The Decline of Social Control and the Rise of Vocabularies of Struggle

Abstract

Argues that, far from being a neutral academic concept, the term social control is best understood as intimately linked to the social democratic political movement in the US; if it is to be useful for analyzing contemporary society, it must be reworked before it can rise above its historical specificity. The political project out of which the term arose is described as one that entailed reflexive communication, democratic discourse, & participation, & implied the perpetuation of capitalism, the power of the state, & the ubiquity of heterogeneity. Although critiques of the term beginning in the late 1960s were right to focus on its lack of historical specificity, its tendency to be centralized in the state, & the implications of this fact for minority groups, they are criticized for reducing the term to its crudest features. A notion of social control that recovers the richness of its original meaning is favored so as to recover the power of self-regulation that was lost at the hands of these radical critiques. D. M. Smith