2 янв 1849 г. - James Silk Buckingham proposes totalizing city designs to increase morality of public

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"In 1849, James Silk Buckingham, a prominent English social reformer, published a plan for a model town... he drew attention to [his proposals'] capacity to prepare all members of the community for 'a high state of existence, instead of merely vegetating like millions in the present state of society, who are far less cared for, and far less happy, than the brutes that perish (Buckingham 1849: 224)... [Buckingham argued:]

'It is constantly contended that mankind are not to be improved by mere mechanical arrangements, and that their reformation must first begin within. But there is surely no reason why both should not be called into operation. A person who is... well clad, cheerfully because agreeably occupied, living in a clean house, in an open and well ventilated Town, free from the intemperate, dissolute, and vicious associations of our existing cities and villages--with ready access to Libraries, Lectures, Galleries of Art, Public Worship, with many objects of architectural beauty, fountains, statues... instead of rags, filth, drunkenness, and prostitution, with blasphemous oaths or dissolute conversation defiling his ears, would at least be more likely to be accessible to moral sentiments, generous feelings, and religious and devout convictions and conduct, than in the teeming hives of iniquity, with which most of our large cities and towns abound...' (Buckingham 1849: 224-5).

The passage echoes a characteristic trait of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of the tasks of government. In the formulations of the science of police that were produced over this period, Foucault has argued... the family... typically served as the model for...government which... concerning itself with 'the wealth and behaviour of each and all', aspired to subject the population of the sate to 'a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods' (Foucault 1978: 92)... Just as remarkable, however, is Buckingham's persistence in maintaining that the exercise of such surveillance and control need not be...any different in principle, when applied to the moral or cultural well being of the population...

It was, appropriately enough, James Silk Buckingham who first introduced such a conception of culture's role into the practical agendas of reforming politics in early Victorian England."

Source: Tony Bennett. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995). Pg. 17-18

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