Extract from the Introduction:
Focusing on Germany during the period when that country experienced its great age of industrial urbanization, this book treats ideas about cities, views of deviant behavior, and the socially reformist implications of some of this thinking. The study represents an effort both to comprehend the variety of ways in which contemporary observers responded to what they saw as threats to moral order in their increasingly urban society and to highlight an element of middle-class activism that has too seldom received the attention it deserves. How, this work asks, did criticism of immorality and crime eventuate not only in antiurbanism and conservative repressiveness but also in more pragmatic efforts to counteract deviancy in ways that did not entail either antiurban or illiberal outcomes? It must be made clear at the outset that this book deals with ideas about aspects of cities other than urban morals and that it treats views of deviancy that did not relate specifically to wrongdoing in cities. But because these themes were so often paired in the minds of contemporaries, I have paired them too, and each theme serves as an essential part of the background to later treatment of would-be moral improvers who were based in German Großstädte.
