Law as Social Technology: A Conceptual History (Begriffsgeschichte) that turns out to be a History of a Reoccupation (Umbesetzungsgeschichte)

The term 'social technology' tends to be perceived as a recent invention, born in the late twentieth century. However, its history reaches back more than a century to the 1890s and can be seen as a series of mutually exclusive conceptions: a neutral method of treating social problems as technical issues; a fallibilist approach to institutional reform; an emancipatory practice developed with, rather than for, the people it affects; and, on a darker note, the positivist reduction of society to an administrative entity. Accordingly, its valence swings between programmatic affirmation and polemical indictment. Our lecture seeks to demonstrate that this nominal unity does not conceal one continuous concept, but rather a recurrent reoccupation in Hans Blumenberg's sense: a vacant functional position that is filled repeatedly by answers that never strictly retrieve the earlier term. Each newcomer presents its use as a fresh coinage, unaware that the place was long occupied. The forgetting here is structural. It reveals less an accident of erudition than a persistent desire to start afresh, to create a new approach that nevertheless reveals an unacknowledged closeness to what it claims to leave behind. When read against the grain of its own forgetting, a social technology reveals itself to be a form of a broader category: the cultural technique (Kulturtechnik). This is one of the processes by which a collective organises and passes on its own life, and law is perhaps the most emblematic example of this. Reconstructed in this way, the history of the term is less a history of a concept (Begriffsgeschichte) and more a history of reoccupations (Umbesetzungensgeschichte). The oldest and most thoroughly forgotten layers prove to be juridical and cultural-technical.