Laboratories of Virtue by Michael Meranze

Laboratories of Virtue by Michael Meranze

Michael Meranze uses Philadelphia as a case study to analyze the relationship between penal reform and liberalism in early America. In Laboratories of Virtue, he interprets the evolving system of criminal punishment as a microcosm of social tensions that characterized the early American republic. Engaging recent work on the history of punishment in England and continental Europe, Meranze traces criminal punishment from the late colonial system of publicly inflicted corporal penalties to the establishment of penitentiaries in the Jacksonian period. Throughout, he reveals a world of class difference and contested values in which those who did not fit the emerging bourgeois ethos were disciplined and eventually segregated.By focusing attention on the system of public penal labor that developed in the 1780s, Meranze effectively links penal reform to the development of republican principles in the Revolutionary era. His study, richly informed by Foucaultian and Freudian theory, departs from recent scholarship that treats penal reform as a nostalgic effort to reestablish social stability. Instead, Meranze interprets the reform of punishment as a forward-looking project. He argues that the new disciplinary practices arose from the reformers' struggle to contain or eliminate contradictions to their vision of an enlightened, liberal republic.

Michael Meranze, associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, is editor of Benjamin Rush's Essays: Literary, Moral, and Philosophical.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780807856314
ISBN 10	0807856312
Titel	Laboratories of Virtue
Autor	Michael Meranze
Serie	Published By The Omohundro Institute Of Early American History And Culture And The University Of North Carolina Press
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Bindungsart	Paperback
Verlag	The University of North Carolina Press
Erscheinungsjahr	1996-04-30
Seitenanzahl	352
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
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