Audiences and Experts in the Language of Social Science in Everyday 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.
Across his six Ford lectures, Peter Mandler walked the audience through the popular reuse and reappropriation of social scientific language in twentieth-century Britain. These neologisms - ‘narcissism’; ‘cost of living index’; ‘psychoanalyse’ - coined sometimes as early as the nineteenth century by political economists and philosophers, came to be used by the public to speak about and know self and society a century later.
Mandler showed that the place of social scientific language in everyday life needs a broader analytic lens than the ‘governmentality’ thesis, popularised by Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller at the end of the twentieth century. In the Foucauldian tradition, the creep of psychological and sociological expertise into everyday life is interpreted as a tool for disciplining subjectivities in late liberal societies. However, rather than seeing social scientific language’s infiltration into everyday speak as the public’s internalisation of expert mechanisms of self-regulation, Mandler argued that we should think of social science language as a tool for 'ordinary' (itself reappropriated social science vocabulary) people to make sense of modern social life.
Mandler’s argument calls to mind Teri Chettiar’s claims in her book The Intimate State, in which she argues that to see the permeation of psychological and psychiatric ideas and practices in everyday life as the product of governmentality assumes a ‘false consciousness’ on behalf of the public. Instead, the more interesting question for Chettiar is ‘why these ideas and practices were persuasive enough to be chosen by many people’. Mandler too is interested in what he calls the demand for social science language in everyday life. Abstract concepts from social science and political philosophy fulfilled a need that Britons had for a language that could give shape to the experience of living in a modern, complex society. This demand was facilitated by increasing levels of mass education across the century, generating a public eager to consume Pelican paperbacks and the popular press.
'See if You're Normal', Daily express, 5 September 1950
Like the governmentality theorists, Mandler interprets the dissemination of expertise as a symptom of modernity. However, in Mandler’s lectures, lay people actively engaged with the condition of modernity, seeking out new ways to make sense of modern life. In his fourth lecture, Mandler explained that the cost of living index was originally developed as a method to discipline workers’ wage claims in the early twentieth century. However, from the 1930s and especially by the 1950s, the ‘cost of living’ had become useful for trade union rhetoric during wage bargaining, for housewives to criticise tools of economic measurement and policy in the popular press, as well as for a population-wide discussion about the material goods necessary for the good life. I found this example especially illustrative of the idea, often missed by governmentality theorists, that once experts put their expertise out into the world, they cannot easily control the uses their expert concepts get put to.
In my own work on occupational psychology and mental health in mid-twentieth century Britain, I see experts forced to relinquish control of their expertise. In encountering managers and workers in their project to create a new ‘psy’ science of the workplace, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts had the scientific substance of their expertise hollowed out, and replaced with disparate, vernacular ways of interpreting the workplace. Middle managers at a light engineering firm mocked the ‘mumbo-jumbo’ psychoanalysts employed to study their factory, dispensing satirical advice to their readers in a send-up of psychological and sociological expertise. One author calling himself ‘W. I. DeBoy’ advised readers to reject the ‘yes man’ persona. The ‘No-Man’ was more likely to raise the ‘modern, democratic’ manager’s ‘self esteem’, DeBoy opined, cheekily recommending those seeking promotion volley their bosses with opposition instead of agreement.
Informed by Science and Technology Studies literature on co-production, I see that lay encounters with psy-expertise fed back into expert projects, pushing workplace psy-scientists to become more like management consultants than social psychiatrists of the workplace. Mandler too traced the feedback loop between lay and expert uses of social scientific language. In his fifth lecture he identified ‘para-scientific’ terms, such as ‘generation gap’ and ‘permissive society’, coined in the late twentieth century by the popular press and seeping back into expert usage.
There is another ‘looping effect’ here, to use Ian Hacking’s concept. Mandler follows popular use of social scientific language through the pages of the popular press; his lectures were wonderfully full of charts tracking the rise of fall of social science vocabulary across various newspaper outlets. How did the popular press imagine themselves relating to reader demand? Did they seek to respond to or shape their audience’s understanding of the world around them? And how did readers take up, challenge, or ignore ideas and concepts expressed in the popular press?
Thinking about audience encourages us to consider the whiteness of the everyday language of social science. The literature on race and the popular press, starting with Stuart Hall, reminds us that the media speaks to a normatively racialised audience. If popular social science helped Britons understand modern life, what aspects of modern life did it help them understand, and what aspects of social life remained unexplained? Mandler argues that social scientific language about class and political economy helped Britons orient themselves in the social structure, even as they disavowed ‘class talk’ in their own lives. How did the language of social science in everyday life shepherd their readers through racialised structures of modern society? Were readers likely to learn about race through the language of eugenics or social anthropology, or was racial thinking expressed in non-expert vernaculars? Omega Douglas and Christine Grandy have demonstrated that racialised readers had to look outside the popular press to find ways of orienting themselves in a modern Britain marked by white supremacy and imperial afterlives, turning instead Black-run magazines and newspapers.
In my research into workplace psy-science, I have found silence over processes of racialisation in the workplace. In mid-twentieth century Civil Service Selection Boards, racialised candidates were excluded according to visual, rather than psychological metrics. The Civil Service Commission paid special attention to candidates’ racialised appearances, wondering if ‘coloured’ described both candidates who were ‘coal black’ as well as ‘people who are slightly “off-white”?’ Identifying when expertise is strategically silent about race, and when vernacular knowledge of race is marshalled as ‘pragmatic’ or ‘common sense’ provides a more textured understanding of the relationship between power and expertise than the governmentality thesis allows for. There are instances in which power relations were best served by jettisoning expertise, especially after the use of scientific expertise to justify racialised hierarchies was made taboo in the shadow of Nazi racial science.
Looking for the language of social science in everyday life also impels us to search for when that language fails. Mandler’s lectures have shown us how digital humanities tools can facilitate more thorough tracking of the rise and fall of certain neologisms over the course of the twentieth century. This is not a monolithic story of the rise of expertise, but a contingent, dynamic account of how certain languages (in the plural) captured the attention of reporters and their audience, as ‘inferiority complex’ gave way to ‘identity’, and ‘subconscious’ fell away while talk of ‘subcultures’ emerged. Tracking the ascent and descent of specific social science vocabulary, as Peter’s future work promises to do, will tell us much about the specific concerns Britons had regarding the relationship between themselves and their society as the twentieth century unfolded.
Grace Whorrall-Campbell is a historian of modern Britain, specialising in the histories of psy-science, sexuality, disability and labour. Before joining Corpus as the Burgess Brock Junior Research Fellow in History, Grace was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin. Recent publications include a history of occupational psychiatry and management at Roffey Park Rehabilitation Centre in History of the Human Sciences and a chapter on psychological job selection in Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z (2025, University of London Press, ed. Maria Cannon and Laura Tisdall).
