Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2003) (The surveillance-state has a long and deep connection to religion. One of the bogus argument about surveillance takes the form "don't worry if you have nothing to hide." This argument wants you to think that surveillance will have limited, if any, adverse impact on the lives of good, law-abiding citizens like yourselves. What it fails to note is how being observed itself changes behavior. Surveillance is a means of controlling and dominating all of us. And, now with the photo/video capacity at our fingertips via our cellphones, we have all become agents of the surveillance state: "self-observation, mutual observation, hierarchical observation." Food for thought?
"By 'disciplinary revolution,' I mean a revolutionary struggle, whether from below or above, which has, as one of its chief ends, the creation of a more disciplined polity. The state, from this perspective, may be defined as a 'pastoral' organization that claims clear priority (if not complete monopoly) over the legitimate means of socialization within a given territory." Id. at xvi. "My argument is that the relationship between the disciplinary revolution and the modern state was quite similar [to the relationship between the industrial revolution and modern capitalism]. Like the industrial revolution, the disciplinary revolution transformed the material and technological bases of production; it created new mechanisms for the production of social and political order. And, like the industrial revolution, the disciplinary revolution was driven by a key technology: the technology of observation--self-observation, mutual observation, hierarchical observation. For it was observation--surveillance--that made it possible to unleash the emerges of the human soul--another well-known by little-used resource--and harness them for the purposes of political power and domination. What steam did for the modern economy, I claim, discipline did for the modern polity by creating more obedient and industrious subjects with less coercion and violence, discipline dramatically increased, not only regulatory power of the state, but it extractive and coercive capacity as well." Id. at xvi. "Following Esping-Andersen, it has become customary for sociologist to distinguish among three different welfare-regimes: liberal, social-democratic, and corporate-conservative. Esping-Andersen himself concludes that corporate-conservative welfare states were most likely to emerge in predominantly Catholic societies, such as France and Italy. What he does not mention is that liberal welfare states emerged only in areas heavy influenced by Reformed Protestantism (that is, England and its settler colonies) or that social-democratic welfare states emerged only the homogeneously Lutheran countries of Scandinavia. This is not to deny the importance of class conflict in welfare-state development; rather it is to suggest that these conflicts may have been mediated or influenced by religious factors (for example, the stance of the church(es) towards the social problems and the relative strength of confessionally based political parties) and that the policies which various countries adopted in response to the social problem may have been influenced by the solutions to pauperism and vagrancy adopted three centuries earlier. For there are remarkable continuities between early modern and modern systems of social provision. Like their Calvinist predecessors, liberal welfare states tend to take a more punitive stance towards the poor and place a higher value on work as a cure for all ills. Similarly, the highly centralized and secular character of social-democratic welfare states was anticipated in their Lutheran forebears, while the more decentralized and less secular character of Christian Democratic welfare states also has premodern roots. It seems unlikely that these continuities are the result of confidence." Id. at 163-164.).
