“So that Every Subject Knows How to Behave”: Social Disciplining in Early Modern Bohemia

Abstract

“Social disciplining” is the name that has been given to attempts by the authorities throughout early modern Europe to regulate people's private lives.1 In explicit contrast to “social control,” the informal mechanisms by which people have always sought to put pressure on one another in traditional societies, “social disciplining” was a set of formal, legislative strategies through which the emerging early modern state sought to “civilize” and “rationalize” its subjects' behavior in order to facilitate well-ordered government and a capitalist modernization of the economy.2 Whether viewed favorably as an essential stage in a beneficent “civilizing process” or more critically as an arbitrary coercion of popular culture in the interests of elites, social disciplining is increasingly regarded as central to most aspects of political, economic, religious, social, and cultural change in Europe between the medieval and the modern periods.3

Consumption, Social Capital, and the “Industrious Revolution” in Early Modern Germany

“…Robust p values in parentheses * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1% a Effect of discrete change of dummy variable from 0 to 1. Hunt (1996); Landwehr (2000); Ogilvie (2006). 80 De Vries (2003), 65-6;Harte (1976), 148.…”

“…150 See the literature surveyed in Ogilvie (2006). 151 Schmidt (2007); Van den Heuvel (2007); Van Nederveen Meerkerk (2006).…”

The Political Economy of Status Competition: Sumptuary Laws in Preindustrial Europe

“…Long-standing institutions, such as sumptuary ordinances, persisted not because of any efficiency properties but because they benefited well-organized and powerful elites. Sumptuary laws could act as a form of “social disciplining” (Ogilvie 2006)—targeting urban consumers and frequently women.…”