Liberal social science originates from fear of the undisciplined individual in crowds

Evidence

Durkheim demonstrated that the social realm had an existence independent of particular individual minds by referring, in the first place, to the behaviour of the individual who joins a crowd. ‘The great movements of enthusiasm, indignation, and pity in a crowd do not originate in any one of the particular individual consciousnesses’, he wrote in The Rules of Sociological Method, published in 1895. ‘They come to each one of us from without and can carry us away in spite of ourselves … Thus, a group of individuals, most of whom are perfectly inoffensive, may, when gathered in a crowd, be drawn into acts of atrocity.’ The tone of this passage already indicates what was to be politically at stake in establishing the object of social science. The problem of the potentially unbounded violence of the crowd is associated with an unbounded individual nature. Modern liberalism’s originary fear of what any one of us might do ‘in spite of ourselves’ is a fear at the heart of liberal social science. From the fear of the unbounded and undisciplined subject arises the need to know and to strengthen the objective existence of society. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 389

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s own thesis (earlier chapters) about how schooling disciplines the colonized subject in Egypt, and to liberal theories of the crowd (e.g. Le Bon, Freud).
• SEED: Angle: how the discipline of ‘society’ as an object was built on a founding fear of what individuals do en masse — a genealogy of crowd panic underlying the modern social sciences.