The Origins of Public Services – EVENT CANCELLED

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Johannes Lindvall is a Professor of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. Before joining Lund University in 2010, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford (2007–2010) and at the European University Institute in Florence (2006). Lindvall's academic work is concerned with political institutions, public policy, the role of interest organizations in political decision-making, and, more generally, the relationship between states and markets.

Lindvall's forthcoming book, The Origins of Public Services, studies the origins of seven public services: policing and prisons, which promoted public order; schools and libraries, which promoted knowledge; and mental institutions, vaccinations, and midwifery, which promoted mental and public health. He and co-author Ben Ansell analyze the development of these seven services in nineteen states between the turn of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War. Their first goal is to account for the sheer expansion of public services in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their second goal is to analyze political conflicts. When public authorities began to promote order, knowledge, and mental and public health, they started to engage more systematically–and insidiously–in social control.

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century political leaders therefore had very different ideas about how public services should be provided, and, importantly, by whom. They emphasize two conflicts of interest. The first was a conflict over the vertical distribution of power among localities, regions, and central authorities–a conflict that pitted conservatives against liberals and socialists (later on, as they show, twentieth-century fascists had their own distinct ideas about the role of the central government). The second was a conflict over the horizontal distribution of power among secular authorities, churches, and voluntary associations–a conflict that pitted secular modernizers against religious conservatives and religious communities against each other.