5 - Networks of influence: the social sciences in the United Kingdom since the war

Summary

Whereas deLeon (chapter 3) and Jann (chapter 4) have focused on US experience, here I turn to the United Kingdom. I pick up a theme identified in chapter 2 by Wittrock et al. that the interaction of the policy sciences and government is not the clinging together of two institutional structures, unpopulated by human beings. The relationship is one between living human beings in their social groups – in Whitehall, in social clubs, in the universities, and elsewhere.

It is a common observation about British political life that it works through who knows whom. The very term ‘establishment’ was coined in the United Kingdom to describe it, and it includes not only the connections carried over from school days (the ‘old-boy network’) and those made at Oxford and Cambridge, but also the lifetime connections of men's clubs, the City, and large corporations. The Labour Party is not without its own networks, nor are the trade unions – Ruskin College, for example. This ‘people culture’ is also strong in the intellectual life of the country, and ideas have always been regarded with suspicion. There has been a certain congruence, therefore, in the political and intellectual life of the country, and it is in this context that the political influence of the social sciences has to be understood. The state has powerful weapons at its disposal to maintain this understanding and to shape the work of intellectuals: patronage, honours, and the resources that social scientists increasingly need for their work.