ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the history of shame and the reaction of nineteenth-century liberalism in England to its existence and persistence. Through an engagement with the ideas of Ute Frevert the chapter examines the legacy of Enlightenment-inspired reforming zeal and its impact primarily upon English society in the period 1780 to the present. Such zeal challenged the unmodern, the uncivilized and the primitive, which it saw in institutions practices and behaviors. Surprisingly we discover the utility of shame as a tool co-opted in the service of precisely this modernization and liberal progressivism. The economic phenomenon of class—invention of the bourgeois century—became a tool by which citizens policed their own interactions and aspirations. All this happened with the determination of the desire to civilize and create compliant citizens. Nonetheless, we uncover incidents where human intervention prevented the worst excesses of market and supposedly benign “rational” logic. Postmodernity claimed to have shaken liberal meta-narratives and certainly introduced an interest in performativity and context, which fits with the reappearance of shame in more forms of media and its reappearance in many contexts. The chapter ends by asking whether the grand liberal narrative of “civilization” and its Janus-faced attempts to remove shame have been eclipsed, or whether the universality of shame and its usefulness requires or spawns its constant reinvention.
