The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic

Abstract

This text poses the question why Americans, beginning in the 1820s and 1830s, simultaneously and confidently constructed prisons, insane asylums, reformatories and almshouses to confine and treat their deviant and dependent population. In his introduction, Rothman examines the reasons that this question is now one of the core concerns of European and American social history; analyzes the many imaginative answers that have been proposed; and evaluates their strengths and weaknesses. The volume explores American attitudes toward crime, madness, poverty and delinquency, and demonstrates how these ideas shaped both the design and the routine of the new institutions. There were no available models for the asylum; it had to be imagined and fabricated with few guiding precedents. The results revolutionized the treatment of the deviant and dependent and have profoundly affected the structure of modern society.