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Comments on Simon Cottee’s ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics:“Left Idealism” Reconsidered’, in Theoretical Criminology 6(4)

Simon Cottee’s article depicts our work as a long series of Punch and Judy shows: two puppets slugging out the same dumb name-calling battles for 30 years. Neither of us has much ‘agency’. The hapless Young does not even understand that ‘ideas presuppose agents’; he seems to think that ‘. . . the ideas do battle on their own behalf’ (p. 390). For him, ‘The protagonists of criminology are never humans, but only reified abstractions’ (p. 391). Young comes out altogether badly: his accounts of others’ work are judged as misplaced, misleading, even ‘conspicuous fiction’ (p. 391); his criticisms (of the early history of British criminology, of left idealism, of Cohen’s work) are ‘. . . founded upon a fundamentally inappropriate approach to the history of ideas’ (p. 403). Cohen gets off more lightly. His histories of early 1960s’ British criminology were wrong and unfair; his support for re-mapping the subject into broader social and sociological issues, was, far from being radical, ‘obsequiously conventional’ (p. 397). Cottee’s personal animus against Young, however, is openly stated and the whole article consists of obsessionally textual defences of Cohen-texts against Young-texts. But Cottee’s real target, as we will see, is our common commitment as representatives of (loosely speaking) ‘critical criminology’. C O M M E N T A R Y