Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-1950. Edited by Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jütte (Washington, D.C., published for the German Historical Institute by Cambridge University Press, 1996) 369 pp. $59.95
GERALD N. GROB Since the 1960s, the “new” social history has eclipsed an older preoccupation with political, military, and diplomatic subjects. The traditional distinction between history and theory blurred as scholars attempted to conceptualize in novel ways the function and role of hospitals, asylums, and prisons in Western Europe and North America since the Renaissance. Concern with ideal types minimized the signiacance of the unique; institutions were vested with universal qualities that transcended individual differences. National boundaries diminished in importance when the comparative approach took center stage. The goal was nothing less than to write a history of conanement that came close to minimizing—if not obliterating—the differences within and between institutions. The conception of institutions of conanement (sometimes characterized as “total” institutions) can be found in the writings of Karl Marx and Max Weber.1 But the agures who played the most inouential roles in elaborating this concept (at least in Europe) were Norbert Elias and Foucault.2 In a seminal work—Über den Prozess der Zivilization (Frankfurt, 1939; repr. 1980–1982), 2v.—Elias argued that the emergence of modern society led to fundamental changes in social controls. External compulsion was replaced by internalized rules of behavior. Foucault, an enigmatic agure whose thought was often presented in dense and obscure language, emphasized the discourses that he called the archaeology of knowledge. These discourses involved a reorganization of society and the deployment of novel stratagems of power. In Institutions of Conanement, eighteen scholars present a series of empirical studies purportedly designed to illuminate four and a half centuries of conanement in Europe and the United States. Examining four institutions—hospitals, asylums, penitentiaries, and prison work-