Dance of the Dialectic? Some Reflections (Polemic and Otherwise) on the Present State of Nineteenth-Century Asylum Studies

Abstract

The 1970s witnessed an intense, often acrimonious debate between revisionist and Whig/neo-Whig historians over the origins and nature of the nineteenth-century asylum experience. By the early 1980s, however, there had emerged no ""new synthesis" (as one might have expected given the dialectical nature of the historical enterprise) but rather a new counter-revisionist paradigm grounded in the precepts of the "new social history." This counter-revisionist paradigm has become, in turn, the "new orthodoxy" in asylum studies in the 1990s. This article argues that the counter-revisionist account is itself highly problematic, offering no convincing synthetic overview of the nineteenth-century asylum experience.