The Language of Individualization in Intellectual Life

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.

Immediately after hearing Peter’s first Ford lecture, I already had ideas for what I wanted to discuss at the roundtable. My comments will mostly concentrate on this opening talk, entitled ‘Foundations’. It was in this lecture that 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 was the work of Michel Foucault and his acolytes that received the most attention from Peter or, to put it more accurately, it was 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, he targeted their use of ‘governmentality’, an idea first developed by Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978. For Peter, the interpretative framework derived from this concept – the focus on expert knowledge systems and how these produced ‘rationalities’ for governing and self-governing – 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, echoed 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 looked 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, and to unapologetically evade offering an answer to this paragraph’s opening question directly—this is evidence of a researcher being in the ‘non-committed stage’ of their doctoral research, still trying to figure out how they plan to use a concept, and worried that an answer offered now will be regretted later—I will, instead, briefly examine discussions of individualization in a specific historical moment, namely, the 1990s.

During this decade, the concept of individualization became pervasive in British sociological thought. The ostensible triggers for these discussions were books written by two sociologists familiar to those who attended Peter’s final lecture: Anthony Giddens, and his 1991 Modernity and Self-Identity, and Ulrich Beck, and his 1986 Risk Society (the original text, written in German, was translated into English in 1992). In these books, Giddens and Beck argued that individualization was a core element of contemporary life. With ‘greater pluralisation’ and ‘openness’ in society, they argued that people were no longer assigned an identity but were tasked with ‘discovering’ one themselves. Class, social status, gender, family, and tradition—these classical structures for identity-formation had declined, while the less distinctive concepts of ‘lifestyle’ and ‘finding oneself’ had grown in importance. Eventually, these arguments from Giddens and Beck became known as the ‘individualization thesis’ and, predictably, received the attention of other sociologists working in Britain. Their responses, however, were mostly critical. Many accused Beck and Giddens of universalising 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 sparked 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. Governmentality, and its associated theoretical lens, he believed, offered a more fruitful way of examining the complex forces acting on the modern subject.

Ingram Pinn/Financial Times, 16 December 2000

Such accounts of individualization in the late twentieth century, then, 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 speak to several themes that most, if not all, intellectual historians contend with in their work. The transmission of knowledge is the most obvious. How the expert language of social science permeates the everyday was the central theme of Peter’s talks. But his work also pushes us to consider a more specific question about transmission: its success and failure. As he discussed in the latter end of his first lecture, certain disciplines were more influential in shaping everyday language in Britain at different points in the twentieth century. In other words, their vocabularies were subject to that tiresome historiographical cliché of ‘rise and fall’. While the language of sociology and psychology ‘rose’ after the Second World War, philosophy’s influence ‘fell’. It ‘more or less abdicated its public role’, stated Peter, and was the ‘dog that didn’t bark…and if it did, not many people listened to it.’

Applying this point to my own sources, it has encouraged me to think about the changing fortunes of particular social theorists and their ‘ways of seeing’ during the same period. At least in the field of modern British history, 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 did 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 adapt 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.