This is a particular period and subject of interest to me, I have mainly just been reading Foucault on it so far, the chapters on the Great Confinement appear to me to be highly relevant to the trends within the UK and British Government and popular opinion towards, squatters, the unemployed, outsiders of all sorts in 2012.
The confinement's served a large financial purpose all across Europe, easing financial burdens, aswell as a social and ideological purpose intimately tied to the Religious theology that dominated Europe at the time, I just thought I'd post an excerpt or ten and a link to the book online and to the sparknotes page if anyone wants to learn more about the development of psychiatry:
The great confinement of the poor, mad, mendicant and idle, it was a period of prominence for hardline christian morality and great development in the means of production that would come to define Industrial Europe, ie the Workhouse.
“There must have formed, silently and doubtless over the course of many years, a social sensibility, common to European culture, the suddenly began to manifest itself in the second half of the seventeenth century; it was this sensibility that suddenly isolated the category destined to populate the places of confinement. To inhabit the reaches long since abandoned by the lepers, they chose a group that to our eyes is strangely mixed and confused. But what is for us merely an undifferentiated sensibility must have been, for those living in the classical age, a clearly articulated perception. It is this mode of perception which we must investigate in order to discover the form of sensibility to madness in an epoch we are accustomed to define by the privileges of Reason.”
"What doubtless remained longer than leprosy, and would persist when the lazar houses had been empty for years, were the values and images attached to the figure of the leper as well as the meaning of his exclusion, the social importance of that insistent and fearful figure which was not driven off without first being inscribed within a sacred circle" (6).
As the lepers disappeared the "poor vagabonds, criminals and ‘dangerous minds’" would take the place of the leper.
1676-Edict called for the establishment of a hospital general in each city in France. Even before that the church had gotten involved and various parishes and orders opened similar types of hospitals (42).
In England these houses took the form of "houses of correction." By the seventeenth century these houses had been taken over by businesses and had trades installed within them (milling, spinning, and weaving). Later, in 1697 the first work houses were established in England. These houses were for the poor and generally turned away the sick, trying not to become a hospital general (44).
John Howard at the end of the 18th century toured these houses of confinement (jails, work houses, hospitals) and found that the poor, criminal and insane were all being housed together (45).
-confinement had become abusive
-move to isolate these groups of people even more than they previously were
Initial reasons for confinement and royal edict
-"preventing mendicancy and idleness as the source of all disorders" (47)
-last great measure since the enlightenment to get rid of poverty and begging
-the city of Paris (population 100,000) had over 30,000 beggars at one point
-archers were positioned at the city gates and told to kill any indigents that came in
-was an answer to the poverty, lack of coin in the seventeenth century (49)
[media][/media]
From the beginning, the institution set itself the task of preventing "mendicancy and idleness as the source of all disorders." In fact, this was the last of the great measures that had been taken since the Renaissance to put an end to unemployment or at least to begging.4 In 1532, the Parlement of Paris decided to arrest beggars and force them to work in the sewers of the city, chained in pairs. The situation soon reached critical proportions: on March 23, 1534, the order was given "to poor scholars and indigenes" to leave the city, while it was forbidden "henceforth to sing hymns before images in the streets." The wars of religion multiplied this suspect crowd, which included peasants driven from their farms, disbanded soldiers or deserters, unemployed workers, impoverished students, and the sick.
When Henri IV began the siege of Paris, the city, which had less than 100,000 inhabitants, contained more than 30,000 beggars. An economic revival began early in the seventeenth century; it was decided to reabsorb by force the unemployed who had not regained a place in society; a decree of the Parlement dated 1606 ordered the beggars of Paris to be whipped in the public square, branded on the shoulder, shorn, and then driven from the city; to keep them from returning, an ordinance of 1607 established companies of archers at all the city gates to forbid entry to indigents.
When the effects of the economic renaissance disappeared with the Thirty Years' War, the problems of mendicancy and idleness reappeared; until the middle of the century, the regular increase of taxes hindered manufactures and augmented unemployment. This was the period of uprisings in Paris (1621), in Lyons (1652), in Rouen (1639).
At the same time, the world of labor was disorganized by the appearance of new economic structures; as the large manufactories developed, the guilds lost their powers and their rights, the "General Regulations" prohibited all assemblies of workers, all leagues, all "associations." In many professions, however, the guilds were reconstituted. They were prosecuted, but it seems that the Parlements showed a certain apathy; the Parlement of Normandy disclaimed all competence to judge the rioters of Rouen. This is doubtless why the Church intervened and accused the workers' secret gatherings of sorcery. A decree of the Sorbonne, in 1655, proclaimed "guilty of sacrilege and mortal sin" all those who were found in such bad company.
In this silent conflict that opposed the severity of the Church to the indulgence of the Parlements, the creation of the Hopital was certainly, at least in the beginning, a victory for the Parlement. It was, in any case, a new solution. For the first time, purely negative measures of exclusion were replaced by a measure of confinement; the unemployed person was no longer driven away or punished; he was taken in charge, at the expense of the nation but at the cost of his individual liberty. Between him and society, an implicit system of obligation was established: he had the right to be fed, but he must accept the physical and moral constraint of confinement.
It is this entire, rather undifferentiated mass at which the edict of 1657 is aimed: a population without resources, without social moorings, a class rejected or rendered mobile by new economic developments. Less than two weeks after it was signed, the edict was read and proclaimed in the streets. Paragraph 9: "We expressly prohibit and forbid all persons of either sex, of any locality and of any age, of whatever breeding and birth, and in whatever condition they may be, able-bodied or invalid, sick or convalescent, curable or incurable, to beg in the city and suburbs of Paris, neither in the churches, nor at the doors of such, nor at the doors of houses nor in the streets, nor anywhere else in public, nor in secret, by day or night... under pain of being whipped for the first offense, and for the second condemned to the galleys if men and boys, banished if women and girls."
The year after—Sunday, May 13, 1657 —a high mass in honor of the Holy Ghost was sung at the Church of Saint-Louis de la Pitie, and on the morning of Monday the fourteenth, the militia, which was to become, in the mythology of popular terror, "the archers of the Hopital," began to hunt down beggars and herd them into the different buildings of the Hopital. Four years later. La Salpetriere housed 1,460 women and small children; at La Pitie there were 98 boys, 897 girls between seven and seventeen, and 95 women; at Bicetre, 1,615 adult men; at La Savonnerie, 305 boys between eight and thirteen; finally, Scipion lodged 530 pregnant women, nursing women, and very young children. Initially, married people, even in need, were not admitted; the administration was instructed to feed them at home; but soon, thanks to a grant from Mazarin, it was possible to lodge them at La Salpetriere. In all, between five and six thousand persons.
Throughout Europe, confinement had the same meaning, at least if we consider its origin. It constituted one of the answers the seventeenth century gave to an economic crisis that affected the entire Western world: reduction of wages, unemployment, scarcity of coin—the coincidence of these phenomena probably being due to a crisis in the Spanish economy. Even England, of all the countries of Western Europe the least dependent on the system, had to solve the same problems. Despite all the measures taken to avoid unemployment and the reduction of wages, poverty continued to spread in the nation.
In 1622 appeared a pamphlet, Grievous Groan for the Poor, attributed to Thomas Dekker, which, emphasizing the danger, condemns the general negligence: "Though the number of the poor do daily increase, all things yet worketh for the worst in their behalf; . . . many of these parishes turneth forth their poor, yea, and their lusty labourers that will not work ... to beg, filch, and steal for their maintenance, so that the country is pitifully pestered with them." It was feared that they would overrun the country, and since they could not, as on the Continent, cross the border into another nation, it was proposed that they be "banished and conveyed to the New-found Land, the East and West Indies."
In 1630, the King established a commission to assure the rigorous observance of the Poor Laws. That same year, it published a series of "orders and directions"; it recommended prosecuting beggars and vagabonds, as well as "all those who live in idleness and will not work for reasonable wages or who spend what they have in taverns." They must be punished according to law and placed in houses of correction...
The meanings that are the most directly practical are the ones that are sacrificed: the flavor, aroma and touch are abolished to the profit of the delusions that permanently lead sight and hearing astray.
Quote:
Above all else, Michel Foucault believed in the freedom of people. He also realized that as individuals, we react to situations in different ways. His used his books as a vehicle to show the various factors that interact and collide in his analyzation of change and its effects. As a philosophical historian and an observer of human relations, his work focused on the dominant genealogical and archaeological knowledge systems and practices, tracking them through different historical eras, including the social contexts that were in place that permitted change - the nature of power in society. He wrote that power "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives" Foucault 1980,30).
Along with other social theorists, Foucault believed that knowledge is always a form of power, but he took it a step further and told us that knowledge can be gained from power; producing it, not preventing it. Through observation, new knowledge is produced. In his view, knowledge is forever connected to power, and often wrote them in this way: power/knowledge. Foucault's theory states that knowledge is power:
Knowledge linked to power, not only assumes the authority of 'the truth' but has the power to make itself true. All knowledge, once applied in the real world, has effects, and in that sense at least, 'becomes true.' Knowledge, once used to regulate the conduct of others, entails constraint, regulation and the disciplining of practice. Thus, 'there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time, power relations(Foucault 1977,27).
For him, power exists everywhere and comes from everywhere; it was a key concept because it acts as a type of relation between people, a complex form of strategy, with the ability to secretly shape another's behaviour. Foucault did not view the effects of power negatively. For him, power didn't exclude, repress, censor, mask, and conceal. Foucault saw it as a producer of reality: "it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth" (Foucault 1977,194). The importance for him always lay in the effect that power has on entire networks, practices, the world around us, and how our behaviour can be affected, not power itself.
One of the techniques/regulatory modes of power/knowledge that Foucault cited was the Panopticon, an architectural design put forth by Jeremy Bentham in the mid-19th Century for prisons, insane asylums, schools, hospitals, and factories. Instead of using violent methods, such as torture, and placing prisoners in dungeons that were used for centuries in monarchial states around the world, the progressive modern democratic state needed a different sort of system to regulate its citizens.
The Panopticon offered a powerful and sophisticated internalized coercion, which was achieved through the constant observation of prisoners, each separated from the other, allowing no interaction, no communication. This modern structure would allow guards to continually see inside each cell from their vantage point in a high central tower, unseen by the prisoners. Constant observation acted as a control mechanism; a consciousness of constant surveillance is internalized.
The Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed Foucault to explore the relationship between 1.) systems of social control and people in a disciplinary situation and, 2.) the power-knowledge concept. In his view, power and knowledge comes from observing others. It marked the transition to a disciplinary power, with every movement supervised and all events recorded.
The result of this surveillance is acceptance of regulations and docility - a normalization of sorts, stemming from the threat of discipline. Suitable behaviour is achieved not through total surveillance, but by panoptic discipline and inducing a population to conform by the internalization of this reality. The actions of the observer are based upon this monitoring and the behaviours he sees exhibited; the more one observes, the more powerful one becomes. The power comes from the knowledge the observer has accumulated from his observations of actions in a circular fashion, with knowledge and power reinforcing each other. Foucault says that "by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase in power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process" (Foucault 1977).
For Foucault, the real danger was not necessarily that individuals are repressed by the social order but that they are "carefully fabricated in it", and because there is a penetration of power into the behaviour of individuals. Power becomes more efficient through the mechanisms of observation, with knowledge following suit, always in search of "new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which power is exercised" (Foucault 1977)
When only certain people or groups of people control knowledge, oppression is a possibility. We need to find out who is recording our actions. At least then we will know who has power and who doesn't.
But what happens to all the knowledge that is collected through mechanisms of power? Isn't that the most important question? Foucault painted us a picture but left it up to us to create a process for resistance, and to figure out how to resolve conflicts ourselves. He gave us instruments of analysis, but offered no weapons.
~~~
Where can we draw the line between security and freedom, especially when modern surveillance technology is increasingly used in urban public spaces to control or modify behaviour, tracking people who aren't incarcerated, but mobile and innocently going about their business? Who determines what our rights are? Can we make the rules together?
Can we mobilize counter-power to form a resistance against the pervasiveness of an increasingly intrusive electronic society that is trying to manage the information it is tracking and collecting? Can we wage our own battles and develop some strategies to help us retain a semblance of individual anonymity and privacy? Can we develop our own system of power/knowledge as a form of resistance? Or should we just surrender to it? Surrender to the unseen power that endeavours to control us from afar? Or should we continue to adapt and submissively, quietly accept the prevailing philosophy of an increasingly monitored society? Or should we try to overcome?
If power systems are already immersed in society, does smart mob technology offer any real opportunities for significant counter-power? Should we even bother to hope that we can change the world? Who or what should we develop a resistance against, if we want to see real change? Foucault says it is better to forget the State in our struggle against power, and instead, concentrate on local struggles. Are recent street protests against globalization a good point of departure? Can we really expect that the right thing will be done just because? Can local cooperation and resistance make a difference globally?
Can smart mobs help by allowing us to organize even more appropriate and more mobilized counter-power protests, and offer a more sophisticated avenue for defending democratic liberties and personal rights? It may be possible that coordination and cooperation, brought about by smart mob technologies, will help us to acquire new forms of social power by organizing just in time and just in place. Perhaps the real power of smart mob technologies lies in their ability to act as agents of change; one group at a time, one place at a time. www.moyak.com/papers/michel-foucault-power.html
The meanings that are the most directly practical are the ones that are sacrificed: the flavor, aroma and touch are abolished to the profit of the delusions that permanently lead sight and hearing astray.
Education was provided for the children,[34] but workhouse teachers were a particular problem. Poorly paid, without any formal training, and facing large classes of unruly children with little or no interest in their lessons, few stayed in the job for more than a few months.[53] In an effort to force workhouses to offer at least a basic level of education legislation was passed in 1845 requiring that all pauper apprentices should be able to read and sign their own indenture papers.[54] A training college for workhouse teachers was set up at Kneller Hall in Twickenham during the 1840s, but it closed in the 1850s.[55]
Some children were trained in skills valuable to the area. In Shrewsbury, the boys were placed in the workhouse's workshop, while girls were tasked with spinning, making gloves and other jobs "suited to their sex, their ages and abilities". At St Martin in the Fields, children were trained in spinning flax, picking hair and carding wool, before being placed as apprentices. Workhouses also had links with local industry; in Nottingham, children employed in a cotton mill earned about £60 a year for the workhouse. Some parishes advertised for apprenticeships, and were willing to pay any employer prepared to offer them. Such agreements were preferable to supporting children in the workhouse: apprenticed children were not subject to inspection by justices, thereby lowering the chance of punishment for neglect; and apprenticeships were viewed as a better long-term method of teaching skills to children who might otherwise be uninterested in work. Supporting an apprenticed child was also considerably cheaper than the workhouse or outdoor relief.[56] Children often had no say in the matter, which could be arranged without the permission or knowledge of their parents.[34] The supply of labour from workhouse to factory, which remained popular until the 1830s, was sometimes viewed as a form of transportation. While getting parish apprentices from Clerkenwell, Samuel Oldknow's agent reported how some parents came "crying to beg they may have their Children out again". Historian Arthur Redford suggests that the poor may have once shunned factories as "an insidious sort of workhouse".[57]
Discipline was strictly enforced in the workhouse; for minor offences such as swearing or feigning sickness the "disorderly" could have their diet restricted for up to 48 hours. For more serious offences such as insubordination or violent behaviour the "refractory" could be confined for up to 24 hours, and might also have their diet restricted. Girls were punished in the same way as adults, but boys under the age of 14 could be beaten with "a rod or other instrument, such as may have been approved of by the Guardians". The persistently refractory, or anyone bringing "spirituous or fermented liquor" into the workhouse, could be taken before a Justice of the Peace and even jailed.[58] All punishments handed out were recorded in a punishment book, which was examined regularly by the workhouse guardians.[54]
Some Poor Law authorities hoped to run workhouses at a profit by utilising the free labour of their inmates, who generally lacked the skills or motivation to compete in the open market. Most were employed on tasks such as breaking stones, bone crushing to produce fertilizer, or picking oakum using a large metal nail known as a spike, perhaps the origin of the workhouse's nickname.
Life in a workhouse was intended to be harsh, to deter the able-bodied poor and to ensure that only the truly destitute would apply. But in areas such as the provision of free medical care and education for children, neither of which was available to the poor in England living outside workhouses until the early 20th century, workhouse inmates were advantaged over the general population, a dilemma that the Poor Law authorities never managed to reconcile.
As the 19th century wore on workhouses increasingly became refuges for the elderly, infirm and sick rather than the able-bodied poor, and in 1929 legislation was passed to allow local authorities to take over workhouse infirmaries as municipal hospitals. Although workhouses were formally abolished by the same legislation in 1930, many continued under their new appellation of Public Assistance Institutions under the control of local authorities. It was not until the National Assistance Act of 1948 that the last vestiges of the Poor Law disappeared, and with them the workhouses.
A policy the current government seems determined to reverse.
In 1550 Parliament passed a law stating that every parish had to build a workhouse for the poor. Edward VI set an example by giving permission for Bridewell Palace in London to be used as a workhouse. In exchange for food and shelter, the people who lived in the workhouse worked without wages. If people without work refused to go to the workhouse they were to be treated as vagabonds.
To pay for these workhouses, vicars were given permission to ask everyone in the parish to give money. If people refused, the vicar had to report them to his bishop. Workhouses did not solve the problem. It has been estimated that in 1570 about 10% of the population were still wandering around the country looking for work.
In 1576 a new Poor Law was introduced. Each parish had to keep a store of "wool, hemp, flax, iron or other stuff that was to be handed out to the unemployed. In exchange for the goods that they produced, the parish gave them money. In this way, the poor could continue living in their own homes. This new law also introduced fines for those who refused to pay money to help the poor.
This was followed in 1601 by another Poor Law. Workhouses now had to be provided for people who were too old or ill to work. People who refused to contribute money to help the poor could now be sent to prison.
(4) Letter sent by the citizens of London to Edward VI (1553)
It was obvious to all men that beggars and thieves were everywhere. And we found the cause was that they were idle; and the cure must be to make them work... by providing work ourselves, so that the strong and sturdy vagabond may be made to earn his living. For this we need a house of work... And so, we ask for the king's house of Bridewell.
(5) Law passed by Parliament in 1576.
So that youth may be accustomed and brought up in labour and work, and so they do not grow to be idle rogues... it is ordered... that in every city and town within this realm a large stock of wool, hemp, flax, iron... shall be provided.
(6) Report on a survey carried out in Norwich in 1571.
Many of the citizens were annoyed that the city was so full with poor people, both men women and children, to the number of 2,300 persons, who went from door to door begging, pretending they wanted work, but did very little.
(7) Law passed by Parliament in 1597.
Every vagabond or beggar... shall be stripped naked from the middle upwards and publicly whipped until his or her body be bloody, and forth with sent to the parish where he was born... If any vagabond or beggar return again, he shall suffer death by hanging.
Sorry for the copy pasta, trying to collect some sources
Charlotte Hodgman talks to Peter Higginbotham about British workhouses, and visits ten locations linked with the provision of relief to Britain’s poor
For many, the word ‘workhouse’ conjures up the image of an orphaned Oliver Twist begging for food from a cruel master. The reality, however, was somewhat different, and Britain’s system of poor relief arguably saved thousands of people from starvation over the course of its 300-year history.
The provision of state-provided poor relief was crystallised in the 1601 Poor Relief Act, which gave parish officials the legal ability to collect money from rate payers to spend on poor relief for the sick, elderly and infirm – the ‘deserving’ poor. Labelled ‘out relief’, handouts usually took the form of bread, clothing, fuel or money.
Though they were termed ‘workhouses’ from the 1620s, the early institutions that provided poor relief were, more often than not, non-residential, offering handouts in return for work.
Much like today’s taxpayers, those funding poor relief were anxious to see their money well spent, wishing to deter those capable of working from claiming assistance. By the end of the 17th century, providing care under one roof was widely regarded as the most effective way of saving money and, as a result, the early 1700s saw a flurry of workhouses opening.
Yet workhouses only really became part of Britain’s social landscape after 1723, when Sir Edward Knatchbull’s Workhouse Test Act won parliamentary approval. The act embodied the principle that the prospect of the workhouse should act as a deterrent and that relief should only be available to those desperate enough to accept its regime. Its impact on the provision of poor relief was dramatic: by the 1770s the number of parish workhouses in England and Wales had soared to around 2,000.
Conditions during the early 19th century, though, meant the government was forced to reassess the way it helped the most impoverished members of society. The return of unemployed or injured servicemen from the Napoleonic Wars saw the national poor relief bill quadruple between 1795 and 1815, rising from £2 million to £8 million. To make matters worse, new Corn Laws restricted grain imports and pushed up the cost of bread.
The government’s response was to pass a Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, based on the recommendation of a royal commission. The new system was still funded by rate payers, but was now administered by unions – groupings of parishes – presided over by a locally elected Board of Guardians. Each union was responsible for providing a central workhouse for its member parishes, and out relief was abolished except in special cases. For the able-bodied poor, it was the workhouse or nothing.
“Entering the workhouse was not simply a matter of turning up at the gate,” says Peter Higginbotham, author of The Workhouse Cookbook. “The poor would first meet with a relieving officer who toured the union on a regular basis. In most cases they would be ‘offered the house’ and given a ticket of admission. The family would then make its way to the workhouse where their clothes were put into storage, and they would be issued with a uniform, given a bath and subjected to a medical examination.”
Men and women were separated, as were the able-bodied and infirm. Those who were able to work did so for their bed and board. Women took on domestic chores such as cooking, laundry and sewing, while men performed physical labour, usually stone breaking, oakum picking or bone crushing. Conditions were basic: parents and children were permitted to meet briefly on a daily basis, or on Sundays. Inmates ate simple fare in a large communal dining hall, and were compelled to take regular, supervised baths.
Until 1860, medical provision in the workhouses was often dire, with nursing duties generally performed by elderly female inmates, many of whom could not read, were hard of hearing, visually impaired, and fond of a drink. Medical wards were frequently cramped and poorly ventilated but, following a sustained campaign led by the medical profession during the 1860s, the government passed the Metropolitan Poor Act, forcing London’s workhouses to run separate infirmaries, preferably on separate sites. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Asylums Board (established in 1867) provided care for fever cases that would ordinarily have ended up in the infirmaries. By the 1880s, the unions widely employed trained nurses, and the poor could increasingly visit workhouse infirmaries for treatment without having to formally enter the institution.
Another problem faced by unions was the homeless poor. The 1834 act made no provision for vagrants, and workhouses were only allowed to serve people residing permanently in the area of the union. The authorities’ solution to this problem was, during the 1840s, to introduce casual blocks, where the homeless could stay for one night per 30-day period. In the 1880s these rules changed, and vagrants could stay two nights, perform one day’s work and be released at dawn on the third day.
Treatment of vagrants varied, but generally they were deemed lower class citizens and subjected to harsher treatment than the ‘deserving’ poor. The mid-19th century saw many so-called ‘social explorers’ and journalists disguise themselves as vagrants and admit themselves to casual wards to experience this treatment for themselves. One of the best-
known of these was James Greenwood, who published A Night in a Workhouse in the
Pall Mall Gazette, a piece that generated a huge amount of public interest.
Historians are still debating when exactly the workhouse system came to an end. Some
date its demise to 1930 when the Board of Guardians system was abolished and many workhouses were redesignated as Public Assistance Institutions, becoming the responsibility of local councils. Others date it to 1948 and the introduction of the National Health Service, when many former workhouse buildings were turned into public hospitals, many of which still survive today.
The EPA (environmental protection agency) and OSHA took air samples in the days following September 11th, they reported that they found no excessive levels of asbestos contrary to other findings....
With the anniversary of September 11th literally just around the corner, unanswered questions still remain for families who lost loved ones during the tragic event, as well as from families...
In 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review a series of lower court rulings that restrict the United States Navy's use of sonar in submarine detection training exercises off...
Whether its 50 cents or five dollars, your donations are appreciated and help keep this community site running so we can all continue to enjoy using it.
This target is to meet our server cost for one year, June 2020 - May 2021,
in USD.
No one is obliged to donate, please only donate what you can afford. Even the smallest amount helps. Being an active member is a positive contribution. Thank You.
