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The Pursuit of Serenity: Psychological Knowledge and the Making of the British Welfare State

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History and Psyche

Abstract

Over recent decades, historians, sociologists and policymakers have begun to pursue the psyche in earnest. From histories of fear and empathy to policy initiatives in education and social welfare, the psyche appears as an elusive but authoritative entity that will provide the grounds of an effective politics and reveal the inner meaning of historical experience. Much has been made of the novelty of these developments. The rise of the so-called happiness agenda is presented by its apostles as a new kind of political dispensation.1 Similarly historians who have embraced psychoanalytic and neuropsychological insights in their writings believe that this has allowed them to escape the cultural theorists’ dead-end obsession with discourse and representation.2 Yet despite the promise and energy associated with these new approaches, the pursuit of the psyche has been marked by a certain ambivalence. Although researchers might celebrate their engagement with psychological life, this engagement is often perceived as demonstrating the limitations of their disciplines. Despite the broadly accepted idea that role and identity is socially constructed, some small aspect of selfhood remains beyond the scope of sociological or economic explanation. Thus in the writings of some contemporary historians on subjectivity, the real essence of the self is located outside history in, for instance, a different temporal order of evolutionary adaptation, a neurobiological affect program or the romantic sublime of the deep unconscious, which is said to resist the claims of social determinism and narrative representation.3

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Notes

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Hayward, R. (2012). The Pursuit of Serenity: Psychological Knowledge and the Making of the British Welfare State. In: Alexander, S., Taylor, B. (eds) History and Psyche. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137092427_15

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