["The Associating Power of Intelligence" : In Search of "Intelligent" Forms of Social and Political Organisation]

This article connects the historical development of modern discourses on intelligence with the sociologisation of theories of social and political organisation. The author focuses on three German discourses of "intelligence" that emerged in different historical contexts and served to justify the creation of different political institutions: the early modern conception of "intelligence" as a network of economically relevant information; nineteenth-century theories that portrayed "intelligence" as a central power structure of the state; and the notion of intelligence, or intelligentsia, as a social group that emerged around 1900. Drawing on these examples, the article develops a new approach to analysing diverse discourses of intelligence and fundamentally challenges the coherence of the established historiography on the subject. The author addresses the following questions: How did "intelligence" render various scientific theories plausible? Which imagined political and social structures were legitimised by the corresponding discourses of intelligence? And which social actors acquired agency through references to "intelligence"?