Nikolas Simon Rose (born 13 April 1947) is a British sociologist and social theorist. He is Distinguished Honorary Professor at the Research School of Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University and Honorary Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London. From January 2012 to until his retirement in April 2021 he was Professor of Sociology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (previously Social Science, Health & Medicine) at King's College London, having joined King's to found this new department. He was the co-founder and co-director of King's ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health. Before moving to King's College London, he was the James Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, director and founder of LSE's BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society from 2002 to 2011, and Head of the LSE Department of Sociology (2002–2006). He was previously Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was Head of the Department of Sociology, Pro-Warden for Research and Head of the Goldsmiths Centre for Urban and Community Research and Director of a major evaluation of urban regeneration in South East London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Arts and the Academy of Social Sciences, and of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters.
Early life and education Nikolas Simon Rose was born 13 April 1947 in London, England. He was the younger brother of neuroscientist and author Steven Rose (born 1938). He studied biology and psychology at the University of Sussex in the 1960s. He initially worked on Drosophila fruit fly genetics in the lab of John Maynard Smith but, in part due to inspiration from contemporary student protest movements, he changed his studies to animal behavior and then to psychology. As an undergrad Rose had his first exposure to French philosopher Michel Foucault, later a decisive influence on his work, via Foucault's book Madness and Civilization. After his undergraduate degree, he trained as a teacher and started to work with "maladjusted children" and began to research the history of the psychological and administrative category of maladjustment. After teaching in a school for maladjusted children, he left to return to university to undertake an MSc. He earned a master's degree with his research on maladjustment and then undertook extensive empirical research on formation of the discipline of psychology for his doctorate, and later published a revision of his doctoral thesis as The Psychological Complex (1985). He next worked for three years in the research department of the British National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Career
Overview Rose has done extensive research on the history and sociology of psychiatry, on mental health policy and risk, and on the social implications of recent developments in psychopharmacology. He has also published widely on the genealogy of subjectivity, on the history of empirical thought in sociology, and on changing rationalities of political power. He is particularly known for his development of the work of the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault for the analysis of the politics of our present, and stimulating the revival of studies of governmentality in the Anglo-American world. His own approach to these issues was set out in his 1999 book Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. His first book, The Psychological Complex, published in 1985, pioneered a new way of understanding the social history and implications of the discipline of psychology. This was followed in 1996 by Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood and in 1989 by Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. These three books are widely recognised as founding texts in a new way of understanding and analysing the links between expertise, subjectivity and political power. Rose argues that the proliferation of the 'psy' disciplines has been intrinsically linked with transformations in governmentality, in the rationalities and technologies of political power in 'advanced and liberal democracies'. (See also the page governmentality for a description of Rose's development of Foucault's concepts). Throughout his academic career he has been a critical analyst of psychiatry. His first book on this topic, The Power of Psychiatry, a collection edited together with Peter Miller was published in 1986. His most recent book Our Psychiatric Future: The Politics of Mental Health was published by Polity Press in October 2018. His recent work has been on the social shaping of mental distress and its biopolitical implications. His book The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City, written with Des Fitzgerald, was published by Princeton University Press in 2022. Questioning Humanity, Being Human in a Posthuman Age, written with Thomas Osborne, was published in 2024. In November 2001, he was listed by The Guardian newspaper as one of the top five UK based social scientists on the basis of a twenty-year analysis of citations to research papers, and among them, the most cited UK based sociologist. He remains among the most highly cited British sociologists, and his work has been translated into many languages including Swedish, Danish, Finnish, German, Italian, French, Hungarian, Korean, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Romanian, Portuguese and Spanish.
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