The Tragedy of Social Control, 1910 -- 1980

Peter Ore, Queens College, CUNY

In this first half of twentieth century, "environmental" control and "social" control came to represent the mainstream progressive response to the irrationalities of capitalist industrial development. As soon as the late 1960s, however, "control" had taken a tragic turn. Where it once was held as a means to social good, it was recast in that decade as a foolish and/or nefarious cover for life-crushing domination by monolithic bureaucracies (though, as I point out in the conclusion, some of the more successful schools of control are still active). The outcome of the modernist project of control, it seemed, could only be authoritarianism or a one-dimensional world. I describe this transformation in two fields with a curious relationship over the period: engineering and sociology. The history of data collection and analysis in these fields, I claim, can stand in for the wider tragedy of control in American society between WWI and the end of the Cold War. The bulk of the paper considers family resemblances in data collection in sociology and environmental (sanitary) engineering in the period. These practices and orientations constellated into a distinctive institution of social learning, with contradictions typical of American republicanism: a deterministic voluntarism, a fear of both masses and elites, a rejection of central authority in favor of a more private and local form of despotism. Most idiosyncratically, I show that American control institutions typically conflate consciousness -- or institutional "seeing" -- with effective social action. With time, observation and data production began to stand in (metonymously) for the entire control process. This conflation lurks behind some of the more outstanding irrationalities of environmental and social governance that we must move beyond to confront climate change.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 140. Reflexivity, Ethics, and Translations in the History of Social Science