Peter Mandler's Response
Peter Mandler delivered the annual Ford Lectures in British History at Oxford University in January and February 2026. Here we present three commentaries on the 2026 Ford lectures from historians based at Oxford and a reply to these comments from Peter Mandler himself.
I am very grateful to Sian Pooley, Ben Jackson and the Oxford Modern British History Seminar for organizing the roundtable on my Ford lectures to which this blog is a revisitation; every scholar deserves such a serious and well-organized scrutiny of their work, especially when it comes at a time when lectures have to be improved and extended into book-form. Interestingly, in this case, the respondents have chosen to focus on issues of method, which gives coherence to the roundtable and gives me an opportunity to clarify some of my chosen methods.
As all three respondents note, my goal in these lectures was to examine the interplay between expert knowledge and popular understandings and uses of it. I adapt Ian Hacking’s ‘looping effect’, the effect by which expert categories recruit (or ‘make up’) people to fit them, extending it to show how people adapt the categories to suit themselves and invent ‘para-scientific’ categories that are similar to but not identical to expert categories, and how reciprocally experts sometimes take in these adapted or invented categories as their own. The loop goes all the way around; experts can be ‘made up’ just like anyone else.
One contribution I mean to make is to the recent trend towards the secondary analysis of social-science surveys and interviews, re-using this raw material from the mid-to-late twentieth century for new historians’ purposes, including the location of ‘vernacular’ understandings behind or obscured by the original social-scientific interpretations. Employing these looping effects, as Freya notes, one can find a more complex or entangled relationship between expert and vernacular discourses. Sometimes, as she says, the response is hostile: social-science attempts to make up people is met with ‘avoidance, suspicion, hostility, and feelings of condescension’. Sometimes, as Grace’s own work shows, the response is satirical: unionized workers view management expertise very often as not only against their interests but misguided or even ridiculous. Often, however, expert knowledge is encountered not as expert knowledge at all, but as something already closer at its origins to ordinary life, which might be taken on board without any risk to independence or integrity. In the lectures I pay a lot of attention to mediators in the popular press – editors, journalists, columnists, and especially ‘agony aunts’ – who have already ‘pre-digested’ expert knowledge to make it more useful and acceptable to readers. As Grace suggests, this relationship – between papers and their readers – is also complex and entangled, riddled with feedback loops as papers feel out what their readers will or will not swallow, and (within limits imposed by proprietors and other powers) adjust their content accordingly.
Relatedly, Freya and Grace both also ask what is left out, either left out by the papers or left out by me with my ‘a priori’ search terms. A good deal is left out – the press, as I say in the first lecture, is only one source for popular understandings of modern life (local conventions, neighbours, family, popular culture being among the others). Race, as Grace says, is handled often indirectly or with deeply embedded assumptions, as Christine Grandy’s just-published book Race on Screen amply documents. In several of my lectures I address the question of how much or how little sex can be discussed even when readers were desperate to know more. My search terms were chosen to locate things that could be discussed but, and here I am glad to have the opportunity to amplify on my method a bit, the ones I cover in the lectures are only the tip of the iceberg. I have been accumulating terms to explore for almost ten years. I tried out many which just failed – and noted the implications of the failures – the terms didn’t catch on, or didn’t prove useful, or produced discomfort, or were just passing fashions. Dogs that don’t bark can tell you as much as those that do.
Ben raises a different set of questions, motivated by his intellectual historian’s orientation to the concepts employed in historiography (and other intellectual theatres) rather than everyday life. He asks a good question about the persistence of Foucauldian views of governmentality and the relative neglect of alternative framings of late modernity by the likes of Giddens and Beck, which I find more congenial. As he says, sociologists have their own reasons to prefer one to the other. Historians, however, don’t as often address higher-order concepts or abstractions like ‘modernity’. When they do, they tend to pull someone else’s theory off the shelf (a point I argued in a previous roundtable in Cultural and Social History 25 years ago). The reasons for gravitating to Foucault are I think largely political, as Ben hints, and those historians who do find abstractions like ‘modernity’ congenial are temperamentally more inclined to adopt the cool, critical, distanced view of modern life and agencies of government that Foucault set up now half a century ago. Even Teri Chettiar, who as Grace says does show more interest in people’s agency and the reasons for their adoption of expert concepts, still sees Hacking-style the loop running mostly from top to bottom – uptake indicates compliance, the state and its experts reach more people with their ideas, their ideas produce meaning, they are invested with authority. But as Bruno Latour once wrote, ‘Actors have many philosophies but sociologists think that they should stick to only a few.’
What appeals to me about Giddens and Beck is the scope they give not only to actors’ agency but also to the multiplicity of modern life, its many choices, its many paths, its many layers. I try not to have a selected path for other people myself (at least not in my capacity as an historian!). One reason I like ‘individuation’ as a term – even if I don’t use it exactly as Beck does – is that it does not imply individualism, but rather leaves open the choice or path or layer of collective identity and action. That is why I devoted my fourth lecture to political and economic structures, and much of my fifth and sixth lectures to groups. In the last lecture, I critique the view that as Ben says Rose claims to share with Beck and Giddens, that the contemporary self had broadly shifted from ‘the social subject of solidarity and citizenship rights in the first half of the twentieth century, to the autonomous subject of choice and self-realization as the twentieth century drew to a close’; to put it in other terms, that homo politicus has given way to homo economicus. Actors have many philosophies, but sociologists sometimes think that they should stick to one.
Peter Mandler is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and was formerly Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge. He is the editor, most recently, with Simon Gunn and Otto Saumarez Smith of The Modern British City, 1945-2000 (Lund Humphries, 2025). He delivered the James Ford Lectures in British History in Hilary Term 2026 and is writing them up in book form; he is also currently writing on the history of universal secondary education in the UK since 1945 and on the rise of the undergraduate degree in History since the early 19th century.
