To many of its critics, psychology is an ‘antisocial’ science, focusing on the properties of individuals abstracted from social relations, reducing social issues to interpersonal ones, servicing an unequal society. There is much of value in such criticisms. But suppose we were to reverse our perspective, to view psychology as a profoundly social science. The subdiscipline of ‘social psychology’ would be located within a broader web of relations that connect even the most ‘individualistic’ aspects of psychology into a social field. It is not only that truth is a constitutively social phenomenon: like any other body of knowledge staking its claims in the commonwealth of science, the truths of psychology become such only as the outcome of a complex process of construction and persuasion undertaken within a social arena. It is also that the birth of psychology as a distinct discipline, its vocation and destiny, is inextricably bound to the emergence of the ‘social’ as a territory of our thought and our reality.

Governing social life

No doubt all humans are social animals. But the social territory is a historical achievement, a shifting and uncertain terrain that began to consolidate in Western societies in the nineteenth century (cf. Deleuze, in Donzelot, 1979). It is he terrain implied by such terms as social security, social welfare, social workers, and social services. The social is a matrix of deliberation and action, the object of certain types of knowledge, the location of certain types of predicaments, the realm traced out by certain types of apparatus, and the target of certain types of program and ambition.