Liberal internationalist visions of expert governance in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, 1865 - 1914
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Politics and International Relations
Abstract
Various conceptions of "expert governance" play a crucial role in the modern liberal picture of international politics as a set of technical problems. Once political decisions are no longer settled by the fiat of those with traditional authority, the question of how they should be settled emerges. One answer is to hope that the accumulation of scientific knowledge, in the Comtean positivist-empiricist sense, will guide political decisions, but it is not entirely obvious why it should. The ideal type of the technical expert is part of the liberal belief that accumulating scientific knowledge can guide and improve political decisions.
My project suggests focussing on the development of statistics as a technology of expert governance as a crucial axis that enables research into the historical contingency of liberal internationalism and its commitment to scientific rationalism. If liberal internationalism and statistics co-evolved in and through the more general "twin birth" of liberalism and scientific rationalism, did one necessitate the other? Is the management of and prediction with numbers an unmissable ingredient of global governance? How does the role of statisticians as experts in the landscape of "fact-based governance" alter the conditions for participating in international society?
How does this play out in practices of international politics? It would seem, for example, as though international cooperation was now perhaps a matter simply of accurate information and the private or public communication thereof, rather than of faith or conviction. Disputed claims would be solved by the expert; false allegations would be debunked by the expert. But where did such a demand for secular expert knowledge come from? This problem forms the centre of the enquiry envisioned. I propose to establish a connection between the history of liberal internationalism and the history of expertise, with the aim of showing how a certain concept of the latter plays an indispensable role in justifying a certain strand of the former.
My research will consist of archival and theoretical inquiry into the connections outlined above. The project considers two parallel developments in novel conjunction: the disciplining of the social sciences (understood as a form of training for expert governance) through the promotion of statistics, and the thought of liberal internationalist social engineers around the turn of the twentieth century. Those times are marked by the march forward of the Comtean call for empirical evidence, starting with the 1834 formation of the Royal Statistical Society, and continuing through the 1843 launch of The Economist; the 1895 foundation of the London School of Economics by members of the Fabian society; and finally the 1914 Bryce Group.
I intend to focus my work on four individuals and their respective milieus: Herbert Spencer, Karl Pearson, Beatrice Webb, and John A. Hobson. These protagonists have three things in common: They appear to subscribe to a "social engineering motif"; they promote statistics as a method of expert governance; and they subscribe, to varying degrees, to some evolutionary/biological notion of human perfection. Relevant archives will be, respectively, the Inter-Parliamentary Union archives in Geneva; the archives of the Royal Statistical Society in London; the Pearson archives at University College London; and the Webb and Hobson archives at the London School of Economics' Special Collections.
Overall, this research project promises opening up new ways of thinking about the linkages between the history of the social sciences, as a discipline and as a practice, and modern practices of international politics. It is thus suited to building a novel connection between the history of liberal internationalism and the history of "expert governance", drawing on the emergence of statistics as an expression of liberal internationalist visions in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
My project suggests focussing on the development of statistics as a technology of expert governance as a crucial axis that enables research into the historical contingency of liberal internationalism and its commitment to scientific rationalism. If liberal internationalism and statistics co-evolved in and through the more general "twin birth" of liberalism and scientific rationalism, did one necessitate the other? Is the management of and prediction with numbers an unmissable ingredient of global governance? How does the role of statisticians as experts in the landscape of "fact-based governance" alter the conditions for participating in international society?
How does this play out in practices of international politics? It would seem, for example, as though international cooperation was now perhaps a matter simply of accurate information and the private or public communication thereof, rather than of faith or conviction. Disputed claims would be solved by the expert; false allegations would be debunked by the expert. But where did such a demand for secular expert knowledge come from? This problem forms the centre of the enquiry envisioned. I propose to establish a connection between the history of liberal internationalism and the history of expertise, with the aim of showing how a certain concept of the latter plays an indispensable role in justifying a certain strand of the former.
My research will consist of archival and theoretical inquiry into the connections outlined above. The project considers two parallel developments in novel conjunction: the disciplining of the social sciences (understood as a form of training for expert governance) through the promotion of statistics, and the thought of liberal internationalist social engineers around the turn of the twentieth century. Those times are marked by the march forward of the Comtean call for empirical evidence, starting with the 1834 formation of the Royal Statistical Society, and continuing through the 1843 launch of The Economist; the 1895 foundation of the London School of Economics by members of the Fabian society; and finally the 1914 Bryce Group.
I intend to focus my work on four individuals and their respective milieus: Herbert Spencer, Karl Pearson, Beatrice Webb, and John A. Hobson. These protagonists have three things in common: They appear to subscribe to a "social engineering motif"; they promote statistics as a method of expert governance; and they subscribe, to varying degrees, to some evolutionary/biological notion of human perfection. Relevant archives will be, respectively, the Inter-Parliamentary Union archives in Geneva; the archives of the Royal Statistical Society in London; the Pearson archives at University College London; and the Webb and Hobson archives at the London School of Economics' Special Collections.
Overall, this research project promises opening up new ways of thinking about the linkages between the history of the social sciences, as a discipline and as a practice, and modern practices of international politics. It is thus suited to building a novel connection between the history of liberal internationalism and the history of "expert governance", drawing on the emergence of statistics as an expression of liberal internationalist visions in Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Jan Eijking (Student) |