Speaker:Professor Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
These lectures chart the spread and use of the language of social science into everyday life in twentieth-century Britain. As a religious language for orienting the self and its relations to others went into decline, and as modern life became more mobile and complex, new tools were taken up to meet the challenges of everyday life: to anatomize and characterize the self, to chart its progress across the life-course, to make palpable modernity's many ‘invisible structures’ and ‘imagined communities’, to compare personal experiences to the experiences of others, and to address private problems with new concepts, new devices, new therapies. Psychology, Sociology, Economics and Politics will feature prominently, alongside consideration of Anthropology, Social Medicine, Literature, History and Philosophy.
Lecture One: Foundations(22 January 2026)
This lecture lays three kinds of foundations: it defines the project of exploring the ‘language of social science in everyday life’; it suggests how this project can revise or challenge classic accounts in social theory of the power/knowledge complex from Foucault to Koselleck, Raymond Williams and Giddens; and it gives an indication of the new vocabulary generated by the emergence of social science from the late 18th century.
How do people learn the language of social science? This lecture surveys some key entry points – mass print, mass broadcast media and mass education – and illustrates some simple digital humanities tools that can be used to analyze a huge volume of material and assess its propagation and uses.
Lecture Three: Self (5 February 2026)
In the first half of the 20th century, the ‘New Psychology’ – in which Freudian psychoanalysis played only a minor role – offered people a new vocabulary for understanding the self in modern conditions, in what has been called a transition ‘from character to personality’. Ideas about the unconscious, personality types, the developmental self, sex and intelligence reached unprecedentedly large audiences.
Lecture Four: State and Economy (12 February 2026)
Historians are familiar with the idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ that bound people across time and space from the late 18th century, predicated on modern communications. This lecture extends this idea into the 20th century and to a wider range of ‘invisible structures’ that were made more palpable via languages of social science, political and especially economic structures.
Lecture Five: Self and Society (19 February 2026)
The decades between the late 1940s and the late 1970s are widely seen as the heyday of social science (and of social democracy), though usually from the point of view of educated or cultivated elites. This lecture seeks evidence of the ‘sociological imagination’ in everyday life, in conditions of ‘affluence’, ‘permissiveness’ and a therapeutic society.
Lecture Six: Self vs Society(26 February 2026)
Critics of neoliberalism claim that in the final decades of the 20th century ‘homo politicus’ was replaced by ‘homo economicus’. This lecture challenges the primacy of either of these imaginings of the human condition and draws attention to other burgeoning identities – the very word ‘identity’ being one of them – supported by the language of social science.
