In Information Institutions and Local Government in Early Modern England, Paul Griffiths challenges Foucault’s assumptions about the advent of societal patterns associated with modernity. He argues that as early as the 1600s there was a “turning inward” in which officials shifted from a focus on “public/visual representations of authority or ‘manifestaccon’” and instead increasingly used more internal information-based approaches that aimed for “precyson.” (1) He argues that while these processes have often been associated with top-down centralization, they actually occurred from the bottom-up as a result of the actions of countless middling officials seeking to improve their localities.
Paul Griffiths is a professor of history at Iowa State University, hailing from Liverpool. He has specialized in the history of crime and authority in Early Modern England with a focus on London. This is his third book.
Information is primarily a work of social and cultural history. It could be seen as either a bottom-up or top-down approach as it is focused on structures of government composed of middle-class officials and utilizes sources in a way more commonly found in bottom-up histories. He utilizes records of crimes, censuses, investigations, punishments, and various statistical records to show attitudes and practices around information and governance.
The book is written with a clear dialogue with Foucault, and the author repeatedly draws attention to this. Specifically, Griffiths engages with Discipline and Punish; Foucault began that work with the dramatic story of the torture and dismemberment of a regicide in 1757. He contrasted that brutal public destruction of a person’s body with modern methods of punishment; Foucault argued that modern punishment was no longer public, and rather than punishing the body, sought to reform the person’s soul.
While Griffiths does not necessarily contest the dynamics of what Foucault describes, he does contest his timeline. Griffith argues that it was not an “abrupt leap” between torturous public punishment and private incarceration. (289) Rather, he argues that the two forms of punishment coexisted for centuries and that private punishment was actually more common than public punishment after 1550. (171) He adds to this by describing the heavy early modern usage of “maidenwells,” early prisons that existed not just for punishment, but for reformation. He also contests the distinction between private and public more generally, arguing, for example, that questions about the public were often decided in private spaces. (288) In contesting a historiography about an emerging hegemony of the public sphere, Griffiths joins historian Lloyd Bowen. In Bowen’s Anatomy of a Duel, Bowen argues against the concept that increased legalism in England went hand in hand with a shift from private violence to public justice within a process of modernization. By highlighting the reciprocal relationship between family feuds and litigation, Bowen also emphasizes the coexistence of the public and private sphere in Early Modern England “question[s] our tendency to distinguish law and violence by their relationship to a supposedly unbelligerent ‘modernity.’” [2]
In addition to Griffith’s argument about the early and gradual process of the English government “turning inside,” he contests the method by which that process occurred. Griffith argues that contrary to a historiography that associates increased information gathering systems with centralization, it instead stemmed from the decentralized actions of local officials to solve local problems. Griffiths argues that these officials shared ideologies including that of “precyson.” By this he means a desire to identify and quantify in an exact and truthful way. (11) To show this he gives various examples of the questions that officials asked in the course of their duties. Two that he finds especially important are “Who are you?” and “What are you?” (14) Through questions, papers, and tests, officials sought to both identify peoples’ identity (who they were), but also to identify what role they played in society (what they were). When they asked these questions, they intended to follow up with actions.
Griffiths argues that middling officials were deeply concerned about what they saw as the degradation of society. He argues that there was an actual increase in crime in the period in which they lived and that they perceived it that way. (7) Griffiths sees the catalyst as being the rapid growth of urban areas that was occurring at this time which brought with it crowded cities, foreigners, beggars, theft, fraud, violence, and prostitution. Officials sought to deal with these changes first by classifying them with precision. Then they sought to deal with the problems that they classified through a variety of methods including whipping, jailing, removing, dunking, and branding. Through these methods, officials sought both to reform troublemakers, but also, they sought to remove them from society.
This removal fit with the purposes of manifestaccon, or the visual projection of authority in pursuit of honor, beauty, cleanliness, and order. Officials believed that these aesthetic criteria were connected to moral decay. (68) Because of this they sought to regulate their surroundings through cleaning, repairing, decorating, and as mentioned above, physical removal.
Griffiths emphasizes that Early Modern officials aimed for perfection in their information gathering and enforcing of standards, but acknowledges that rather than a utopian vision, it was more like “a permanent condition or strategy that defined governance.” (31) He argued that the manifestaccon approach to governance never really went away, “but that age-old intense and regulatory identity-authority-politics has all but disappeared from ‘official’ scripts” as institutions turned inward.
Griffiths tone throughout the work is one of deep skepticism and cynicism towards the information, institutions, and local governments in Early Modern England that he covers. He succeeds in showing the Early Modern antecedents of Foucault’s panopticon, but perhaps one weakness of his work is that in the process he paints a picture of Early Modern England that appears more like a managerial surveillance state than it actually was. This is less in the details that Griffiths does include and more in his tone and what he doesn’t include. He rarely emphasizes the ways in which the Early Modern world was significantly less precise and less private than the contemporary world.
While he may have overstated his case at times, Griffiths adds significantly to the historiography by showing the early history of processes that are essential to our understanding of modernity institutions. While Griffith’s book is frequently excessively wordy and difficult to read (like Foucault), it is also engrossing. Griffith succeeds at giving a glimpse into the worldview of local English leaders in Early Modern times and effectively shows the impact of the structures and methods they created.
[1] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage, 2012).
[2] Lloyd Bowen, Anatomy of a Duel in Jacobean England: Gentry Honour, Violence and the Law (Boydell & Brewer, 2021), 9.