Abstract

The purpose of this study is to establish the importance of children in what Norbert Elias describes as the "civilizing process." The adult-child relation has not been extensively theorized as a structuring principle in bourgeois society and this study would hope to open a somewhat radical debate on the meaning of childhood in Western culture since the seventeenth century. The child-adult relation is viewed throughout this study as a model form of all social power relations and the material history of modes of child discipline are traced. ;If this study has a novel perspective on the child-adult relation, it is the focus on movement and restraint. Children are considered in terms of the problematic which their relatively uncontrolled and "uncivilized" movements pose to adult society, while adult society's relation to childhood is considered in terms of the strategies and devices the adult society has developed to restrict children's movement