The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States

When politicians argue over the fashioning and refashioning of social and economic policies, they draw on a reservoir of evidence and theory generated by complex processes of social investigation. Much of that investigation has been undertaken either by or for the purposes of the state. The very meanings of terms such as poverty, unemployment, and inequality, as well as the data about them, have been shaped in inquiries like those of Britain's many royal commissions on the conditions of the poor and the United States's famous Coleman report on race and education. The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States addresses the historical development of the knowledge base on which the public policies of the democratic state depend. The book results from a Woodrow Wilson Center project on the growth of knowledge and the rise of the modern state and is a companion volume to The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences (1990), edited by Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple. This comparative study extends from the Enlightenment origins of the impulse to base legislation on scientific knowledge to the twentieth-century development of specialized institutions and professions engaged in social investigation and public policymaking. It probes investigators' biases and omissions as well as their strengths as factors shaping social learning. It illuminates the vital link between social empiricism and the late nineteenth-century emergence of the new liberalism both in Britain and in the United States. And it ponders the impact on social investigation and social policy today of relativism, antistatism, devolution, and privatization as these currents have developed in both societies since the 1970s. Scholars, advanced students, and practitioners interested in social and economic policy, political and welfare history, and modern social thought in Britain and the United States will find in this book an indispensable guide to the history of social policy and investigation.