The Language of Individualization in Intellectual Life

It is testament to Peter’s intellectually rich first lecture that I already had ideas for what I was going to discuss at the roundtable after hearing it. My comments will mostly concentrate on this opening talk, entitled ‘Foundations’.

In this lecture, Peter surveyed the existing literature on his topic of social science in everyday life, introducing us to Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘basic concepts’, Raymond Williams’s ‘keywords’, Anthony Giddens’s ‘double hermeneutic’, and Ian Hacking’s ‘looping effects’. But it is the work of Michel Foucault and his acolytes that received the most attention from Peter or, to put it more accurately, it is the ‘Foucauldians’ that bore the brunt of Peter’s sharp criticisms. Patrick Joyce, James Vernon, and Nikolas Rose—their books were a permanent feature in Peter’s lectures slides.

In particular, it is their concept of governmentality – the assemblage of knowledge systems that act together to produce novel ways of rationalising the technologies of governing – that has been a specific target for Peter. For him, this approach leaves little room for agency. It ignores how lay actors appropriated and used the concepts of social science in unique ways across the twentieth century, beyond the parameters set by the Foucauldians. Peter, thus, echoes the longstanding critique directed towards poststructuralism, that people, when viewed through its associated theoretical lenses, often appear as merely passive subjects.

This humanist critique perhaps received its most forceful articulation from the philosopher Marshall Berman in 1982. Putting it in rather frank terms, he stated that while Foucault is

‘just about the only writer of the past decade who has had anything substantial to say about modernity…his totalities swallow up every facet of modern life…a cage far more airtight than anything Weber ever dreamed of, into which no life can break…The mystery is why so many of today’s intellectuals seem to want to choke in there with him.’

Berman’s posing of the question of why intellectuals were drawn to Foucault’s ideas is partly a reflection of my own interests. My research examines how contemporary intellectuals and the wider commentariat observed society in late twentieth-century Britain. Whereas Peter looks to challenge the accounts put forward by groups like the Foucauldians, my aims are to locate them in their historical settings, account for why they took the form they did, and assess their impact on the immediate and future intellectual cultures. And defining this further, I am specifically interested in those accounts of social life that examine individualization.

So what is ‘individualization’? That is usually the follow-up question I get asked after answering the initial, dreaded question of ‘what is your PhD about?’ As Peter pointed out in his last lecture, this tricky concept should not be confused with its cognates of individualism or individuation. Entire books could be written about defining such words; indeed, they have. But to avoid turning the rest of this post into something resemblant of an OED entry, I will briefly examine the meaning of individualization in the context of a specific historical moment, namely, the 1990s.

During this decade, the concept of individualization became pervasive in British sociological thought. Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society, published in his native language of German in 1986, before being translated into English in 1992, represented an ostensible, ‘starting gun’ for these discussions. Beck – a sociologist who had started to gain increasing prominence in British circles from around the mid-80s – argued that individualization represented an ‘ordering principle’ for society in late-modernity. What did he mean by this? People, he believed, were no longer assigned an identity, but were now tasked with ‘discovering’ one themselves. Class, social status, gender, family and tradition—the influence of these classical structures for identity-formation had declined.

Beck was not alone in describing so-called ‘second modernity’ in such terms. The aforementioned theorist, Anthony Giddens, echoed Beck’s ideas about individualization. In his 1991 book, Modernity and Self-Identity, he similarly viewed ‘late modernity’ as forcing people into this process of ‘finding oneself’, without the traditional guides of class, gender, or family to help them.

It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the work of Beck and Giddens set the agenda for sociological thought in Britain across the decade. Surveying the content of their pages from the 1990s in 2016, the editors of the journal Sociology settled on ‘Self-Identity and Its Discontents’ as its main theme. They found that many of its contributors in this period responded to the ‘individualization thesis’ and challenged – as they put it – Beck’s and Giddens’s universalising of a white, middle-class experience.

Another familiar voice also got involved. In the introduction to the second edition of his book, Governing the Soul, published in 1999, Nikolas Rose expressed his appreciation for how Beck and Giddens had encouraged the ‘return of the problem of the self to the heart of sociology’. He also thought they were on to something. While he did not support Beck’s and Giddens’s attachment to sociological ideas of pre-modernity and late-modernity – what Rose called their ‘epochilisation’ – he did agree 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 capture these changes, he thought the classical ideas found in sociology were outdated. Instead, the theoretical apparatus of Foucault’s concept of governmentality, he believed, would be better equipped at addressing the complex forces acting on the modern subject.

Ingramm Pinn, Financial Times, 16 December 2000.

So these types of accounts of individualization in the late twentieth century are the focus of my DPhil research. I look to set this ‘moment’ in the 1990s into a longer intellectual history, starting with its origins in the late 1960s and 1970s. Looking ahead, I anticipate that Peter’s lectures – and future book – will appear frequently in my citations. Not only is this due to his direct engagement with the work of Beck, Giddens, and Rose, but also because his lectures relate to several themes that most, if not all, intellectual historians contend with in their work. The transmission of knowledge is the most obvious. Yet Peter’s work pushes us to consider the deeper question about how far these transmissions were successful. As he discussed in the latter end of his first lecture, the vocabulary of specific disciplines in shaping everyday language were subject to that tiresome historiographical cliché of ‘rise and fall’. Sociology and psychology ‘rose’ after the Second World War; philosophy, most notably, ‘fell’. The latter ‘more or less abdicated its public role’ and was, in Peter’s words, the ‘dog that didn’t bark…and if it did, not many people listened to it.’

Applying this point to my own source material, it has encouraged me to think about the changing fortunes of particular social theorists and their ‘ways of seeing’ in late twentieth-century Britain. At least in the field of modern British history, it appears that Rose’s account of individualization emerged from the intellectual debates of the 1990s relatively unscathed. In fact, according to Peter in his third lecture, this Foucauldian view on how the self became ‘psychologised’ in the twentieth century did more than survive: it became ‘entrenched’ in the historiography. ‘Entrenched’ might be too strong of an adjective here, but recent histories of psy-expertise in Britain (see Shaul Bar-Haim’s or Michal Shapira’s monographs) provide little direct challenge to Rose’s work, certainly not an outright repudiation.

And if we have winners, then we have losers. Why did, say, Giddens’s account of social life not at least inspire some parts of the historiography? By proposing this question, I am certainly not endorsing Giddens’s position on individualization. Mike Savage and Beverely Skeggs offer much-needed rebuttals of his work. But I think this point about reputation does speak to a larger one about the intellectual – to steal Peter’s title – ‘foundations’ of academic historians, especially those working in the field of modern British history. Giddens’s standing as a social theorist took a serious – perhaps justified – hit through his turn to Third Way politics and his association with New Labour. Why did Rose’s reputation improve across the 1990s, despite multiple reviewers of the first edition of Governing the Soul, published in 1989, making the same criticisms Peter has throughout these lectures? As one reviewer noted, ‘the voices of human subjects, and their prospects for reaction and resistance, fail to materialize’; another stated that while ‘Rose contends throughout that the motivations for the employment of psychological techniques are far more complex than many social analysts would have [he] fails to offer any evidence that they have nothing to do with coercion or social regulation’. If a historian in 2026 believes it is necessary to echo these criticisms made in the early 1990s, then what does this suggest about the existing intellectual foundations? Or – to this time reverse the idiom used by Peter – which dogs are still barking, and why?

Ben Copeland is a first-year DPhil candidate in History at Wolfson College, Oxford, researching the supposed dominance of individualism in late twentieth-century Britain.