25th Anniversary Commemoration || Crime and Social Criticism

Crime and Social CriticismAuthor(s): Ian TaylorSource: Social Justice, Vol. 26, No. 2 (76), 25th Anniversary Commemoration (Summer 1999),pp. 150-167Published by: Social Justice/Global OptionsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29767148 .

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Crime and Social Criticism

Ian Taylor

The pimp, so to speak, is just another form of salesman. ? Alvin Gouldner (1973: xiii)

Author's Note

ATE IN 1998, THE EDITORS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE INVITED ME TO CONTRIBUTE A PIECE

commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the journal. I had coincidentally M J already agreed to give a lecture on the legacies of critical criminology to

the Max-Planck-Institute in Freiburg, Germany, and I anticipate that that lecture would be of interest to readers of Social Justice, even though it does not

specifically discuss the considerable contributions that this journal has made to the

development of a critical tradition in respect of criminology on both sides of the Atlantic.

? ? ?>

It is a quarter of a century since the publication of The New Criminology and its companion volume, Critical Criminology (Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973;

1975). It may be an appropriate moment ? in radically different historical circumstances?to appraise the legacy of the very ideaof a "critical criminology.''

The interventions that Paul Walton, Jock Young, and I made into the study of crime and social control in the early 1970s can be understood to have been informed by two key objectives. We were concerned, first, as the subtitle of The

New Criminology declared, with advancing a critique of the different forms of

"analytically individualist" approaches to the explanation of crime then dominant in the criminology institutes of North America and Western Europe, and with

offering in its place what we called "a social theory of deviance." Second, in

offering this kind of intervention into the prevailing thinking about crime, we were

also interested, following the examples of so many other social thinkers and commentators of the period, from Alvin Gouldner to Herbert Marcuse, in thinking of these issues in what we might call an "emancipatory mode."1 That is to say, we

Ian Taylor is a Professor at Van Mildert College and the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Durham, Durham DH1 3LH, England (email: [email protected]). Among his recent books is Crime in Context: A Critical Criminology of Market Societies (Polity Press, 1999). This article was first presented at the Max-Planck-Institut f?r Ausl?ndisches und Internationales Strafrecht,

Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany (February 19, 1999).

150 Social Justice Vol. 26, No. 2



Crime and Social Criticism 151

were interested in recognizing many different dimensions of discrimination,

injustice, and oppression operating specifically within the criminal justice system or within the broader structures of what we would call "the system of social control." We were also interested, it must be said, in affirming the authenticity, in

such circumstances, of much of what passed for "deviance." Thus, the focus of

analytic interest in our own work, as in the work of some of our friends within the

National Deviancy Conference, extended from the control systems then in place in the factories of the Fordist manufacturing industry that were concerned with

regulating pilferage and sabotage by workers (L. Taylor and Walton, 1971) to the role played by psychiatry in the containment of student unrest (Maddison, 1973).2 There is, indeed, a clear echo in the pages of The New Criminology of one of the

powerful political themes of the period ? the idea of a "worker-and-student

alliance" against the various oppressions of "capitalism" and, specifically, the

"capitalist state." Added to this more broadly understood political vision of an

"anti-capitalist alliance" extending, in the case of Paris, from the Renault factories to Nanterre (the "university" itself as a factory), however, was an interest in the

criminal and, quite specifically, the convict as an additional victim of the routine

operations of a capitalist system?a victim, that is, of "processes of reproduction" of social and racial inequality. In this respect, the influence of the writings of

George Jackson, the "Soledad Brother" (Jackson, 1970), and Angela Davis, whose

iconic "If they come in the night" poster decorated every one of our walls at some

time during this period, is unmistakable. Equally unmistakable, however, espe?

cially in the exchanges in the pages of Economy and Society between Paul Hirst

(speaking, then, for a structuralist Marxism heavily influenced by the writings of

Louis Althusser) (Hirst, 1972) and Paul Walton and myself (speaking for the

humanist Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts) (I. Taylor and Walton, 1972), is the

attempt made by "the new criminologists" to make a fulsome use of Marxism as

a particular form of critical social inquiry and analysis, alongside other critical and

hermeneu tic forms of social thinking (especially phenomenology), within a

formal theoretical model within which the social phenomena of crime and social

control were to be understood.

The Crisis of Marxism as Emancipatory Theory

(a) "Objective Conditions"

It is, of course, quite trite to note that the use of Marxism as "emancipatory

theory," 25 years on from 1968, is fraught with difficulty, and, for many commentators, even in bad faith. A series of unmistakable economic, political, and

social developments ? which Marxists themselves might once have identified as

"objective conditions" ? must be grasped "without fear or favor."

(i) First came the collapse of the Soviet Union. This massive historical event ? in part the result of popular rejection of the quality of living under a command



152 Taylor

economy ?

effectively destroyed Utopian visions, still current in some quarters in the 1960s, about the superiority of Soviet planning over the boom and slump conditions of market capitalism as evidenced, for example, in the Sputnik launch. It is also quite clear now that the achievements of the Soviet state involved a very considerable restriction, and perhaps oppression, of human liberty, in ways that no

emancipatory thinker in the West could contemplate and accept. (ii) A further challenge to the Utopian forms of Marxism still current in the

1960s and 1970s, of course, was the developing recognition that the size and influence of the agency thought within Marxism to be sowing the seeds of an

alternative post-capitalist future ? namely, the organized working class ? was

in significant, and possibly terminal, decline (Gorz, 1980; Hobsbawm, 1981). Without the possibility that this working class could move from being a "class-in itself' to a "class-for-itself," there could be no chance of a socialist challenge to

capital and the capitalist state. For all the continuing protests of a far left committed to such a transformation, by the mid-1980s there was widespread recognition among critical social thinkers that no such social transformation was in the cards.

(iii) Whether this "victory of capital" amounted to "the end of history" ? in

the specific sense Francis Fukuyama (1992) was advancing (i.e., as an endpoint in

epochal-style transformations) ? was a secondary discussion. Yet Western

societies, having recently experienced 25 to 30 years of life within "the mixed

economy," overlain by social democratic and welfarist ideologies, were clearly

entering a very different period ? one in which the pursuit of everyday economic

survival and/or personal advancement would take place within "liberalized" free

markets, underpinned by competitive and individualistic forms of everyday politics and cultural discourse (Hall, 1988).

(iv) Not the least important feature of this challenge to, and transformation of, the Keynesian welfare state ? now increasingly recognized "on the Left," rather

hurriedly and belatedly, as a friend and ally rather than an instrument of capitalist oppression

? would be the veritable collapse of what J?rgen Habermas (1989) called "the Utopian energies" that had underpinned the self-denying and underpaid work of people employed in public sector occupations like education and social work. Subsequent analysis of the condition of "the culture" in the United States by Robert Bellah et al. (1985), Robert Putnam, and Amitai Etzioni (1992) confirmed this particular consequence of the advance of an individualist consumer culture and pointed to the massive decline that apparently occurred during the 1980s and 1990s in levels of voluntary activity, low-paid pro bono publico work within "the

community," and, indeed, in popular interest regarding "the public sphere" of

politics and democratic deliberation. This "crisis of the public sphere" is a fundamen? tal crisis for any kind of political vision, like Marxism or social democracy, that is articulated around the idea of democratic political involvement and participation.

(v) The crisis of the nation-state is a further ? and in many ways paradoxical ?challenge to Marxism (which in its 19th- and 20th-century incarnations always




saw itself as an internationalist kind of politics and theory). Whether a function of the increasingly international character of economic life within liberalized and

enlarged market cartels (the European Union, the North American Free Trade

Area, ASEAN, etc.), or as Giddens (1990,1991) and Beck (1986) argue, the result of the increasingly widely shared and common sets of "threats" and "risks"

afflicting different "high modern" societies, there is a clear sense that the nation state has experienced a considerable loss of power. In Europe, in particular, there is an increasingly pressing sense of the emergence of new forms of transnational

systems of governance, whose provenance must be understood in a much more

complex and multifaceted fashion (taking into account new forms of elite

formation, interest and pressure group activity, the emergence and resonance of an

"information society," as well as new forms of international and interpersonal deliberation) than was used in the social scientific or critical analysis of the modernist capitalist state. This is not to argue that the dominant discourses and

practical priorities of the European Union are not "capitalist" in some important and possibly definitive sense. Yet, the ways in which such positions of power, influence, and dominance are achieved by "capital" are not to be understood by

relying on the theorizing of Marxist scholars of the 1960s and 1970s like Ralph Miliband (1969) and Nicos Poulantzas (1973, 1978) on the conditions of exist?

ence, the different structures, and the reproduction of "the (national) capitalist state," i.e., as being absolutely and finally determined by the agendas of the industrial elites of individual capitalist societies, working directly and closely with

national governments.

The Crisis of Marxism

(b) Theoretical Impasses

The advance of certain "objective conditions" has posed challenges to both

structural and humanist varieties of Marxism. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, the received paradigm was also seriously challenged on specifically theoretical

grounds. Especially in the 1970s, the most important challenge came from

feminism, both with respect to the issue of what social and political agenda

underpinned the project of social critique (what qualifies to be seen and critiqued) and to issues of agency and voice (on what grounds or by what right those who

adopt a critical voice claim to speak). This challenge to Marxism, as a masculinist and blinkered form of critical theory

? able only to identify with the injustices of

class division in the developed capitalist world ? was also embraced by social

analysts and activists for whom the most urgent and serious expression of

institutionalized inequality was that based on race and ethnicity. The late 1970s

and early 1980s were a period of troubled, and essentially inconclusive, struggle around the limitations of "class theory," accompanied by anxious interest in the

possibilities that "new social movements" might somehow be able to resolve the

difficulties of abstract theory in concrete practice.



154 Taylor

During the 1980s, another discrete challenge to Marxism and to any social

critique of "modernist" society predicated on a conception of "replacement" ? of

one relatively ordered social formation (high modern capitalism) by another

(socialism?) ? came from the increasingly widespread argument that this orderly

and coherent "modern society" has begun to fragment into a mass of unconnected

scripts and messages, having in common only their provenance within the

"mediascape" or the consumer marketplace. In the early 1970s, Jean Baudrillard

(1975) began to write about a world in which none of these "representations" bore

any necessary relationship to "reality," and in this way mounted an attack on most

earlier forms of Marxist theory in which the sphere of representation was to be

understood as the sphere of ideology ? that is, as a sphere in which the operation

of particular political and economic interests could be discovered not far below the

surface of these ideological representations. Baudrillard and many other thinkers

influenced by the perceived advance of "postmodern" conditions believed that

theories like Marxism, constrained by their overwhelming focus on the world of

labor and production, were unable to provide an adequate explanation or under?

standing of the new world of images and representation. Unable to suggest any alternative to the continuing domination of this media-world, Marxism and other

forms of "critical theory" are doomed to impotence. Especially in his later works, Baudrillard (1990) recommends the disavowal of any form of social critique and

can only envisage the appropriate task of social commentary to be a close

reportage of the nihilism of a culture without foundations.

Theoretical Problems in Radical

Deviancy Theory and Critical Criminology

The influence of the postmodern agenda on the social analysis of crime has

taken several forms. Most obvious during the 1980s and 1990s was the increasing incoherence both of forms of deviance theory that had done battle with orthodox

criminology and of orthodox forms of social criticism like Marxism. In a world of

endless invention, especially in the visual media, of new forms of diversion and

distraction for the jaded consumer, the idea of a "deviant" makes less and less sense

as a description either of personality formation or of social behavior. In an

important sense, "bizarre" forms of behavior and/or "different" forms of human

existence are "normal" ? normal, that is, within the new marketplace of images and representations that constitutes the cultural resource for postmodern televi?

sion. In such circumstances, as Colin Sumner (1994) has argued, the idea of

"deviance theory" itself (as an exploration of marginal worlds within otherwise

monolithic and orderly societies) makes little sense at the fin de siecle. The

mobilization of such a firm idea of the deviant, he argues, has been replaced by a

world in which an unpredictable series of parasitical and unwanted Others are

singled out for momentary "social censure" and perhaps for the imposition of

penalty and exclusion.




A second effect of the postmodern influence, we would argue, has been the

development of a social account of crime that entirely lacks a value or ethical foundation. Jack Katz' Seductions of Crime, published in 1988, offers an osten?

sibly value-neutral account of "the sensory attractions of doing evil." This includes a wide range of criminal activities (from burglary and bank robbery to

murder to rape) that have become the field of study of Quentin Tarantino and, more

recently, Oliver Stone and other Hollywood film producers. The "imaginative" exploration of these forms of crime by privileged academic

commentators working within the postmodern tradition is "nihilistic" in that, unlike Thomas de Quincey' s (1827) famous essay on the art of murder, there is no

attempt to be ironic (or to understand how aestheticizing predatory violence is itself a powerful, desperate critique of the culture). Such imaginative ethnography is also literally "imaginative," in the sense that it does not actually or accurately situate the "seductions of crime" in specific individual or group circumstances. It does generate the kind of critical but naturalistic appreciation of the "drift into rule

breaking" in all of its contradictory dimensions, as produced by the existential

phenomenologist David Matza (1964, 1969). Not the least of the contradictory features of the individual drift into rule-breaking, consistently present in Matza's

work, but entirely absent in the approaches of Jack Katz and other postmodern writers, is the sense of demoralization in individual lives, especially that produced by massive and continuing social disadvantage (something that close observers of

unequal societies have always understood).3 Ironically or otherwise, this aware? ness of the organic tendency toward a demoralization of life among the urban poor was once part of the much-maligned Marxist tradition itself, not least in the

continuing debate over whether "the lumpenproletariat" could ever be won over to progressive solutions to its problems of multiple social disadvantage or whether it was doomed, in all circumstances, to constitute "the dangerous class."

However, the most important dimension of the theoretical crisis of radical

deviancy theory and/or critical criminology perhaps resides in its continuing commitment to "social control," a libertarian project of critique (cf, for example,

Melossi, 1990). This continuing one-dimensional commitment was the source of a variety of theoretical and critical impasses during the 1970s and 1980s, such as

that between "critical criminology" and feminism in the course of angry debates on the prosecution of rape and sexual assault (in which feminists sought enhanced state intervention into the lives of men). Attracting less public attention at the time was a body of critical work into the operation of the courts and existing laws in the field of safety at work, especially of workers employed in dangerous conditions like the North Sea oil fields (Carson, 1982). Here, too, the idea of a critical

criminology organized only around the libertarian idea of "radical noninterven? tion" seemed entirely unhelpful as a point of departure. In the same period, the

continuing influence of movements for prison abolition, especially in the Nether? lands and Scandinavia, acted as a further reinforcement for the "critique of social



156 Taylor

control," without ever giving space to a principled critical debate as to the circumstances in which social critics, committed to the idea of a collective social

interest, might in fact contemplate the use of prison.4 In the early 1990s, a spate of very widely publicized "crimes of the powerful," like the massive frauds committed against small investors and pension-holders by Robert Maxwell in Britain and Michael Milken in the United States, posed serious challenges to a

critical criminological project committed only to the minimization of social control. It is quite startling, in retrospect, to observe how little self-reflection there was among critical criminologists during the 1970s and 1980s with respect to the use of "social control" as an object of critical analysis, and how little interest was shown in the ongoing debates taking place, for example, in the adjacent field of social philosophy around the utility of a concept of "social justice" as the

organizing framework for social critique (cf., for example, Walzer, 1983; Young, 1990). It is equally startling to recognize how disavowing a concept like social

justice implied a break with the key demand that had always been advanced by popular movements in the late feudal and early capitalist periods, thereby situating the idea of critique entirely within a liberal or libertarian framework.5 Less

surprising, in retrospect, is how the continuing and unreflective commitment to "the critique of social control" as a framework for analysis left critical or radical

deviancy theorists during the 1990s without a vantage point from which to critique the rise of market libertarianism in Britain, the United States, and other high

modern Western societies. At its most extreme, this form unmistakably played a

contributory role in social critique, sometimes as journalism drawing on the traditions of radical deviancy theory and sometimes as directly political writing,6 to advance this libertarian Utopia, now being realized in the extension of every freedom to every energetic entrepreneur in the new market society.

Not So Fast: New Evidence for the Old Orthodoxies

In an important sense, the advance of the new market societies in the West has thrown up an extension of state social control. Following on the example of the United States in the 1980s, there has been an unprecedented increase in the size of the prison population across much of Europe in the 1990s (see Table 1 at the end of the article). There were absolutely no comparable increases in the size of

prison populations in individual nation-states in the first half of the 20th century ? that is, during the period examined by the Marxist student of penality, Georg Rusche, and later interpreted, with the support of Otto Kirchheimer, in Punish? ment and Social Structure (Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939). In this sense,

analysis of the relationship between the size of the prison population and the character of labor markets?of the kind encouraged by Rusche and Kirchheimer, and subsequently taken further by Melossi and Pavarini within this Marxist

tradition, interpreting the prison as an agency for the management of the "reserve

army of labor" (Melossi and Pavarini, 1977) ? would appear entirely apposite




in a European market in which official unemployment remains firmly stuck at about 12%.

Among the reasons for revisiting this 1980's debate would be the recognition that the increase in the prison population is not simply an expression of actually occurring crime rates. In Britain, where the experiment in liberal markets began in 1979, although rates of officially recorded crime entered a period of radical increase from 1979 through 1991, since 1991 the rate has continued to decline (the first eight-year period in which records have shown such a reduction). Despite declining crime rates, the judicial use of imprisonment increased radically. Current projections are that if the rates at which custody is imposed and sentence

lengths stay at their present level, the prison population in 2006 in England and Wales will rise to 73,400 (19% higher than its present level) (White et al., 1999). The increased use of prison in England and Wales, it is strongly suggested, directly reflects the centrality of the "Law and Order" issue in the political stances of the last Conservative and the new Labor Government, as well as the increased reliance on penal "solutions" to the social problem of crime within such authoritative forms of national politics. Where the prison population has increased significantly on the

European mainland (the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, France, and

Italy), this increase is widely thought to be at least partly understandable as a

response on the part of authorities to increased public anxieties around issues of

immigration and public order on the streets. We are apparently confronting an important contemporary instance of the

intensified use of penality as an ideological instrument ? that is, as a mechanism wielded by the European governing classes in the management (the calming) of the level of anxiety and/or panic among the citizens of the larger society. Students of ideology, working within the familiar frameworks of some forms of Marxism, would find considerable scope for analytical research on the specific circum? stances that have led up to this explosion in prison populations within major

member states of the European Community. Students of this "embrace of disci?

pline," as evidenced in the adoption of "three strikes and you're out" law-and order policies in the United States and Britain, might also be inspired by the critical

essays of the Dutch Marxist criminologist, Willem Bonger (1935), who in the 1930s identified and challenged the rise of reactionary forms of jurisprudence and

penal thinking in Germany and the Low Countries. Whether the "return to

penality" in Europe in the last years of the 20th century can be explained with a

political economy that focuses on the control by national (capitalist) states over

their reserve armies of labor, for the duration of periods of recession and slump, is a different question.

The reversion to penality in advanced capitalist societies runs parallel to at least one other development for which some Marxist critics might claim to have an explanation within traditional frameworks. Across most of the advanced

capitalist societies, the adoption of liberal or free market policies has had the effect



158 Taylor

of reversing the organic tendencies of the earlier postwar period toward a greater

equality of wealth distribution and, indeed, toward the elimination of poverty. One

aspect of this is the continuing increase in the level of unemployment. In the

European Community, for example, unemployment during the 1960s averaged some 1.6% on official measures, but in the mid-1990s the official record suggested an average of about 12% (Judt, 1996: 6). A European Commission investigation of the distribution of wealth across the Community in 1993 suggested that the bottom 10% of the population was receiving only 37% of the overall gross domestic product, compared with 39% 10 years earlier, and that the top 10% was

appropriating 189% in 1993 as against 184% in 1983.7 Students of Europe's welfare systems of the late 1980s pointed to radical increases in the numbers of

Europeans whose survival depended entirely on different forms of state social assistance (Teeskens and van Praag, 1990). These increases in poverty and

dependency, they argued, were an expression of increasingly long-term forms of

unemployment and of new social divisions (for example, within the family) that were largely produced by the collapse of mass manufacturing industry and the loss of the "family wage" earned during the Fordist period by the male worker (Room, Lawson, and Laczko, 1989). Students of poverty pointed to the return of street

begging and homelessness as mass social phenomena, especially in the large cities of Europe, as well as to the return of diseases like rickets, which had been thought characteristic of an earlier, less enlightened moment of social development. In

1993, the European Commission's own agency, Eurostat, reported that one-fifth of all children and one-sixth of all individual citizens of the European Community were living below what was defined as the official poverty line in their own

country (Hajimichalis, 1997: 23). Other commentators pointed to the return of

"poor people's street markets" and other cheap consumer outlets in market

societies, catering to the developing needs of increasing numbers of the "new

poor" (Taylor, Evans, and Fraser, 1996). There is an important sense here in which we ought to recognize an "immiseration" of the working people, predicted as an

inevitable feature of capitalist development by some Marxist writers of the most

traditional persuasion. It is also tempting to argue that the problem of "crime," which is so high on the agenda of most Western market societies, is simply an

expression of the reemergence of a very traditional problem?the lumpenproletariat ? so familiar to students of the Marxist canon, but now reconstituted in

contemporary discussion as "the problem of the underclass." Yet there is also an important sense in which the emergence of a "new poverty"

and inequality, such as in the European Community, is evidence of new social

processes that need to be grasped and analyzed on their own terms, rather than

through the prism of Marxist class analysis or, indeed, of any other traditional form of sociological analysis. The return of "wars of blood and belonging" in Europe during the 1990s has produced a new migrant "class" of refugees and asylum seekers, who are attempting to find a home somewhere within the broad Commu




nity. According to the United Nations Office of High Commissioner for Refugees, there were nearly three million refugees in Europe, over 260,000 officially recognized asylum seekers, and another 2.3 million people whose circumstances were of immediate concern. Across the world as a whole, there were some 12 million refugees, 954,000 asylum seekers, and nearly six million others in circumstances of immediate concern (UNHCR, 1998). The explosive increase in each of these categories during the 1980s and 1990s is one just one immediate measure of the numbers of people experiencing new circumstances of uncertainty, enforced mobility, and poverty. In the late 1990s, the growth of this population of

refugees and asylum-seekers is unquestionably a major factor in the fears and anxieties that are expressed via the issue of crime in particular societies (for example, in Italy and the Netherlands) and it is clearly a responsibility of "critical

criminology'' to engage in a close analysis of these new relationships.

Grasping the Realities of the New Market Society

Contemporary developments in free-market capitalist societies?particularly the enhanced use of penal discipline, the return of a strong and continuing trend toward inequality, and the provenance of poverty within civil society

? are familiar to Marxist and other critics of capitalism. No study of patterns of crime in the late 20th century that ignores this secular context is really credible. It is nevertheless instructive to reflect on the relative absence of criminological studies of crime that directly connect these secular trends toward "inequality" and

"poverty" to "crime" in the last years of the century.8 Various reasons account for such an absence of attention. Social scientific

observers generally sense that the dynamics of wealth creation, wealth distribu?

tion, and poverty are changing very rapidly. Moreover, the framework recom? mended for understanding such issues, inherited from an earlier period of welfare state development, may have encountered its limits. Perhaps particular impacts of the post-Fordist transformation on certain localities and specific local forms of

"gender-order," rather than overall levels of unemployment or poverty per se,

explain the explosion of burglaries and car thefts in a country like Britain (which pushes it ahead of the United States in terms of this kind of criminal victimiza?

tion).9 Perhaps some forms of "private violence" by men must be explained primarily in terms of changes in local gender-order, rather than in terms of local census data on the distribution of wealth. Again, it may be important to understand the changing patterns of wealth distribution and relative poverty in terms of the levels of insecurity obtaining in particular societies over the direction and speed of change. Will Hutton's classic study on the impact of the "free market experi? ment" in Britain spoke of the emergence in that society of a "30:30:40" society, in which 30% of the population could only be described as multiply disadvantaged (largely because of their experience of unemployment and economic inactivity),

while another 30% were marginalized and insecure (because of the limited



160 Taylor

protection afforded by part-time or short-term employment). Only 40% of the British population

? the privileged ? had full-time work in the mid-1990s, but

this was a shrinking proportion of the total number of people employed in the labor market (Hutton, 1995:105-109). Within this working population, therefore, there was evidence of the competitiveness and insecurity that Arlie Hochschild identi? fied in the American population during the 1980s. Communitarian critics also focused on the immediate and long-term impact of an accelerated work culture on

the quality of parenting and neighborhood life (including the capacity of neighbor? hoods to provide any system of informal policing vis-?-vis local crime). In many of these domestic contexts, the level of acceleration and stress within those

households, and the expressed desire for alternative ways of living, may matter more than the level of household income. Within the new "underclass" neighbor? hoods of market society, in the meantime, long-term unemployment was produc? ing an immobility and a restricted set of life experiences, with its own demoraliz?

ing effects (and the encouragement provided for certain kinds of desperate expressive behavior, from "joy-riding" in stolen cars to predatory sexual crimes).10

Any straightforwardly empirical investigation of the relation between increas?

ing levels of poverty (or inequality) and crime in the new market societies confronts the very contradictions encountered historically under different circum? stances by Willem Bonger in his investigations in the 1930s. Not the least of the obvious contradictions is the increasingly visible phenomenon of upper-class or

corporate crime ? evident throughout the 1980s and 1990s in a string of major cases of money laundering, insider-trading scandals, junk bond and long-firm frauds, illegal arms trades, and many other previously unknown instances of economic fraudsterism. The temptation arises simply to identify in these cases the

contemporary echoes of the "cowboy" or "piratical" activities that characterized earlier periods of precapitalist and capitalist development?as activities awaiting a suitable regulatory response by an organized nation-state acting in the public interest. In the 1990s, even the most cursory examination of the details of these offenses underlines the complicity between major corporate institutions and national and international agencies of government in the production of such crimes. Intergovernmental activity on the question of "hot money" running through the international banking system during the 1980s and 1990s has so far

only intensified the rate of investment of such illicit capital in stock exchanges in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

The problems and challenges involved in explaining economic crime empiri? cally are relatively insignificant when compared to those involved in providing a

coherent account of different forms of interpersonal crime, from assaults through rape and murder. Ironically, these crimes (rather than mundane economic crimes like burglary) are most frequently brought to the attention of contemporary criminologists by local television, radio, and other media who are looking for a

marketable explanation from "the expert." The number of such offenses being




reported to the police is on the increase in most European societies, even in societies experiencing a reduction in the overall total of reported crime. Other areas of interpersonal activity that are being increasingly understood in terms of the application of a criminal sanction would include the exploding problem of

prostitution, in countries like Italy. An analysis of the "supply" of such sex workers within Europe must be framed in terms of the new trade in people across the borders of the European Community from the war zones of middle Europe and the Balkans. As argued elsewhere (Taylor, 1999: Chapter 8), however, the increased marketization of sexuality itself in market society, as well as its different social

effects, also ought to be an important part of the project of critical criminology. Any socially engaged criminological commentary, therefore, confronts an

increasingly complicated picture in terms of prioritizing the types of harms and fears of harm that come to be identified by some agency as crime, as well as of

relating them to the question of social justice. In some postmodern quarters, understandably, the task of social critique seems to have been relinquished, after the example of Baudrillard, in favor of a descriptive appreciation of crime, in effect, as "text." Other sophisticated scholars, at pains to retain some distance from a purely empirical and practical involvement with' 'crime prevention'' as currently defined, are

concerned to advance understanding of the range of different ways in which concepts of crime are socially constructed or "constituted," in increasingly fragmented, mass

mediated "representational" cultures (Henry and Milovanovic, 1997). The contribu? tion these approaches could make to achieving any idea of a just or secure society is not always easy to see, though that may not be a problem they recognize.

Two concluding remarks may help frame "a position" with respect to these connected issues. In contrast to many other fashionable postmodernist accommo?

dations to the nihilism of the marketplace, these observations may facilitate a

distinctive critical intervention into ongoing public or private deliberations. First, I wish to suggest that much remains to be gained from a critical tradition that

attends, after the example of Philippe Bourgois, Mike Davis, Will Hutton, Loic

Wacquant, and others mentioned in this essay, to new patterns of inequality in the

organization of economic and social life, even in the analysis of societies that other commentators may prefer to describe in terms of increasingly fragmented, complex, and overlapping forms of "identity" and "difference." What matters,

however, in revisiting such critical traditions, as applied to "modernist" and "Fordist" societies organized at the level of individual nation-states, is that they try to perceive and analyze these patterns of inequality transnationally, in relationship to much larger spheres of influence than the individual nation-state itself or the

configuration of Fordist industrial workplaces and work forces in an earlier

historical period. Only by thinking about these issues transnationally can there

emerge a criminology of any critical value to the analysis of patterns of migration into and across the European Community, of crime and fear or crime, of the

responses of agencies of "social control," or to the broader issue of social justice.



162 Taylor

It is vital to undertake this analysis of the new post-Fordist economy in a coldly realistic fashion ? paying regard to actual developments such as the post-Fordist labor markets unfolding in North America, Europe, and elsewhere ? without

anticipating any necessary endpoint, or "revolutionary moment," in these devel?

opments. Indeed, the arrival of a market society organized along post-Fordist lines

may have a permanence that could not be claimed by Fordism itself. The

emergence of a "permanent post-Fordism" has quite fundamental implications for the ways in which modernist criminologists conduct their analysis of a wide

variety of phenomena. "Subcultural" approaches to the study of young people understood to be adjusting, momentarily, to the pains of essentially temporary

rejection at school may have to be rewritten to account for lives of continuing and

unending exclusion from a post-Fordist economic world, in which unskilled

young people have become endlessly surplus to requirements.11 Analysis of the troubled inner cities of Europe, conducted with reference to conventional neo

Chicagoan frameworks that view such areas as "zones of transition" in a mobile

society of opportunity, may have to take seriously the work of Mike Davis (1990) and Loic Wacquant (1994, 1998) in the United States, which see these areas as

"permanent bantustans" or new forms of "hyper-ghetto" (holding camps for

particularly seriously marginalized fractions of the "new poor"). It may be that

criminology, like social science in general, must take into account not only the

crisis of "rehabilitative optimism" (the belief in the reformative capacity of

juvenile institutions), but also a serious crisis in Utopian or ameliorist forms of commonsense in the population at large.

Having encouraged that kind of realist recognition, however, I still wish to

defend the idea that the analysis of these developments ought to be conducted in a critical ? which is to say, emancipatory

? mode. I wish to defend the idea of

critique first articulated by Adorno (1970) and his colleagues in the Frankfurt

School, the idea of criticism as a "negative dialectic." The argument is that a

principled critique of social and political developments (in their case fascism, and

in ours increasingly hegemonic free markets) does not depend on the description, or the immediate potentiality, of an alternative. "Negative dialectics" in this sense

is the straightforward insistence that the analysis of existing social development does not depend on its acceptance. Indeed, analysis may be enhanced by recogniz? ing the desperate and inhuman quality of much social behavior within the world as currently constituted ? that is, human activities produced by the "demoraliza?

tion" of a citizenry.12 By offering a critique of social formations in which

"everything has gone to the market" (including people's basic incomes and

standard of living, as well as their health and personal well-being), we are not

necessarily advancing a politics that rejects the importance of competitiveness and

efficiency in the conduct of economic life and work. As I argue elsewhere (Taylor, 1999), all the major social transformations that characterize our lives at the end of

the century need not necessarily be explained simply and exclusively in terms of




the sudden explosion of "the free market." However, connections must still be

made between the organic transformations that have occurred in the organization of economic activity and work (the rise of a new "market structure") and

accompanying transformations of the larger culture and social formation (the

continuing rise to dominance of a "market culture"). In "market societies," as

against welfare states, there are specific and powerful structures (such as housing and labor market access, and "personal financial services") that reinforce and

reproduce individual survival and individual success. Cultural scripts (in advertis?

ing and political and media discourses) work in the same direction. Generally more

difficult to locate in market societies are structures and cultures working in support of "communities," "neighborhoods," and other forms of collaborative or collec? tive forms of living (all of which have been under persistent attack over the last two

decades). It is vital for criminologists engaged in the public task of explaining the

presence of crime in such societies to understand the fundamental transformation that has occurred in the forms of social relationships and associated "cultural

scripts" during these last two decades. In both the legal and illegal locales of the modern economy, social relations have rapidly been transformed into intense,

competitive, exploitative, and self-interested forms of commodity exchange. Little imagination is required to understand how this contemporary truth may help to explain the increasing presence in so many "advanced" societies of dehuman?

ized and predatory criminality, as well as the level of fear and insecurity on which

the discipline of criminology is currently so dependent.

Table 1:

European Community Prison Populations, 1990-1996

Country Prison Population

September 1990

Prison Population

September 1996

Percent Change 1990-1996

Netherlands

Italy

Portugal

Spain Scotland

England and Wales

Belgium France

Germany Sweden

Austria

Greece

Ireland

Denmark

Finland

Total

6,892

32,588

9,169

33,058

4,724

45,649

6,549

47,449

65,838*

5,300

6,527

5,133

2,108

3,205

3,252

277,419

11,931

48,747

13,743

42,105

5,861

55,537

7,763

54,014

71,047

5,757

6,788

5,427

2,139

3,194

3,248

337,309

+ 73 + 49

+ 49 + 27 + 24 + 21

+ 18 + 13

+ 7

+ 0.08 + 0.05 + 0.03

+ 0.01

-0.01

-0.005

+ 21

Source: Criminal Statistics, England and Wales, 1996. * Figure for 1993.



164 Taylor

NOTES

1. Our commitment to this "emancipatory mode" in The New Criminology no doubt explains some of the exaggerated claims that were made, especially in the final chapter, for our "social theory of deviance." Our insistence on the primacy of a social explanation could not in itself abolish the

influence of biology or personality disorder within individual acts of rule-breaking, and, as Elliott

Currie pointed out in a quite brilliant critical review (Currie, 1974), the denial of biology and

"pathology" would have been a very "undialectical" position to assume. What matters in a theory of

criminal behavior framed in terms of a fully sociological analysis is to try to specify the sets of social

conditions that are conducive to the production, enactment, and/or the institutionalization of pathology within individual lives, or the experiences of social groups as a whole, vis-?-vis those that have

different, socially therapeutic effects.

2. Maddison's study of university psychiatry was clearly very much influenced by another form

of "critical social enquiry" in place in that period ? the "anti-psychiatry" of R.D. Laing, and also the

different critiques of psychiatric power advanced in North America by the right-wing libertarian

Thomas Szasz and in Italy by the Marxist student of mental health, Franco Basaglia. 3. I have in mind here the quite unromantic observations of fiction writers like Charles Dickens

and Upton Sinclair on the range of different adaptations to life among the urban poor in 19th-century London and Chicago, including the most predatory of interpersonal theft and personal attack. Similar

observations about the contradictory expressions of poverty in 19th-century London are found in

Henry Mayhew's famous taxonomies of the London poor. The recent scholarly commentary on the

lives of people in the multiply deprived "hyper-ghettoes" of the urban United States, by Loic Wacquant and William Julius Wilson, reemphasizes the overwhelming importance of situating even the most

"meaningless" forms of crime in the desperate sets of social and economic circumstances from which

they most often emanate.

4. I made one modest attempt to inquire into these considerations, drawing on the earlier work

of the English Utopian socialist, Edward Carpenter (see Taylor, 1991). 5. But, as Zygmunt Bauman (1992:219) so clearly puts it, "one thing that liberalism cannot cater

for is precisely the matter of justice, social justice." 6. One of the most extraordinary examples of the political articulation of the "critique of social

control" position in Britain is to be found in the pages of Living Marxism, the journal of the

Revolutionary Communist Party sold on the streets of major cities. Living Marxism is committed to

a paranoid view of world politics, in which most representations in television news are seen to be

substantially controlled by the CIA on the one hand, and, on the other, a libertarian and individualist

form of domestic politics, in which all forms of state regulation (like the control of private ownership of firearms or the supervision of pedophiles) are an intrusion to be opposed.

7. See "Income Distribution and Poverty in EU12," Statistics in Focus No. 6 (Luxembourg: Eurostat, 1997).

8. An honorable exception here is John Hagan of the University of Toronto in two important

monographs co-authored in the 1990s (Hagan and Peterson, 1995; Hagan and McCarthy, 1998). In

Europe, other critical commentators who have always insisted on the empirical connection between

poverty and crime would include Fritz Sack of the University of Hamburg. 9. There are marked differences in the levels of these crimes reported to the police across

England and Wales, which bear no direct relationship to recorded levels of unemployment or to other

aspects of local economic development. Car thefts are highest in Teesside, an area of high unemploy? ment and uncertain economic prospects, and in Greater Manchester, with a lesser level of unemploy? ment and relatively good economic prospects.

10. In one of his most recent commentaries on life in postmodern market society, Zygmunt Bauman speaks of a new inequality between those privileged vanguards in the "first world" for whom

space and time restraints have been all but abolished (travel is unproblematic), and a "second world"




whose residents live almost entirely within that space (i.e., in their own homes and neighborhoods). In this space, "time is void"; in their time, "nothing ever happens." Only virtual TV time has a structure, a "timetable ? the rest of time is monotonously ticking away" (Bauman, 1998: 88-89). When the

residents of this second world "travel" outside their neighborhoods, Bauman argues, they are

immediately under surveillance, harassed, and, very often, arrested or deported. 11. Some of this rewriting of subcultural approaches to "delinquency" has already begun in the

United States, as, for example, in the ethnographic studies conducted by Jay MacLeod (1987) and

Mercer Sullivan (1989), but I know of no European equivalent study. 12. I take it that this approach was what informed the quite extraordinary ethnographic work

undertaken by Philippe B ourgois in a community of "crack dealers" on the upper East Side in New York

in the early 1990s, prophetically entitled In Search of Respect (Bourgois, 1996).

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