The Historical Sociology of Social Pathologies

This session will address the historical dynamics of social pathologies, of disorders of development, function and structure, expressed in symptoms that indicate an underlying condition. Social pathology is not limited narrowly to health and well-being, but rather to a wider spectrum of social problems such as violence, mass incarceration, injustice, exclusion, and failures to provide for people’s needs, that are systemic and that produce social suffering. At the same time, the social problems that are deemed pathological are frequently political constructions, public dramas, or scapegoating exercises where behaviours and people once considered unremarkable become pathologized as sick, infectious, subversive, and to be corrected. Thus, the session is concerned with the interweaving of civilizing with decivilising processes, but also with civilising offensives, projects of normalisation, the construction of folk devils and the secondary harms caused by these processes.

The goal is to view social pathologies as rooted in collectively experienced conditions of historical development and social transformation, so that they can only be adequately understood through identifying their origins and processual nature.