Promoting the Social State. Statistical Knowledge and Popular Education in Zurich. The Case of the Swiss Social Museum, 1913-1941

"Test of truth for the welfare state": this is how some media described the challenge that awaited governments affected by the Covid-19 epidemic (Le Temps, May 13, 2020). How to "absorb the shock" of a global crisis and how to meet the needs of the most vulnerable categories? These few questions which are now making a comeback in public debate have their origins almost one hundred and fifty years ago, in the aftermath of the Great Depression which struck Western States. If we now know better the complex mechanisms which governed the slow and contradictory development of social protection in Switzerland, as well as the crucial role of the social sciences and their experts in this process (Studer, 1998; Lengwiler, 2002 ), on the other hand, few works have focused on the way in which the idea of ​​a "social state" was conveyed in the public sphere and the way in which it was successively formulated, disseminated and appropriated. The history of the Schweizerisches Sozialmuseum (below: Swiss Social Museum or MSS) offers a particularly illuminating case study for understanding this phenomenon. Between 1913 and 1941, the museum occupied a unique place in the institutional landscape of social policy. Neither a documentation center nor a collection of instruments, the MSS was first and foremost a place of experimentation, where new reflections were developed on the modes of production and dissemination of social knowledge. It was also, as this project shows, a place where different conceptions of the social state clashed and where its definitions were negotiated. No historical study has been devoted to MSS to date. Entitled Promoting the Social State. Statistical knowledge and popular education in Zurich. The case of the Swiss Social Museum, 1913-1941, this project for a 12-month return to Switzerland phase at the University of Zurich (UZH) will be largely devoted to it. Beyond a purely monographic history, this research will situate its subject at the crossroads of several disciplinary fields, rarely considered in an articulated manner: the history of social policies and statistics, the history and epistemology of knowledge, finally, visual and media history. Because far from limiting itself to illustrating existing social policies, the MSS has contributed to shaping successive representations of the social state and to objectifying its principles. Thus, the main hypothesis of this research is that the MSS was, for several years, an essential place for the production and dissemination of "useful knowledge" (Rauch, 2001) mobilized in the development and implementation implementation of social policies (social statistics, demography, consumer price index, etc.). From a historiographical point of view, this project pursues three objectives: a) contribute to a transnational history of social museums by focusing on the unique place of the MSS within the European "reform nebula" (Topalov, 1999). , while contributing to a social and cultural history of statistics in Switzerland; b) make an original contribution to the historiography of social protection through the prism of an institution (the MSS) on the margins of state action; c) develop an epistemological reflection on the conditions for the formation of an "imaginary of the social State" based in particular on the use of statistics and its visual representations. The articulation between economic and social history (analysis of institutions, actors and networks), the history of the media (analysis of museographic systems) and the history of statistics (analysis of the numbering of society ) brings heuristic added value which constitutes the originality of my approach. This project is part of my current research on the history of data visualization, while extending towards the fields of economic and social history . At this stage of my career, it will allow me to formalize my own theoretical approach, at the crossroads of the different disciplines that have informed my research to date. Innovative from the point of view of its subject, as well as the methods used, it constitutes an opportunity to develop my network in German-speaking Switzerland, to establish new collaborations and to strengthen my career prospects in Switzerland and internationally. "