ABSTRACT
At the end of the nineteenth century, Edward Alsworth Ross became one of America’s best-known sociologists through publication of a series of articles on the phenomenon he labeled social control.1 Ross (1866-1951) concerned himself with not criminology per se, but rather social control – factors that maintain social order. From this perspective, crime control is an aspect of social order that can be deliberated, manipulated, and organized to increase or relax the mechanisms of order maintenance, according to current needs. In his book Social Control, from which this extract comes, law is one form of social control among many others (including sympathy, religion, and the sense of justice). Formal systems of social control are best operated by experts who work largely behind the scenes for the good of the social whole. Here we see Ross sharing his Progressive contemporaries’ faith in experts who can run society according to scientific principles.
