The Making of the Modern State: Social Scientization and Education Legislation in the United Kingdom, 1800–1914

Until the 19th century, the UK state stayed out of education. Only in 1833 would Parliament first pass an act that subsidized education for the poor. By 1914, 160 education acts had been passed, consolidating into the state schooling system we recognize today. This paper seeks to explain this remarkable progression. I argue that the emergence of social-knowledge institutions across the West was a powerful force of cultural construction.

What I term social scientization, this process was multidimensional and translocal, entailing the elaboration, reification, and diffusion of functionalist theories of the nation-state that centered national education as means to greater cultural rationalization. Longitudinal analyses on comprehensive population data comprising over 10,100 UK parliamentary acts support the core historical insight of this piece: increasingly routine and aggressive forms of state intervention in education were the progressive instantiation of the 19th-century nation-state model, which was fundamentally epistemic in character and inextricably linked to the expansive cultural content of the ascendant social sciences.