SOCY 275 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Age Of Enlightenment, Philosophes, Converting Vegetarians
5 Dec 2015
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Social justice in the 18th century: the practice of the courts was demonstrably irrational, corrupt, unjust, cruel, harsh, and arbitrary. Holy terror was the law of the times. Most forms of misbehaviour went totally unpunished, so that life for most people was unpredictable and hard. Particularly when the accused was of low status, punishments were deliberately made as horrifying as possible and often took the form of public rituals of pain, which attracted large crowds, as a circus might do. The safeguards of due process, which we now take for granted, were completely absent: despite the terror, social control was not well maintained. The system was so unpredictable that the guilty might well escape punishment, while the innocent were tortured into confessions and executed. Disastrous wars meant increases in taxation and the periodic return of disaffected soldiers hardened by war and unsuited to peacetime employment. Typhus and cholera epidemics brought on by urban conditions affected the social balance.
