Thomas S D Osborne

Governing Cities: Notes on the Spatialisation of Virtue

This paper represents a series of speculations concerning the imagination of the city as a space of government, authority, and ‘the conduct of conduct’ . The authors argue that it is possible to understand the myriad ways in which various authorities have sought to govern the city through an interrogation of the series of means through which the city has been ‘diagrammed’ as a space of power, regulation, ethics, and citizenship. These speculations take a historical but not a historically ‘periodised’ form; the authors consider in turn the diagramming of the city in the ancient Greek world, the nineteenth-century liberal diagramming of the city, eugenic models of the city, and latter-day neoliberal modes of visualising, programming, and governing urban spaces. The aim is neither to found yet another theory of spatialisation nor to advance a Foucauldian urban sociology but to gauge the parameters which have bequeathed us the contemporary city as a governed and ethically saturated space.

On mediators: Intellectuals and the ideas trade in the knowledge society

This paper aims to provide some broad outlines of a model of intellectual practice that is arguably gaining increasing salience today: the model of the intellectual as mediator. The paper begins by drawing briefly upon some empirical data from a recent study in order to suggest that, although institutions such as universities and think tanks do seem to be embracing practices of intellectual production that are at some remove from ‘traditional’ models of knowledge, the shift is not absolute – not least because the idea of the ‘traditional’ intellectual as a basic norm is itself no doubt somewhat problematic. In seeking to address precisely this question as to how to think about norms of intellectual practice, the main body of the paper is more theoretical in its orientation. It seeks to adapt and extend some features of the work of Michel Foucault and Zygmunt Bauman in attempting to theorize a fourfold typology of intellectual style on the basis of the concepts of legislation, expertise, interpretation and finally mediation itself. Lastly, the paper considers the status of the intellectual as mediator in todays ‘knowledge society’, considering whether the so-called ‘end of ideology’ has led to the demise of the intellectual who generates ‘big ideas’.

Against ‘creativity’: a ­philistine rant

The aspiration to be creative seems today to be more or less compulsory in an increasing number of areas of life. In psychological vocabularies, in economic life, in education and beyond, the values of creativity have taken on the force of a moral agenda. Yet creativity is a value which, though we may believe we choose it ourselves, may in fact make us complicit with what today might be seen as the most conservative of norms: compulsory individualism, compulsory ‘innovation’, compulsory performativity and productiveness, the compulsory valorization of the putatively new. This article suggests that, in order to escape the moralizing injunction to be creative, we need to cultivate a kind of ethical philistinism, albeit disaggregating such philistinism from the negativism of outright cynicism or fatuity. However, there is not much use in outlining an abstract model of philistinism. Instead, we take some ‘exemplars’ of a philistine attitude to creativity – Gilles Deleuze, F. R. Leavis, and Paul Cézanne – in order to show how such an ethos can be accomplished, on the one hand, with or without philosophy, and, on the other, with or without even the very idea of creativity itself, invoking instead the notions of ‘inventiveness’ and an ‘ethics of inertia’ as against creativity as such. The message should be that, rather than this or that theory, only exemplars – the bit-by-bit assembly of reminders – can help liberate us from the potentially moronic consequences of the doctrine of creativity.

The ordinariness of the archive

This article argues that the notion of the archive is of some value for those interested in the history of the human sciences. Above all, the archive is a means of generating ethical and epistemological credibility. The article goes on to suggest that there are three aspects to modern archival reason: a principle of publicity whereby archival information is made available to some or other kind of public; a principle of singularity according to which archival reason focuses upon questions of detail; and a principle of mundanity, whereby the privileged focus of archival reason is said to be the commonplace dimension of everyday life.

What is a Problem

By way of a selective comparison of the work of Georges Canguilhem and Henri Bergson on their respective conceptions of ‘problematology’, this article argues that the centrality of the notion of the ‘problem’ in each can be found in their differing conceptions of the philosophy of life and the living being. Canguilhem’s model, however, ultimately moves beyond or away from (legislative) philosophy and epistemology towards the question of ethics in so far as his vitalism is a means of signalling the refusal of the supposition that all of the dimensions of life are or might be in our possession. Michel Foucault’s project, though directed for the most part to very different subject-matter, worked out a similar logic in the historical problematology of the sciences of ‘man’ and mentalities of government and power; and the results were equally ethical in so far as Foucault’s nominalist historical problematology entailed the refusal of any idea that all of the dimensions of our anthropological ‘essence’ are, or could be, likewise, in our possession.

Editors' Introduction Reinscribing British sociology: some critical reflections

Why should anyone care about the history of sociology in Britain in the twentieth century? Surely, if sociology is to make a case for itself for our own times, this must be on the basis of what it can offer to this century, and to a world whose geographical scope, heterogeneity, modes of interaction and transaction far exceed the limited imagination of those British social thinkers of the last century who were still working within the confines of an old colonial power and whose centrality to global history and social progress was in any event a myth? Should we not leave that history to the antiquarians? There is certainly a case for doing so. After all, there is no reason why we should subject ourselves to the historicist prejudice of holding that the present or future of sociology is somehow determined by its past. Historical investigation should not bind us to history. Nor should we use historical studies to free ourselves from history, as suggested by some poststructuralist understandings. Instead, we prefer to see the past as a kind of laboratory, which we can make use of in the present to explore various kinds of creativity and inventiveness. For we should not accept another common prejudice and believe that the social sciences, even in their most empiricist moments, are not capable of creative insight and original thought. This is why we think we might learn something from an interrogation of the recent past of British Sociology, provided we do not conduct this as either a celebration or a critique. Perhaps we could relate to that past in the mode of diagnosis, if not aetiology and prognosis. And in that way, we might be able to tease out some of the originality that inhabited all those false-starts, creative beginnings and episodes of conceptual, empirical and institutional conflict that make up this history – we might learn something about what makes social thought productive, and what does not.

Populating sociology: Carr-Saunders and the problem of population

Research programmes in the social sciences and elsewhere can be seen as ‘set-ups’ which combine inscription devices and thought styles. The history of inscription devices without consideration of changing and often discontinuous thought styles effectively takes the historical dimension out of the history of thought. Perhaps thought styles are actually more important than the techniques of inscription that arise from them. The social sciences have relied upon multiple modes of inscription, often using, adapting or extending those invented for other purposes, such as the census. But the strategic prioritisation and deployment of specific inscriptions in analysis and argument has inescapably been dependent on particular thought styles; of which by far the most significant over the course of the first half of the twentieth century was eugenics with its specific problem of ‘population’. This paper describes the way that Alexander Carr-Saunders took up the problem of population within early attempts to develop sociology. We ask whether Carr-Saunders can be considered a ‘precursor’ of a sociologist. The history of British sociology takes different shapes – as indeed does the very idea of a history of sociology – depending on how one answers this question.

Universities in ‘the condition of publicity’: how LSE engages with the wider world

This article analyses how one institution, the London School of Economics under Anthony Giddens’s directorship, sought to occupy the ‘condition of publicity’ that is increasingly a prerequisite for university success in ‘knowledge‐society’ contexts. In particular, we illustrate how the LSE has sought to develop a brand and practice that is policy‐relevant, close to society, media‐savvy and think‐tank‐like, whilst at the same time remaining impeccably academic. Whilst one goal of the paper is the relatively modest one of giving local texture to some of the general tendencies identified in wider debates about ‘academic capitalism’, ‘the postmodern university’, and the like, we also develop some initial considerations that are intended as a contribution to the assessment of those theoretical themes.

Medicine and ideology

This paper is an excursion on some of the views that Canguilhem expressed about ideology. The paper argues that there are senses in which modern medical rationality is driven by impulses that might – so long as we modify some of our traditional preconceptions about the concept – be described as ideological. Not least of the merits of Canguilhems thought in this area was that he made the attempt to create an opening for a rethinking of the concept of ideology in the philosophy and epistemology of science which may be useful and challenging at a time when that concept is otherwise rather discredited.

Populism: a deflationary view

Abstract This paper takes a critical, synoptic view of the current upsurge of populism. Populism, it is argued, has long been a feature of liberal democracies in so far as claims are made for democracy to be as directly expressive as possible of the will of its subjects. Yet populisms are hybrid in form and parasitic on existing political arrangements. What unites them is more to do with what they oppose than what they espouse. Above all, it is the norms of liberalism that are brought into question by populist proponents of direct democracy with their characteristic hostility towards elites, experts and the so-called establishment. In so far as all populisms can be dangerous this lies in the degree to which they oppose the existing norms of liberalism and seek to undermine its moderating institutions. Rather than relying on generic theories of populism to explain contemporary developments, what needs investigation is the degree to which particular populisms prioritize fear over judgement, unqualified assertion over reasoned deliberation and resentment over the moderation of power.