The Atomic Theory of Society

1930 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 628-637
Author(s):  
William Orton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
The State ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Atomic Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
House Of Lords

In few affairs is political wisdom so put to the test as in the treatment of institutions that are growing old. Age in these cases has little to do with mere antiquity: the forms of social life are subject to no set term of years. It is a matter of continuing adaptability. Some institutions, like the British monarchy, possess this attribute in an astounding degree. Others, like the House of Lords, betray a hardening of the arteries that bodes ill for their survival in times of rapid change. For the speed of social change affects not only their physical and conceptual environment; it acts also upon, and through, the temper of the politicians and the public. In such periods society will sometimes administer a sudden coup de grâce to its more recalcitrant institutions, abolishing at one stroke both the abuses they have inflicted and the garnered wisdom they enshrine. The loss involved in these moments is seldom evident until long after, when it has to be made good ab ovo.To such moods the Gallic genius is peculiarly liable; and it was in one of them that the French crashed open the gates of the nineteenth century and nailed the atomic theory of society to the lintel. “There are no longer any guilds in the state, but only the private interest of each individual and the general interest. No one may arouse in the citizens any intermediate interest, or separate them from the public weal by corporate sentiment.”

scholarly journals "A Strange Fever of the Nerves and Blood": Nervous Illness in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah Parry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Rich

<p>In the nineteenth century, the discussion of personal health and wellbeing became almost a national pastime. With publications such as the British Medical Journal and Lancet freely accessible to the everyday reader, common medical terms and diagnoses were readily absorbed by the public. In particular, the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of the ‘nervous illness’ – sicknesses which had no apparent physical cause, but had the capacity to cripple their victims with (among other things) delirium, tremors and convulsions. As part of the rich social life of this popular class of disorder, writers of fiction within the nineteenth century also participated in the public dialogue on the subject. Authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all constructed narratives involving nervous sufferers, particularly hypochondriacs and victims of brain fever. Despite writing in a wide variety of genres ranging from Gothic to realist, the roles played by the illnesses within the texts of these authors remain a vital feature of the plot, either as a hindrance to the protagonists (by removing key players from the plot at a critical moment) or a method of revealing deeper aspects of their character. Nervous illnesses carried with them social stigmas: men could be rendered feminine; women could be branded recklessly passionate or even considered visionaries as ideas about the nerves, the supposed seat of emotion and passion, brought into sharp relief the boundaries between physical and mental suffering, and physical and spiritual experiences.  The central aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural understanding of nervous illness and how nineteenth-century texts interacted with and challenged this knowledge. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors of different genres – particularly the Gothic, sensation and realist genres – use the common convention of nervous illness – particularly hypochondria and brain fever – to develop their protagonists and influence the plot. Through comparisons between literary symptoms and those recorded by contemporary sufferers and their physicians, this thesis analyses the way that the cultural concept of nervous illness is used by four principal Victorian authors across a range of their works, looking at how hypochondria and brain fever function within their plots and interact with gender and genre conventions to uphold and subvert the common tropes of each. Whether it aids or hinders the protagonist, or merely gives the reader an insight into their personality, nervous illness in the Victorian novel was a widely used convention which speaks not only of the mindset of the author, but also of the public which so willingly received it.</p>

Compensated Motherhood and the State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Rymph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Child Welfare ◽  
Foster Parents ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Child Welfare Professionals ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Proper Balance

This chapter examines the role of foster parents as workers, an idea rooted in the nineteenth century role of the “boarding mother.” Child Welfare professionals, foster parents, and the public struggled over the proper balance between paying adequate board to foster parents while ensuring that desire to nurture a child remained the paramount motivation. By the 1960s, foster parents began organizing themselves, culminating in the formation of the National Foster Parents Association in 1971.

Re-imagining the Social Order

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Innes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
The State ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw attempts around the Mediterranean world to replace an old order of privilege and delegated power with one in which all subjects were equal before the state. Across southern Europe, revolutionary France provided the model: under French and subsequently liberal regimes, privilege in state, church, and economy was cut back; there were analogous changes in the Ottoman world. Legal change did not always translate into substantive social change. Nonetheless, new conceptions of a largely autonomous ‘society’ developed, and new protocols were invented to relate state to ‘society’, often entailing use of tax status as a reference point for the allocation of rights and duties. The French Doctrinaires argued that the abolition of privilege made society ‘democratic’, posing the question, how was such a society best governed? By the middle of the nineteenth century, this conception was widely endorsed across southern Europe.

Zwierzynski v. Poland

2001 ◽  
Vol 12 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 367-370
Keyword(s):  
Moral Obligation ◽  
The State ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Public Order ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Guardian ◽  
Fair Balance

Any interference with the protection of property had to strike a fair balance between the demands of the general interest of the community and the requirements of the protection of the individual's fundamental rights. The requisite balance would not be struck where the person concerned bore an individual and excessive burden. Where an issue in the general interest was at stake it was incumbent on the public authorities to act in an appropriate manner and with utmost consistency. In addition, the State, as the guardian of public order, had a moral obligation to lead by example and it had a duty to ensure that its organs charged with the protection of public order enforced observance of that obligation.

scholarly journals The Attitudes of Friendly Societies towards the Movement in Great Britain for State Pensions, 1878—1908

1970 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Treble
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Old Age ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The State ◽  
Friendly Societies ◽  
The Individual

The last three decades of the nineteenth century were marked in British social history by a vigorous and far-reaching debate about the causes and incidence of poverty amongst the elderly. By the early 1890s this controversy had produced a sharp cleavage of opinion between those commentators who held that old-age pauperism was largely a product of character defects and those who attributed it to certain social and economic ills which the individual, acting alone, could never hope to remedy. Social thinkers who subscribed to this latter view – the loosely labelled collectivist school of thought – were not content, however, merely with the work of analysis; they were equally anxious to find a panacea for one of the main social problems of the day. In the end the solution they most widely canvassed was the introduction of an old age pensions scheme in which the state would have a vital rle to play. But perhaps of more significance for the development of social services in Great Britain, three of the leading advocates of state intervention endeavoured, in their own distinctive styles, to translate this general declaration of intent into detailed programmes of action.

Stillman Wanders, Babel Rises

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Eberl
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
The Public ◽  
Fault Lines

Chapter 6 discusses how innovation changes social structures. Fault lines traverse societies. Their structures are complex, their statuses differentiated, and their power structures unequal. Rather than existing in the abstract, these aspects of social life materialize in concrete actions, things, and people. Diacritical consumption sets members of society apart based on culture-specific values. To work as status-differentiating items, these values should be understood, at least partially, by members of society, especially as they develop meta-awareness through their interaction with social frames. For social change, these individual experiences have to be converted into a public discourse about structures. Inventions then materialize personal visions of society and become novel arguments in the public discourse. As people adopt them, they shift the course of their society.

Gold and the Public in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-87
Author(s):  
David Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Good ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Private Land ◽  
Private Benefits ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Resources ◽  
Electoral Defeat

In the great nineteenth-century British world cycle of gold rushes, individualist wealth seeking became associated with democratic politics, and views about the public rather than private benefits of gold became increasingly the preserve of conservatives. In Georgia, governor George Gilmer declared in 1830 that the gold diggers were “appropriating riches to themselves, which of right equally belong to every other citizen of the state,” but he soon suffered electoral defeat. In 1850s California and Australia, individual miners were rapidly associated with a democratic and egalitarian future, even with the public good. This helps explain the oddly uncontested decisions to allow mining on public—and, in many places, private—land and use of public resources such as timber and water. This chapter is by David Goodman.

Sale of Office

2021 ◽  
pp. 341-373
Author(s):  
Mark Knights
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Personal Property ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

The chapter charts a shift in attitudes to the sale of office, from the Jacobean period, when it seems to have been relatively commonplace, to the early nineteenth century, when the practice was formally banned for most offices (except those in the army). This reflected a shift away from the idea of office as personal property towards office as a public duty, and away from the idea of office as generating informal, personal profit beyond the public, formal remuneration decided by the state or corporation. But the shift was a protracted and messy one, with an ongoing contest between different ways of thinking about venality. For some it was a pragmatic issue, often related to customary norms, that did not imperil the morality or the smooth running of the state; for others, it represented an immoral pursuit of self-interest and avarice that posed a dangerous threat to the polity.

The Sovereign and the Sage

2020 ◽  
pp. 218-242
Author(s):  
James Pickett
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Military Elite

This chapter assesses the ulama's relationship with state power. By the long nineteenth century, the ulama stood as a pillar of the state, limited though that state was. Islamic scholars systematically deployed their diverse Persianate skill set and leveraged Islamic knowledge on behalf of the Turkic nobility. Nevertheless, the ulama still envisioned the state as an Islamic state, and they carefully guarded their moral prerogative to speak for the religion both groups agreed had a total monopoly on politics and social life. Although in certain instances evidence exists of this most important of prerogatives — the authority to legitimately speak for religion — shifting in favor of the Turkic military elite, the ulama cultivated a spirit of moral independence and superiority to the state.

In Search of the Greek State: A Rejoinder to M.H. Hansen

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 107-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moshe Berent
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
The State ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Stateless Society

In a collection of articles based on my Cambridge doctoral thesis (1994) I have argued that, contrary to what has been traditionally assumed, the Greek polis was not a State but rather what anthropologists call ‘a stateless society’. The latter is characterized by the absence of ‘government’, that is, an agency which has separated itself out from the rest of social life and which monopolizes the use of violence. In a recent article Mogens Herman Hansen discusses and rejects my notion of the stateless polis. This paper is a rejoinder to Hansen’s criticism and offers critical analysis of the concept of ‘The Greek State’ which has been employed by Hansen and by other ancient historians. Among the questions discussed: To what extent did the polis have amonopoly on violence? To what extent do the relations between the polis and its territory resemble those of (tribal) stateless communities? Could the State/Society distinction be applied to the Greek polis? How is the Greek distinction between the private and the public different from its modern counterpart and how is this difference related to the statelessness of the Greek polis?

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