Social Control in Victorian Britain
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3368942 |
|---|---|
| Authors | F M L Thompson (Deutsches Historisches Institut London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1981 |
| Volume | 34 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 189 |
| Publication date | 1981-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Economic History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-0117 • E-ISSN: 1468-0289 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2595241 |
| OpenAlex | W4210605297 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 60 |
| References cited | 8 |
There is nothing particularly new about the observation that the social order in Britain was subjected to immense strains by the processes of urbanization and industrialization. It threatened at times to disintegrate into anarchy through the disruption of social ties and institutions, and the emergence of frighteningly large masses of apparently masterless men. And it was transformed in the course of the nineteenth century without suffering the collapse, or revolution, which many contemporaries from right and left, from Martineau to Marx, and Eldon to Engels, had anticipated with dread or relish. Neither is there anything particularly new in observing that those who have power, authority, and influence seek to use these to protect and preserve the state of things which gives them power, and to maintain the peaceful, and preferably contented, subordination of those less comfortable than themselves. What is new is that in the last decade many social historians have approached a whole range of the activities of powergroups as exercises in devising mechanisms of social control which conditioned and manipulated the propertyless masses into accepting and operating the forms and functions of behaviour necessary to sustain the social order of an industrial society. Such efforts at social control are seen as playing an important, conceivably decisive, role in the formation and underpinning of bourgeois capitalist society. In such a view the success of social control in taming and civilizing the working classes in moulds shaped to fit the needs of bourgeois society must take its place alongside the iron disciplines of wage labour, and the coercive power of the state, as a key factor in the shaping of modern society. In many ways this is a curious view, placing the working classes perpetually on the receiving end of outside forces and influences, and portraying them as so much putty in the hands of a masterful and scheming bourgeoisie, a remote and powerful state, and a set of technological imperatives. It allows little for the possibility that the working classes themselves generated their own values and attitudes suited to the requirements of life in an industrial society, and imposed their own forms on middle-class institutions. The tables might be turned on
Control (management) · Economics · Management · Political science · Social control · Social science · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Political and Economic history of UK and US
Policing, Crime and Mental Illness in England and Wales
Preserving The English Landscape, c .1870–1914
Punishment and the cultural limits to state power in late 18th-century Britain
Des histoires contestées
Urban elites in Victorian Britain
Only a local affair’? Imagining and enacting locality through London's Boer War carnivals
The Marquis of Anglesey
Rustic and Rude’
How Amateur was my valley
Philanthropy and the ‘social history paradigm'∗
English rural society and the New Poor Law
Science, Society and Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century England
Discussions of the characteristics of mechanics’ institutes in the second half of the nineteenth century
Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain
Culture and the Middle Classes
United to Support But Not Combined to Injure”
Rank and Filism” and Labour History
In Darkest England and the Way Out”
The Progressives and the Urban Question
To Raise and Dare Resentment’
Reinterpreting ‘Factory Politics’ in Bury, Lancashire, 1868–1880
The Limits of Bureaucratic Autonomy in Victorian Administration
The history of education in the 1980s
The search for social cohesion
Kinship and Community in Victorian London
Historical industrialisation, path dependence and contemporary culture
Betting, Self-Transformation and Sinful Respectability
The allure of self-help
Feasting in a South Yorkshire Colliery District
The Duke of Portland and his Agent
The Rural Estate through the Eyes of the Land Agent
Assessing the responses of the unemployed to the depression of the 1930s∗
The politics and poetics of modern British Leisure
Bound in darkness and idolatry”? Protestant working-class underachievement and unionist hegemony
Gazette of Morality and Social Whip
The social and occupational structure of organized sport in central Scotland during the nineteenth century
Social Cohesion and Multilevel Urban Governance
The narrative constitution of identity
The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950
The Broadmeadows Camp 1930-32
The Unloved State
Neither private property nor public service
Making good little English children
Leisure, culture and the historian
Social Control and the Volksschule in Vormärz Prussia
The Poverty of Social Control
Custom, Courts, and Class Formation
Influences on School Attendance in Victorian England
Influences on school attendance in Victorian England
Animals and the State in nineteenth-century England
The Plague of the Blue Locusts
The Decline of Saint Monday 1766-1876
Oh Happy English Children
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism
Educational Policy and Social Control in Early Victorian England
| Unique citing works | 47 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,36 |
| Citation span | 1982 - 2026 (45) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 37 |