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Peter Townsend (1928–2009) was one of the most important British social scientists of the twentieth century, best known for pioneering and innovative research on poverty, as well as his political campaigning, most notably for the Child Poverty Action Group. This article returns to Townsend's influential work on ageing, for which he first became widely known, during the 1950s and early 1960s. It does so to recover the ways in which his research, first in Bethnal Green at the Institute of Community Studies (ICS), and then at the London School of Economics, as well as the professional and political networks he built during this period, were rooted in and shaped by his home life in Hampstead. As will be shown, the most important figure in the interconnecting spheres of Townsend's career was his wife, Ruth (1927–2011), who not only was central to the construction of a way of life in which the boundaries between research, the domestic sphere, and politics were often so blurred as to be non-existent, but also made significant and underappreciated contributions to her husband's research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The «welfare state» is a slippery concept. For some scholars, it has a fairly narrow meaning. For many others, though, the welfare state is a much broader idea, covering not only fairly obvious social services but also an accompanying set of strategies for governing society, built around ideas such as full employment. For this reason, histories of the welfare state have always seemed most coherent when contained within clear boundaries, which have allowed scholars to frame their work with ideas about the nation and nationhood, among other things. As this review essay explores, however, an important challenge for future historiography is imagining what histories of welfare states look like without borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is the product of a conference, The Future of the History of the Human Sciences, which was held at the University of York in April 2016. The meeting brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and at various stages of their careers to reflect on what were identified as major challenges and opportunities for the research that History of the Human Sciences publishes. The articles included here are a sample of the responses that were generated and contain reflections on not only the boundaries of history of the human sciences research but also the methods used within the discipline. As this introduction explains, the overall aim of the conference was to explore these questions in order to think about both future directions for research and ways in which we can ensure the field remains dynamic and vital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often said that the advent of the Freudian talking cure around 1900 revolutionised the psychiatric setting by giving patients a voice. Less known is that for decades prior to the popularisation of this technique, several researchers had been experimenting with another, written practice aimed at probing the mind. This was particularly the case in France. Alongside neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot's spectacular staging of hypnotised bodies, 'automatic writing' became widely used in fin-de-siècle clinics and laboratories, with French psychologists regularly asking entranced patients to scribble down words to validate their nascent theories on the divided self. This article traces the emergence of automatic writing in French psychological discourse at the close of the 19th century. By focusing on the early work of Dr Pierre Janet and some of his contemporaries, it re-examines the role played by this practice in what Henri Ellenberger famously called 'The Discovery of the Unconscious'. It also considers the various levels of reconstruction at play in recent historical accounts. What does it mean to give subjects a (written) voice? How does automatic writing differ from the Freudian talking cure as respective expressions of the unspeakable? And how might these questions inform future historical practice? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on a presentation at the Future of the History of the Human Sciences workshop (2016), discusses some of the potential benefits and pitfalls of digital humanities (DH) tools and approaches for historians of the human sciences. It reviews some of the major approaches that form DH and draws on the author's experience as part of a team creating a large DH resource to consider the complications presented by these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article began life as, and retains the character of, spoken argument for not allowing the neurosciences to shape the agenda of the history of the human sciences. This argument is then used to suggest purposes and content for the journal, History of the Human Sciences. The style is rhetorical, even polemical, but open-ended. I challenge two clichés about the neurosciences, that they intellectually challenge other areas of knowledge, and that they are reconfiguring the human with the notion of 'brainhood'. The suggestion is that the real challenges lie elsewhere; specifically with understanding the relations of different forms of knowledge and making it conceivable by political action, or simply mode of life, to implement one way of being human rather than another. The conclusion re-asserts the value of the heading, 'history of the human sciences', and of the value of the journal with this name, as a forum in which to reflect on the identity and relations of forms of knowledge about 'the human' in all their variety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about the future of sociology, as transformations in the digital and biological sciences lay claim to the discipline's jurisdictional hold over 'the social'. Rather than analyse the specifics of these transformations, however, the focus of the article is on how a narrative of methodological crisis is sustained in sociology, and on how such a narrative conjures very particular disciplinary futures. Through a close reading of key texts, the article makes two claims: (1) that a surprisingly conventional urge towards disciplinary reproduction often animates accounts of sociology's crisis; (2) that, even more surprisingly, these same accounts are often haunted by a hidden metaphorical architecture centred on biology, vitality, vigour and life. The central gambit of the article is that, perhaps in spite of itself, this subterranean image of life actually hints at less reproductively conventional ways of understanding – and intervening in – sociology's methodological 'crisis'. Drawing, empirically, on the author's recent work on urban stress and, theoretically, on Stefan Helmreich's (2011, 2016) account of 'limit biologies', the articles ends with a call for a 'limit sociology' – a form of attention that could, similarly, expand rather than contract the present moment of transformation. At the heart of the article is a hope that thinking with such a limit may help sociologists to imagine a less deadening future than that on offer from a canonised discipline cathected by endless crisis-talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I reconstruct my own journey into the history of the human sciences, which I show to have been a process of discovering the metaphysical standing of the human. I begin with Alexandre Koyré's encounter with Edmund Husserl in the 1930s, which I use to throw light on the legacy of Kant's 'anthropological' understanding of the human, which dominated and limited 19th-century science. As I show, those who broke from Kant's strictures and set the stage for the 20th-century revolutions in science - from Hegel, to John McTaggart, to Max Weber - typically were pursuing crypto-theological questions about how a finite being can comprehend an infinite universe. This journey is about the 'common measure' of being human, which is what links Plato to Kuhn, but has been most consistently taken up by law. I suggest that in seeking this 'measure of man', we may discover that to be human is not necessarily to be Homo sapiens, which would suggest a radical reorientation of the history of the human sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that current programmes in the human sciences which adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to history need to be wary of treating the knowledge of the natural sciences as being independent of social influence. Such efforts to do 'Big History', 'Deep History' or co-evolutionary history themselves have a past, and this article suggests that potential practitioners could benefit from considering that historical context. To that end, it explores the career of Herbert John Fleure, a scholar whose career defied disciplinary classification, but who was concerned to understand how the human past and present could be understood as they combined in the physical and social context of their production, and what they implied for the possibility of a human future. It concludes by arguing that Fleure's major lesson for modern researchers is his confrontation of the contingent nature and political consequences of his conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ethnographic or ethnomethodological turn in the history of the human sciences has been a Holy Grail at least since Cooter and Pumphrey called for it in 1994, but it has been little realized in practice. This article sketches out some ways to explore the reception, use and/or co-production of scientific knowledge using material generated by mediators such as mass-market paperbacks, radio, TV and especially newspapers. It then presents some preliminary findings, tracing the prevalence and, to a lesser extent, use of selected social-science concepts in the USA and the UK from the 1930s to the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enthusiasm for creating new histories of social mobility has grown at a moment when sociologists in Britain have been engaged in a high-profile project to update the models of class they have used for more than 50 years. These endeavours share the same intellectual ambition: to show class and social mobility are multi-dimensional phenomena. However, as this article shows, these developments recall the infancy of British social mobility research, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, when the relationships between disciplines, institutions and ideas had yet to take the shape we now recognise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sociologists in Britain have debated the nature of their field's relationship with biology since the late nineteenth century, interest in the full range of responses has only grown in recent years. This paper contributes to the spirit of historical revisionism by turning to the work of the biologist and first director of UNESCO, Julian Huxley (1887–1975). Paying particular attention to the doctrine he called ‘scientific humanism’ and his ideas about a biosocial agenda separate from the priorities of biology itself, the paper uses historical tools to address a concern that has frequently cast a shadow over debates about biosocial science: does it interfere with the progressive agenda sociologists have traditionally seen themselves as contributing to? The paper argues that Huxley's work is evidence that biosocial science is compatible with progressive goals and that recent developments in biology mean it may be the ideal time to reconsider long-standing attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the relationship between biology and social science during the early twentieth century. However, discussion is often drawn toward a particular conception of eugenics, which tends to obscure our understanding of not only the wide range of intersections between biology and social science during the period but also their impact on subsequent developments. This paper draws attention to one of those intersections: the British economist and social reformer William Beveridge's controversial efforts to establish a Department of Social Biology at London School of Economics during the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring a fully equipped laboratory headed by a leading geneticist, the Department of Social Biology was Beveridge's attempt to "cross-fertilise" biology and social science and, in so doing, take the ideological heat out of social scientific, in particular economic, methods of investigation. Exploring why Beveridge's project failed and throwing light on its long-term legacies, this paper considers what we can learn from the short-lived Department of Social Biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stephen T. Casper and Steve Fuller's commentaries on my paper "Completing Circle of the Social Sciences? William Beveridge and Social Biology at the London School of Economics during the 1930s" raises important questions about the historical entanglement of the political left, welfarism, biology, and social science. In this response, I clarify questions about my analysis of events at the London School of Economics in the early twentieth century and identify ways in which they are important in the present. I suggest that there is much to be learned from the school's failed experiment with social biology, not least when it comes to thinking about the historical contingency of relationships between progressive politics and biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders the work of the Scottish biologist, sociologist, and town planner Patrick Geddes and his most famous intellectual disciple: the American independent scholar Lewis Mumford. It is argued that existing interpretations of their work, ranging from a dismissal of the two men as eccentric polymaths to the speculative emphasis on the importance of psychological theories in Mumford's oeuvre, are fundamentally flawed. Examining their writings and the letters they exchanged during their 17-year correspondence, this paper shows that the only way we can appreciate the scholarly conventions underpinning Geddes's and Mumford's work, as well as the context in which it was produced, is by looking to the principles of classical sociological theory. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]