Book Description
The Tenth to the Thirteenth centuries in Europe saw the appearance of popular heresy and the establishment of the inquisition; expropriation and mass murder of Jews; the foundation of leper hospitals in large numbers and the propagation of elaborate measures to segregate lepers from the healthy. These have traditionally been seen as distinct and separate developments, and explained in terms of the problems which their victims presented to medieval society. In this stimulating book Robert Moore argues that the coincidences in the treatment of these and other minority groups cannot be explained independently, and that all are part of a pattern of persecution which now appeared for the first time to make Europe become, as it has remained, a persecuting society.
Customer Reviews:
Dangerous and skewed volume.......2003-02-19
R.I. Moore has done a great disservice to historians and historiography with this volume. He has made several broad assumptions regarding persecution, marginalizing of groups, and even the nature of illness. On top of this he places late 20th century nurban expectations upon an earlier society.
Moore is on fairly safe ground when he speaks of the marginalization of Jews during the Middle Ages -- this is well documented -- but he overstates his case. His assertation that this practice only started in the Middle Ages is, however, rather off the mark. Certainly we can read Roman authors (and edicts) which show active persecution of Jews. But Moore tells us that it was only during the Middle Ages that organized persecution be minorities truly began; I am sure this is a great comfort of Christians persecuted since the 1st century A.D. within the confines of the Roman Empire.
When he turns to lepers he is on terribly dangerous ground and, indeed, utterly misinterprets evidence laid before his eyes. As Moore points out there have been many studies that show that what was called "leprosy" during the Middle Ages was probably a wide range of both related and non-related illnesses, so we cannot equate it exactly with the modern disease; however it must also be remembered that germ theory did not exists until the 19th century. What Moore tells us is that the creation of leper colonies during the Middle Ages is the moral equivalent to concentration camps in the 20th century. Here are nobles, particularly noble women, who are forcing these "lepers" to live apart from society. Thus nobles decide who is a leper and segregate them from society. QED, a persecuting society. Instead, from a medieval point of view, these nobles were providing a chance at life for individuals who were likely to die on their own because they had been shunned by their own families, due to some horrible, disfiguring disease. What was in actuallity an example of good works and aid to one's fellow man is twisted by Moore into proto-Nazism.
Moore is a man who wants to answer a question -- why is their racism and when did it begin? The problem is that by overstating his case and trying to suggest that only one area (Europe) at only one time (the 9th-12th centuries) are responsible for this phenomenon worldwide. This, sadly, is not true. People have been marginalized for their skin colour, their faith, their way of dress, or any of a host of other reasons practically since human beings emerged and certainly it is, again sadly, a world-wide phenomenon. It would have been comforting to stick this label, but in doing so Moore is, in effect, guilty of exactly the same crime that he wishes to place on others -- marginaliztion of a group of people because they do not fit to his personal beliefs and standards. Much as there was evil in medieval Europe, it is far from responsible for all the sins of the world.
useful overview, interesting and topical subject.......2002-08-19
Since i started to study European (Medieval and Renaissance) history, I got the distinct impression that intolerance, a fear of the other, although a human universal throughout world history, plays a particularly important role in European history. Prof. Moore gives a good overview or pulling together various sources on how this phenonemon reared its ugly head again, and especially toward what were deemed new heretical movements in Europe from the 11/12th century onward, after relative calm son that front since the 7th century or so.
Although he does not really offer altogether new insights or sources, which he himself freely admits, this is nevertheless an interesting and useful overview of the creation and treatment of various considered 'marginal' groups in society, such as heretics, lepers, Jews, homosexuals and prostitutes. He tries to explain why in this particular period heretical movements made their comeback, and why persecution started to become much more vigourous and vicious. It is an interesting question and he links it to a number of reasons such as the rise of the money economy that greatly upset existing social arrangements in that time. His main point however, and an interesting one, is that persecution did not necessarily reflect popular sentiment at all, but that to find cogent reasons one needs to look more to the persecutors rather than the persecuted. He states that persecution was the decision of princes and prelates for their own political reasons. This much reflects or coincides with Misha Glenny's observation on the persecutions in Balkan history that nearly each genocide has had the more or less active support of local governments. Also, the political use of disease is well documented elsewhere and so this did not add much new, but it was still good to read it here again.
The author does elaborate on this interesting conclusion, and it is indeed central to Moores' book, but I did miss a more specific or detailed discussion or explanation of why these princes and prelates indeed did think it to their political advantage to start perscution and build the elaborate machinery for this in these particular times. Another point that i would have liked to see discussed a bit more is whether these developments are uniquely European or could be found with as much roots in other societes in that time as well. For this the book is too short and leaves one wondering. Nevertheless, i do recommend the book as it deals succinctly with a very important subject that has obvious links with present Europe and elsewhere.
Exploring the rise of intolerance.......2000-05-28
This book is an insightful, if brief, examination of the how and why behind the rise of intolerance and persution in the mid to late middle ages. Lots of books are written about one of the specific topics or groups Moore analyzes (lepers, Jews, homosexuals, people considered religious heretics, etc.) but Moore connects these various expressions of persecution to the historical context and the factors encouraging intolerance at particular times of European culture. Unlike many authors, Moore unpacks and questions assumptions about the inevitability of religious persecution and the creation and persecution of so-called heretical religious beliefs and behavior.
Book Description
An informative look at a very difficult topic! The discretion, authority, and power granted the police to accomplish their mission offer multiple opportunities for deviance. This revised edition effectively organizes a large amount of material in order to provide students with a timely and comprehensive review of this disturbing dimension of police organizations. The authors' analysis of deviance as the product of the organization of the occupation, the expectations of society, and the perceptions and interpretations of the role of the police are compellingly presented. A fascinating portrait of the social and organizational factors of the police working environment emerges, providing students with a broad framework for assessing the police culture and the many forms of police deviance.
Customer Reviews:
Feminist look at family violence.......2004-11-16
"Child abuse is not usually a product of unilateral brutality but of familial power struggles, shaped by extrafamilial social factors and historical change," argues Linda Gordon in "Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence." Those social and historical factors, the author contends, changed over time. So too did those activities that constituted abuse. One could substitute "wife beating," "child neglect," and "incest" in the place of child abuse in this sentence. Through a variety of sources--legal documents, social workers' case histories, and relief agency registers--Gordon examines how conceptions of family violence changed in Boston between 1880 and 1960, and why they changed. Her subjects are not upperclass families and individuals, but the lowest strata of Boston society. They are the Irish and Italian immigrants, the unemployed or underemployed, and the transient. To understand Gordon's analysis of family violence, it is important to understand feminism, male domination of the family, and gender roles.
The author argues that the one thing that changed slowly during the period was how society and social workers viewed the family, a view too often adopted by writers on the subject. Historians, she argues, tend to think of the family as a seamless unit headed by the breadwinning father. The mother and children each have their own roles to fulfill within the unit, but all activity and decision flows from the male head of the family. Gordon scoffs at this generalization, claiming that the family is not a seamless unit but an agglomeration of individuals with aspirations that often conflict. The failure of social workers in Boston to alleviate child abuse, child neglect, wife beating, and incest stemmed from their overemphasis on "stresses" and failure to acknowledge this underlying power structure of the family. These stresses--extreme poverty, alcoholism, and unemployment--contributed to outlandish behavior. But the inability of women to take independent action to combat the problems facing their families allowed bad behavior to flourish. Social workers, reflecting the beliefs of society, attempted to rebuild patriarchal families at the expense of female independence.
The pressure put on single mothers to reconstruct the patriarchal family through remarriage or reconciliation with abusive husbands, along with a similar pressures placed on married women to maintain a household even in the face of extreme abuse, exacerbated family violence. A vicious cycle emerged concerning women caught up in abusive families. For single mothers, they had to work for a living if they wished to care for their children and maintain a home. But in doing so, they left their children unattended or in the care of others. Social workers saw female employment as a potential form of child neglect and as a violation of patriarchy that required a variety of responses, from court actions to removing the children from the household. Women could survive through only two methods: quit working or get their man back in the house. Gordon argues that only during times when a strong feminist movement emerged did society begin to view family violence in its proper context, as a problem of power and gender relationships and not a series of social problems flowing from poverty, alcohol, and unemployment.
Gordon's ability to tease out information from scanty sources is amazing, and is probably the best aspect of the book. She found her greatest challenges in the nineteenth century records, a time predating the emergence of professional social work and its attendant requirement of extensive written case histories recording all aspects of the clients' lives. The author relates in several places that the only evidence she could rely upon consisted of a few lines scrawled in a musty ledger. But by putting together enough of these incomplete records, Gordon managed to reconstruct a better picture of what went on in the early days of Boston's relief efforts. Pictures showing neglected children add an additional poignancy to many of the heartrending stories of personal tragedy in the book.
A significant problem with Gordon's book is limiting her research to Boston, Massachusetts. Gordon's arguments that Boston's experiences with immigrants represented similar problems in other states is not completely accurate. Although she notes that the city's high immigrant population made it exceptional, she does not go far enough in explaining how much of an exception it was. Massachusetts was home to a huge number of immigrants, far more than any other area in the United States in the nineteenth century. The immigrants strained the state's resources to the breaking point, which might account in some part for many of the faults she finds with the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (MSPCC) and other agencies. The city and the state simply did not have the funds to deal effectively with the problem of family violence. The importance of the MSPCC to other social agencies in the country probably stemmed from the recognition that Massachusetts had more immigrants to deal with than anyone else.
A related dilemma concerns the sorts of institutions the author studied. While she made excellent use of the sources she consulted, there is a tendency to not look further. Family violence, from all indications, was at times a charged political issue. Gordon explains that the MSPCC was a political organization, supporting legislation at various times in its early history, and also possessing police powers to enter homes and remove children. The term "politics" in the title of the book refers to personal politics between family members, but examining the more common meaning of the word might have helped. Why not consult legislative records at the city and state level? Moreover, other institutions existed to assist the poor, especially poor immigrants. Political machines, although far from altruistic organizations, helped immigrant men find employment, and agencies run by ethnic groups also lent a hand. Immigrants to the United States did not have as many options to better their conditions as did native-born citizens, but they had more options than Gordon claims.
Heroes.......2000-04-06
Linda Gordon did a wonderful job at showing the growth of social services over time, however the book lacked a sense of committment.
Book Description
Arguing against the grain of her own discipline, Anne Hendershott asserts the value and strength of the most important of all determinants of behavior--social norms and the commitment to accept them. The Politics of Deviance maintains that definitions of deviance that rely upon reason, and not emotion or political advocacy, are indispensable to the process of generating and sustaining cultural values and reaffirming the moral ties that bind us together.
Customer Reviews:
Bam This Book is spot on!.......2007-07-29
When I left the USA to teach abroad everyone was an individualist.
When I returned people were arguing about who was the victim.
Now I understand what happened while I was gone.
I thought people had lost their minds.
Little did I realize the Left had redefine the entire culture.
When you have Victims, they need an advocate and they become your constituency.This book shows how to see how they turned everything upside down.This book should be titled how we all became victims of the left.
THANKS ANNE!!!
This isn't social science.......2006-03-29
Regardless of whether you agree with Hendershott's views, you must admit that there isn't any actual sociology in Hendershott's book. There is virtually no reference to social science research, except to criticize studies without any reason except that she doesn't like the results. Instead, Hendershott provides anecdotal evidence from nonscientific sources as if it is generalizable.
There are two testable hypotheses in Hendershott's book. First, that definitions of deviance have changed greatly over time. Second, that this shift in definitions has affected people's behavior in negative ways. Both of these are easily testable hypotheses, but she unfortunately doesn't test either of them, and just provides examples that support her arguments. This is what sociologists call relying on an "N of 1." She should have learned that as an undergrad.
I hope this review helps you avoid the massive time-waste that reading this book would be. Instead, I'd suggest reading Joel Best's "More Damned Lies and Statistics," which points out very well how dangerous it is to rely on examples and case studies as if they represent large-scale social patterns.
I'm surprised Regnery didn't publish this...Oops! It's Encounter Press.......2005-07-07
From the folks who brought you the truth about the "liberal media" comes an uncredentialed academic's rant about the "liberal" turn sociology allegedly took in "the sixties." First of all, she would do well to read Thomas Frank's "The Conquest of Cool" about the rather lucrative conservative myth about "the Sixties." Secondly, it's hilarious to see a right-wing conservative who must have gone to graduate school still grasping to portray objectivity while hiding behind "academic" language to criticize behaviors she deems immoral--the hilarious collapse of pedophilia and homosexuality, for example, which seems not to notice there is a difference between consensual and non-consensual behavior, is a case in point. There seems not to be much difference in the intellectual nuance exhibited by a conservative rep like Santorum and a right-wing academic, no wonder she ended up at UC-SD. All in all, this book is the kind of politicized, conservative trash that ends up at a publisher like Encounter, all she needs to do now is to water down the language and take it to Regnery. Maybe then at least it'll sell something.
Farewell to Deviance. .......2005-06-28
I have to say first that this is one of the most underrated books of all time. I mentioned it the other day in a review because it covers societal decline better than just about every other book I've read on the topic. Anne Hendershott is a brave writer who took considerable risk in addressing the topic of deviance, as it is one that her fellow academics in sociology, wish to pretend no longer exists.
Yet, exist it does, only now our society has defined the traditional representations of deviance, such as drug addiction, homosexuality, and pedophilia, down to the point where they as normal as low cut jeans on young girls. Society has also replaced the abnormalities of the past with the concocted crimes of sexism, homophobia, and, most humorously, racism-through-questioning-racism, which is what happens when one argues over the necessity of affirmative action programs. We also now have the nauseating circumstance wherein deviance has been defined up, meaning that those who chose to remain virgins and "un-experimental" are the ones judged pathological.
In the chapter, "Rape, Real, and Imagined," we find that rape has become a crime which, by definition, is systematically biased against men. Their accusers have the right to anonymity, whereas, those on trial are entitled to no such courtesies. A semantic twist suddenly rephrases pedophilia as "intergenerational relationships." As an aside, one of these days I would like to find out why the FBI does not arrest NAMBLA en masse under the RICO statutes. Why not? They're all members of a proven criminal organization. Speaking of NAMBLA, mental illness has now been extended to cover the lazy, the irritable, and the over-energetic. In ADHD, PTSD, and PMS, we have a hangman's game full of letters that describe somewhat fuzzy categories of dysfunction. This is explored, more in depth, in Satel and Sommers new book on therapism.
The Politics of Deviance is not merely a sociology book, it is an exploration of how of society has declined to the point where merely attempting to follow the rules is a Herculean task as the rules and mores shift downwards every other month. It is not a long book but the prose is concise. Hendershott really delivers a narrator devoid of distracters and hyperbola. It is a worthy read.
Backwards Thinking.......2005-02-22
The author's book is about culture and the norm's of culture. She reports that her course "the sociology of deviance" is a rare sociology course that is not being taught in most universities. She says this is because many behaviors that were formerly labeled as deviant are no longer being referred to as deviant.
This book is about many forms of behavior that the author thinks should be reclassified as deviant. This is not a good book. The author is interested in putting black labels on behaviors that have shades of gray. She as a conservative, with right-wing type thinking apparently would like to take all behaviors that she doesn't like and label them as deviant. This is really a political book more than it is a sociology book. One gets the feeling that she would like to label more and more people as deviant as a sponsorship of her right-wing views. This book is a dangerous book. This book is very political and it is an effort to take our culture away from the political center where our culture can best serve the needs of all citizens.
Average customer rating:
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Adolescents at Risk
Barbara M. Yarnold
Manufacturer: University Press of America
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 Substance Abuse
| Recovery
| Health, Mind & Body
| Subjects
| Books
Adolescent Psychology
| Psychology & Counseling
| Health, Mind & Body
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Social Services & Welfare
| Poverty
| Current Events
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Criminology
| Crime & Criminals
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General
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General
| Sociology
| Social Sciences
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ASIN: 076180904X |
Book Description
Given the resurgence of substance abuse in the 1990's among adolescents, this research is of critical importance. Presents a timely analysis of substance abuse among Miami adolescents in the 1990's. The book is multidisciplinary, drawing from the research on substance abuse in such fields as psychology, sociology, criminal justice, political science, and economics. Additionally, it derives a comprehensive "risk factor" approach in addressing the underlying issue of why it is that certain adolescents seem to be more prone to substance abuse. The scope of the study is also important, starting with such common substances as cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana and moving on to some of the relative newcomers such as crack and steroids. Other substances analyzed are inhalants, LSD, cocaine, heroin, and narcotics. The research presented here is also conceived as a broader policy analytic piece, with specific suggestions for the schools, parents, and communities facing the overwhelming plague of substance abuse.
Book Description
Corporate and Governmental Deviance is the most complete and accessible treatment and exploration of the deviant behavior of big business and big government. Now in its fifth edition, this popular collection has been thoroughly updated to include an expanded introductory essay by the editors, new selections on corporate cover-ups, including such controversial issues as the Pinto fire hazards, the health risks associated with Rely tampons, as well as the current debates on excessive force by police and price-fixing. Moral issues within government, such as the rationalization of the use of genocide during the Nazi Holocaust, along with an essay on the media coverage and the public reactions to such crimes are covered as well. The new edition also retains the familiar classic essays by major scholars featured in previous editions. Intended for use in sociology and criminology courses, this book provides readers with an even clearer appreciation of the fact that organizations, and not just individuals, commit acts of deviance.
Customer Reviews:
It was for school and now it's for me.......2007-03-09
I had only bought this book for a course in university but we only had to do the first five chapters. I had to go on with it though. The cases are all extremely well written and did an amazing job of showing me how insane the corporate world can be. It's a great book if you're looking for something to change your perspectives on the ethics of todays business society and the major differences between "white collar" and traditional crimes.
Average customer rating:
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Deviance and Control
Craig B. Little
Manufacturer: F.E. Peacock Publishers
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Politics
| Nonfiction
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General
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
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General
| Sociology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
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Social Situations
| Sociology
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
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Similar Items:
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Social Deviance: Readings in Theory and Research (5th Edition)
ASIN: 087581395X |
Average customer rating:
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Deviance and Power in Late Medieval London (Past and Present Publications)
Frank Rexroth , and
Pamela Selwyn
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Europe
| History
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General
| England
| Europe
| History
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London
| England
| Europe
| History
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Medieval
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General
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Western
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Social History
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ASIN: 0521847303 |
Book Description
During the late Middle Ages the London ruling elite was increasingly influenced by the idea that a secret counter-society was operating in the city. Its members were suspected to be active mainly at night, to roam the city aimlessly and to be identifiable by three main characteristics: their latent, unmotivated and habitual penchant for violence, their sexual license and their disinclination to work. The rumours about this real and imagined ‘milieu of the night’ strongly influenced Londoners' perceptions of social relations within urban society. In wards, parishes, guilds and companies, people adapted their behaviour and gradually defined their own respectability in negative terms, in opposition to the new ‘urban underworld’. The book sheds considerable new light on everyday life in late medieval London and its case study opens up wider debates about the relationship between morality and politics in Europe’s cities in this period.
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