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REVIEWS 169

Punishment and Modern Society By David Garland (Chicago, Ill : Univer-sityofChicago Press 1990.312 pp. 29.95).

h e criminologist David Garland is probably best known among historians forhis book Punishment and Welfare which analyzes the evolution of the penalsystem and its relationship to the emerging welfare state, especially in Englandsince the late nineteenth century. His new book is no t a work of straightforwardhistory. Rather, his aim is to arrive at a sociology of punishment, a sociologywhich would help us deal with th t phenomenon today. He does write from adevelopmental perspective though, making ample use of historical data.

Garland's premise is th t most of the recent literature on punishment hasbeen written by professionals who, in one way or the other, were involved in thecriminal justice system themselves. They were concerned primarily with th t

system's internal functioning, or rather dysfunctioning, which prevented themfrom adopting a view from outside. Faced with a crisis of disillusionment inpenological writing, Garland wants to stress the importance of such an outsideview, of seeing the criminal justice system, or penality as he calls it, as oneelement in a wider social network: we need to know what punishment is inorder to think what it can and should be (10).

His method essentially consists of critically reviewing what other theoristshave said about penality, weeding out the weak elements and emphasizing thestrong ones. Thus, he discussesthe work of three classical sociologists, Durkheim,

Marx and Weber, and their followers, moving next to more recent studies by, orinspired by,Foucault and Elias. he common element in these respective analysesis th t they do no t deal with punishment for its own sake but in order to validatea specifictheory about society asa whole and its development. Foucault probablycomes closest to reviewing punishment for its own sake, but he, too, has a widerperspective of power, discipline and the constitutive role of certain discourses.Although neither Weber nor Elias extensively dealt with penalitv, others havebeen influenced by their writings. In the case of Weber this means th t authorstook up themes such as rationalization or the routinization of charisma; in thecase of Elias the implications involved changing sensibilities and punishment'scultural context. Marx and Durkheim, of course, had their own grand theories.

Garland pursues his method consistently and diligently. He often devotes aseparate chapter to the exposition of a specific approach and another to hiscriticism of this approach. h e result is a highly readable book from which alot is to be learned about theories of punishment and the character of penality.Durkheim, for example, is rescued more or less from the obscurity of a textbookexistence. Garland shows how Durkheim's theory of penality, although illustrated mainly by examples from 'primitive' societies, still has its relevance forthe modern world. We do no t have to swallow his view of organic solidarity

and his vision of society as a moral community in its entirety, but we can stilladmit th t punishment sometimes has solidarity-producing effects. Where othertheories ofpenality often concentrate on just two parties, the controllers and thecontrolled, Durkheim stresses the role of a third party, the onlookers. While hemay have taken the term onlookers in a rather literal sense, we may view themas members of the general public reading newspapers and watching t.v. Somecrimes such as murder or rape certainly produce collective feelings of moral out-

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170 journal of social history fall 1992

rage throughout the population. However, as Garland rightly states, communityfeeling nowadays is concerned primarily with whether individual offenders getthe appropriate amount of what isconsidered their due. Thus, Durkheim s thesisthat punishments express collective sentiments is shown to be applicable, but

in a restricted way. In a similar vein, Garland shows the theories of Marx andothers to be partially relevant and, what ismore important, he shows where theyapply and where they don t.

Garland wishes his own theory of penality to be as close to social reality aspossible, which is of course what every theorist should strive for. In particular,he wants to incorporate all relevant features of punishment and to use them asbuilding blocks for his theory, at the risk ofmaking it lesscoherent than the grandtheories he has reviewed. This is done in the book s two concluding chapters.Th e firstdeals with the mutual relationships ofpunishment and culture, viewing

penality not only as a reflection of culture but also as an active creator of culture.Th e final chapter argues that punishment is a complex social institution. Th estrength of Garland s analysis, his refusal to opt for any of the grand theories andhis careful scrutiny of empirical reality, is simultaneously his weakness: it doesno t become entirely clear what his own theory is and in some cases the readerwonders whether the detour of reviewing the work of several great sociologistswas really necessary to arrive at an obvious conclusion. On the other hand,Garland s task was far from easyand the concluding chapters, too, contain manyinteresting ideas. This is certainly a book that every historian or other social

scientist concerned with crime and justice should read.

Erasmus University Rotterdam Pieter Spierenburg

Coffee Contention and Change in the Making odem Brazil By MauricioA. Font Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwel l, 1990. xii plus 351 pp. .

This detailed study of Sao Paulo in the 1920s is an ambitious and innovativeattempt to ssess the impact of coffee on Brazilian society. Rejecting Frank s development of underdevelopment thesis, Font, a sociologist, argues that factors at work within Sao Paulo s export economy unleashed a dynamic processof social and economic diversification leading toward a full-fledged capitalistrevolution.

Diversification, according to Font, resulted from a fundamental weakness inSao Paulo s plantation economy: fazendas (large coffee estates) were not fullycapitalist enterprises. Both capitalist and precapitalist features characterized therelationship between planters and the European immigrants they employed.

Under the standard contract, immigrant workers received wages and were alsoallowed to cultivate food crops for their own use as well for sale in nearby mar,kets. Through such sales, a surprisingly large number of immigrants eventuallymanaged to set aside the savings needed to purchase land and to establish them,selves as independent producers. Font estimates that, by the late 1920s, at leastone quarter of all the coffeeharvested in Sao Paulo came from small farms ownedby immigrants. Smallholders also cultivated cereals and cotton.

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