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

The 1970s witnessed an intense, often acrimonious debate between revisionist and Whig/neo-Whig historians over the origins and nature of the ninteenth-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 counterrevisionist 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.