A past: a revolution in public ethics

This piece is about those elements of British nineteenth-century deep culture which have to do with the production of subordination, compliance, and acquiescence. It is about perceptions of deviance. The purpose of this work is to provide some support for a suggestion about attribution of the replacement of the dominant British public ethic concerning treatment of deviance during the nineteenth century (1780-1914). Until then deviant persons had been, by and large, subject to policies and customs of exclusion and excision. These practices were replaced by new mechanisms of relegation and subordination, arrangements which lent themselves readily to institutionalisation and subsequent centralised control under a rubric of inclusion in humanity. The social, legal, and administrative mechanisms of exclusion increasingly came under attack for their inhumanity, and a climate of favour grew in Britain for a public ethic of inclusion. This principle, once it got hold, asserted into public life the beliefs which ended such practices of exclusion as slavery, public execution, transportation to the colonies, the inhuman treatment of lunatics and the dispatch of "savages". In order to support the suggestion, it will be necessary to establish that evangelicals placed themselves in the public domain as moral experts, that evangelicals expertly labelled deviant persons and groups, that evangelical publicities and structures energised in the main the revolution in the treatment of deviance without threat to power relations, and that the beginnings of national institutions of labelling are to be found in this revolution of ideas.