Conclusion
What is problematic with accounts such as Spierenburg's is the almost inevitable circularity of argument - decline in public executions is too easily taken as evidence of more gentle sensibilities. We cannot securely know, in the twentieth century, whether in earlier centuries the clamour of protest against public mutilation and execution grew to such an extent that it could not be ignored, or whether rulers began to listen to the voices protesting against the spectacle because to do so suited other circum¬stances. The idea of ^progress' in sensibilities is after all, hard to sustain in an era which has witnessed the barbarities of the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, and massacres in Rwanda. Less sensationally, a future historian of punishment noting the abolition of capital punishment in England and Wales, would be wrong to assume that this was because the tide of public sensibility had turned against it. The dimension of punishment that is expressive of culture, and sustaining of social solidarity, is important, and its renewed recognition is thus welcome, but it needs to be fitted together with the perspectives which connect forms of punishment with economic and political power, and which recognize its instrumental as well as Its expressive functions (Garland, 1990b).