Anita Mage wrote:
>I have a question on terminology: do people really say they're doing social
>engineering today? the term has a definite early 20th century tone to me.
>
>"social engineering" certainly didn't emerge fullgrown from the head of a
>rockefeller foundation officer, but, according to lily kay, it was - or
>rather the perception at the time of its failures was - a big part of the
>background to the rf's push into molecular biology (see Lily E. Kay, The
>Molecular Vision of Life. Caltech, the Rockefeller Foudation and the Rise
>of the New Biology. Oxford 1993).
>
>Anita
hey anita, i have a somewhat different definition than you (cultural skidding as elena says! since i'm addressing what is a rather unique US take on it all) mine may be more in line with norms. not sure.
for me, social engineering (SE) is a concept that is used to characterize comte and saint simon. but more than that, people characterize enlightenment liberal social theories that emerged during the industrial and political revolutions as theories that favored, in one form or another, social engineering.
all 'modern' social theories are distinctive because they arise at a time when the very idea of the social/society can no longer be taken for granted. the questions of how society works, how it stays together and what tears it apart are questions that emerge in an effort to put society 'back together'. sociology in its nascent form emerges among the scottish enlightenment thinkers, for ex. however they rejected those who thought the social world was envisionable enough to be consciously planned. (hence the interest on smith's part with theories of "moral sentiment" [see also hume and some folks whom i've forgotten names of]
SE. with its roots in some version of modern social theory, is the idea that we can use science to understand how society works so we can fix social problems. Adam Smith was advocating a kind of social engineering complaining as he did about the policies of the mercantalists.
SE hits its stride in the work of Saint Simon (SS) who is most often cited here. in an argument that influenced Marx, SS maintained that a more just society requires that power be taken from the non producers and given to the producers (who are useful)(not the parasites john!!!). But SS differs radically from Marx. SS was convinced that the crises of European society could be resolved only with the rationalization of power, the transformation of politics into rational administration.
With the advancement of the science,SS argued, there would emerge a "society of science": "politics will b/c a science of observation and political questions handled by those who would have studied the positive science of man...Politics (must b/c) the science of production."(SS quoted in Durkheim)
For SS, the scientization (depoliticization) and rationalization (in the weberian, frankfurt school sense) of politics would mean the reconstruction of society to benefit all humanity. Politics is reduced to the rational administration of social reality. The ends to which power is to be put, the purposes by which society is to be regulated, are given in the facts of existing society. We must defer to those capable of identifying these facts and that they, in turn, submit to the facts themselves. (his is the basis for the US progressive era assumption that experts and managers best know how to organize society and address social problems)
more generally, i interpreted norm to be deploying a term that libertarians and cons use to hurl at lib'ruls and the left (if they understand the diference at all). (for juicy analyses see david duke's web site (ha): http://www.davidduke.com/library/innate/pearson2.html)
they do so b/c they believe that lib'ruls are responsible for big daddy/mommy .government nosing around trying to fix things like racism, sexism, etc.
now, certainly this idea has roots in small "l' enlightenment liberalism. in terms of the terrain of US politics, it is a mistake, i think, to believe that only contemporary liberals are social engineers. conservatives are, as well, but in a different way that they often don't recognize.
moreover, if you define the scope of the concept more broadly then, indeed, libertarians are also advocating a form of social engineering. they are asking for a change in the organization of contemporary society to be more in line with what they believe is "human nature". as such, it is a form of SE. however, i suspect they would justify this insofar as they would argue that their social engineering has less harmful affects than, say, the maintenance of min wages laws, the regulation of industry to protect the environment, legislation against discrimination or sexual harassment, etc. that is, they would say that their "new improved, supersize me for only 10cents more" form of social organization is more free than what others have argued. behavior would be regulated by the discipline of the free market, on their view, and this is a better mechanism than gov. (following the private vices yield public virtues argument), as well as by the informal social processes characteristic of civil society.
there is a fun article that i used to teach with to illustrate this position. Charles Mueller's ""Democracy & Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery: Elections, Equality, & the Minimal Human Being." In it Mueller argues that folks like lib'ruls think that we can have alice's restaurant where you can have anything you want. They expect to much of people. people are basically lazy and self interested and not particularly good at participatory democracy, says Mueller.
Mueller says that the problem with advocates of strengthening or perfecting democracy is that such attempts to create such a world proves more problematic than not. democracy (and implicitly one modeled on the "free market" is and ought to be more like ralph's pretty good grocery store. ralph's store is a mythical little store in a small town that never as all the wonderous variety that the big supermarkets have. at ralph's you can't get anything you want. however, fact is, say Mueller, if you can't get what you want there, "you can probably get along without it" and this holds he says, because people are basically lazy and apathetic (minimal human beings)
on the face of it, the idea that the use of .gov to effect rational planning is, indeed, problematic, since the state is ultimately to be understood as a monopoly on the means of violence. however, the problem with such a simplistic analysis is that it fails to recognize more complex forms/operations of power. power, domination, force are all, in the libertarian view, associated with the state and little is said about the insidiousness of power as it operates in the informal sectors of society. and it is those very forms of power that are most difficult to address because it is difficult to name the source of (who wields) power. poorly worded that last bit. i'll just cross my toes and hope that it makes sense.
kelley
(pardon me for rants. reese is reading hayek and driving me insane. {xo} i uhhhh encouraged this. don't know what on earth i was thinking!!! consequently, i use this forum b/c i need to get my jabs in when i can. :) justin, will you wax eloquent about hayek for reese, pls i'm going to go stark raving if someone else doesn't provide a sounding board for his work!!! heh)