Book Reviews

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2006.00367.x
Published date01 September 2006
Date01 September 2006
Book Reviews
SILENTLY SILENCED. ESSAYS ON THE CREATION OF ACQUIE-
SCENCE IN MODERN SOCIETY by THOMAS MATHIESEN
(Winchester: Waterside Press, 2004, 116 pp., £14.50)
The Norwegian sociologist Thomas Mathiesen is known in the English-
speaking world mostly for his work on prisons. This goes back to 1965,
when he published Defences of the Weak. Over the years he became one of
the leading proponents of prison abolition (The Politics of Abolition, 1974).
Fifteen years later, he summed up the arguments against prison as an
institution and what to do about it (Prisons on Trial, 2000). This last book is
still unsurpassed in the thoroughness with which it treats the different
justifications for imprisonment and their lack of empirical support, as well as
the political functions the prison institution serves, and the necessity of what
the author calls `anti-functionalist' work.
It is much less well known outside Scandinavia that Thomas Mathiesen
has written on subjects other than prisons. On first glance this could be due
to the fact that very little of his other work has been translated into English.
1
It must therefore come as a surprise to read in the introduction to the present
volume that the material contained in it was translated into English as early
as 1981 by the author. However, according to his own account, he `left the
manuscript unpublished in a drawer. I was too preoccupied with other
matters' (p. iv).
2
Most of the original essays from the late 1970s were published in
Norwegian. They are now published for the first time in English, but
Mathiesen has kept them unchanged in his translation from more than twenty
years ago. But he has added footnotes, bringing some arguments up to date.
He has also added two new, previously unpublished essays. Thus, the
volume contains eight papers, as well as an important introductory essay.
The introduction outlines the common thread running through the papers:
the importance of non-physical, non-violent, and more or less invisible
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ß2006 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2006 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
1 The main exception is Mathiesen's book, Law, Society and Political Action (1980),
which contains an early version of some of the ideas contained in the present volume.
2 Interestingly enough, the situation was different in Germany where, alongside his
prison writings, other works by Thomas Mathiesen were translated and found
enthusiastic audiences in their day. Among them was, twenty years ago, a volume
which includes some of the material now available for the first time in the English
language, Die lautlose Disziplinierung (1985). The basis of most of the German
publication must have been the unpublished English version, since the principal
translator was not able to read Norwegian.
mechanisms that contribute to acquiescence in Western societies. The author
is at pains to insist that he does not deny the existence of much cruder,
visible, and noisy forms of social control:
Obviously, the presence of physical means of coercion is significant, and quite
obviously, a strengthening ± in terms of increased resources and personnel ± is
currently taking place, for example of the police and the prisons in many
countries (p. 10).
But these forms of social control are the exception rather than the rule. And
they are in many ways dependent on less obtrusive mechanisms of control. It
is in the nature of `silent silencing' that it is much more difficult to observe
and to describe than the more physical types of political repression. The goal
of this collection of essays is therefore an attempt at demonstrating by way
of examples how this kind of social control occurs.
A similar format is used throughout: each paper starts with a specific
event, specifies and analyses the mechanisms through which acquiescence is
created, and (almost always) finishes by proposing counter-strategies. This is
even true in the only relatively abstract paper (`System and Silencing'),
where, after detailing mechanisms that keep people in line within organiza-
tions, Mathiesen emphatically insists that `opposition is possible' (and
mentions `organizing outside the system' as an absolute necessary condition
for successful resistance).
The majority of the papers deal with the role of the media in glossing
over, neutralizing or, as Mathiesen puts it, `pulverising' social and political
problems. In one chapter he identifies the mechanisms by which an appear-
ance of freedom of the press is maintained, while simultaneously serving the
profit interests of the owners. In another he spells out, in great detail, how the
media, by not placing events in a larger context or `totality', avoid
`disturbing' the people. Another chapter shows how the media, even on
important matters like political surveillance, base their reports mainly on the
government's press releases rather than on the actual government documents
(in this case, a new surveillance instruction issued by the government). He
demonstrates in the final chapter how media and opinion polls can create
`spirals of silence' as long as there are no countervailing critical networks or
communities. In all of these cases, he turns his theory around to give advice
on how to fight these mechanisms of acquiescence. All of this is easily
accessible, written not just for academics, but for general consumption. For
the foreign reader, it is not always easy to relate to Mathiesen's Norwegian
examples (for example, the capsizing of the oil rig `Alexander Kielland' in
1980), since they may seem far away in space and time. But he tries to
compensate by adding additional globalized examples in the new footnotes.
A smaller number of the papers concerns the role of the professions
(especially sociologists) in making people go along with capitalist society.
My favourite is `Sociology: a silenced profession'. Its basic thesis is that the
sociological profession is undergoing a fundamental change of character in
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ß2006 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2006 Cardiff University Law School

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