In recent years, historians have conducted an extended debate on the nature and level of violence in early modern English society. This debate has come to focus on the murder rate as an index of violence and to turn on highly specialized points of statistical analysis. In some ways it can be characterized as a debate between optimistic and pessimistic historians. Lawrence Stone, representing the “pessimists,” paints a portrait of early modern society as violent, unloving, and uncaring until civilized by the eighteenth century; J. A. Sharpe, representing the “optimists,” emphasizes the problems of the data used by Stone and argues, like Alan Macfarlane, that English society in the early modern period was little different from that of today. J. S. Cockburn, the latest entrant into the fray, leans toward the optimists but has expressed some hesitation about the debate itself: he notes not only the serious problems with the data involved but also the difficulties of defining what constitutes a violent society, as “it is not at all clear that homicide rates are a reliable measure of the overall level of violent behavior in a particular society.” This caution suggests that we should take an entirely different approach to the problem of violence, to look for “the social meaning of violence.” We must move beyond the statistical data (important though they be) to a broader context for thinking about violence.

The way historians think about violence has been deeply influenced by the work of Max Weber and his assertion that “legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state”; it is often forgotten that the first word of that sentence is “Today.”

In nineteenth-century Britain, friendly societies (working-class mutual benefit clubs) and ruling elites contested definitions of respectability and independence in a struggle to delineate relations between societies and the state. This process was an important part of an ongoing set of negotiations by which working-class organizations influenced middle-class attitudes toward collective action. Pressure from friendly societies forced members of Parliament and bureaucrats to accept their claim to respectability and, with it, to independence from state control, changing the discourse of respectability in three stages. During the first quarter of the century, clergymen and landowners equated respectability with middle-class patronage and independence from the Poor Law. Around midcentury, the societies appropriated the discourse of respectability and, with qualified elite approval, used it to redefine independence as freedom from middle-class supervision. By the 1870s, however, friendly society leaders requested government assistance to limit the independence of rank-and-file members, whose autonomy they claimed was a threat to the societies' respectability.

Friendly societies wanted, as one member wrote, “to do what is ‘respectable.’” This meant redefining respectability in a collective, working-class context. While middle-class definitions rested on the premise that individualism and self-help were the twin foundations of respectability, friendly societies gained access to the social power of respectability by offering an alternative definition based on collective self-help and independence from external control. Friendly societies were democratically managed insurance clubs offering sickness and burial coverage and sociable activities in return for regular payments. They often met in public houses, which they identified as respectable, contradicting middle-class attitudes.

The images are familiar and ineradicable: cities scorched by blasts of tremendous heat, with thousands of civilians vaporized, thousands of others burned and disfigured, landscapes rendered desolate and uninhabitable by radiation; submarines, automobiles, luxury liners, and airplanes powered by clumps of uranium the size of a human fist; homes heated and cooled by limitless supplies of cheap energy drawn from secure reactors; land-based particle beam weapons capable of destroying airborne missiles and thus of providing a protective shield for civilian populations; eccentric physicists with thick central European accents, unkempt hair, ill-fitting clothes, and a crazed gleam of unearthly mischief in their eyes; politicians, civil servants, joint chiefs blinkered by hatred and ambition, ignorant of even the first principles of science and technology, careless of civilians, reckless in brinksmanship, and arrogant in assessments of military capability.

Such images, indeed, are part of the consciousness of all citizens of the atomic age: we who have stared at the newsreels of Nagasaki and Chernobyl, sat riveted with John Hersey's unforgettable Hiroshima, laughed over the absurdities of Dr. Strangelove (1964), winced at the smiling publicity of atomic energy authorities or the local power company's plans for a new reactor, trembled at the apprarently inexorable proliferation of nuclear technologies into the Third and Fourth Worlds, or grown angry at the exaggerations—both budgetary and practical—of yet the latest “generation” of weapons systems. And yet the images of obliterated cities, atomic-powered ships, and particle beam weapons—images which have come to define so much of the anxiety as well as opportunity of the postwar world—all existed in the popular consciousness in Britain and America long before August 1945, before, indeed, December 1941 or even September 1939.

The 1945 Labour government came to power with a clearly formulated economic program relating to nationalization and the continuation of wartime planning and controls to smooth the transition to a peacetime economy. The first of these components, at least, was largely carried out according to plan over the next six years. The transition to a peacetime economy was much less smooth, and Labour's policies here underwent a major shift. While controls remained an important part of the policy regime down to 1951, they increasingly gave way to the instruments of fiscal policy. In large part this reflected the buffeting of the economy by balance-of-payments problems. But while the compelling force of economic circumstance must be given its due, it is clear that the increasing dependence on demand management was a political and ideological defeat for Labour, in the sense that it had previously based its distinctive appeal so much on microeconomic policies usually summed up in that ambiguous term, “economic planning.” In that sense the reliance on demand management represented a retreat for Labour from its policy position of 1945: “Socialist planning was a notable, if unlikely casualty of Labour government after the Second World War.”

On one influential view, Labour's conversion to macroeconomic management may be considered a success; eventually, as Alec Cairncross records, that management delivered balance-of-payments equilibrium without sacrificing the goal of full employment. But it is increasingly recognized that Labour's agenda involved issues beyond these macroeconomic goals, important as they undoubtedly were.