Social technicians made technical procedure the arbiter of social reality

Evidence

For Rabinow, “social technicians were articulating a normative or middling modernism. In their discourses, society became its own referent, to be worked on by means of technical procedures which were becoming the authoritative arbiters of what counted as socially real” (Rabinow, 1989:13). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2314

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Rabinow’s concept of ‘middling modernism’ where society becomes its own referent worked on by technical procedures.