BiblioVault - Books about Social Order

The Commerce of War

Exchange and Social Order in Latin Epic

Neil Coffee

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Latin epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s Civil War, and Statius’s Thebaid addressed Roman aristocrats whose dealings in gifts, favors, and payments defined their conceptions of social order. In The Commerce of War, Neil Coffee argues that these exchanges play a central yet overlooked role in epic depictions of Roman society.

Tracing the collapse of an aristocratic worldview across all three poems, Coffee highlights the distinction they draw between reciprocal gift giving among elites and the more problematic behaviors of buying and selling. In the Aeneid, customary gift and favor exchanges are undermined by characters who view human interaction as short-term and commodity-driven. The Civil War takes the next logical step, illuminating how Romans cope once commercial greed has supplanted traditional values. Concluding with the Thebaid, which focuses on the problems of excessive consumption rather than exchange, Coffee closes his powerful case that these poems constitute far-reaching critiques of Roman society during its transition from republic to empire.

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The Conundrum of Class

Public Discourse on the Social Order in America

Martin J. Burke

University of Chicago Press, 1995

Martin Burke traces the surprisingly complicated history of the idea of class in America from the forming of a new nation to the heart of the Gilded Age.

Surveying American political, social, and intellectual life from the late 17th to the end of the 19th century, Burke examines in detail the contested discourse about equality—the way Americans thought and wrote about class, class relations, and their meaning in society.

Burke explores a remarkable range of thought to establish the boundaries of class and the language used to describe it in the works of leading political figures, social reformers, and moral philosophers. He traces a shift from class as a legal category of ranks and orders to socio-economic divisions based on occupations and income. Throughout the century, he finds no permanent consensus about the meaning of class in America and instead describes a culture of conflicting ideas and opinions.

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The Culture of Control

Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society

David Garland

University of Chicago Press, 2001

The past 30 years have seen vast changes in our attitudes toward crime. More and more of us live in gated communities; prison populations have skyrocketed; and issues such as racial profiling, community policing, and "zero-tolerance" policies dominate the headlines. How is it that our response to crime and our sense of criminal justice has come to be so dramatically reconfigured? David Garland charts the changes in crime and criminal justice in America and Britain over the past twenty-five years, showing how they have been shaped by two underlying social forces: the distinctive social organization of late modernity and the neoconservative politics that came to dominate the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

Garland explains how the new policies of crime and punishment, welfare and security—and the changing class, race, and gender relations that underpin them—are linked to the fundamental problems of governing contemporary societies, as states, corporations, and private citizens grapple with a volatile economy and a culture that combines expanded personal freedom with relaxed social controls. It is the risky, unfixed character of modern life that underlies our accelerating concern with control and crime control in particular. It is not just crime that has changed; society has changed as well, and this transformation has reshaped criminological thought, public policy, and the cultural meaning of crime and criminals. David Garland's The Culture of Control offers a brilliant guide to this process and its still-reverberating consequences.

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Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan

Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System

Nam-lin Hur

Harvard University Press, 2007

Buddhism was a fact of life and death during the Tokugawa period (1600–1868): every household was expected to be affiliated with a Buddhist temple, and every citizen had to be given a Buddhist funeral. The enduring relationship between temples and their affiliated households gave rise to the danka system of funerary patronage.

This private custom became a public institution when the Tokugawa shogunate discovered an effective means by which to control the populace and prevent the spread of ideologies potentially dangerous to its power—especially Christianity. Despite its lack of legal status, the danka system was applied to the entire population without exception; it became for the government a potent tool of social order and for the Buddhist establishment a practical way to ensure its survival within the socioeconomic context of early modern Japan.

In this study, Nam-lin Hur follows the historical development of the danka system and details the intricate interplay of social forces, political concerns, and religious beliefs that drove this “economy of death” and buttressed the Tokugawa governing system. With meticulous research and careful analysis, Hur demonstrates how Buddhist death left its mark firmly upon the world of the Tokugawa Japanese.

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The Fabrication of Social Order

A Critical Theory of Police Power

Mark Neocleous

Pluto Press, 2000

Anyone who considers questions of power cannot help but be struck by the ubiquitous nature, emotional force and political pull of the concept of order. The Fabrication of Social Order examines the role of policing in the fabrication of order.

After an initial exploration of the original relationship between police, state power and the question of order, Neocleous focuses on the ways in which eighteenth century liberalism refined and narrowed the concept of the police, a process which masked the power of capital and broader issues of social control. In doing so he challenges the way liberalism came to define policing solely in terms of the question of crime and the rule of law. This liberal definition created a limited and fundamentally misleading understanding of policing which remains in use today.

In contrast, Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, adequate to the expansive set of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance or reproduction of order, but with its fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order based on wage labour. This project, he argues, should be understood as the project of social security. Grasping this point allows a fuller understanding of the ways in which the state polices and secures civil society, and how order is fabricated through law and administration.

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From Puritan to Yankee

Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690–1765

Richard L. Bushman

Harvard University Press, 2005

The years from 1690 to 1765 in America have usually been considered a waiting period before the Revolution. Richard L. Bushman, in his penetrating study of colonial Connecticut, takes another view. He shows how, during these years, economic ambition and religious ferment profoundly altered the structure of Puritan society, enlarging the bounds of liberty and inspiring resistance to established authority.

This is an investigation of the strains that accompanied the growth of liberty in an authoritarian society. Mr. Bushman traces the deterioration of Puritan social institutions and the consequences for human character. He does this by focusing on day-to-day life in Connecticut—on the farms, in the churches, and in the town meetings. Controversies within the towns over property, money, and church discipline shook the “land of steady habits,” and the mounting frustration of common needs compelled those in authority, in contradiction to Puritan assumptions, to become more responsive to popular demands.

In the Puritan setting these tensions were inevitably given a moral significance. Integrating social and economic interpretations, Mr. Bushman explains the Great Awakening of the 1740s as an outgrowth of the stresses placed on the Puritan character. Men, plagued with guilt for pursuing their economic ambitions and resisting their rulers, became highly susceptible to revival preaching.

The Awakening gave men a new vision of the good society. The party of the converted, the “New Lights,” which also absorbed people with economic discontents, put unprecedented demands on civil and ecclesiastical authorities. The resulting dissension moved Connecticut, almost unawares, toward republican attitudes and practices. Disturbed by the turmoil, many observers were, by 1765, groping toward a new theory of social order that would reconcile traditional values with their eighteenth-century experiences.

Vividly written, full of illustrative detail, the manuscript of this book has been called by Oscar Handlin one of the most important works of American history in recent years.

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Institutions and Social Order

Karol Soltan, Virginia Haufler, and Eric M. Uslaner, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 1998

"Institutionalism" is the buzzword of the 1980s and 1990s in the social sciences. What is new in the contemporary analysis of institutions and what does it offer to the study of social order? In this book a distinguished group of social scientists drawn from political science, economics, and sociology, explore this question and show us how different theoretical approaches to institutional analysis can be joined to build a more thorough understanding of institutions.
The modern analysis of institutions has taken two separate paths. Rational choice theories identified institutions as a strategic response to collective action problems and as instruments for the promotion of cooperation. Contrary to these theories, such cooperation is fundamental to social order and a prerequisite for economic growth and development. An alternate form of institutionalism, drawn from sociological and historical analysis, de-emphasized the role of choice, strategy, and design in the construction of many of the major institutions in social life. This form of institutional analysis pointed to the role of prior choices, common norms, and culture in making certain options and choices unthinkable or impossible. Institutions, according to this view, may represent a certain kind of social order, but they do not always promote cooperation and economic growth. The more recent theories in the "new institutionalism" bring these seemingly irreconcilable perspectives closer together. New institutionalists argue that institutions must be grounded in the social fabric, and thus rational choice must be combined with historical and cultural variables. The papers collected in this volume address the merging of rational choice and historical-sociological institutionalism in the "new institutionalism."
The contributors are Randall L. Calvert, Christopher Clague, Kathleen Cook, Peter Hall, Virginia Haufler, James Johnson, Gary Miller, Karol Soltan, Rosemary C. R. Taylor, Eric M. Uslaner, and Barry Weingast.
Karol Soltan is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Maryland. Eric M. Uslaner is Professor of Political Science, University of Maryland. Virginia Haufler is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Maryland.

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Ladies Errant

Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy

Deanna Shemek

Duke University Press, 1998

The issue of a woman’s place—and the possibility that she might stray from it—was one of early modern Italy’s most persistent social concerns. Ladies Errant takes as its starting point the vast literature of this era devoted to the proper conduct and education of women. Deanna Shemek uses this foundation to present the problem of wayward feminine behavior as it was perceived to threaten male identity and social order in the artistic and intellectual articulations of the Italian Renaissance.
Seeing errancy as an act of resistance rather than of error, Shemek carries her study beyond the didactic and prescriptive literature on femininity in early modern Italy to an arena in which theories about femininity are considered jointly with real and fictional instances of women’s waywardness. As prostitutes, warriors, lovers, and poets, the women of Shemek’s study are found in canonical texts, marginal works, and popular artistic activity, appearing, for instance, in literature, paintings, legal proceedings, and accounts of public festivals. By juxtaposing these varied places of errancy—from Ariosto’s chivalric Orlando furioso to the prostitutes’ race in the Palio di San Giorgio—Shemek points to the important contact between elite and popular cultures in early modernity, revealing the strength and flexibility of a gender boundary fundamental to early modern conceptions of social order.

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Mound Excavations at Moundville

Architecture, Elites and Social Order

Vernon James Knight, Jr.

University of Alabama Press, 2010

How social and political power was wielded in order to build Moundville

This work is a state-of-the-art, data-rich study of excavations undertaken at the Moundville site in west central Alabama, one of the largest and most complex of the mound sites of pre-contact North America. Despite the site's importance and sustained attention by researchers, until now it has lacked a comprehensive analysis of its modern excavations. Richly documented by maps, artifact photo-graphs, profiles of strata, and inventories of materials found, the present work explores one expression of social complexity; the significance of Moundville’s monumental architecture, including its earthen mounds; the pole-frame architecture that once occupied the summits of these mounds; and the associated middens that reveal the culture of Moundville’s elites.

This book supplies a survey of important materials recovered in more than a decade of recent excavations of seven mounds and related areas under the author’s direction, as part of a long-term archaeological project consisting of new field work at the Mississippian political and ceremonial center of Moundville.

Visitors to Moundville are immediately impressed with its monumentality. The expansiveness and grandness of that landscape are, of course, deliberate features that have a story to tell and this archaeological project reveals Moundville’s monumentality and its significance to the people whose capital town it was.

Exactly how the social and political power symbolized by mound building was distributed is a question central to this work. It seems critical to ask to what extent this monumental landscape was the product of a chief’s ability to recruit and direct the labor of large groups of political subordinates, most of whom were presumably non-kin. At the onset of the present project, speculations regarding the paired orders of mounds and the timing of the formal structuring of space at Moundville were already suggested but were in need of further testing, confirmation, and refinement. The work reported in this volume is largely devoted to filling in such evidence and refining those initial insights. An excellent chapter by H. Edwin Jackson and Susan L. Scott, "Zooarchaeology of Mounds Q, G, E, F, and R," compliments this research.

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

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The Social Order of a Frontier Community

Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825-70

Don Harrison Doyle

University of Illinois Press, 1978

"A well-conceived and well-argued book that is essential reading for those interested in the study of community building." --Journal of American History

"This study is important for both frontier and urban historians. It is well written, thoroughly documented, and illustrated in an informative manner. One may hope that future studies of other nineteenth century American towns will be completed with the competence and style of this excellent volume." --The Old Northwest

"For one who has lived in Jacksonville as I have, reading this book stirred fond memories and answered lingering questions about this town. . . . As a capsule study of an unusual Illinois community renowned for its past, Doyle's book makes for fascinating reading." --Civil War History

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The Social Order of the Slum

Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City

Gerald D. Suttles

University of Chicago Press, 1970

While he did the research for this book, Gerald Suttles lived for almost three years in the high-delinquency area around Hull House on Chicago's New West Side. He came to know it intimately and was welcomed by its residents, who are Italian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Negro. Suttles contends that the residents of a slum neighborhood have a set of standards for behavior that take precedence over the more widely held "moral standards" of "straight" society. These standards arise out of the specific experience of each locality, are peculiar to it, and largely determine how the neighborhood people act. One of the tasks of urban sociology, according to Suttles, is to explore why and how slum communities provide their inhabitants with these local norms. The Social Order of the Slum is the record of such an exploration, and it defines theoretical principles and concepts that will aid in subsequent research.

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