The James Ford Lectures 2026, The Language of Social Science in Everyday Life: 5. Self and Society

Speaker: Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
Location: South School, Examination Schools

Lecture Five: Self and Society

The decades between the late 1940s and the late 1970s are widely seen as the heyday of social science (and of social democracy), though usually from the point of view of educated or cultivated elites.  This lecture seeks evidence of the ‘sociological imagination’ in everyday life, in conditions of ‘affluence’, ‘permissiveness’ and a therapeutic society.

These lectures chart the spread and use of the language of social science into everyday life 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, new tools were taken up to meet the challenges of everyday life:  to anatomize 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.  Psychology, Sociology, Economics and Politics will feature prominently, alongside consideration of Anthropology, Social Medicine, Literature, History and Philosophy.