| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter N. Stearns. Battleground of Desire: The Struggle of Self-Control in Modern America. New York: New York University Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 434. $28.95.

Historians after Michel Foucault understand social control as one of the major legacies of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, the real question is whether or not it remains a permanent part of our own world. The common wisdom (if you believe both the right and the left-wing media) is that ever since the eighteenth century, we have been moving toward a loosening of these controls. Peter N. Stearns, the author of the acclaimed Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (1997), has now written a truly contrarian history of self-control in America. His thesis is straightforward: there has not been a descent into chaos or a freeing from the shackles of state morality. Indeed, things are different now in focus but not in their substance. 1

Stearns's reach is broad. Running the gamut from sex to movies (or are they the same thing?), from questions of addiction to problems of body form and beauty, he compellingly documents how many of the same objects were a permanent part of a nineteenth-century American culture of the control of desire. This echoes, according to Stearns, many of the concerns American culture sees as vital today. Thus one small subchapter deals with the question of child abuse. Certainly this has been a part of the violence of American culture from the origins of "America" (however defined). . . .

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