The Handbook of Social Control, First Edition. Edited by Mathieu Deflem. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1 This chapter provides an overview of the concept of social control in the history of sociology. Social control emerged in the late nineteenth century at roughly the same time as the estab- lishment of American sociology, with Edward A. Ross being the main innovator of the concept. A parallel movement in Europe (represented in the thought of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber) focused on the larger problem of social order rather than social control per se. By the 1950s, Talcott Parsons sought to bring into alignment the broader concept of social order with the narrower one of social control by way of the development of a general theory of social systems that specified four functions operating across all levels of human reality. The analytical requirement of four functions implied that social control appeared concretely as four basic types: informal, legal, medical, and religious. By the 1980s, the consensus within sociology saw a further simplification of the Parsons schema into three basic types of social control: informal, legal, and medical (with religious control now being subsumed under informal). The trend over time has been that the most ancient and fundamental system of control – informal control – has waned and become somewhat imperiled in the face of the growth of both legal and medical control. Ross and Early American Sociology During the 1960s, the criminologist Travis Hirschi was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Early in his doctoral training, Hirschi took a deviance course from Erving Goffman, in which the latter provided an overview of the history and current status of social control. It was Goffman’s opinion that the reason social control was on the decline (circa the early 1960s) was that it had become synonymous with sociology. As Hirschi explained, “There was nothing you could not study under the rubric of social control” (quoted in Laub, 2011:300). According to Hirschi, Goffman traced this view of social control as a broad and unman- ageable mélange of sociological topics to Edward A. Ross, who had published a series of articles on social control in the American Journal of Sociology beginning in 1896. Ross later Social Control: History of the Concept James J. Chriss 1