ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that standard comment reflects a simplistic understanding of shame in human history. It considers Norbert Elias’s account of the rise of shame in Western history. The chapter argues that Elias did not take account of some important historical reversals in the influence of shame; and that he also ignored the way social control based on violence rather than shame escalated in dealings with the lower classes just as the prominence of shaming in upper-class social relations increased. Elias’s longer time horizon makes a fascinating contrast with the analysis of community from the vantage of the shorter time-frame typically grasped by post-war criminologists. There is no inexorable historical march with modernization towards a society where shaming works less well. As a society becomes more role-differentiated, the potential for effective shaming increases in important ways, but so does the potential for stigmatization that cuts off effective shaming.
