Peter Mandler delivered the annual Ford Lectures in British History at Oxford University in January and February 2026. Mandler's lectures, entitled 'The Language of Social Science in Everyday Life', examined how social scientific ideas were deployed and popularised in twentieth-century Britain. As a religious language for orienting the self and its relations to others went into decline, and as modern life became more mobile and complex, Mandler showed that new tools from the social sciences were taken up to meet the challenges of everyday life: to anatomise and characterize the self, to chart its progress across the life-course, to make palpable modernity's many ‘invisible structures’ and ‘imagined communities’, to compare personal experiences to the experiences of others, and to address private problems with new concepts, new devices, new therapies. 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.
