Toward an Abolitionist Literary History of the Police

2021 ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
Sal Nicolazzo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Broken Windows ◽  
Neighborhood Safety ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modes Of Thought

This coda presents a reading of George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson's enormously influential article “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety” (1982) as a remarkably politically successful redeployment of the tropes of eighteenth-century vagrancy. This article both draws on and occludes the prehistory of the police. Kelling and Wilson rely significantly on early histories of policing — in particular, the history of vagrancy law. At the same time, they push their readers insistently away from historical modes of thought. Through a reading of this text, much of whose political influence relies on the persuasive success of its master metaphors, the chapter proposes that reading methods of literary history can offer unique critical insights into the deep histories still animating contemporary theorizations of policing.

scholarly journals Domestic Every-day Life, and Manners and Customs in this Country, From the Earliest Period to the end of the Eighteenth Century

1878 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 176-211
Author(s):  
George Harris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
General Condition ◽  
Early Career ◽  
General Survey ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
National Enterprise

The Norman conquest, when William, Duke of Normandy, in the year 1066, landed in this country with a number of his chosen followers, and after killing King Harold in battle, and routing his army, established here the Norman sway, and introduced new laws and customs and manners, is one of those leading events in the history of this country by which the most important results upon its whole career, and more especially the cause of its civilization, were produced. True it is that the bulk of the people remained, and many of their institutions continued unchanged. But a great deal that was new was engrafted on the old. The native inhabitants were brought into immediate contact with the people of another country, who were not only more powerful than themselves, but who possessed different habits and pursuits and modes of thought, and who varied from them essentially in character and disposition; besides being used to a manner of living entirely varying from what they found here, and who were moreover determined, as the dominant power, to make changes in the government and institutions of the kingdom. Civilization was thus advanced by the coming in contact of the people of the two countries, and by the superior cultivation possessed by the Normans; and a very great stimulus was given to art, commerce, and national enterprise of every description. Hence, although I do not intend to give an account of the battles and political contests which occurred during their early career in this country, yet the Norman conquest is so intimately connected with, and had so important an influence on the habits, pursuits, and general condition of the people in this land, that it is absolutely necessary, in order correctly to become acquainted with the latter, to take a general survey of the former also.

scholarly journals The Conceptual Foundations of the Modern Idea of Government in the British Eighteenth Century: A Distributional Concept Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 619-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter de Bolla ◽  
Ewan Jones ◽  
Paul Nulty ◽  
Gabriel Recchia ◽  
John Regan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
Digital Archives ◽  
Scale Reading ◽  
Reading Methods ◽  
Human Scale ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mixed Approach ◽  
Conceptual Foundations

This essay sets out a new method for the history of ideas. Using a mixed approach combining computer assisted reading methods with more traditional close reading, the essay tracks the evolution of a set of terms over the eighteenth century that have become central to how we think about government in particular and political concepts in general. The essay is offered as an example of how data mining very large digital archives allows us to see trends and patterns that are invisible at the granular level of human scale reading, and it proposes that these largescale observations can both complement and complicate our hitherto analogue histories of ideas. The findings of this mixed approach indicate that ‘despotism’ functioned as a type of gate in an electronic circuit, sometimes allowing the connection to liberty and government and on others blocking those connections. Most significantly ‘despotism’ is shown to be an essential ingredient in the conceptual foundations of a theory of rights, liberty and government in the period and that this structure underpins contemporary theories of government.

Literary Histories

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Lerer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Literary history has had a mixed history among the readers and the writers of the European traditions. For William Warburton, an eighteenth-century ecclesiast and critic, literary history was “the most agreeable subject in the world.” However, the early nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine describes literary history as a “morgue where each seeks out the friend he most loved.” The complex connotation of literary history stems in part from the modern European understanding of the place of literature in the formation of national identity. This article examines how the history of medieval literature was received during the Renaissance. It first looks at the regulations of late Henrician reading, particularly the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, before focusing on Miles Hogarde and his poetry. It then discusses Richard Tottel’sMiscellanyin the context of English literature and its past, along with the poetry of love and loss that follows Tottel.

Addison and the Victorians

2021 ◽  
pp. 308-328
Author(s):  
Brian Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Literary Biography ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Valuable Study ◽  
History Of

The masculine world of Addison’s eighteenth-century ‘republic of letters’ was mirrored by that inhabited by Victorian ‘Men of Letters’, and hence much of the lively interest taken in him by nineteenth-century cultural commentators and makers of (and historians of) public opinion. The agnostic manliness of such men as Leslie Stephen and W. J. Courthope informed the way they wrote about Addison, whose Christianity they tended to slight and who was described by them as ‘delicate’. Macaulay had been more admiring of Addison as a Christian gentleman, while Thackeray praised him as an English humorist. Pope and Swift continued to enjoy an ascendancy in eighteenth-century English literary history, with Addison and Steele appreciated more for having been ‘characteristic’ of their age than as acting in any way as intellectually innovative figures. Matthew Arnold was notably critical of Addison, whom he found provincial and narrow. Both Addison and his Victorian critics were subjected to feminist criticism by Virginia Woolf, who happened to be Stephen’s daughter, but she in her turn slighted the most significant early Victorian study of Addison, the life written by the Unitarian Lucy Aikin. The ‘long nineteenth century’ in the English literary history of the eighteenth century is thus bookended by studies of Addison by women, and it is time that justice was paid to Aikin’s pioneering and still valuable study, submerged as it has been by readers of Macaulay’s essay on Addison, which was ostensibly a review of Aikin’s exercise in literary biography.

A Literary History of Spain: The Eighteenth Century.

1974 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 376
Author(s):  
Theodore A. Sackett ◽  
Nigel Glendinning
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
History Of
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