State expansion, social science, and schooling in the United Kingdom, 1800 to 1914
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation is grounded in an empirical puzzle: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, few states compelled a national education through state schooling; yet by its end, states that schooled were nearly ubiquitous across North America and Western Europe. Why? Why did states with vastly different histories, material resources, and political traditions converge on this specific social welfare policy? I theorize that the ongoing development and institutionalization of the social sciences during the nineteenth century constituted a powerful, transnational force of cultural construction that made new kinds of state intervention newly conceivable. What I term social scientization, this epistemic movement elaborated state-centric functionalist social theory that centered on rationalized societal progress via state schooling; reified this theory with new varieties and volumes of social data and quantification; and diffused these theories translocally within and via state apparatuses as well as civil society organizations. The chapters of this chapter set out (Chapter 1) and test this argument with quantitative and computational techniques, highlighting scientization's role in expanding political notions of the schooling state (Chapter 2), in intensifying the rationalization of welfare and education policy discourse (Chapter 3), in diffusing functionalist theories of societal progress via state schooling in normative political debate (Chapter 4), and in progressively intensifying the state's intervention in education through formal legislative acts (Chapter 5). Together, this dissertation offers a computational historical-sociological case study of state expansion while demonstrating empirically how the expansive cultural content of the nascent nineteenth-century social sciences fundamentally and indelibly shaped the politics of education in the modern era.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Smith, Daniel Scott |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Bromley, Patricia |
| Degree supervisor | Meyer, John |
| Thesis advisor | Bromley, Patricia |
| Thesis advisor | Meyer, John |
| Thesis advisor | McFarland, Daniel |
| Degree committee member | McFarland, Daniel |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Education |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Daniel Scott Smith. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/qf554sm2734 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Daniel Scott Smith
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