History (Universalgeschichte)

The late 1920s saw a dramatic upsurge in popular concern about the abuse of police powers in Britain, the end result of a longer-term trend. Various aspects of policing were seen as worrying, but the most important concerned illegitimate forms of questioning. The phrase ‘the third degree’—imported from America—came to encapsulate this unease. Before the First World War, the terminology began to be used in British coverage of American crimes and their investigation, typically accompanied by disparaging commentary on American methods as well as the confident assertion of the superiority of British policing. The war-time growth in police powers and broader state regulation caused some to see an erosion in the ‘liberty of the subject’, and a series of scandals seemed to reveal serious problems with police procedure. The popularity of crime dramas featuring ‘third degree’ interrogations also shaped public images of the police. Scandals in 1928 generated enough outcry to force the calling of the Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure (1928-29). Even though few concrete procedural changes were undertaken, it appears to have successfully calmed worries about the police. Concerns about the police receded, not to reach a similar level until the late 1950s.

This article considers reader responses to newspaper coverage of a British murder case in 1928. Accused of the arsenic murder of her husband, Beatrice Pace became a fixture on the front pages of the British press. More than two hundred letters sent to her after her acquittal have survived in papers kept by her solicitor. Although far from a perfect source for gauging public opinion, the letters provide a rare and valuable glimpse into the range of reactions that media stories inspired in the past. Although it is clear that press coverage crucially influenced public attitudes, reactions to Pace were also highly individual and affected by readers’ personalities and previous experiences. On the other hand, there are obvious patterns in the responses, most notably related to gender. From their letters, it is apparent that many female readers identified with Pace, whether as women, as mothers or as fellow victims of domestic violence. Men’s reactions were motivated by respect, desire (sometimes in the form of marriage proposals) or business opportunities. Other themes apparent in the letters were shared across gender lines: most notably religion (including an emphasis on divine vengeance), spiritualism and the desire to make contact with a famous figure.

"‘Justice’ is a historical phenomenon: legal institutions and cultural attitudes (along with their various languages) vary across geography and time. At the same time, enduring elements of human psychology and recurring patterns in social structures provide continuities which allow the past to speak to contemporary issues. To understand the ‘experience of justice’, the historical tension between continuity and change and the many factors influencing the perceived boundaries of acceptable behaviour must be addressed. One approach involves examining specific experiences of victimisation, which is particularly important in the case of those who have traditionally been socially, legally and politically disadvantaged, such as women.

However, while it is primarily an admission of powerlessness, ‘victimhood’ – the active claiming of victim status – can also be a source of social power. Only ‘victims’, after all, are in the position to claim some form of justice, whether retributive or restorative. However, one of the main problems with gaining a historical perspective on female victims of domestic violence is that their voices have relatively rarely survived in the public record.

A valuable exception is the case of Beatrice Annie Pace. The wife of a Gloucestershire quarryman and sheep farmer, she was tried and acquitted for murdering her husband with arsenic in 1928. Extensive pre-trial hearings had revealed the horrifying extent of the dead man’s physical and psychological brutality throughout eighteen-years of marriage. The dramatic twists and unexpected developments in the case were eagerly picked up by the voracious newspaper media, making the trial a sensation. ‘Mrs. Pace’, as she was known, achieved celebrity status; no longer simply an individual, she also became a popular and sympathetic media persona.

This chapter explores the issue of justice by looking at the languages surrounding the Pace case. While legal issues raised in the trial (such as the accused’s treatment by the police and coroner’s jury) even led to questions being asked in Parliament, Pace was not only talked about but also received the rare opportunity to present her own version of events to the public which had so eagerly supported her. Following her acquittal, she sold her story to a tabloid, and the married ‘martyrdom’ which she revealed in a serialised memoir riveted newspaper readers across Britain. In this context, she had a great deal to say about her experience of abuse, the nature of married life and her treatment by the British legal system. The result is an invaluable resource for examining not only how one woman came to grips with her experience but also to compare her own views with those of other observers of the case. For some, Pace’s suffering was evidence of serious shortcomings in British society and law. Pace’s own commentary is both more personal and, ultimately, more ambiguous about the meaning of her victimisation and ultimate vindication. Thus, this case allows a unique, historically aware consideration of the complicated nature of the ways in which one woman created justice and resisted injustice through one of the only vehicles available to her: language.
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Despite lively debates in many related fields about whether biological and evolutionary approaches can contribute to social and cultural investigations of human behaviour, historians have rarely confronted this issue directly. The historiography of violence is a partial exception, but there has been relatively little interdisciplinary exchange on topics central to both historical and natural-science analyses. Nevertheless, historians of violence have relied upon two concepts—‘social roles’ and ‘social construction’—that have been subject to constructive critique and revision from Darwinian perspectives. This article concludes by arguing that greater incorporation of evolutionary psychological perspectives and approaches into social and cultural analyses of violence (whether historical or contemporary) has much to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of physical aggression.

Late 1920s Britain saw dramatic press and political debates resulting from a series of police scandals involving questionable arrests, illegitimate interrogation methods and corruption. Although historians have downplayed the impact of politics on inter-war criminal justice, they played an important role in these debates: the Labour Party and the left-wing press pushed for in-depth inquires into and legal reforms of police powers while conservatives tended to defend the police and resist substantial changes. Despite the debates’ sensational nature (which shed light on significant cultural trends in the 1920s) they had little impact on police procedure.

"Much of J. G. Ballard’s writing involves variations on a recurrent theme: the interaction between twentieth-century society and enduring human psychological drives. Impulsivity, self-control and aggression are central topics for him. Thus, it is curious that his fiction has yet to be examined in light of a theory with similar interests that has greatly influenced the historical and social analysis of violence: Norbert Elias’s ‘civilising process’. This paper examines how Ballard dramatises crises and tensions within the ‘civilising’ factors Elias identified.

Elias saw the long-term growth of self-control as a central feature of increasingly complex societies, driven by economic and social interdependence, centralised monopolisation of legitimate force and increasing social pressure to restrain sexual and aggressive impulses. Historians of violence have used this theory in explaining the centuries-long decline in everyday interpersonal violence in Western Europe; however, it is far from a naïve notion of historical progress.

Indeed, the novels High-Rise and Super-Cannes highlight two factors Elias recognised about the civilising process: its potential fragility and tendency toward creating psychological dissatisfaction. High-Rise stages a ‘de-civilising process’: internal and external interdependencies are disrupted, the monopoly of force breaks down and psychological self-restraint is relaxed. The sprawling business park in Super-Cannes allows Ballard to explore a more chronic and subtle civilisational tension. As Elias noted, the ‘quest for excitement in unexciting societies’ leads to the ‘controlled decontrolling of emotional controls’ in contexts such as sport, an analysis I extend to the violent ‘games’ and ‘controlled and supervised madness’ featured in the novel."

Although Oswald Spengler’s ideas fascinated some British intellectuals in the inter-war period, there have been suggestions that his approach remained on the margins of British thinking about history and about the fate of ‘the West’ (or of ‘Europe’). So far, however, there has been no attempt to systematically consider how Spengler was popularly discussed in Britain in the two decades after his magnum opus, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) in 1918 and 1922. As signalled in my title, I focus here on press sources. These consist of the Conservative- leaning papers The Times, the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror, the Observer and the Scotsman, and the ‘liberal’ leaning Manchester Guardian and Economist. A range of provincial papers have also been consulted via the British Newspapers Online project. The intellectual/cultural press – the Times Literary Supplement (TLS)and the weekly BBC magazine The Listener (which began in 1929 and reprinted many radio talks) – have likewise been consulted in their digitised forms, as have three British fascist newspapers, Action, The Fascist Week and The Blackshirt. The Nation and the Fabian New Statesman offer an intellectual and left-wing perspective. While not comprehensive these sources do offer a reasonably representative cross section of commentary about Spengler’s ideas.

Even prior to the translation of the first volume of Untergang des Abendlandes into English (1926), both its title and the name Spengler were well known in Britain; reviewers were impressed with the boldness of Spengler’s approach, even if remaining convinced by its specifics. An emphasis was put on the gloomy, even pessimistic, qualities of what was already being called ‘Spenglerism’. However, broader engagement in Britain with Spengler first got going in 1926. The overall pattern was one of respect for Spengler’s ingenuity combined with scepticism about his ‘morphology’ of history. By the time the translation of volume two appeared in English in late 1928 opinions seem to have subtly hardened against key elements of Spengler’s argument: the organic analogy of ‘Cultures’, the insistence on their separateness and the claim that their destinies could be predicted.

However, there were other factors and associations that shaped British responses to Spengler’s thought that went beyond specifically methodological doubts. These can be discussed under the headings of ‘erudition’, ‘pessimism’, ‘Germanness’ and ‘politics’. Taken together, these elements help to explain the relatively minor inroads Spenglerian thought made in Britain in the inter-war period, even if there were individual commentators who found themselves impressed – or even enthusiastic – about it. For example, Germanness as such would not have been a hindrance to Spengler’s popularity; however, Spengler’s philosophy (and perhaps even more his politics) ran against the grain of those aspects of Weimar Germany – ‘modernity’, youthfulness, innovation and experimentation – that appealed to British intellectuals and academics in this period.

Thus hindered, Spengler’s ideas were hobbled in the face of stiff competition from other thinkers who were also presenting broad, universal histories and considering the future of Western (or European) civilisation, particularly H. G. Wells and Arnold J. Toynbee. There was, in addition, a relative lack of political resonance for Spengler’s ideas – his advocacy of ‘Prussianism’, German nationalism and ‘Caesarism’ – in 1920s and 1930s Britain. In Britain, Spengler thus became a figure whose name was known by most, whose work was cited by many but whose analysis was actually advocated (and possibly even read) by a relative few.

While many questions remain about the precise balance of causes that lead to specific incidents of violence in particular places – and while definitively predicting individual behaviour remains elusive – there is no reason to see violence, in general, as a random, senseless or mysterious phenomenon. All human societies have been (and remain) well acquainted with interpersonal aggression; its prevalence certainly varies widely over space and time, but researchers are repeatedly confronted with evidence that the basic motivations for, and contexts of, the infliction of non-consensual interpersonal harm are universal. It is, in a manner of speaking, very much a part of what we are.

It is thus becoming increasingly clear that any effort to explain convincingly this mixture of change and continuity (or similarity and difference) will have to consider violence from an interdisciplinary perspective that involves ‘biology’ (i.e., the physiological bases of behaviour and the presence in all normal brains of emotional and cognitive capacities that encourage or restrain the use of interpersonal aggression), ‘society’ (the different constellations of interpersonal relationships that encourage or discourage violent predispositions) and ‘culture’ (the sets of meanings, codes and expectations related to violence that are passed on by non-biological means from one generation to another). In all three cases, making sense of violence means understanding history.

While most historians have tended to focus narrowly on particular times and places, some recent work in violence history has begun to consider much longer periods of time and to cross national borders. This expansion of the aims of violence history brings it increasingly into contact with sociological and psychological theories about the causes of violence. This paper will consider the consequences of this encounter, arguing that a combination of cultural, psychological and biological interpretations is required in order to ‘make sense’ of interpersonal aggression.

Due to violence’s cross-cultural and trans-historical importance in human societies and its contemporary significance as a locus of social fears, it has unsurprisingly been a key topic in research on the influence of innate biological factors on human psychology and behaviour. At the same time, especially since the 1980s, historians of crime have been focusing ever more attention on the topic of small-scale, ‘everyday’ violence, taking into account both its quantitative social history (e.g., analysing homicide and assault rates) and qualitative cultural history (e.g., reconstructing attitudes toward violence).

There are many points at which these two strands of inquiry – natural science and socio-cultural history – might usefully contribute to a unified analysis. However, there have so far been few efforts to consider what a natural science perspective on violence (in particular that offered by ‘evolutionary psychology’ would actually mean for historical understanding of a topic such as violence. The work that has been done in this direction has been promising, but has also revealed certain difficulties in integrating approaches. Finally, some historians have sought to position history (particularly cultural history) as a site of resistance to ‘biological’ analyses of behaviour. In this paper, I will discuss some key interdisciplinary efforts made so far and argue that there are useful ways that evolutionary psychology can assist our understanding of violence within historical time frames.

Although historians have (understandably) emphasised the ways that the popular media have presented criminals as a prominent social fear, there have been times in twentieth-century Britain during which crime-fighting has faced equally intense media criticism. The late 1920s saw a (now largely forgotten) popular concern about the potential abuse of police powers. The discourse of ‘civil liberties’ was not well developed; however, a series of scandals involving allegations of police harassment and miscarriages of justice drove media coverage, popular uproar and political debate.

Press coverage of these incidents stoked a widespread disquiet about the threats posed by alleged ‘third-degree’ police methods. Although political discussions about civil liberties and law reform were often dry and failed to arouse popular passions, several key cases in the late 1920s helped to provide a compelling focus for more abstract concerns: in this way, the press enabled important political issues to be mediated via dramatic personal stories. The issue of ‘third degree’ methods tied specific cases together in a coherent narrative and generated public concerns that connected revelations about the behaviour of police officers toward particular suspects or witnesses. Readers were invited to identify with the presumed victims of overbearing police powers, and relatively intangible notions about freedom and the acceptable boundaries of state power were expressed in a far more immediate and directly relevant way.

This paper will analyse how fears about the police were transmitted and discussed in the popular press, focusing on case studies from the late 1920s and giving particular attention to the presentation of gender, the impact of political allegiances and the efforts by the police to respond to press criticism. In my talk, I will also make use of images, attending to the important role of photography and newspaper layout in selling stories to the public.

This talk derives from my preliminary work on a project examining a Christian intellectual network organised primarily by the Anglican Church in the 1930s and 1940s to respond to the European crises of that era. Here, I focus on how a specific concept developed within continental sociology influenced a part of this network which was otherwise firmly within the cultural world of anglo-American Christianity. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Hungarian-born sociologist Karl Mannheim lost his professorship in Frankfurt and relocated to London. There, he encountered and befriended a leading figure in the British missionary and ecumenical movements, Joseph Oldham. Mannheim became a crucial member of Oldham's high-powered discussion group called 'the Moot', and a part of his analysis of the modern state, which he called 'planning for freedom' had a creat influence on this group. Oldham himself published a Christian gloss on Mannheim's ideas in his war-time periodical, The Christian Newsletter.

Um die komplexe und widersprüchliche Beziehung zwischen Religion und Kapitalismus zu verstehen ist es unerlässlich, eine historische Perspektive einzunehmen. „Die“ religiöse Perspektive auf den Kapitalismus hat es nie gegeben, da jedes Zeitalter ein breites Spektrum religiöser Denkweisen über die Frage sozialer und wirtschaftlicher Organisation hervorbringt, die unterschiedliche Konflikt- und Akkommodationskonstellationen mit der kapitalistischen Ordnung bilden. Mal waren diese Denkweisen wohlwollender, mal kritischer gegenüber den sozialen und moralischen Einflüssen kapitalistischer Wirtschaftsformen. 

Momente des gesellschaftlichen Umbruchs heben die Spannungen zwischen verschiedenen Ordnungskonzepten, die in stabileren Zeiten oft leichter überbrückbar (oder übersehbar) sind, hervor. Von besonderem Interesse im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert sind gesellschaftliche Umbruchserlebnisse durch die im Kapitalismus inhärenten Wirtschaftskrisen. Solche Krisen (und ihre sozialen und politischen Konsequenzen) stellten bestehende Ordnungsverständnisse infrage und förderten das Interesse an alternativen Formen gesellschaftlicher Organisation. Dies manifestierte sich oft als Kapitalismuskritik. Für religiöse Kapitalismuskritiker besteht hierbei jedoch die Herausforderung, dass sie in der Regel nicht nur mit dem Kapitalismus, sondern auch mit anderen (oft betont säkularen) Formen der Kapitalismuskritik in Konflikt stehen.
Anhand exemplarischer Beispiele werden in diesem Vortrag Aspekte der christlichen Kapitalismuskritik Großbritanniens in den 1930er Jahren analysiert, um Erkenntnisse über  dieses komplexe religiös-säkulare Spannungsfeld zu liefern. Obwohl Großbritannien wie andere europäische Länder von der Weltwirtschaftskrise schwer getroffen wurde, stellte sie die Legitimität des britischen Staates nicht grundlegend in Frage und, anders als einige andere europäische Länder der Zwischenkriegszeit, behielt Großbritannien eine lebendige und weitgehend freie Öffentlichkeit in der über Reformen oder gar eine Neuordnung der Gesellschaft offen debattiert wurde. Um den Ursprung und die Lösung der globalen Wirtschaftskrise, die zentrale Themen in den intensiv geführten öffentlichen Debatten darstellten, zu verstehen, war eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der kapitalistischen Grundordnung der Gesellschaft vonnöten.

Christliche Denker nahmen aktiv an solchen Debatten teil. Viele führende Figuren aus diesem intellektuellen Milieu waren aufgrund einer allgemeinen linksgerichteten Entwicklungstendenz des britischen christlichen Glaubens in der Zwischenkriegszeit (vor allem in seiner anglikanischen Ausprägung) mehr oder minder kritisch gegenüber dem Kapitalismus eingestellt. Hierbei waren sie aber gezwungen, sich nicht nur mit dem Kapitalismus an sich zu beschäftigen, sondern auch mit einer in dieser Zeit erfolgreichen alternativen Strömung der Kapitalismuskritik: dem Marxismus. Während viele Christen sich vehement von dieser ausdrücklich atheistischen Ideologie distanzierten, versuchten andere, die Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen ihrem Glauben und kommunistischer Wirtschaftskritik zu verstehen. Argumentiert wurde sogar, dass Marxismus und Christlicher Glauben auf unterschiedlicher Weise zu vereinbaren sind. Sammelbände wie Christianity and the Crisis (1933) oder Christianity and the Social Revolution (1935) sowie Tagungen wie die „Church, Community and State“ Konferenz in Oxford (1937) (deren Bericht im selben Jahr als The Churches Survey Their Task veröffentlicht wurde) waren wichtige Foren für diesen religiös-säkularen Dialog, dessen Hauptthemen in diesem Vortrag identifiziert und analysiert werden. Dass dieses Thema nicht nur von historischem Interesse ist, sondern ein grundlegendes Spannungsfeld adressiert, zeigt der Titel eines vom amtierenden Erzbischof von Canterbury verfassten Artikels über die aktuelle Finanzkrise: „Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism.“ (Rowan Williams, Spectator, 24.9.2008).

In Britain, recent years have seen increasing criticism of police ineffectiveness, high-profile incidents of vigilantism and interest in alternatives to traditional policing.  In light of these trends, this article first considers nineteenth-century community “self-policing,” which ordered social relations according to a more diffuse distribution of acceptable violence.  Second, it addresses the expansion of the state monopoly on violence and its accompanying expectation of more elaborate individual self-control, a “policing of the self.” Third, it suggests ways that the civilizing process can, in certain contexts, generate tensions if this “civilizing bargain”—exchanging self-policing for state protection—fails to meet community expectations.

In this essay, I examine the public discourse about Oswald Spengler's ideas in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the »cultural morphology« he developed in his two-volume work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (translated into English in the second half of the 1920s as Decline of the West). Previous work has suggested that Spengler’s work was greeted in Britain, overall, with measured scepticism, although there were some individual enthusiasts. Beyond such  generalisations, however, there has so far been no systematic analysis of Spengler's British public reception in the two decades following the publication of Der Untergang des Abendlandes. As signalled in my title, I focus on press sources. These provide insight into three questions: how were Spengler's ideas described? With what other concepts or characteristics were they associated? How were patterns in their reception related to the cultural and political context of inter-war Britain? There was a focus across the period on what can be labelled Spengler's »organicism«, »relativism« and »determinism«. Moreover, Spengler's reception was also shaped by topics that were not specifically methodological: his erudition, pessimism, Germanness, advocacy of »Prussianism« and associations with Nazism.

Although studying the history of violence invites a broad methodological and topical diversity, three issues have predominated: the relationship between quantitative and qualitative methods, the notion of a “civilizing process,” and the topic of gender. As “violence” refers to physical acts as well as to cultural understandings of those acts, coming to terms with its history has meant fusing quantitative, social-history emphases on social structure and behavior with qualitative, cultural approaches to understanding narrative and discourse. There is now a consensus that, over the long term, rates of interpersonal violence declined between the late Middle Ages and the middle of the twentieth century; nonetheless, over the same period violence played an ever more prominent role among people's social fears. Building upon these findings, some historians of violence assert that a “civilizing process”– involving new patterns of social interaction and psychological restraint – has affected both the social reality and cultural construction of violence. In these and other approaches, gender has emerged as the most prominent of a variety of central concerns, although its specific role in shaping the cultures and patterns of violence remains unclear and debated.