, but rather has to be grasped, viewed and experienced or re-experienced with the totality of all spiritual powers.10 For all that American historians invoked Ranke as the founder of scientific archival research, Meinecke’s depiction raises a troubling question for historicism as scientific history – how does its depiction of an historical object yield an overall account that is something other than the mere accumulation of facts? The two issues that most impeded Ranke’s quest for scientific history are the problem of selection – which of myriad events to include in a history – and the relation of individual and unique events to a more general process of development. On the one hand, Ranke thought that all events great and small, of one era and of another, would be equal in the mind of God, and he rejected either teleological history or any assumption of progress. On the other hand, he affirmed faith in God’s purpose for this world, and he sought to discern the

200

John R. Hall

workings of God in the actions of individuals and the histories of groups. Paradoxically, Ranke wanted to be objective because he saw history as something of a sign of God, which should not be prejudged in terms of mere earthly conceptions of divine will, and which therefore required careful research to discover. Ranke’s solution to the problems of selecting events and identifying the directions of history was to advance a single theory of historical coherence that would connect discrete events with ultimate process from the outset. By positing that society’s institutional elites (the papacy, powerful political elites in national states) represent unique unfolding spiritual essences of history,11 he finessed the need for any further invocation of social theory, and in the bargain solved the problem of selection by linking particular histories as the manifestations presumed to reveal general historical development. In Ranke’s hegemonic historicism, history’s larger pattern at the same stroke renders coherent the multitude of events and hints at God’s ineffable mystery in the destinies of nations and the Church. In effect, Ranke posited contingent interpretation and explanation as the stuff of historical analysis, linking them through his resolution of the value problem to a general metaphysical ontology of elite history as History writ large (see Figure 11.1).

Figure 11.1 Historicism: The four forms of discourse and the research practice.

Cultures of inquiry 201 During the twentieth century, various ‘new’ histories invoked Ranke’s historicism as a negative exemplar, but they often rejected his specific metaphysical ontology rather than the use of such an ontology in the practice of historicism itself. Reaction against histories of elites in the Rankean mould inspired both the Annales programme of social and ecological history as well as the recent interest in social and cultural history.12 However, the core logic of historicism simply looks to contingent interpretation and explanation of phenomena in antitheoretical and self-coherent terms, and this approach continues to have broad appeal. Thus Gertrude Himmelfarb affirms both the centrality of power and politics as well as the importance of narrative, not just of one event, ‘but precisely of a series of events chronologically connected so as to tell a story over a significant span of time’. Today, the range of historicist practice is considerably broader than Ranke’s – or Himmelfarb’s – solution. When the kernel of Ranke’s historicist practice is clarified, it becomes clear that the focus on religious and political elites is not essential to the approach that he championed. What matters is the consolidation of unique History predicated upon an ontological metaphysic of historical connectedness. The content of this consolidation remains open. Thus, like Ranke, Marxist historicism scorns any formal theoretical ‘laws’ of development; it differs from Ranke by discerning the direction of history in concrete class conflicts rather than the interplay of institutional elites. And this is hardly the only alternative. More generally, historicism can be centred on the study of social movements as barometers of historical development, and in other dispensations, it serves as one possible basis for anthropological and sociological field research directed towards what Clifford Geertz called ‘thick description’ of cultural domains.13 In these terms, historicism retains a rich potential for ordering inquiry, despite the low esteem in which it is supposedly held. Shorn of its theological trappings, Ranke’s solution was to colligate carefully analysed unique events into a history ‘of’ something based on a philosophical commitment to a general social theory about the linkages between contingent events and a larger historical process. This is a conventional procedure that continues to be widely followed by historians of diverse persuasions, even though the objectivity of the procedure has become widely questioned, most convincingly in a deconstructive assault on historical narrative by Sande Cohen. Applying Cohen’s critique to historicism, its signature is an overarching self-referential narrative ‘of’ an object that is consolidated as ‘history’.14 Hans-Georg Gadamer’s reflections on historicism suggest two alternative bases on which historical coherence tends to be asserted. One version has a romantic inspiration that would restore the relevance of a past wiped out by Enlightenment reason. Alternatively, if historicism becomes legitimated as objective science, as Ranke wanted, Gadamer concludes that it universalizes the ‘discrediting of all prejudices’ and thus eclipses the self-understandings of ‘traditions’. This tension – between historicism as the recapture and self-understanding of ‘our’ history versus scientific historicism – remains highly salient today, for it frames a basic struggle over the content of history as moral

202

John R. Hall

discourse. Employing explanation or interpretation, historicism consolidates a claim to account for the unique meaning of a given narrative by invoking larger moral stakes. But either Enlightenment or enduring (or invented) traditions can define the moral stakes. Thus, without ever venturing beyond historicism as a practice of inquiry, we can trace endemic struggles over whose agenda defines the value discourse of historicism’s history. Such, indeed, is a standard topic of historiography.15 Historicism offers moral drama on an unstable philosophical basis, in a hermeneutic circle open as to the source of its coherence. It thus should come as no surprise that the practice is subject to periodic reinvention. Within the discipline of history, the record will show a succession of proposals for ‘new’ history and manifold claims concerning what ‘real’ history is. To survey the possibilities would require a historiography of grand narrative of the sort framed by Dorothy Ross.16 That project (much less a consideration of historicist practices in anthropology, sociology and the humanities) is beyond the scope of the present chapter, but examining several examples that Ross cites suggests the range of historicist practice today. Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, published in 1994, works selfconsciously in the genre of a jeremiad. The book employs a solidly historicist device of thematic coherence – periodization – as a framework for sketching major geopolitical, social, economic, technological, cultural and military developments of the twentieth century. Hobsbawm is thus able to consolidate a vision of a shared world in unfolding time by analysing large-scale historical forces – the Great Depression as the catalyst for the rise of both fascism and Franklin D. Roosevelt; the importance of the Soviet Union’s Red Army in the Allied Powers’ victory over Germany; the consequences of agricultural biology and chemistry for the end of the peasantry as a global class. The result is a history of ‘the Short Twentieth Century from 1914 to 1991’.17 A more conventionally upbeat historicist study, Gordon Wood’s 1991 book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, describes ‘a momentous upheaval that not only fundamentally altered the character of American society but decisively affected the course of subsequent history’. Here, the sense of national history and its moral significance is palpable. Wood’s account ranges widely, but his central agenda is his claim that the American Revolution as a social revolution was neither narrowly concerned with political independence nor conservative in its interests. At points Wood invokes population growth, migration and commercial expansion as master trends, but he holds the diverse discussions of his narrative together by a strong thread that follows what amounts to a telos of change begetting revolutionary change. ‘In the end’, he argues, ‘the disintegration of the traditional eighteenth-century monarchical society of paternal and dependent relationships prepared the way for the emergence of the liberal, democratic, capitalistic world of the early nineteenth century’. In Wood’s account, the American revolutionaries aimed to consolidate republicanism over monarchy, but their success unleashed forces for democratization more radical than they intended.18

Cultures of inquiry 203 A quite different kind of study suggests both the resilience of historicism, as well as the malleability of ‘power’ as an ontology of the social that can be used to constitute ‘history’. Judith Walkowitz’s fascinating book, City of Dreadful Delight, is not a grand narrative at all in the tradition of Hobsbawm or Wood. It is not even a developmental narrative. Nevertheless, Walkowitz is concerned with power, specifically in a feminist and Foucaldian sense, which she explores via discourses of sexuality in urban space. Although City of Dreadful Delight ‘observes chronological boundaries, it does not proceed in linear fashion’. Instead, Walkowitz ‘maps out a dense cultural grid’ by juxtaposing narratives of sexual danger in Victorian London (Jack the Ripper and the ‘Maiden Tribute’ exposé of prostitution) and sexual exploration (the sexually liberated Eleanor Marx, Karl Pearson in the Men and Women’s Club). The juxtaposition of these narratives establishes something of a poststructuralist tableau of historical ethnography that displays how narratives in the social world rework both popular-culture melodramas of narrated sexualities and practised sexual sensibilities. If Hobsbawm offers an Enlightenment jeremiad, if Wood offers an invented tradition of democratic enlightenment, Walkowitz works in a way like Gadamer’s romantic historian, but with irony, to ‘recapture’ the sexual anxieties and aspirations of Victorian London, so that we may experience that historical moment with all its ambiguous resonances for our own day.19 The diversity of these contemporary exemplars suggests two important points about historicism. First, although idealism and science are often counterposed in debates among historians, they are two poles of a single overall practice, tied together by the shared interest in consolidating a topic beyond the intentionalities of individuals, but without resorting to explicit value ordering of inquiry or thoroughgoing social theoretical constructionism. At one pole, idealist historicists like Meinecke will embrace an intuitionist grasp of historical individualities and deride science as impoverished in its capacity to understand the inner connections that give history its force. Conversely, scientific historians who want to use detailed empirical research to establish ‘what happened’ will disdain obviously idealist narratives (in this, they are in the company of Ranke himself). These differences may seem striking, but they are dialectical ones: each depends for its existence on a secret embrace of the repressed other – idealism in its claim of objectivity, science in its metaphysical object – in a more encompassing logic of historicism that fuses the two of them in the pursuit of idiographic accounts. Second, the metaphysical character of ‘History’ (for example, ‘the’ history of the United States) even at the ‘scientific’ pole accounts in large measure for both the resilience and the intractable conflicts of historicist inquiry. Because the ‘aboutness’ of realist historicism is established metaphysically, narrative is open to radical disputation about how the object of inquiry is to be constructed in the first place. Thus various proclamations of ‘new’ histories over the years often amount to the old historicism applied to new topics. For example, Fernand Braudel’s formulation of the Annales vision did not abandon objective temporality; instead, it broadened the canvas of conventional political history

204

John R. Hall

by including a diverse range of social, institutional and ecological events within a multiscale yet realist framework of linear time.20 Much historical argumentation concerns not facts or even historical sequences. It addresses the relation of facts and sequences to ‘historical reality’, when that reality itself is a metaphysical construction open to contestations. Especially when historicism is tilted toward its scientific pole, the metaphysical aspects are suppressed, with the result that metaphysical argumentation becomes transmuted into arguments for the superiority of one narrative over another. Such arguments are about which story is told, not which story is true. These points suggest that historicism will be the site of continuing struggle. Indeed, the struggle is now renewed not only by the turn towards historicity in the social sciences, but also by the historicist turn in literary criticism. Thus, the ‘New Historicism’ advanced by Stephen Greenblatt may be understood as a turn away from ahistorical and highly theorized textual criticism, and towards consideration of the historical embeddedness of literature and the literary and discursive dimensions of history and the social more widely.21 However, insofar as this ‘cultural poetics’ simply reinvents historicism under a new metaphysic, it becomes caught up in the contemporary Methodenstreit of sociohistorical inquiry – a conflict ironically fuelled by the literary critical deconstruction of historical narrative. The humanistic journey to history as anything like a ‘natural’ practice of inquiry arrives at a destination that has disappeared. Nevertheless, Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher recently affirmed that New Historicism embraces the wider historicist resistance to theory in favour of deep interpretive engagement with the meanings of its objects of analysis as such, and they would deem any effort to abstract theory or method from their project as sign of a failure on their part.22 Their project, in short, resonates with historicism in the strong sense of the term. New Historicism, and cultural studies more generally, have an important potential for erasing disciplinary boundaries, partly by emphasizing the sociohistorical character of humanistic inquiry. Once ‘literary’ texts are historicized and other texts and discourses are explored via ‘literary’ interpretive methods, investigation requires analysis of the specific ways in which writing and reading and speaking are socially embedded. Humanistic inquiries thus rightly become enterprises of sociohistorical inquiry. But a turn towards the historical does not resolve the methodological problems of humanistic inquiry. Instead, it begs the same question confronted in history and the social sciences more widely – how to practice sociohistorical inquiry.

Cultures of inquiry and the erosion of disciplines Historicism, of course, is only one among alternative methodological practices. In Cultures of Inquiry I identify seven others. The simultaneously diverse and interconnected character of these methodologies evidences that sociohistorical inquiry is neither a single, coherent, epistemologically founded scientific enterprise based on pure reason, nor a Babel of languages beyond translation. It is a

Cultures of inquiry 205 complex of interpenetrating discourses, each with its own internal conflicts open to multiple resolutions, lacking any inherent external alignment, yet articulated with one another in alternative discursive constellations of inquiry. The possible practices of research are shaped by historical legacies, yet open-ended and emergent. Any new practice remains, like other practices, a hybrid cultural logic of ‘impure reason’ that confronts – well or poorly – both the enduring problematics within various formative discourses as well as the problem of bridging among multiple discourses in the conduct of research. Precisely because inquiry operates in these circumstances, a surprising web of affinities and shared problematics can be found in the manifold practices of sociohistorical inquiry (see Figure 11.2, an admittedly byzantine diagram that probably should be viewed only when sitting down!). Heterogeneous methodologies of research are not autonomous; they are deeply connected, and sometimes dependent upon one another. These connections are often denied by practitioners who want to assert the purity of their own methods, maintaining the boundaries that mark off some epistemological Other. But ultimate claims for the superiority of any given practice are suspect, because alternative and sometimes conflicting kinds of knowledge are culturally constructed under the

Figure 11.2 Generalizing and particularizing practices of inquiry arrayed according to value/theory criteria of adjudication and value/theory basis of construction of the object of inquiry

206

John R. Hall

discursive circumstances of impure reason shared by all practices. Therefore, no rhetorical claims of superiority can unilaterally seal off a given practice from critical considerations that lie beyond its supposedly pure domain. Especially noteworthy, practices of science are predicated, like other sociohistorical research methodologies, on one or another cultural logic. By the opposite token, practices of inquiry that are dismissed in some quarters as ‘unscientific’ or ‘anecdotal’ have their own viable rationales which, if pursued rigorously, are capable of producing knowledge deserving of attention even by scientists. These conclusions imply neither that all culturally constructed knowledge is equally plausible, nor that any culturally constructed knowledge is necessarily untrue. What are the implications of this account for disciplines and interdisciplinarity in the social sciences, history, and the humanities – the broad domain that I have labelled sociohistorical inquiry? Most generally, the ‘hybrid’ cultural logics by which inquiry is conducted make any discipline something less than ‘pure’. Neither the intellectual puzzles, nor the methodologies used to bring analysis to bear on those puzzles, are any longer neatly divided by discipline. Several points could be elaborated in relation to this claim: •

•

•

First, and most obviously, any discipline encompasses the use of divergent methodological practices (e.g. historicism versus universal history in the discipline of history, or quantitative analytic generalization versus historicist participant-observation in sociology), whereas the same methodological practice is often shared across disciplines (e.g. historicist practice in both anthropological ethnography and sociological participantobservation). Thus radically different kinds of sociohistorical knowledge are routinely produced within the ‘same’ discipline, while directly commensurate knowledge is produced within ‘different’ disciplines. Second, the divisions between history versus other social science and humanities disciplines are arbitrary. Historicity is a key property of analysis for any analytically delineated phenomenon, even at a putatively ‘frozen’ point in time. And even the most antitheoretical historians and humanist critics depend on theory and methodology in their work, even if only implicitly so. Third, when arbitrary disciplinary boundaries are transcended, the same thematic subject matter or object of inquiry, shared across conventionally bounded disciplines, can serve as a focal point for investigation that will help facilitate translation among various kinds of knowledge, even knowledge produced through different methodological practices. In a parallel way, shared methodological practices can create the potential for translating across different subject matters or objects of inquiry, without regard to disciplines.

Cultures of inquiry 207 These findings suggest the importance of restructuring the domain of history, the social sciences, and the humanities, so as to reduce the extent to which institutional structures impede education and scholarship. Given the political realities of universities as institutions, as the Gulbenkian report observes, wholesale academic reorganization is seldom politically feasible, and perhaps undesirable. Departments thus are likely to remain important administrative units for the foreseeable future.23 Given these circumstances, analysing the cultures of sociohistorical inquiry suggests the following components of reorganization as worthy of consideration. •

•

•

First, social theory should be the object of strong efforts to facilitate transdisciplinary training. This training should avoid parochialism. Social theory in the broadest sense ought to encompass historical precursors of social theory, classical modern social theory, contemporary social-science theories (e.g. network theory, rational choice theory), as well as feminist theory, critical theory, and hermeneutic, semiotic, deconstructive, symbolic interactionist and other theories of meaning.24 Training in social theory should address both the fundamentally divergent conceptual strategies and programmes, as well as shared or contested issues, strategies and claims. Second, methodological training should increasingly be centred in emergent understandings of social epistemology (that is, methodology construed in relation to science studies), and the transdisciplinary cultural logics of methodological practice. In practical terms, this means that researchers coming out of the traditions of the humanities, history, and the human sciences will become both more explicit and more reflexive about their methodological practices. For their part, social scientists who have strongly embraced an unsustainable claim to methodological purity will need to reconsider the implications of social epistemological understandings for their practice. Methodological training will often require specialized programmes and centres (e.g. in historical demography, or ethnography under conditions of globalization). However, on all methodological fronts, training programmes will benefit from general survey courses that consider the cultural logics of diverse kinds of inquiry, and all researchers will benefit from considering possibilities of ‘translation’ between their own and other research practices.25 Third, in both research and teaching, traditional disciplines ought to be increasingly supplanted by topical and thematic teaching and research clusters. Such clusters could be formed on the basis of theoretical foci (e.g. social movement mobilization), historical individuals (e.g. First World War), historical themes (e.g. the rise of capitalism), and comparative studies (e.g. colonialism). Of course, scholars already have been carrying out this programme for some time. The task of universities and colleges is to facilitate it. How to do so is a topic in itself, one that would include encouraging development of theoretical, comparative, and historical dimensions in

208

John R. Hall course offerings of departments; promoting team (and especially interdisciplinary) teaching; providing resources and incentives for interdisciplinary research, teaching, and seminar clusters; and establishing interdisciplinary graduate training centres and programmes that supplement conventional disciplinary training.26

How administrative reorganization of academic life is to be accomplished under the new climate involves complex and delicate issues best pursued within specific institutions. But the need for such reorganization is beyond serious question. One basis for pursuing that project is to gain a better understanding of the interdependent cultures through which sociohistorical inquiry is practiced.

Acknowledgement I wish to thank Cambridge University Press for permission to draw in this chapter from John R. Hall, Cultures of Inquiry: From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research (1999).

Notes 1` 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Kiser and Hechter 1991; Davis 1983; 1988. See the report of the Gulbenkian Commission by Wallerstein et al. 1996. Kant 1963; 1951, esp. 12–19; for a discussion of this problem, see Lyotard 1986. Latour 1993. Nietzsche 1957: 50. For my extended account, see Hall 1999. Foucault 1972. Krieger 1977. Popper 1961, 45. I agree with E. H. Carr’s (1961: 119–20) assessment of Popper’s confusions. Iggers 1975; Novick 1988; Lloyd 1993: 164. Meinecke, quoted in Iggers 1975: 34. For example, in Ranke 1973: 31–2. For a broad review of twentieth-century developments, see Iggers 1997. Himmelfarb 1987: 9. For a Marxist defence of historicism, see Thompson 1978. Cohen 1986. Gadamer 1975, part II, esp. 244. See also White 1987: ch. 1; Lyotard 1984. Ross 1995. Hobsbawm 1994. G. Wood 1991: 6, 95. Walkowitz 1992. Hall 1980. Greenblatt 1982. Greenblatt and Gallagher 2000: chs 1 and 2, and p. 19. See the Gulbenkian Commission’s report, Wallerstein et al. 1996, 96–8. The International Consortium for Social Theory has been established recently to promote just such an endeavour. Their website can be found at www.socialtheory.org. On possibilities of translation that emerge from understanding inquiry as pursued through cultural practices, see Hall 1999: 245–52.

Cultures of inquiry 209 26 Example of universities pursuing the development of such institutional complexes include the University of California-Davis Center for History, Society, and Culture (www.chsc.ucdavis.edu), York University’s Social and Political Thought Programme (www.yorku.ca/org/spot/), and the University of Kentucky’s Committee on Social Theory (www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/SocTheo/).

References Carr, Edward H. (1961) What is History?, New York: Random House. Cohen, Sande (1986) Historical Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press. Davis, Natalie Zemon (1983) The Return of Martin Guerre, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. ——(1988) ‘On the lame’, American Historical Review, 93: 572–603. Foucault, Michel (1972) [1969] The Archaeology of Knowledge, London: Tavistock. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1975) Truth and Method, New York: Seabury Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (1982) ‘Introduction’ to ‘The forms of power and the power of forms in the renaissance’, Genre, 15: 3–6. Greenblatt, Stephen, and Gallagher, Catherine (2000) Practicing New Historicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hall, John R. (1980) ‘The time of history and the history of times’, History and Theory, 19: 113–31. ——(1999) Cultures of Inquiry: From Epistemology to Discourse in Sociohistorical Research, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Himmelfarb, Gertrude (1987) The New History and the Old, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J. (1994) The Age of Extremes, New York: Pantheon. Iggers, Georg G. (1975) ‘The image of Ranke in American and German historical thought’, History and Theory, 2: 17–40. ——(1997) Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, Hanover NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England. Kant, Immanuel (1963) [1784] ‘Idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view’, in On History, ed. Lewis W. Beck, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 11–26. ——(1951) [1790] Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard, New York: Hafner. Kiser, Edgar and Hechter, Michael (1991) ‘The role of general theory in comparativehistorical sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 97: 1–30. Krieger, Leonard (1977) Ranke: The Meaning of History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Lloyd, Christopher (1993) The Structures of History, Cambridge: Blackwell. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) [1979] The Postmodern Condition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——(1986) L’Enthousiasme: La Critique Kantienne de l’Histoire, Paris: Editions Galilée. ——(1988) The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1957) [1874] The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Novick, Peter (1988) That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, New York: Cambridge University Press.

210

John R. Hall

Popper, Karl R. (1961) [1957] The Poverty of Historicism, New York: Harper & Row. Ranke, Leopold von (1973) [c.1830s] ‘On the relations of history and philosophy’, in Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (eds) The Theory and Practice of History: Leopold von Ranke, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 29–32. Ross, Dorothy (1995) ‘Grand narrative in American historical writing: from romance to uncertainty’, American Historical Review, 100: 651–77. Thompson, E. P. (1978) ‘The Poverty of Theory’ and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press. Walkowitz, Judith R. (1992) City of Dreadful Delight, London: Virago. Wallerstein, Immanuel et al. (1996) Open the Social Sciences: The Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, Stanford: Stanford University Press. White, Hayden (1987) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wood, Gordon S. (1991) The Radicalism of the American Revolution, New York: Knopf.

Index

abattoirs 107, 108 abstract space: concepts and interpretations 1, 98, 133–40; and creation of modern state 7, 14, 100, 137–8; and place 14, 99, 134, 136, 144–6; and reason 141–4; understanding of maps and statistics 98, 99 abstraction 4–5; eighteenth-century theories of human nature 44, 46, 52, 54, 55, 56–7; formulations of Petrus Ramus 25; levels of complexity 47–8; social imaginary of modernity 5–6, 13–14, 45, 47, 48, 51 Act of Toleration (1689) 66 action: Adam Smith’s theory 135 actor network theory (ANT) 152, 154; Tarde as predecessor 117, 118, 119, 122, 126, 127, 130 actual necessity: mediaeval thought and Scotus 26, 27–9, 35, 36, 38 Addison, Joseph 53 Adorno, Theodor: Dialektik der Aufklärung 64 affinities: transdisciplinary 4–5, 16–17, 205–6, 205 Althusser, Louis 180 America see North America; United States of America American Revolution: Wood’s historicist study 202 Anderson, Benedict 49 Annales school of history 3, 44, 69, 153, 201, 203–4 anthropology: aspects of Foucault 181; development as discipline of colonial governance 81, 86; different views of ritual 27; dimensions of the social 10, 98; relation between place and knowledge 142–3 Aquinas, St Thomas 26, 30, 35

Arabic culture: Sufi notion of ‘firasa’ 15, 172 architecture: and definitions of labour 143; superseded by communications in nineteenth century 105 archive: cross-disciplinary concept 4, 16; Foucault’s use of 181, 186; postfunctionalist sensibility to 183; recent historical approaches 185–8 Arendt, Hannah: Origins of Totalitarianism 77 Aristotelian thought: theory of knowledge 27 Arunima, G.: study of Nayar men in Kerala 89–90 Arya Samaj: and Vedic Hinduism 91–2, 92–3 association: actor network theory 117; Tarde’s view of society 120, 120–1 associational history: current need to explore 188 astrology: Jeake’s work 169–70 astronomy: value of temporal precision 166–7 Australia: recent literature on governmentality 182 Bacon, Francis 35 Baker, Keith 7, 69 Balibar, Etienne 96n Bank of England: Samuel Jeake 169 Barthes, Roland 185; essay on discourse of history 178 Barthez, P.J. 75 Bartholomew Fair (Cloth Fair) 109–10, 111 Bauman, Zygmunt 15, 21, 64, 180 Bayle, Pierre 66 Becker, Carl: Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers 63, 64 Benedict, St 29 Bentham, Jeremy 88

212

Index

Bergson, Henri 120 Bernard of Clairvaux, St 29 Beveridge, William, 1st Baron 177 Bhabha, Homi 95n Bharatiya Janata Party see BJP Bichat, Marie François Xavier 69, 75 Biernacki, Richard 1, 3, 6, 7, 13–14, 179 binary distinctions 193–4 BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) 93 Blackbourn, P. 153 Blackmore, Susan 119 blood: charnel-house of nineteenthcentury London 106–12 Bodin, Jean 31, 36, 71 the body: analogy with the city 105–6; biological perspectives of the social 8 Bonald, Louis Gabriel Amboise, vicomte de 69 Bonnell, Victoria: Beyond the Cultural Turn (with Hunt) 2 Bordeu, 75 Boyle, Robert 56, 145 Boyne, R. 154 Brasilia: Holston’s study 144–5 Braudel, Fernand 203–4 Bray, Charles: reference to ‘social reform’ 46 Brazil see Brasilia Brewer, John 53 Bristol: clocks 162–6, 162, 163, 164; study of clock times 157–60 Britain: colonial conquest of India 84, 85; current revival of social theory 180; design of factories and definition of labour 143; development of modern statistics 98; development of the social city 11; history of Ordnance Survey map 99–104; influences on social history 3; introduction of municipal retail market 112; lack of national authority in early eighteenth century 53; mapping of India in early nineteenth century 99; marketization from 1970s 12; nineteenth-century attempts at urban reform 9; perceived threat of postmodernism to social history 175–6; recent literature on governmentality 182; regulation of slaughter 107; social imaginaries of power 97–8 Brown, Wendy 94–5 Burdin, Jean 69, 75 Burney, Ian 145 Bushnan, J. Stevenson 108–9, 111 Butler, Joseph 46, 47

Cabanis, Pierre Jean Georges 68, 68–9 Calcutta: streets and social networks 146; Western-educated elites under colonial rule 83–4 Calvinism 7, 31 Canada see North America capitalism: abstract space as tool of 137; as bearer of the social 1; and colonialism 81–2; human labour as kind of substance 143; as research cluster topic 207 cartography: defining concerns of government 9, 97, 98–104, 138 Casey, Edward 133 Cassirer, Ernst: Die Philosophie der Aufklärung 64 caste system: history of 85–6, 94 Castoriadis, Cornelius: concept of social imaginary 5, 6, 48 cemeteries: introduction of 106, 107–8 census: Irish maps of 1841 102; use of by British colonial government in India 86, 87 Certeau, Michel de 171 Chadwick, Edwin: report on sanitary condition of towns (1842) 102 charity: late mediaeval changes in understanding 32–3, 37 Charles II, King 53 Chartism: work of Stedman Jones 185 Chatterjee, Partha 88–9, 93 Chicago: zoning 12 China: Tarde’s comparison of with other societies 121 choice: politics of 12 Christ: and the Eucharist in mediaeval life 34; subordination of body into the state 36 Christianity: concept of grace 7; and the Enlightenment 63, 64, 66; mediaeval principles before Scotus 31; monastic ritual and formation of virtues 29–30; time and regulation of everyday life 157, 159, see also Protestantism; Roman Catholicism Church: and the Eucharist in mediaeval life 34; Hobbes’s subordination of 36; loss of credibility during Reformation 53 churches: clocks in Bristol 162–4, 163, 164; timing of services and celebrations 157, 165 churchyards: burial in 107 cities: analogy with the body 105–6, 146; charnel house of London in nineteenth

Index century 106–12; development of the social 11–12, 97–8; early urban maps of Britain 100, 102–4, 103, 108; food markets as liminal spaces 10; Holston’s study of Brasilia 144–5; nineteenthcentury attempts at reform 9, 10; sanitary systems as material objects 14; social imaginary of 105–6, 146; Walkowitz’s exploration of London narratives 203 ‘civic toilette’ 97–8, 105–6, 110 the civil and civility: substitution of for the sacred 6, 34, 35 civil society: definition 21; institution and limits of in India 9, 82, 83–8, 93; late mediaeval origins of 6, 21, 23, 26; ‘liberalism’ of cartography 100–2; ritual and manners 23, 36; role of statistics 98, 99; shift from the religious to the secular 7, 35 Civil War 52, 53 civilization: idea of modern order 21–2 civitas 70, 71 class: Marxist historicism 201; questioning of by new ideas of the social 2, 3 Classe des sciences morales et politiques 68, 69 clock time: components of research project 156, 156; histories of practices 152–6, 160–1, 172–3; use in everyday practices 152, 157–70, 171 clocks: in Bristol 162–5, 163, 164; demands on human activity 154, 155; historical importance 173; networks 13, 152, 154, 155–6; ownership 161–2, 162, 163 Cohen, G.A. 179 Cohen, Sande 201 Cohn, Bernard 86 collective interests: invoked by community 84 collective memory: role of history 16, 186 Collège de France 117, 120 colleges and universities: need for reorganization of cultures of inquiry 207–8 colonialism: and ethnology 82–3, 86; genealogy of community in British India 9, 83–8, 90, 93, 94; relationship with modernity 83, 93; as research cluster topic 207; and rule of capital 81–2; and universalization of Western reason 92

213

commerce: new emphasis in eighteenth century 52, 54 commodities: Marx’s model 143 common sense: and the modern fact 48–9, 50 Commonwealth (1649–53) 53 communication: Gould’s network analysis 139; as mode of liberal governmentality 104–5 communications see postal service; transport communism: Leninist conception of 76; Nancy’s understanding of 94 community: colonial genealogy of in British India 8–9, 83–8, 90, 93, 94; concepts of 90–3, 94; operation of in late twentiethcentury 12; promise and predicaments 94–5; role of craft guilds and lay fraternities in Middle Ages 32–3 comparative studies: as research cluster topic 207–8 Comte, Auguste 8, 70, 120 concept formation 195–6, 196 conceptuality: alliance with social history 183–4 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de 75 Condorcet, Marie Jean, Marquis de 65, 67, 69 conjectural knowledge: Ginzburg and notion of ‘firasa’ 15, 171–2 conquest: as foundation of colonial state 81, 82, 84 consumption 12, 154 contingency: recent conceptual emphasis 1–2 Copenhagen Fields, Islington: cattle market 108, 111–12 Corbin, Alain 105 cosmos: Tarde’s reductionism 119, 128, 129 craft guilds: protection of through regulation of markets 157; role of charity in Middle Ages 32–3 critical theory: influence on hermeneutic deconstruction 195 cultural difference: questions raised by ethnology 82 cultural history 2, 3, 179, 201 cultural studies: influence of Marxism in Britain 3 culture: and inquiry 192–3, 208 Cunningham, Clark 143

214

Index

Darwinism: Tarde’s metaphysics 128 Davis, Natalie Zemon: The Return of Martin Guerre 153, 191 Dawkins, Richard 119, 127 Dayanand Sarasvati, Swami: and Vedic Hinduism 91–3 the dead: nineteenth-century burial in London 106, 107–8 death: charnel-house of nineteenthcentury London 107–12; and institution of memory in cemeteries 107–8, see also slaughter Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme (1789) 65 deconstruction: assault on historical narrative 201, 204, see also hermeneutic deconstruction deductive evolutionism 186 Deleuze, Gilles 38, 151, 171, 177, 183; Tarde’s influence on 118, 124, 128–9 Delfini, Alex 22 democracy: defeat of during French Revolution 76; emergence of following American Revolution 202; liberal 105; Sieyès’s view of 73, 76, 77 Derrida, Jacques 38, 171, 187 Descartes, René 25, 129, 130 d’Holbach see Holbach, Paul Heinrich, Baron d’ dialectic: idealism and science 203; Ramist displacement of 24–5 dichotomies: as products of a social imaginary 50 Diderot, Denis 65, 75 difference: Tarde’s metaphysics 129 Dirks, Nicholas 85–6 disciplinarity 175 disciplines 2; alternative cultures of inquiry 192, 194, 205; erosion of 204–8; institutions of 87; problem of boundaries 193, 194, 204; seeking paradisciplinarity 4, 16 discourse: of emergent public sphere 53–4; hermeneutic deconstruction of 16, 192, 194–7, 198; historicism 199, 200, 200; of history 178, 183, 184; of selfgovernance in British India 88–90 divine providence: elements in Butler’s ‘nature of man’ 46 divine will: new idea of Duns Scotus 26, 27, 36–7; and Ranke’s historicism 200 division of labour: Durkheim 136 Douglas, Mary 110 Duns Scotus, John 6, 26–37

Durkheim, Emile: The Division of Labour 135–6, 137; on local and abstract space 142; scientific discipline of sociology 117, 118, 135–6; Tarde’s major differences with 119, 120, 125 e-mail: Derrida’s comments 187 East Sussex: ownership of clocks in eighteenth century 162 ecological history 201 Economic and Social Research Council see ESRC economics: late mediaeval transformations 32–3; restructuring of western economies 4 the economy: as abstraction with institutional presence 47; consolidation during seventeenth century 52–3 Edney, Matthew 99 education: marketization of in Britain 12; women’s reform in nineteenth-century British India 88–9, see also colleges and universities electricity: role in making of society 14 Elias, Norbert 21–2 elocutio: reduction of rhetoric to 24–5 embodied being: recent emphasis on 1 empiricism: of archival discipline of history 179, 185 Encyclopédie 66, 69 Engels, Friedrich 70 England: early OS town plans 102; histories of clock time 152–6; religious dissenters in eighteenth century 66; seventeenth-century consolidation of economy 52–3 Enlightenment: emergence of the social 7; ideas of ratio and gnosis 22, 26; identified with modernity 37–8, 64, 65; Kant 141; recognition of common humanity 77; relationship with historicism 201, 202; view of the world by triangulation 99 Enlightenment ‘Project’: description 63, 64–5; failure of 66–7; and the French Revolution 62, 64, 65; and the modern nation state 64, 65, 74–8; religious controversies 65–6 epistemology: anchored by the modern fact 48, 51, 57; as challenged by the social 192, 194, 195; and postmodernism 175, 178; of power 9; system of Petrus Ramus 23

Index

215

epochalism: Bauman 15, 180 Erasmus, Desiderius 34 ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) 4 ethics: orientation of theory 4; and the social 7–8; vocation in practice of social history 16, 176, 188; Weber’s thinking 180 ethnicity: questions opened up by social history 177 ethnography: poststructuralist 203 ethnology: Foucault 82–3 etymology: history of the social 45–8; see also language Eucharist: as central in mediaeval life 34; see also transubstantiation the everyday: ideas inherited from Reformation 27; as key element of history and society 15, 152–3; models of 153–4; practices of clock time 152, 157–8, 160–6, 167–70, 170–1; and ritual in mediaeval society before Scotus 28–9; sundering of ritual from 35 explanation and interpretation: discourse of 196–7, 199; historicism 199, 200, 201, 202

National Assembly (1789) 70, 71–2, 73, 77; events marking inception of Enlightenment 65–6; influence of mapping techniques 100, 102; postwar interchange between social sciences and history 179; pre-Revolutionary public opinion 7; seventeenth-century refinement of manners 22; social science and the state 8, 97, see also Annales school of history; Classe des sciences morales et politiques; French Revolution Frankfurt school 21 fraternities see lay fraternities Frauenhofer, Joseph von 144 freedom: and liberalism 182 Freitag, Sandra 95–6n French Revolution: descent into Terror 73–4; and invention of the modern nation state 62, 64, 70–4; and invention of social science 62, 67–70; as marking demise of Enlightenment ‘Project’ 62, 64, 65 Freud, Sigmund 62, 63; conception of the Jewish people in Moses and Monotheism 64, 74 functionalism 2, 179–80, 183, 186

facts: relation with ‘historical reality’ 204, see also modern fact; social facts family: late mediaeval transformations 31, 32 fascism: rise of 202 feminism 3, 4, 195; influence on hermeneutic deconstruction 195; Walkowitz’s exploration of power 203 Ferguson, Adam 55, 135 ‘firasa’ see conjectural knowledge First World War 2 Florence: arising of new concept of charity 33 Foucault, Michel 15, 52, 171; archaeology of knowledge 16; Discipline and Punish 143–4, 145, 181; on historicity and ethnology 82–3; influence 9, 14; on monuments and documents 186; Les Mots et les Choses 62–3, 65; notion of governmentality 87, 88, 105; perceptions and misunderstandings of 181–2, 184; on rise of human sciences 62–3, 67, 68, 75; on rise of the modern state 62, 70, 71 France: abattoirs 107; development of modern statistics 98; establishment of

Gadamer, Hans-Georg: on historicism 201–2, 203 Gallagher, C. 151–2, 204 Gandhi, Mahatma: idea of the Indian nation 93 Garat, Dominique-Joseph 67, 68 Geertz, Clifford 181, 201 Gellner, Ernest 179 gender: marginalization of women 9; questions opened up by social history 177 genealogy: orientation of Foucault 181 Germany: design of factories and definition of labour 143; perceptions of Ranke’s historicism 199; Weimar republic 64 Gibbon, Edward 67 Giddens, Anthony 180 Ginzburg, Carlo 15, 153, 171–2 Glasgow: city centre dwellings in nineteenth century 103–4 Glennie, Paul 2, 5, 13, 14, 15 globalization: as force questioning the social 4 Glorious Revolution 55 gnosis: advocates of Enlightenment 22

216

Index

Goad, John 169 God: and creation in mediaeval thought 27–8; and ethical capacity 7–8; ideas of new theology after Scotus 37; and the moral sense 56; Ranke’s faith in 199–200, see also divine providence; divine will godparenthood: importance in mediaeval everyday ritual 30–1, 34 Goffman, Erving 123 Gould, Roger: Insurgent Identities 138–40 governance: convergence with the social 6, 7, 9, 11–12, 97, 98–9, 112, 182; and discourse of self-governance in British India 88–90; nineteenth-century rule of society 105, 177, 182; structure of in British India 85 governmentality 8, 9–10; colonial 87–8; community as aspect of 93; liberal 52, 55–6; new form in early eighteenthcentury Britain 44, 45, 54–7; new ideas of 15, 182 Great Depression 202 Greenblatt, S. 151–2, 204 Grotius, Hugo 52 Guattari, Felix 124 Gulbenkian report 207 Gusdorf, Georges 62 Habermas, Jürgen 52, 53, 54, 76, 148n, 179 Hall, John R. 4, 16–17 Hamlet: ‘to be or not to be’ 129 Hanoverian monarchs 53 Hapsburg maps (1774) 100 Harley, Robert 53 Harness, H.D. 101, 102 Harvey, David 133, 140 Hays, Mary 58 Hazard, Paul: La Crise de la Conscience Européenne (1935) 65 Head, Brian 62 health see medical mapping; sanitary systems Health of Towns Association 102, 104, 105 Hechter, Michael 191 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: on ‘Absolute freedom and terror’ 71, 72, 74; on civil interests and the state 81; Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts 74 Heidegger, Martin: Being qua Being 129 Helvétius, Claude Adrien 75

Herf, Jeffrey: Reactionary Modernism 21 heritage: discourse of 188 hermeneutic deconstruction: identifying forms of discourse 16, 192, 194–7 Himmelfarb, Gertrude 201 Hinduism: and British colonial construction of communalism 87; revivalism and nationalism 91–3 historical materialism: Cohen 179 historicism: currents in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 11; four forms of discourse 200; as practice of inquiry 16, 192, 198–204; Ranke 198, 199–201, see also new historicism historicity: Foucault 82 historiography 184, 202 history: Annales school 3; and collective memory 16, 186; craft of 172; credibility and the archive 185–8; and cultures of inquiry 16, 191–2; discourse of 178, 183, 184; effects of transformation of society 4; emphasis on process 1; as empiricist and archival discipline 179; and historicism 202, 203–4; as hybrid 194; interdisciplinary engagement with social sciences 183, 197, 204, 206–8; invocation of the everyday 152–4, 170–1; as offering rational mode of being in India 93; perceived threats of postmodernism 175–6, 179–80; rethinking of discipline of 15, 175, 183, 188, 192, 202, 203, see also cultural history; social history Hobbes, Thomas: and Leviathan 36, 71, 121; theory of representation and the nation state 77, 82 Hobsbawm, Eric: The Age of Extremes 202, 203 Hogg, John 107, 111 Holbach, Paul Heinrich, Baron d’ 75 Holland: Enlightenment 66 Holston, James: study of Brasilia 144–5 Horkheimer, Max 64 housing: city centre maps of midnineteenth century 103–4 human nature: eighteenth-century philosophical theories 44, 45, 46, 54–7, 63; Hume’s perspective 56–7, 75; in ‘la science sociale’ 68, 75; relating with social order 52, 97; secularization of 51; Wollstonecraft’s critique 58 human rights: abuses by nation states 77 human sciences: Foucault on rise of 62–3, 67, 68, 75

Index human will: new idea of Duns Scotus 27 humanities: alternative cultures of inquiry 191–2; interdisciplinary engagement with sciences 204, 206–8 Hume, David 55, 75, 135; Treatise of Human Nature 56–7, 57 Hunt, Lynn: Beyond the Cultural Turn (with Bonnell) 2 Hutcheson, Francis 55, 56, 57 Hutchins, E 156 hybridity: of alternative methodological practices 192, 194, 197–8, 198, 204–5; Latour’s view of modernity 10, 99, 194 idealism: development of 10–11; in historicism 203 identity philosophy: Tarde’s rejection of 129–30 identity politics: lifestyle 12; in USA 94–5 ideology: concept and associations of 49, 50–1, see also mythic ideology Iggers, Georg 199 imaginary: concept in Castoriadis 6, see also social imaginaries imagined communities: Anderson’s notion 49 immanentism: deployed by nationalists in India 90–1, 94 India: British colonial rule and development of community 9, 83–8, 90, 93, 94; British mapping of in early nineteenth century 99; community and the discourse of self-governance 88–90, 93; institution and limits of civil society 9, 83–8; Marx’s interpretation of 81–2, 86; nationalism and Vedic Hinduism 90–3 individualism: late nineteenth-century liberal crisis of 10–11 infrastructure: and the social 14, 44, 137 inquiry: alternative practices 192, 193, 194, 197–8, 198, 205; cultures of 4–5, 16, 191–3, 194, 204–8; historicism as practice of 16, 192, 198–204; impure reason of 17 Institut National des Sciences et des Arts 68 institutions: Foucault 87, 143–4 interdisciplinarity 183, 191, 192, 197, 206–8 internet: as Tardian 131n interpretation see explanation and interpretation

217

Ireland: census of 1841 102; OS maps and British territorial power 101–2 Irish Railway Committee Report (1837) 101 Islam see Muslims Islington see Copenhagen Fields Jack the Ripper 203 Jackson, Myles 144 Jacobins: fall of and passing of Terror 67; notion of sovereignty 73–4 James II, King (James VII of Scotland) 53 Jameson, Fredric 59n Jansenism 7 Jeake, Samuel: records of precise timekeeping 167–70, 170 Jesuits: suppression of in France 65 Johnson, Samuel: Dictionary of the English Language 45, 46 Jones, Gareth Stedman see Stedman Jones, Gareth Jones, Horace 111 Jordan, Jennifer 1, 6, 13–14 Joyce, Patrick 146, 175–6 Kant, Immanuel 77, 130, 134, 141–2, 192 Kaviraj, Sudipta 146 Kennedy, Emmet 62 Kensal Green cemetery, London 106 Kerala: study of Nayar men 89–90 Kharkhordin, Oleg 142 kinship: bonds in mediaeval society 30–1, 33; downgrading rituals of after Scotus 37; in history of community 94 Kiser, Edgar 191 knowledge: and cultures of inquiry 192–3; from perspective of place 142–3; laboratory space of scientific inquiry 141; representations in theory of Duns Scotus 27, 35; sociology of 195; Third Path 192, 193–4, 194, see also epistemology Koselleck, Reinhart: ‘Begriffsgeschichte and social history’ 184–5 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 75 labour: Adam Smith’s theory 135; definitions through factory design 143 Lacquer, Thomas: on transition of the dead from churchyard to cemetery 108 Lacretelle, Pierre-Louis: De l’Etablissement des Connoissances Humaines (1791) 67 Landes, D.S. 152 language: Ramist style 25; Tarde on

218

Index

grammatical laws 123, see also etymology Larcom, T.A. 102 Latour, Bruno 1, 2, 4–5, 12–13, 109, 151; on hybridity of modernity 10, 99, 194; We Have Never Been Modern 37 Lauer, Quentin 22 laws: liberal rule 105, see also natural law lay fraternities: downgrading of after Scotus 33, 37; and role of charity in Middle Ages 32–3, 34 Le Goff, Jacques 152 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel: Montaillou 153 Lefebvre, Henri: notion of abstract space 133, 137 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 119, 128 Leninism: conception of communism 76 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 143 Lezra, Jacques 52 liberalism: and civic behaviour 22–3; definition 10; and freedom 182; governmentality 52, 55–6, 182; late nineteenth-century crisis 10–11; nineteenth-century governance of society 105, 146, 177, 182; production and consumption of maps 100–2, 105; state power and voluntary cooperation 45 liminality: of markets 10, 110–11; zone between theory and history 188 linguistics: approaches to social history 175, 178–9, 184 literary criticism: historicist turn 204 liturgical forms: downgrading of after Duns Scotus 37; monastic ritual 29 Lloyd, Christopher 199 Locke, John 65, 66, 75 London: as charnel house in nineteenth century 106–12; Hogg’s description (1837) 106; meat markets and slaughter houses 106–7, 108–10, 111; nineteenth-century burial of the dead 106, 108; Walkowitz’s exploration of narratives 203 longitude: calculation sheet (1782) 168 Louis XVI, King: convocation of Estates General 65, 71 love: and changing idea of charity in sixteenth century 33, 35 Luhmann, Niklas 44, 179 Luther, Martin 31, 31–2 Luxemburg, Rosa 76 Lyotard, J.-F.: The Postmodern Condition 176, 177

McAllister, Ted 22 McDowell, Paula 58 MacIntyre, Alasdair 62, 64 macro see micro/macro Mahabharata 92 Maistre, Joseph de 69 Maitland, F.W. 188 Manchester: anatomical realism and the social 105; city centre dwellings in nineteenth century 103–4; OS city centre plan of 1849 102–3, 103, 108 Manchester University: workshops on rethinking history and social sciences 4 Mann, Michael 180–1 manners: compared to ritual 36; seventeenth-century codes of 21–2, 23, 25–6, 35 maps: epistemic foundations of 98, 99; as public documents 100–1, see also cartography; Ordnance Survey (OS) map marine chronometer 167, 169 marketization: in Britain from 1970s 12 markets: introduction of retail type in nineteenth century 111–12; as liminal places 10, 110–11; and the nation state 137; time and regulation of trading 157, 165 marriage: early and later mediaeval theological ideas 31; establishment of formal procedures 31–2, 37 Marx, Eleanor 203 Marx, Karl: Capital 143; interpretation of India 81–2, 86; use of term ‘the social’ 44 Marxism: currents in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 11; historicism 199, 201; influence on historians 3, 186 Mary II, Queen 66 material world: recent emphasis on 1, 14; and the symbolic 10 materialism: invocation of ‘mystical commandment’ in Tarde’s view 128 mathematics: advances in astronomy 166; mapping and nature of space 98, 99 mathesis 25–6 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de 75 mediaeval beliefs: monasticism and formation of virtues 29–30; and rise of civil society 6, 21, 23, 26, 34; sacralized understanding of the world 6; union of the natural and the social 10 medical mapping 102; anatomical realism and the city 105 Meinecke, Friedrich 199, 203

Index memory: institution of in cemeteries 108, see also collective memory Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 74 metaphysics: historicism 200, 200, 201, 203–4; as repressed other of science 203; in Tarde’s social theory 13, 118, 119, 128, 130 methodological practices: divergence within any discipline 206; hermeneutic deconstruction 194–7; hybridity 192, 194, 197–8, 198, 204–5; Methodenstreit 193, 198, 204; training for sociohistorical inquiry 207–8 Michels, Roberto 76 micro/macro: Tarde’s rejection of social distinction 2, 13, 118, 119, 121, 122–5 Middle Ages: comparison of postmodern age with later part 38; idea of darkness of 84; search for methodological security 24, see also mediaeval beliefs Mill, James 88 Mill, John Stuart 88 modern fact: concept of 48–9, 51, 57 modernism: arbitrary standoff with postmodernism 193; Latour’s observation 194 modernity: associations with social science 68, 76; Bauman’s epoch of 180; and colonial rebuilding of India 84; and community in India 8–9, 93, 94; emergence of with civil realm 36; equation with abstract space 137, 142; Foucault’s conceptual history of 62–3, 75, 145; as gnostic 22; hybridity of in Latour’s view 10, 194; ideal of order as mutual benefit 51; identified with the Enlightenment 37–8, 64, 65, 74–8; relationship with colonialism 83, 93; repudiation of Rousseau’s Contrat Social 74; roots of in late mediaeval theology 23; seen as totalitarian 21, 22–3; social imaginaries of 5–6, 13–14, 44, 51; state as a nation state 71, 77; towards a revised genealogy of 37–8 monadology: Tarde’s social theory 119–21, 122, 125, 126, 128, 129 monasticism: after downgrading of ritual 37; ritual and formation of virtues 29–30 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède 65, 75 moral philosophy: eighteenth-century theories of human nature 44, 45, 46,

219

54–7, 63, 97; perspective on the social 5–6, 7–8 Moral and Statistical Society of France 102 morality: and history 201–2; Hutcheson’s description of moral sense 56, 57 Moravia, Sergio 62 Mucchielli, Laurent 131n Mukerji, Chandra 142 Mullick, Gosto Behary 83–4 Muslims: ancient heritage of India 83, 84; and British construction of communalism 87 myth: and ratio 6, 21, 23, 24, 27 mythic ideology 21, 22 Nancy, Jean-Luc: understanding of ‘community’ 90, 94 narrative: discourse of 195–6, 199; historicism 199, 201, 203 the nation state: and end of Enlightenment ‘Project’ 76, 77, 78; as invented in course of French Revolution 62, 64, 70–4, 77; links with community and religion in Dayanand’s Hinduism 92; and notion of abstract space 137–8; and question of rights 11, 77–8, 94; relationship with the social 8, 97, 135, see also state nationalism: Indian 9, 87, 90–3 the natural: relationship with the social 10, 14, 98; shift of the social towards 7–8 natural law: replacement of by ‘human nature’ 55 natural philosophy: objectivity 56 nature/society divide: Tarde’s dismissal of 118, 119 navigation: and development of clocks 159; longitude observation calculation sheet (1782) 168; value of temporal precision 166–7 Nayar: study of 89–90 Nazis: mythic ideology 21 necessity see actual necessity Nehru, Pandit Jawaharial: Discovery of India 93 neo-liberalism 177, 182 network analysis: Gould on Paris uprisings 138–40 networks 1; of clocks 13, 152, 154, 155–6; of power 180–1, see also actor network theory (ANT)

220

Index

new historicism: Gallagher and Greenblatt 151–2, 204 Newgate meat market 108 Newton, Isaac 127, 145 Nietzsche, Friedrich 194 North America: culturalism in history 179 Novick, Peter 199 Oakeshott, Michael 175 objectivism 192, 193 objectivity: elaboration of through statistics 98–9; natural philosophy 56; as repressed other of idealism 203 objects: as important part of historical endeavour 154 OED (Oxford English Dictionary) 45, 46 Ogborn, Miles 143 Ong, Walter J. 24 ontology: generated by system of Petrus Ramus 24; historicism 200, 201, 203; in Tarde’s social theory 118 order: observations of eighteenth-century moral philosophers 56–7, 135, see also providential order; social order Ordnance Survey (OS) maps: history and influence of 99–104; plan of Manchester city centre (1849) 102–3, 103, 108 organicism: superseding of by strucuralist and functionalist ideas 2 orientalism: images used in governance of community in India 90 Osborne, Thomas 4, 13, 15–16, 172 the Other: ethnology as colonial discipline of 83; postmodern engagement with 22 overseas development: political ideology of 2 Oxford English Dictionary see OED Paine, Thomas 73 Pandey, Gyanendra 87 papal bull Unigenitus (1713) 65 paradisciplinarity 4, 16, 183 Paris: Commune (1871) 76, 138; June Days (1848) 138–40 Parsons, Talcott 123, 179, 180 paternity: elevation of literal over mystical in later mediaeval era 31 peace: substitution of civic for sacral 34–5, 36 Pearson, Karl 203 peasantry: end of as global class 202 Pellicani, Luciano 21–2 philosophy: in Tarde’s social theory 118,

129–30, see also moral philosophy; natural philosophy physiology: and anatomical realism 105; ideas influencing eighteenth-century conception of social science 75 Piccone, Paul 22 Pickstock, Catherine 6–7, 10 piety: collusion with a rational dichotomy 37–8; new theory of Duns Scotus 27; undermining of earlier notion of peace and the Eucharist 34 place: Foucault’s analysis 143–4, 145; perspective on knowledge 142–3; and space 14, 99, 134, 136, 144–5; temporal communities 157–60 political correctness: seen as tyranny 22–2 political technologies: governmentality 9–10, 182 politics: association of the Left and social history 3; coercion and capitalist development in colonies 81–2, 87; eighteenth-century use of press for propaganda 53; historicism 201; impact of historical thought 188; technicalization of 98–9; understanding of Indian society 93, 94, 95, see also identity politics Polson, Archer: invocation of ‘social economy’ 46, 47 Pomian, K. 187 the poor: mapping of city centre dwelling spaces 103–4 Poovey, Mary 5–6, 7, 7–8, 9, 97, 133, 137 Pope, Alexander 56, 70 Popper, Karl: use of term historicism 198–9 population: start of social mapping 101–2 possession: philosophy of Tarde’s social theory 119, 129–30 postal service: clock time in eighteenthcentury Bristol 157, 165, 166 postfunctionalism 4, 15, 16, 179, 180–3 post-Marxism: effects of transformation of society 4 postmodernism 15, 22; arbitrary standoff with modernism 193; comparison with later part of Middle Ages 38; debate with social history 3–4, 175–8; and extension of the archive 187; influence of feminism 3; links with style of functionalism 179–80; perceived threats to discipline of history 175–6, 179; perceptions of Foucault 181 postmodernity: Bauman’s epoch of 180 post-structuralism 178, 179; Walkowitz’s

Index historical ethnography 203 power: critiques of in discipline of history 186; development of secular models 6; historicism 201, 203; networks 180–1; OS maps and British control over Ireland 101; social imaginaries of 9–10, 97 practice: recent emphasis on 1 practices: concept of societies 151 pragmatism: influence on hermeneutic deconstruction 195 Prakash, Gyan 8–9 the press: and emerging public sphere in eighteenth-century Britain 53 printing: active participation of women in early industry 58; and early dissemination of secular knowledge 52; role of book trade in process of the Enlightenment 66 privacy: sphere of 54, 106 prostitution: ‘Maiden Tribute’ exposé 203 Protectorate (1652–9) 53 Protestantism: elevation of marriage 31–2; influence of Nonconformist forms on social history 3; sixteenth-century Marian persecution against 109 providential order: and concept of abstract space 137; displacement of by naturalized explanations 57, 97; in eighteenth-century philosophical thought 45, 57; as predecessor of the social 51, 54 psychology: perspectives of the social 8; and Tarde 127 Public Health Act (1848) 102 public sphere: destruction of by nation state 76; emergence of 52, 53–4; impact of early city maps 103 publishing see maps; printing Pufendorf, Samuel Baron 52 Puranas: myths and legends 92 race: questions opened up by social history 177 Ramus, Petrus: Logike (1574) 23–6 Ranke, Leopold von: historicism 198, 199–201 ratio: of the Enlightenment 22, 26; and myth 6, 21, 23, 24, 27; Western 82–3 rationalism: collusion of high piety 37–8; non-rational foundation of 22 reason: and abstract space 141–4; as arbiter of divine messages in Duns Scotus 27; Enlightenment 201;

221

historical 183; Kant’s critique 141, 192; operations of in sixteenth century 6; as source of discourse of public sphere 53–4; Western assertion of 92 reductionism: accounts of rise of abstract space 137–8; dangers of 192; Tarde 119–21, 122–3 Reformation: crises engendering search for methodological security 24; and development of the social 7; repudiation of images 53 Reid, Thomas: on social operations of the mind 46, 47, 55 relativism 192 religion: and the Enlightenment 65–6; and mediaeval origins of the social 6; shift to secular 7; wars of 26, 38, 52, 66, see also Christianity; Hinduism; Muslims Renaissance: myth of light after Dark Middle Ages 84; tracts on government 71 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) 65, 66 Rheinberger, H. 151 rhetoric: influence on hermeneutic deconstruction 195; Ramist reduction of to elocutio 24–5 Ricoeur, Paul 186 rights: as joined to state sovereignty 11, 77–8, 94 ritual: in civil society 23; conceptions of 27; and the everyday in mediaeval society before Scotus 28–9, 34; manners compared to 36; monastic and liturgical 29–30, 37; slaughter as 107; substitution of civil for sacral peace 34; as theatre 35–6 Roman Catholicism: crisis in eighteenthcentury France 65; sacrament of marriage 31–2 romanticism: in historicism 201–2, 203 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 202 Rose, Nikolas 12, 182 Rosenberg, Charles 144 Ross, Dorothy 202 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 66, 72, 73, 74, 76 Royal Navy: precision of timekeeping 155 Royal Society 48–9, 169 Runciman, W.G. 181 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre 66 Saint-Simon, C.H. comte de 69–70, 75 Samuel, Raphael 186–7

222

Index

sanitary systems: early OS maps 100; ideas and reform in nineteenth-century cities 105–8; and making of society 14, 97 Sarasvati, Swami Dayanand see Dayanand Sarasvati, Swami Schaffer, Simon 26, 141 Schama, Simon 63, 187 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 144 schools: important role of clock time 157 Schumpeter, Joseph 76 science: cellular notion of society 120; cultural logics 206, 207; and development of laboratory conditions 141; and Hindu revivalism of Dayanand 91–2; in historicism 201–2, 203; as hybrid 194; and relations between space and place 145; Tarde’s monadology 128, see also human sciences; social science science studies: and social theory 126–7 scientific method: gaining of authority in seventeenth century 49 scientometrics 126 secularization: of power 6; segregation of sacred from 34; shift from the religious to 7, 35 Seigworth, G.J. 153 self: eighteenth-century women’s sense of 58; mediaeval outlook 29 self-authentication: nature of Taylor’s social imaginaries 49–50 self-fashioning: and redefining community in study of Nayar 89–90 self-help: proliferation of institutions 12 self-love: in understanding of human nature 46, 54, 56 sexuality: modern redeployment of orientalist images in India 90; Walkowitz’s discourses 203 Shapin, Steven 26, 141, 145, 187 Sieyès, abbé: as father of the nation state 72–3, 76, 77; introduction of ‘la science sociale’ 67, 68, 69, 71, 75, 76 Simmel, Georg 1 Skinner, Quentin 70 slaughter: control and regulation of 107, 111–12; Smithfield animal market 106, 108–10 Smith, Adam 55, 57; The Wealth of Nations 73, 135 Smith, Roger 55 Smith, Thomas Southwood 105 Smithfield market 106–7, 108–10, 111

‘social’: definitions and use as adjective 45–7, 54 the social: concepts and new understandings 1–2, 5, 44–5; context of social imaginaries 5–6, 51; convergence with governance 6, 7, 9, 11–12, 97, 98–9, 112, 182; etymological process of 45–8; in form of community in India 94; as informed by principles of order 57, 135; mediaeval origins 6–7; moral philosophical perspectives 5–6, 7–8; old, ontological concept 1, 2, 3, 10, 13–14; questioning and rethinking of 4, 12–13, 16, 17, 175, 188; relationship with nation state 8, 97, 135; relationship with the natural 10, 14, 98; role of statistics 98; as second-order abstraction 48, 51; Tarde’s theory 117–30; ‘the end of’ 12, 177; use of concept of abstract space 134–6, 138 social capacity 46, 47, 54, 55, 56, 97 social economy: Polson’s invocation of 46–7 social facts 98, 120 social groups: Tarde’s idea of associates 120–1 social history 201; concepts of the social 2–3, 5, 177, 188; credibility and the archive 183, 185–8; debate with postmodernism 3–4, 175–8; ethical vocation in practice of 16, 176; history of 176–9; Koselleck’s understanding of 184–5; linguistic turn 175, 178–9, see also sociohistorical knowledge social hygiene: early development in France 8, 70 social imaginaries 5–6, 45, 48–54; of the city 105–6, 146; community in colonial India 9, 84–5, 87, 93; of liberal democracy 105; of modernity 5, 14, 44, 48, 51; of power 9–10, 97; and practices of marginalized individuals 57–8; reception of community in India 9; secular 7; Taylor’s idea of 45, 48, 49–50, 51–4 social mapping 101–2 social movements: as research cluster topic 207; study of in historicism 201 social order: European colonial idea of 82; modern abstraction of 51, 57; relating with human nature 52, 97; Tarde’s picture of 124; threatening of by market places 111; use of term by abbé Sieyès 67

Index social reform: Bray’s reference to 46–7; nineteenth-century idea of 11 social science: associations with modernity 68, 76; concept of abstract space 98, 133; and development of statistics 98; as a discipline 10; effects of transformation of contemporary society 4; French Revolutionary invention of 62, 67–70, 71, 74–5; idea of cultural inquiry 16; interdisciplinary engagement with history 179, 191–2, 197, 204, 206–8; macroscopic tendency 122; parallel history of the modern state 62, 76; rethinking of discipline of 15; seen as insubstantial 118; and the unified state in France 8, 71, 97 social theory: crisis of 179–83; discourse of 195–6, 199; need for rethinking of 207; Ranke’s historicism 199, 201, see also theory socialism: currents in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 11; of guilds 188; influence of Saint-Simon 70; link with social history 176 sociation: Simmel 1 Société de 1789 67, 68 society: as abstraction with institutional presence 47; concept of as pre-political category 81; Durkheim’s view of 136; Koselleck’s understanding of 184; laws of 11; as loose formation of practices 151; as mutually beneficial 55; nineteenth-century liberal governance of 104–5, 146, 177; replacing of with the market 12; role of social imaginary 49; secular 21; seen as consequence rather than cause 12–13, 125; Tarde’s reductionist theory 119–21, see also civil society; nature/society divide sociohistorical knowledge: affinities in practices of 205–6, 205; cultures of inquiry 191–3, 194, 204–8; forms of discourse 192, 194, 194–7, 197–8, see also social history sociolinguistics: Tarde’s idea of 123 sociologism: crisis of 180–1 sociology: the ‘big picture’ 124; as discipline of bourgeois civil society 83; Durkheim’s scientific discipline 117, 118, 135–6; invention of ‘sociologie’ by Comte 70; misinterpretations concerning abstract space 134, 138–40; post-societal, mobile 1–2; pre-history

223

and early days as discipline 1; use of general theory 191 Sokal, Allan 127 sovereignty: eighteenth-century notions of 73–4; Foucault’s distinction with governmentality 87 Soviet Union: importance of Red Army in Allied victory 202 space: geometrization of in maps 105; implied by clock time 155–6, 165–6; recent conceptual emphasis on 1–2, see also abstract space Spectator 53, 54 Spencer, Herbert 125 Spinoza, Benedict de 66 the state: as bearer of the social 1; European colonialism and foundation of 81, 87–8; French mapping of 100; origins of our conception of 70; rise of body of 36, 38; and social legislation 11; use of cartography 97, see also nation state statistics: defining concerns of government 9; and development of mapping in Britain 102; epistemic foundations of 98 Staum, Martin 62 Stedman Jones, Gareth 184, 185 Steedman, C. 187 Steele, Richard 53 Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle) 122 Stephen, Fitzjames 88 Stone, Lawrence 180 structuralism 178 subjectivism 193 subjectivity: capital’s determination of 94; eighteenth-century reflections on 55 surveillance: Foucault on sites of 143–4, 145 Sussex see East Sussex the symbolic: and material 10; sundering of from the literal 35 Talmon, Jacob: Origins of Totalitarian Democracy 63 Tarde, Gabriel: divergence from mainstream sociology 1, 13, 117–18, 124, 125, 130; Les Lois Sociales (LS) 117, 122, 124, 125, 126–7; on micro and macro 13, 122–5; Monadologie et Sociologie (M&S) 117–18, 118, 119–21, 123, 127, 128–30; possession philosophy 129–30 Taylor, Charles 5; concept of social imaginaries 45, 48, 49–50, 51–4 technology: and importance of objects 154

224

Index

theology: controversy in France 65–6; genuine Augustinian and Thomist vision 38–9 theory: ethical orientation 4; examples of foci for research clusters 207–8; and history 183, 188; new perspectives 15–16, 172, 182–3; in process of social imaginary 50; threats posed to discipline of history 175, see also social theory Thomism see Aquinas, St Thomas Thompson, E.P.: The Making of the English Working Class 153, 176–7; ‘Time, workdiscipline and industrial capitalism’ (1967) 151, 152, 157, 161, 170 Thrift, Nigel 2, 5, 13, 14, 15 time: dominance of E.P. Thompson’s study 151, 152; early practices of temporal reckoning 159–60; process of abstraction from 23; recent conceptual emphasis on 1–2, see also clock time; clocks Tocqueville, Alexis de 44, 140 totalitarianism: modernity seen as 21, 22–3; ratio of the Enlightenment 22 traces: as historical archives 186, 187, 188 Tracy, Destutt de 68 transport: use of clock time in eighteenthcentury Bristol 165 transubstantiation: late mediaeval changes in understanding of 26–7, 32 Traugott, Mark 142 triangulation: survey method of 99, 105 Trotsky, Leon 76 Turnbull, George 55 United Kingdom see Britain United States of America (USA): effect of American Revolution 202; establishment of government 73; identity politics 94–5; influence of Marxism 3; influence of Ranke in 1950s 199; perspectives on the social in Bonnell and Hunt 2; political correctness 22; Tarde’s influence 131n, see also Chicago universal history 199 universities see colleges and universities Ussher, Archbishop 65, 71 utilitarianism: and colonial despotism 88 values: discourse of 195–6, 195, 199; Ranke’s historicism 199, 200 Vedas: claims of Swami Dayanand Sarasvati 91–2

Velody, Irving 185 Veyne, Paul 187 Vicq-d’Azyr, Felix 69 Victorian era: Walkowitz’s exploration of London narratives 203 virtues: monasticism and formation of 29–30 Voegelin, Eric 22 Volney, Constantin François ChasseBoeuf, comte de 68 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet): Traité sur la Tolérance 66 voluntarism: Duns Scotus 26–7; and emergence of secular modernity 38; favoured by the liberal state 45 Wales: early OS town plans 102 Walkowitz, Judith: City of Dreadful Delight 203 Weber, Max 181; as ethical thinker and theorist 180; historicism 1, 198; interpretive method of cultural analysis 193, 194 Welch, Cheryl 62 welfare: marketization of in Britain 12 welfare state: foundations of 11, 177 White, Harrison 138 White, Hayden 185 Whitehead, Alfred North 120, 128, 140, 146 will see divine will; human will William III (William of Orange), King 66 Williams, Raymond: model of competing ideologies 50–1 Wokler, Robert 8, 97 Wolloston, William 46 Wollstonecraft, Mary 58 women: image and community identity in colonial India 90; marginalization of in eighteenth century 9, 58; nineteenthcentury reforms in British India 88–9; questions opened up by social history 177 Wood, Gordon: The Radicalism of the American Revolution 202, 203 Wordsworth, William 109 working class: questions opened up by social history 177