15 - Mobilising social knowledge for social welfare: intermediary institutions in the political systems of the United States and Great Britain between the First and Second World Wars

Summary

We constantly speak about the State or our Society under terms of social organism; more, we talk of the State as if it were a person. But it is a person with a great number of totally detached centres of consciousness; with very little of anything like what could be called a centre of self-consciousness. The individual when we meet him, if he is troubled with any disease, is often painfully anxious to ascertain what his disease is and the way of curing it. But our society sits like a gigantic fat man troubled with all kinds of maladies and diseases in all the various parts of his enormous person; but the pain which each part of the organism suffers is uninvestigated and unremedied because the central consciousness is so remarkably weak. And what we want today is to strengthen the central consciousness that we may both know what are the diseases under which the various parts of the body are suffering and set ourselves with something more of seriousness to investigate the remedy.

(Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford, 1914)

Introduction

The development of the application and use of scientific research — including natural science, medicine and social science — in relation to government and policy-making is a twentieth-century phenomenon.