Detectives

Abstract

For the Reformers and their claims to professional authority, standardized rules would only be effective if their enforcement were centralized, passing from the part-time responsibility of inexpert local magistrates to national bureaucracies, such as the Commissioners in Lunacy, the Prison Commissioners, the Poor Law Guardians and the General Medical Council. But it was precisely this centralization that caused most resistance. Opposition to Reform derived not only from the reluctance of tax- and rate-payers to finance the ‘idle’ and the inertia of vested interests in the local power structures. The insistence on centralized control by a state bureaucracy continually threatened to compromise the philanthropic rhetoric of the Reformers by raising the spectre of the French-style ‘police’ so feared by the English. Yet, it seems to me, behind their rhetoric of humane concern, the principle of surveillance was absolutely central to the Reform project. Through their strategy of statistical reports, the philanthropic social researchers had already established the principle that mastery comes from a police of information: one finds out (dis-covers) by lifting the roof of the institutional or private space (de-tecting) and looking in (in-specting).