Last month “Peripheral Vision” saw the highest number of clisks – 260,297 of them. I am indeed very flattered to have received so many….meaning we must get something right...
Richard Murphy is an interesting British economist/tax expert who has just
released a fascinating post about “normality” which is one of the best things he’s
written.
From description to prescription
What had begun as a statistical description gradually acquired social significance. The average person became defined as the normal person. The normal person then became the desirable person. Before long, institutions began to organise themselves around assumptions about what such a person should be. What had started as mathematics slowly became morality.That tansformation occurred at exactly the moment when industrial society was emerging:
Governments were becoming larger and more sophisticated.
Public education systems were being created.
Factories were employing vast workforces.
Cities were expanding rapidly.
Entire populations were increasingly being organised through institutions that depended upon standardisation.
And for all these new organisations, the idea of normality proved extraordinarily useful. Schools could be designed around assumptions concerning how children learned. Employers could make assumptions about how workers behaved. Administrators could create systems based on expectations about what citizens might do. Doctors could compare patients against established norms.The concept of the normal person provided a benchmark around which an increasingly complex society could organise itself. Let me stress, this was not necessarily or entirely a bad thing. Large-scale institutions do require generalisations. No education system can funct ion without assumptions about learning. No healthcare system can function without assumptions about health. No government can function without categories and classifications. An issue did emerge, though. The problem arose when averages ceased to be descriptive and became prescriptive. An average tells us what is common. It does not tell us what is desirable. Yet the distinction between those two ideas became increasingly blurred. The normal person was no longer simply a statistical construct. The normal person became an aspiration. As a result, people increasingly came to be judged according to their proximity to a norm. Those who approximated to it were regarded as successful. Those who diverged from it increasingly became subjects of concern. The consequences of this shift can be found throughout modern society:
Educational systems identify those who do not fit expected learning patterns.
Labour markets classify those who do not participate in expected ways.
Public policy increasingly categorises citizens according to their relationship with social norms.
Sometimes this has undoubtedly been beneficial. Public health programmes, mass education and social security systems all relied upon the capacity to understand populations at scale. But the same process also encouraged a particular way of thinking about human beings:
People increasingly became problems to be solved.
Differences increasingly became deviations to be explained.
Variation increasingly became something that institutions sought to manage.
The more I look at modern politics, the more I think we still live within the world Quetelet helped create, with all the problems that have flowed from it The language might have changed, but the assumptions that flowed from Qutelet’s work remain remarkably familiar. For example, when politicians talk about:
working people,
hard-working families,
productive citizens,
employability,
social mobility or
educational attainment, they are frequently doing more than describing reality. They are implicitly comparing people with an imagined norm. They are invoking a model citizen against whom success can be measured.
That model citizen is rarely described explicitly. Most of the time, we are simply expected to know who they are. The reason this matters is that much of twentieth-century politics can be understood as an argument about how best to create that model citizen. The political right and the political left might have claimed to disagree profoundly about ownership, markets, the state, and the distribution of power, and maybe they did disagree in that way in my youth. Despite that, they have shared a surprising amount of common ground when it came to assumptions about expertise, administration and social improvement. Both have always believed:
that society could be improved,
institutions could help achieve that improvement,
outcomes of change could be measured, and
progress involves bringing more people closer to an accepted social norm.
That common thinking has shaped almost every major political movement of the last century. It also helps explain why so many of our current political debates feel simultaneously intense and strangely unsatisfactory. The argument is presented as a conflict between competing visions of society. In practice, I now wonder whether it is actually a dispute between competing definitions of normality.
Gates, Fabianism and the management of society; The more I have thought about this issue, the more I have come to suspect that much of twentieth-century politics was conducted within a framework that neither side seriously questioned. The great political battles of the age were real enough. There were arguments about:
ownership,
taxation,
welfare or social security (depending on perspective),
public services,
labour rights, and
economic management.
They still matter. But beneath those disputes lay a deeper agreement about the nature of society itself. Both left and right increasingly came to believe that society could be improved through expertise, which meant that:
social problems could be identified through research,
institutions could be designed to produce better outcomes,
progress could be measured, and
there were broadly accepted norms against which that progress might be judged.
The differences between the sides in the debate concerned who should undertake this work, through which institutions it should be undertaken, and to whom that work should be accountable. The right increasingly gravitated towards a model associated with Frederick Taylor Gates. Gates, like Quetelet, is now largely forgotten, but in many respects, he was one of the architects of modern philanthropy. He worked with John D. Rockefeller. Doing so, he helped pioneer the idea that private wealth could be used systematically to reshape society through large-scale institutions devoted to education, medicine, public health and research. This resulted in the Flexner Report, which has shaped the history of modern medicine since its publication in 1910. I have already considered the consequences of that report here. The significance of Gates lay not simply in his belief that social problems could be solved. Many people believed that. What distinguished him was his conviction that solutions could be designed, tested and implemented by experts operating through carefully constructed institutions. This was not charitable in the traditional sense. It was deliberate social engineering. The argument he and Rockefeller put forward was that their purpose was not simply to alleviate suffering but to improve society itself, albeit in the way their philanthropy desired. They defined the terms. The theme remains familiar today. The beneficiaries of this approach were often real enough. Universities expanded. Medical research was advanced. Public health improved. There is no point pretending otherwise. Yet the underlying assumption remained that experts could identify desirable outcomes and then create institutions capable of delivering them. The Fabian tradition, founded in the UK in 1884, shared much of this outlook. Sidney and Beatrice Webb are often remembered as architects of the welfare state and important influences on modern social democracy. Their politics differed profoundly from those associated with Rockefeller philanthropy. Yet their intellectual assumptions were often remarkably similar. The Fabians also trusted expertise and research, and believed that institutions could be designed to improve society, whilst believing that social progress could be planned.There was, however, a difference between their thinking. Where Gates looked to foundations, philanthropy and philanthropists as those to whom those promoting social change should be accountable, the Fabians looked to the state. Where Gates relied upon private wealth, the Fabians relied upon public authority. But both traditions saw society as something that could be managed. Both believed that intelligent administration could improve outcomes. Both placed extraordinary faith in the capacity of institutions to shape human behaviour. The similarities and differences can perhaps be summarised like this:
There's then a fascinating table which I'm not allowed to reproduce - so please look at it yourself
The table is, of course, a simplification. No historical tradition is ever quite as tidy as a table suggests. Nonetheless, I think it captures something important. The great political argument of the twentieth century was often not about whether society should be administered. It was about who should administer it. The right trusted philanthropic institutions and private expertise. The left trusted government and public expertise.
Hyperpolitics – extreme politicisation without political consequences
Anton Jaeger (2026) reviews https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/03/against-civil-society-a-review-of-anton-jagers-hyperpolitics/ https://jacobin.com/2026/02/hyperpolitics-jager-institutions-media-review https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/anton-J%C3%A4ger-palmer-daniele-pope-francis-hyperpolitics-review
