Social Control in Modern Britain

Abstract

All good history, which is to say lively, interesting, and intellectually challenging history, borrows concepts from other disciplines. These instruments for the dissection and interpretation of the past may come from law, theology, economics, politics, psychology, anthropology, and many other sources. Without them history is a simple chronicle of events; and it could be said that the narrative historian in order to be good needs to acquire the skills of the storyteller. The appearance of the term ‘social control’ in the vocabulary of social historians, a concept developed by sociologists and anthropologists, is thus part of a long-standing and continuing process which is continually broadening and deepening the field, and the texture, of historical writing. The trouble is that while tools used by the historical demographer, such as ‘gross reproduction rate’, or the economic historian, such as ‘net national income per capita’, have precise technical meanings which give them a clear cutting edge, encouraging them to be used with care, equipment taken from the sociologist’s tool-bag tends to look homely, familiar, and harmless, encouraging a certain amount of unreflecting and unskilled use for inappropriate jobs. Thus ‘social control’ is at once a phrase which appears to have a plain, commonsense, uncomplicated meaning — that those in power and authority are always trying to control the rest of society in one way or another — and also a concept drawn from theoretical sociology. This ambiguity has spread confusion and incoherence in much recent writing on modern social history; while the fashion-ability of the new terminology has led some early modernists to introduce essentially superfluous and redundant verbiage into their work.