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In praise of dangerous thoughts

David Downes once famously remarked that criminology is a ‘rendezvous discipline’ – it is a subject where other disciplines meet and its very liveliness and, at its best, intellectual interest is because of this position on the busy crossroads of sociology, psychology, law and philosophy. Criminology cannot exist separately from social theory, it is inevitably concerned with the central problems of social order and disorder. One glance at the classic texts: Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Merton, the Chicago School and the symbolic interactionists shows the shared canon with sociology. What is distinctive about criminology is not its knowledge base but its formal focus: on the origins of crime, on criminal law and on the interaction between the offender and the law – and latterly the victim. Suffice it to say that all the main social theorists engage with at least some part of this problematic – the major exemplar is, of course, Durkheim – and that not only does criminology need social theory but social theory has been manifestly and frequently concerned with crime, disorder and regulation. Yet there is the ever-present tendency in contemporary work, particularly in the burgeoning administrative criminology, to cast adrift from grand theory to write as if a theory of the social order, the State and political economy were no concern to the jobbing criminologist. This text sets out to help place theory back into its key role particularly with regards to contemporary theory and in relationship to the wide changes engendered by late modernity. David Garland and Richard Sparks in a far-reaching and thoughtful introductory essay set out to analyse the impact of late modernity on criminology, their central thesis being that the world today is no longer the same as that which faced the modernist criminology which developed during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. According to their analysis modern criminology was a discourse which emerged around the penal–welfare complex. It was hegemonic in its influence, individualistic in its focus and relatively autonomous from wider currents of social thought. Its aim was the social engineering of the maladjusted individual into the ranks of the law-abiding majority – it was a discourse of inclusion. It presented a progressive narrative of modern times, as reform followed reform and the rehabilitative ideal of the criminologist influenced politicians