The genesis and structure of moral universalism: social justice in Victorian Britain, 1834–1901

The Persistence of Pardons and the End of Attainder

“…They represent a universal experience of the ills involved in legislative justice” [Pound 1914: 12] and, we can add, that universal experience was the opposite with respect to clemency. Pound’s explanation is helpful in its focus on experience [Strand 2015], a turn to the world, and to facts about the world as one of the key drivers of the divergent trajectories of these institutions. The all but universal rule-of-law judgment on pardons and attainders reflects a more general form: an interpretive nexus formed on one side by the structured specificity of culture and on the other by the experience of a social world containing facts that neither fully escape the grasp of culture nor are fully determined by it––a tangle of facts and meanings.…”

“…Thick moral constructs also render facts intelligible as part of larger moral systems that are structured by the relationships between multiple moral constructs. Strand [2015] has pursued this very idea in the context of Bourdieusian field theory, arguing that changes in the character of morality can be attributed to the experience of moral fields that are structured by, among other things, moral concepts. By focusing on Geertz rather than Bourdieu I hope to foreground interpretive dynamics rather than the more tightly specified “social mechanics” [Geertz 1983: 182] of Bourdieusian field theory, but the idea is roughly the same: that a moral system is structured both by the substantive content of its thick moral constructs and by the relationships among the multiple moral constructs that it contains.…”

“…While descriptive relativist assumptions require that truth be “bracketed” [Tavory 2011: 275] when explaining moral action, there is no such requirement for facts. Indeed, many sociologists of morality have worked to understand how, for example, material facts [Barnard 2016; Klett 2014], social facts [Quinn 2008; Sayer 2005], and facts of history and experience [Strand 2015] influence moral judgments, actions, and systems.…”

Examining the links between beliefs and institutional emergence

“…This organizational model became the international norm because it resonated with interlocking public concerns about medical conditions on the battlefield, the role of religion in civil society, and the proper ways to extend charity (see also Dromi, ). Similarly, Strand shows that purportedly morally universal discourse about inequality that contemporary progressives espouse emerged in a particular historical set of conditions—the Victorian‐era grapple with classifying the poor and ascribing moral meanings to their social condition (Strand, , ).…”

Symbolic revolutions. Mobilizing a neglected Bourdieusian concept for historical sociology

“…While discussions seeking to instate Bourdieu as a historical sociologist have drawn attention to such change in fields on an exegetical level, empirical analyses employing the field concept have dealt with these internal dynamics to a much lesser degree. Historical sociology has thus far used field theory either in comparative work, focusing on two different states of a field in time rather than on a process (e.g., Berling, 2012;Go, 2008), or it has put most of its focus on the genesis and autonomization of fields (Chalaby, 1998;Dezalay & Garth, 2006;Dromi, 2016;Ferguson, 1998;Krause, 2014;Sapiro, 2016;Strand, 2015). Where studies of fields do focus on internal transformations, their accounts of such change become less theorydriven and only cursorily reference field-theoretical concepts (e.g., Krause, 2011;Strand, 2011).…”