Social Control

How do we understand civil society's self-regulation? Is it some­thing undertaken voluntarily in a neo-Kantian spirit of self-willed autonomy and freedom? Or is it a subtle but still outside imposi­tion on unwilling subjects by the state, possibly acting on behalf of powerful interests? Where an initial socialization had failed and citizens were then brought back into the fold, power relations were obvious.

Yet self-control could be liberating, too. Self-discipline was not just a crude class-determined imposition. Social control has often been interpreted as a subtle way to ensure what the state or domi­nant groups sought.

The civilizing process aimed for a self-controlled citizen of mod­erate, restrained tastes and habits. That selected against the rowdier of lower-class pursuits as well as against paupers, with their alleged tendency to be insubordinate, footloose, improvident, and unwill­ing to work.⁸⁰ But the civilizing process was equally a rejection of the sexual libertinage, purposeless blood sports, and lavish con­sumption of the wealthy. In countless ways, markets, societies, and states have socialized modern people into prudent, regular habits, bringing forth the disciplined, punctual, reliable, and predictable citizens required by complex economies. The meritocracy debate of our own era indicates the extent to which the allegedly bourgeois virtues of thrift, hard work, tamed instincts, and the cultivation of talent and intellect have come to define us all.⁸¹ Hedge-fund man­agers, quants, and technonerds are the new exemplars; landowners have lost their allure.

The discipline that drove the civilizing process could be demo­cratic and liberating in a neo-Kantian way. Much as Kant and Hegel thought that freedom was achieved by following just law, so citi­zens came to see self-discipline and self-control as means to avoid authority's outside impositions by submitting voluntarily to the dictates of civilized cohabitation. The point of socialization was to sidestep the need for external interventions. The more self-control and self-policing, the fewer the state's impositions. Nikolas Rose has expanded Elias's theory to argue that self-government is true gov­ernment and self-discipline not the state's psychic imposition but the means of achieving freedom.⁸²

Social control has been a conceptual black box, concealing vari­ous approaches to the question “Who wields power?” Social control has been innocently interpreted as the means of assuring the behav­ioral calibration required by life in interdependent industrialized society. The nineteenth-century sociologists who first formulated the concept meant the way in which necessary behavioral modifi­cations were achieved through a consensual mutual adjustment by everyone.⁸³ Socialization, informal social pressure, and then, only if these had failed, the state's formal apparatus—those were the tools to keep citizens in line. The American jurist Roscoe Pound defined social control as “the pressure upon each man brought to bear by his fellow men in order to constrain him to do his part in uphold­ing civilized society.”⁸⁴ Seen thus, social control was necessary and benign.

Social control is also more cynically seen as how elites ensure their predominance, merely disguising the exertion of power and coercion. Precisely by whom and why were the issues. Prisons were unmasked as means of turning recalcitrant proletarians into a docile reserve army of workers. Mental hospitals made differently thinking patients conform. Even welfare or charitable policies or organized leisure pursuits—sports and the like—might be means of keeping a possibly unruly lower class placid by supplying bread and circuses.

Self-abnegation, thrift, industriousness, and temperance could be taken at face value as habits that helped their practitioners make something of themselves. Or they could be interpreted cynically as what capitalism required of its workers. Without a clear steer as to whose interests governed society, social control arguments easily tied themselves in knots. If docility were the goal, why inculcate habits of self-discipline that might lead workers to expect a better future for themselves?⁸⁶ Religion, the opium of the masses, might be a better ideological control, as it in fact remained in those states that recognized the inherent danger of allowing subordinates, whether the poor, ethnic minorities, or women, to learn to read or otherwise better themselves.

And all this assumed that the institutions of social control actu­ally performed as planned. But did they? Victorian prisons, for example, were rarely the engines of social discipline imagined by Foucauldians. More often, they treated their inmates better than they were accustomed to in the outside world, imposing little dis­cipline and scarcely any control. In any case, the prisons were too understaffed and kept their charges too briefly to have much influ­ence one way or the other.⁸⁷ Ironically, the theorists of disciplin­ary institutions—Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, and David Rothman—wrote at just that twentieth-century moment when they witnessed these institutions' trajectory reverse.⁸⁸ Convincing anyone that universities and hospitals were institutions of covert coercion had always been a long shot. Workhouses and poorhouses were long gone. Asylums and orphanages, in turn, emptied out pre­cisely at the moment their affinity to prisons was being trumpeted.

Conversely, if social control actually did what was claimed on its behalf, why so ineffectually? If modern prisons were supposed to keep a reserve labor force off the streets when unemployment was high, why should incarceration cost more than the dole? If state schools were intended to train the rising generation of worker bees, why not do so more effectively? Who were these Machiavellians covertly running things? If they were so clever, why did they usu­ally fail? Like all conspiracy theories, the view of social control as an effective force stumbled over the fatal contradiction between an allegedly omniscient and omnipotent group of manipulators and the hash they were in fact making of things. Nor, in this view, was there any room for discipline that individuals underwent for their own betterment—abstinence, self-improvement, or even any form of training or education.

Whatever their precise formulation, social control arguments still approached power as a bilateral encounter: the powerful exerted force over the dispossessed, either directly or indirectly, covertly or overtly, and the dispossessed in turn resisted as best they could. But this view was rife with ambiguities. Who controlled whom, and for what purpose? If the powerful were the first to self-discipline, if self-control were broadly speaking good for those undertaking it and not just something forced on them, then who was to say that power was being exerted in only one direction? Hospitals sought to cure, schools to educate, factories to produce, and even prisons sometimes to rehabilitate.

Elias willingly accepted the socially ameliorative aspects of self-discipline. Rose expanded on that notion, harnessing it to a broader Kantian project of freedom achieved through law. Foucault shunned the crude Marxism of locating power reductively in the hands of dominant classes, with the state but their handmaiden. His escape from the dilemma that remained was to obfuscate the very idea of power. No longer something exerted by one actor over another, power became decentered, a multitude of forces cascading hither and yon, controlling elites and subordinates equally. Disci­pline, not power, became the overarching concept, able to reconcile the apparent moderation of the modern state with an insistence that the velvet glove still harbored iron. Power, quoth Foucault, is “a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much as those over whom it is exercised.”⁹⁰