Oz Frankel.States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States.:States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth‐Century Britain and the United States.(New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History.)

Abstract

Oz Frankel has written a strenuously empirical, theoretically informed study that reaches across a wide range of subjects, geographies, and politics to examine how official knowledge was created in the nineteenth century. It argues that this knowledge project was vitally important to liberal democracies that were replacing older, hierarchal structures of rule with civil societies capable of governing themselves. Frankel's eight chapters explore various efforts to organize the categories of life and so make life more governable. These include the birth of parliamentary commissions in Great Britain (assigned with investigating the plight of the poor, or the use of child labor, or factory conditions, or the system of education), American Congressional reports (including, of course, land surveys), narrative accounts of expeditions of discovery and exploration (that were inseparable from American continental expansion and railroad building), the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission (seeking to discover a “black subjectivity” that would then become the basis for integrating the former slaves into the body politic), and a burgeoning anthropological interest in Indian life, under the partial aegis of the new Smithsonian Institution and invariably invested in questions of the nation's manifest destiny. These investigations were related to the formal apparatus of government in different ways, but all contributed to the state's redefinition of itself for a liberal age. As such, they addressed political and ontological issues concerning government and population, the “culture of the social fact,” the market's role in the production and dissemination of information, the construction of national memory, the creation of a reading public, and the relationship between authorship and authority, and between publicity and the public.