ABSTRACT
This chapter illuminates the contours, context, and some of the content of the concept moral regulation. Moral regulation — as, in their different ways, ‘Oxford philosophy’, structuralism, and sociolinguistics have shown — concerns forms and contexts, determining thus the realization of utterance, display, gesture, indication, action — in a phrase, proper forms of expression which are always-ever far more than lingual. Without both a theoretical understanding of the pervasiveness of moral regulation and the historical construction of the present forms of that regulation, one constantly runs the danger of seeing ‘anomie’ or ‘ascription’ to be temporary phases in an otherwise improving progress towards consensus and achievements. Nevertheless, moral regulation-in-general, and State formation and discipline in particular, sustain the links between the powerful and the controllers, and determine the legitimacy of the mode and means that the codes of power classify and the codes of control frame.
