The crisis of the social and post-social history1

 Translated by Marie McMahon. This research forms part of the Ministry of Education and Science project HUM004-04562/HIST, and is supported by FEDER funding.

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Notes

 Translated by Marie McMahon. This research forms part of the Ministry of Education and Science project HUM004-04562/HIST, and is supported by FEDER funding.

 The expression death of the social (or “the end of the social”), increasingly used nowadays, refers to the weakening and giving up of a conception of society and social problems founded on the notion of social structure, the same conception that had laid the foundations for the emergence and development of welfare states. See, for instance, N. Rose, “The Death of the Social? Re-figuring the Territory of Government,” Economy and Society 25 (1996): 327–56; and M. Dean, Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), 151–3.

 P. Joyce, “Introduction,” in The Social in Question. New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, ed. P. Joyce (London: Routledge, 2002), 1.

 J. M. Smith, “No More Language Games: Words, Beliefs, and the Political Culture of Early Modern France,” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1413–40. See also J. M. Smith, “Between Discourse and Experience: Agency and Ideas in the French Pre-Revolution,” History and Theory 40 (2001): 116–42.

 G. S. Jones, “The Determinist Fix: Some Obstacles to the Further Development of the Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s,” History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 19–35. Of course, this brief characterization does not do justice to all the complexity and sophistication of Jones’ theoretical position. A more detailed appraisal of such a position can be found in M. A. Cabrera, “Linguistic Approach or Return to Subjectivism? In Search of an Alternative to Social History,” Social History 24 (1999): 74–8.

 S. Maza, “The Social Imaginary of the French Revolution: the Third Estate, the National Guard, and the Absent Bourgeoisie,” in The Age of Cultural Revolutions. Britain and France, 1750–1820, ed. C. Jones and D. Wahrman (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 106–23, quote at 123.

 Joyce, “Introduction,” 7.

 C. Pickstock, “The Mediaeval Origins of Civil Society” and M. Poovey, “The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social in Eighteenth-century British Moral Philosophy,” both in The Social in Question, ed. Joyce, 21–43 and 44–61. Poovey's essay also appeared, in a slightly different version, in Public Culture 14 (2002): 125–45.

 Poovey, “The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social in Eighteenth-century British Moral Philosophy,” 44–5.

 Ibid., 46–7.

 R. Wokler, “Repatriating Modernity's Alleged Debts to the Enlightenment: French Revolutionary Social Science and the Genesis of the Nation State” and P. Joyce, “Maps, Blood and the City: the Governance of the Social in Nineteenth-century Britain,” both in The Social in Question, ed. Joyce, Chs 4 and 6; and P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom. Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003).

 K. M. Baker, “Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History,” in Main Trends in Cultural History, ed. W. Melching and W. Velema (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 114. [Also in Civil Society. History and Possibilities, ed. S. Kaviraj and S. Khilnani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 84–104.]

 C. Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 91 and 106–7. Taylor has expanded and gone deeply into his argument in Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). The term social imaginary has not been, of course, coined by Taylor, as it had been previously used by many authors, chiefly French ones. Moreover, Taylor draws upon the work of (equally French-speaking) authors like Bronislaw Baczko and, above all, Cornelius Castoriadis, whose work is frequently mentioned and commented on by Taylor. See M. Maffesoli, “The Social Imaginary,” Current Sociology 41 (1993): 59–67; B. Baczko, Les Imaginaires Sociaux (Paris: Payot, 1984); and C. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). In Taylor's hands, however, the concept of social imaginary has gained new meanings with greater theoretical density and analytical depth.

 A more detailed account of the post-social history as an emerging theoretical paradigm can be found in M. A. Cabrera, Postsocial History. An Introduction (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004).

 N. Rose, Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Ch. 3, “The Social.”

 The term “socialist” is not used here in its standard sense (although this is encompassed), but in opposition to “individualist” and, therefore, I employ it simply with the purpose of making a distinction between the two variants of the modern social imaginary.

 W. H. Sewell, “Whatever Happened to the ‘Social’ in Social History?,” in Schools of Thought. Twenty-five Years of Interpretive Social Science, ed. J. W. Scott and D. Keates (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 209–26.

 I am paraphrasing here from P. Joyce, “The End of Social History?,” Social History 20 (1995): 74.