It has Always Known, and we have Always been ‘other’: Knowing Capitalism and the ‘Coming Crisis’ of Sociology Confront the Concentration System and Mass-Observation

Abstract

It has been suggested that the contemporary form of capitalism – knowing capitalism – is distinctively different from its earlier incarnations by being ‘knowing’ in unprecedented ways; and that there is a ‘coming crisis of empirical sociology’, because related technological developments are producing a leading-edge research infrastructure located firmly within knowing capitalism, rather than in academic social science. These arguments are counter-posed here through two case studies. Thinking over the longer run via these suggests that ‘it has always known’ and sociologists ‘have always been “other” ‘, and that the current situation is not as new as is claimed. The first case study concerns the reverberations of the South African War (1899–1902) and particularly the ‘concentration system’ and its knowledge-based and generating classification, measurement and disposition of groups of people. The second case study concerns the post-World War Two impact of wartime changes in the configuration of research and knowledge on Mass-Observation, a radical social science research organization on the borders and ‘other’ to institutionalised sociology.