The Department of Education Battle, 1918–1932: Public Schools, Catholic Schools, and the Social Order by Douglas J. Slawson

Recent research in American urban history has given us a polarized view of the social order of nineteenth-century cities. At one extreme the studies of urban spatial and social mobility have revealed a restless shifting population of individuals moving through the city attached by little more than a brief term of employment. “American society…,” concluded one such mobility study, “was more like a procession than a stable social order. How did this social order cohere at all?” To a large extent the answer to this question has come from another body of studies which have reexamined a variety of institutions from police to public schools and found them to be part of a broad effort among Protestant middle-class leaders to bring control and order to this strange new urban world. The new research on mobility and social control has enlarged our understanding of American social history in many important ways, however, our emphasis on mobility and the mechanisms of coercive social control may obscure the social order that citizens of nineteenth-century communities defined for themselves.

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The Social Order Yields to Functional Analysis

Contemporary Psychology ◽

10.1037/005815 ◽

1958 ◽

Vol 3 (6) ◽

pp. 158-160

Author(s):

LAWRENCE SCHLESINGER

Keyword(s):

Functional Analysis ◽

Social Order ◽

The Social

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Sex and the Social Order.

10.1037/11417-000 ◽

1946 ◽

Cited By ~ 37

Author(s):

Georgene H. Seward

Keyword(s):

Social Order ◽

The Social

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George Hoggart Toulmin: politics and geology

Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History ◽

10.3366/jsbnh.1978.8.4.481 ◽

1978 ◽

Vol 8 (4) ◽

pp. 481-481

Author(s):

ROY PORTER

Keyword(s):

French Revolution ◽

Social Order ◽

Lower Class ◽

Great Distance ◽

The Earth ◽

Christian View ◽

The Social ◽

French Enlightenment ◽

Political Conservatism ◽

History Of

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).

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