Cover of Discipline and power

Discipline and power

Discipline and Power is an intellectual, cultural, and social analysis of the ways in which universities successfully transformed a set of values, encoded in the concept of "liberal education," into a licensing system for a national elite. From the mid-1870's until the rise of totalitarianism and the Great Depression challenged prevailing habits of mind and conduct, the universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, achieved unrivaled influence upon thought and conduct in every sphere.

Read more

In their independence from external interference, the universities and colleges evolved by regulating the contents and purposes of new subjects.

History, more than any other discipline, reflected and reinforced a broad Victorian consensus about God, country, and the good. Among the contending fields of study, history provided the most consistent moral panorama able to satisfy a variety of intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic needs. History was taught, studied, and tested by a set of assumptions deduced far more from a patriotic agreement about duty than from critical methods or from the weight of evidence.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 308 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Discipline and power? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Discipline and power. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History Shares elite, power, history
  2. Power elites and state building Shares elite, power, politics
  3. Who's running America? Shares elite, power, politics
  4. Organizing Enlightenment Shares universities and colleges, intellectual life, history

“If you want more of the same (history), start with these.”

  1. Parable and politics in early Islamic history
  2. Sir John Malcolm and the creation of British India
  3. No More Vietnams
  4. Ambition, a history

“If it was the elite that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100–1400
  2. Capitalism, culture, and decline in Britain, 1750-1990
  3. Jewish learning in American universities
  4. Social Relations, Politics, and Power in Early Modern France

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. What Are Universities for?
  2. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline
  3. God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition
  4. Making The Soviet Intelligentsia Universities And Intellectual Life Under Stalin And Khrushchev