UC San Diego

This study is concerned with explaining why and how - under what practical condition and within what social arrangements - knowledge about society emerged as "social science": a relatively autonomous domain of expertise with its own distinctive arrangement of working practices, institutional arrangements and technologies. Social Science, I argue, originated not as much with Marx and Weber in Germany, or Comte and Durkheim in France, as with the political institution of governmental investigations in Britain almost half a century before it obtained academic prestige within the disciplinary framework of the universities. Only after social science was well entrenched in the political field, through the work of governmental commissions, and its influence and effects were felt in the public sphere, through legislation and policy, did it migrate into the universities, where it was appropriated by academics in their associations. I suggest that there is much we can learn about the scientificity of social knowledge once we forgo the traditional ways in which the history of social science is told and look at political institutions, political practices and political circumstances as the driving force behind the emergence not only of social investigations but indeed of social science more in general. It was politics, its discourse, its mechanics of parliamentary and governmental work, its legislative practices and bureaucratic routines, its technologies of recording, compiling, archiving, presenting and transporting information, which provided the condition of possibility for the emergence of social science as a domain of expertise, not least by investing social knowledge with importance, authority and relevance, through the work of governmental social investigations. Social science, I argue, was developed as a creative response to the growing requirement of publicity in the exercise of political authority during the first half of the nineteenth century. I locate the origins of social science within a larger transformation in the organizational culture of the British parliament, which took place at this period, following the increasing publicity of parliamentary debates and proceedings in the national Press. This transformation conditioned specific patterns of investigation and publication that turned social knowledge into a domain of expertise, thus paving the way for the emergence of social science. The first step in this transformation was the disenchantment of politics. With the opening of parliament to the "public gaze," politics became a domain an application for public reportage - a category of knowledge, that was understood to be worthwhile to observe and interpret, and which was constituted through the monitoring of parliamentary debates. Once politics was constructed as a field of application for the Press and identified with public reportage, contemporary political and social events inside and outside parliament became observational and 'experimental' and could now be legitimately monitored, accumulated, archived, combined into chronologies, and then served as a basis for interpretation and commentary. In the second step, the growing coverage of politics in the press, encouraged government officials to take control of the legislation process from parliament by establishing a new policymaking regime, based on empirical explorations of social problems outside parliament by especially assigned governmental commissions. Serving on these commissions, politicians effectively became social experts, turning their gaze onto the public, carefully inspecting and monitoring social problems in their localities, thus making social knowledge a legitimate domain of political expertise. With the growing use of governmental investigations, expert knowledge about society was effectively entrenched into the political field, transforming the organizational culture of parliament, its discourse and practices, from "verbal economy" of oratorical performance to the "visual economy" of writing public reports for policymaking purposes. In this new parliamentary regime, visual knowledge gained a cultural comparative advantage, an "epistemic privilege," over verbal knowledge, not merely because of its physicality but, more importantly, because it "fitted" the new circumstances created by the growing power of the press and the formation of political-print-culture. An "elective affinity" was created between political reportage and social reportage. In the third and final step, government officials attempted to control and manage the variety and partisan and contradictory understandings of politics that were created by the Press and challenged the ability of government to elicit support for its policies inside and outside parliament. They did so by establishing various associations whose goal was to promote an official political discourse through immense public opinion campaigns, accompanied by a massive dissemination of governmental reports about social problems. In these campaigns, expert knowledge about society, produced by governmental investigations, was presented as scientific: useful, relevant, non-partisan, tangible and accessible to others. In this way, expert knowledge about society was grafted onto the practice and discourse of its public consumers, effectively becoming "scientific."