Discipline and Power is an intellectual, cultural, and social analysis of the ways in which universities successfully transformed a set of values, encoded in the concept of "liberal education," into a licensing system for a national elite. From the mid-1870's until the rise of totalitarianism and the Great Depression challenged prevailing habits of mind and conduct, the universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, achieved unrivaled influence upon thought and conduct in every sphere.

In their independence from external interference, the universities and colleges evolved by regulating the contents and purposes of new subjects.

History, more than any other discipline, reflected and reinforced a broad Victorian consensus about God, country, and the good. Among the contending fields of study, history provided the most consistent moral panorama able to satisfy a variety of intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic needs. History was taught, studied, and tested by a set of assumptions deduced far more from a patriotic agreement about duty than from critical methods or from the weight of evidence.