ABSTRACT
In the first half of the nineteenth century governance and the social converged for the first time, governance now being enacted explicitly through the social, which increasingly became a central part of the social imaginaries of power. Actual governance was built upon those early excavations of the social that Mary Poovey’s contribution in Chapter 3 of this volume indicates, namely the role of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century in naturalizing a providential social order. Seen now to work through humans, this order operated with an increasing degree of autonomy from divine intervention. Understanding ‘human nature’, and relating it to how a benificent social order could be attained out of the ‘social capacity’ that was the result of this nature’s operations, were in effect foundations for later understandings of how actual state government might work. As the contribution of Robert Wokler (Chapter 4 in this volume) shows, social science in France from the late 1790s was increasingly enlisted in the service of the state, and represented an attempt to govern according to a science that was autonomous of politics and legislation. There was shift from the legislator to the administrator and the bureaucrat, the new science of the social receiving its most characteristic expression in the form of the techno-administrative state that began to emerge at this time, one supposedly neutral in its command of new kinds of expertise and its deployment of new sorts of experts in power and the social.
