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Beyond “Social Control:” Institutions and Disorder in Bourgeois Society

David Rothman's path-breaking study of The Discovery of the Asylum is proving to be the Poverty and Progress of the 1970's. Just as Stephan Thernstrom's social mobility study defined the central issue for American social historians in the 1960's, Rothman's provocative work on nineteenth century institutions has framed the issue for a wave of recent studies—many still unpublished—that try to analyze the complex ideological and institutional response Americans made to the "disorder*' of an industrializing society. (1) Allan Stanley Horlick's stimulating examination of the changing world of New York's merchants and their clerks before the Civil War owes a clear debt to Roth­ man's perspective. Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York is an effort to show how merchants who had themselves been trained step-by-step as "apprentices" in a well-ordered, hierarchical system later found themselves threatened by an influx of "disorderly" young clerks who rejected that system. In the merchants' view, the grasping, self-aggrandizing youth who refused to cultivate the tutelage of their seniors were undermining the tradi­ tional status of the merchant calling. In response, Horlick agrues, the merchants sought institutional means to control the young deviants: the YMCA, the Mercantile Library Association, and the Association for the Suppression of Gambling. What Horlick has attempted, in short, is to ground Rothman's general perspective in a concrete case. Whereas for Rothman the disorder of Jacksonian society gave rise to a generalized movement to restore order, for Horlick the unsettled state of ante-bellum New York posed a particular threat to a specific social class. It is in documenting the response of members of that class—often with innovative use of travel guides, novels, advice pamphlets and pictures, as well as diaries and commer­ cial journals—that Horlick's book begins to advance beyond the standpoint of The Discovery of the Asylum. In Rothman's analysis social control is no more in the interest of one social group than another; it is a mysteriously diffuse movement toward equilibrium characterizing an entire society—a society that has slipped, for reasons that remain unclean, into a temporary state of disequilibrium. In Country Boys and Merchant Princes the movement toward social control is grounded in the lived experience—the perceptions, fears, beliefs—of a particular group whose world is changing in identifiable ways. Moreover, Horlick is more successful than Roth­ man in keeping the perception of disorder analytically distinct from actual disorder. Rothman tended to use the asylum reformers' claims of unprecedented social up­ heaval as his primary evidence for the existence of disorder—without asking whether