ABSTRACT
The unwritten assumptions and influences on this kind of work are drawn from many sources, not always explicit. Important among them is the concept, first developed by Norbert Elias, of social disciplining.1 Elias’s work is a powerful tool of synthesis which offers the prospect of integrating psychoanalysis with a historically informed sociology. With its help, historians can transform the quaint detail of the history of cleanliness, or the intimate details of sexual practice in the past into the building blocks of a strong narrative of social and cultural change. Such seeming trivia are indices of the process of social disciplining, a transformation by which the developing state of the early modern period gradually managed to inculcate order in its citizens. This process was not
merely accomplished at the level of the state alone: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people underwent psychological change of the kind necessary to submit themselves to the authority of a civilized society. The attractions of such a theory to modern historians are immense.
