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Law, Order and Power in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

P. Rock
P. Rock*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics London, United Kingdom
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Extract

« Money … is the true Fuller's Earth for Reputations, there is not a Spot or a Stain but what it can take out. A rich Rogue nowa days is fit Company for any Gentleman ; and the World … hath not such a Contempt for R'oguery as you imagine». (Peachum [Jonathan Wild], The Beggar's Opera, Act. 1, Scene IX).

This paper will offer a highly schematic and focused explanation of a few features of communal and organised crime at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It will largely concentrate on the negotiated character of criminal and social order. I intend my argument to illuminate the effects of rudimentary policing and some special properties of moral status. That argument has been made possible by a deliberate arrangement of structural metaphors, an arrangement which can be justified only by principles of utility and parsimony. It does not pretend to be comprehensive. Neither is it designed to capture any essential truths about criminal phenomena. Raher, it has knowingly neglected much that would prove interesting. For instance, there is no full discussion of the ordering of moral beliefs, although those beliefs furnished vitally important recipes for political action. There is no attempt at developmental analysis recipes despite the enlightenment which would undoubtedly flow from an examination of the evolution of criminal processes. Mine will be a comparatively simple exercise in social statics, dwelling on the relationships between social distance, crime and the coercive capacity of the state. Such an exercise cannot assign logical or «causal» primacy to the individual phenomena which it describes. It must merely insist on the analytic interdependence of its parts.

Type
II. — Historical and Macro-Criminological Studies
Information
International Annals of Criminology , Volume 16 , Issue 1-2 , 1977 , pp. 233 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 International Society for Criminology

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References

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