Criminology and Political Theory

Dr Anthony Amatrudo, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412930505, 9781412930499
• eBook ISBN: 9781473903586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

A lucid, sophisticated and timely vindication of the importance of Marxist, feminist and other radical perspectives on the state and political economy to the analysis of crime, control and justice. It offers a valuable guide to issues of political philosophy for students and teachers of criminology, critically deconstructing the taken-for-granted categories of law and criminal justice. - Professor Robert Reiner, London School of Economics, UK

This clear and concise book sets out the relationship between political theory and criminology. It critically analyzes key theories and debates within criminology and addresses the major political ideas that lie beneath them. Organized around key criminological concepts and issues, the book covers:

" power and ideology

" the nature of the state

" social control and policing

" punishment

" economics and criminal activity

" morality.

The book has been carefully developed to support practical teaching and learning and contains chapter summaries, further reading and a comprehensive glossary, which combine to provide a full understanding of the themes.

1

THE NATURE OF THE STATE

Political power is, of course, always coercive power backed by the state’s machinery for enforcing its laws. But in a constitutional regime political power is also power of equal citizens as a collective body: it is regularly imposed on citizens as individuals, some of whom may not accept the reasons widely believed to justify the general structure of political authority (the constitution); or when they do accept that structure, they may not regard as well grounded many of the laws enacted by the legislature to which they are subject.

John Rawls, 2001¹

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Introduction

The nature of the state is a topic which divides criminologists. There are those who see it as a neutral instrument which upholds civic order or which supports citizens through a system of benefits and support and there are those who see the state as either having interests of its own or advancing the interests of a specific class of persons, in whose interests it governs. The idea of justice as fairness rests upon the idea that the state is a neutral entity and it is fair to say that the liberal tradition within Criminology has tended either to neglect the state or to rely, wholesale, upon liberal political theorists, such as John Rawls and his conception of ‘social cooperation among equals for mutual advantage’.² The Marxist and Feminist traditions within Criminology have a far richer body of writing about the state and more generally about state control and social regulation. This chapter will set out the main ideas used in contemporary Criminology, either explicitly or implicitly, concerning the nature of the state.

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The State

The state is, arguably, the most contested term in political theory and it may refer to a great many different things, such as a philosophical or ideological category, an institution, a territorial power or a functional organising principle. It is a topic covered extensively in the writings of political philosophers since classical times, and certainly Plato, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Marx are only a few of the writers who have tackled the subject of the state. In Criminology different traditions have grown up which attribute varying motivations to the state. In order to make progress, let us outline four basic and interrelated features of a state. First, the state must have a working political organisational structure. In other words, it must have a set of institutions which allow it to operate, such as the courts, a civil service and a police force. Secondly, for a state to be a working entity it has to persist in time and space, i.e. it must control a set territory and survive changes in its basic organisation, as would be the case if an election altered the government. Thirdly, it must be able to support a single political form of public order and therefore it must have agency. It must be sovereign and be able to claim a monopoly of political authority, law-making and power, and it must be autonomous. Fourthly, but closely linked to the idea of the state as a single political form of public order, it must have the allegiance of its members (citizens, subjects), who are subject to its laws and who have an obligation to obey it. The political theorist John Charvet has noted that: ‘For Locke, as well as for Hobbes and Rousseau, entry into political society from the state of nature is possible only if individuals surrender their natural right of private judgement to the public judgement of the community or its agent.’³

The two most important features for criminologists are the first and third features. The first feature, that the state is a particular form of political organisation, is the dominant notion at work in contemporary Criminology. It is the view of Karl Marx, who wrote in The German Ideology that: ‘Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopts both for internal and external purposes, for mutual guarantee of their property and interests.’⁴ In contemporary legal theory, Joseph Raz has also argued that the state is a form of political organisation, but he has usefully delineated the state from law and government: ‘The state …is the political organisation of a society, its government, the agent through which it acts, and the law, the vehicle through which much of its power is exercised.’⁵ Raz has further argued that: ‘A state is the political organisation of a society, it is a subsystem of a more comprehensive social system.’⁶ This position echoes John Rawls’ idea, expressed in Political Liberalism, that: ‘a society’s main political, social, and economic institutions, and how they fit together into one unified system of social cooperation from one generation to the next’.⁷ It should be noted here that the political and social basis of the state are not very clearly delineated.⁸

The third feature, that the state is a political form of public order with a monopoly of political authority, law-making and power, was underscored by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who defined the state as that form of political power which has the sole right to make laws and to punish those who fail to follow them, and it has obvious connections to the study of crime. Hobbes, in the Leviathan, wrote: ‘I Authorise and give up my Right of Government myselfe, to this Man, or his Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authority all his Actions in like manner.’⁹ Hobbes saw the state as being that thing which preserves men from the state of nature. Hobbes’ conception is set out in the Leviathan, where he writes: ‘The state of nature is simply the condition of men without a sovereign power to compel order. Just as we may never have a perfect vacuum, perhaps we can never have a situation where there are no vestiges of the restraints that sovereignty provides, but inasmuch as sovereignty is absent, to that extent men will begin to exhibit behaviour typical of the state of nature.’¹⁰ In Hobbes, we get the idea that it is not natural for men and women to subordinate themselves for the greater good. Rather, we are presented with a view that social community, and freedom from the state of nature, can only be established through the exercise of political power. Our human society is the outcome of agreements and conventions that men and women make themselves.¹¹ John Locke, following Hobbes, saw the state as that political institution which maintains order. Locke details his notion of the main function of a state in his description of the Law of Nature: ‘For the Law of Nature would, as other Laws that concern men in this world, be in vain, if there were no body that in the state of nature, had a power to execute the Law and thereby preserve the innocent and restrain offenders.’¹² In this passage we note both his understanding that all law requires enforcement and concern for deterrence in punishment.¹³ In contemporary liberal political theory, both Charvet and Raz follow the tradition of understanding the state as that thing that maintains law and order and thereby allows persons to live their lives unhindered by the dangers inherent in a state of nature; indeed, it is the standard view.¹⁴ It is important to note that in liberal theory the state is the outcome of a voluntary agreement made by individuals who realise that only a social contract will save them from the dangers of the state of nature. The liberal state is always a protective neutral entity which represents all the people fairly for the common good of all. This conception of a neutral state that safeguards its citizens equally from the state of nature is what Marxism and Feminism take issue with.

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Marxism and the State

The classic statement within Marxist Criminology on the state, as that thing which frames laws which uphold sectional class interests, was given us by Bill Chambliss when he wrote: ‘... without doubt the single most important force behind criminal law creation is doubtless the economic interest and political power of those social classes which either (1) own or control the resources of the society, or (2) occupy positions of authority in state bureaucracies’.¹⁵ Marx himself gave two different accounts of the state. The account Marx gives in his Introduction to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is an unfinished work and is a critique of Hegel, rather than a systematic view of his own thinking. The first view Marx outlined for himself was given in the 1848 The Communist Manifesto, where he wrote: ‘...executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’.¹⁶ In The Communist Manifesto, the state simply coordinates the interests of dominant class. We are presented with a straightforward binary opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. However, Marx also advanced a second view, notably in two other works, the Class Struggles in France, written in 1850, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written in 1852. In these works, he outlines a plurality of classes and details how the state is far more than just a simple coordinator of the interests of the dominant class. Marx also argued, in this second view, that the state itself has some autonomy. This second view of the state has become the dominant view in contemporary Marxist scholarship and Carnoy has written that: ‘The State is not regarded simply as an instrument of the ruling class. ... Who rules the State is an important issue, but few, if any, current writers claim that the ruling class controls the State directly.’¹⁷ However, we must not lose sight of the fact that Marx did not furnish a systematic theory of the state and his ideas are often inconsistent or not fully formed, though this is in part due to the fact that he was far more concerned with Political Economy, rather than Political Theory.¹⁸ Marx also tends to underplay the ability of individuals to either act or calculate independently of their economic situation. Because Marx failed to provide a thoroughgoing or clear conception of the state, his followers have had to interpret his writings and this has spawned a variety of latter-day Marxist theories.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the Marxist state is always essentially economic in its character. As Pashukanis said of legal forms, they ‘form a united whole with the material relations of which they are the expression’.²⁰ This position is found in Marx’s Preface to a Critique of Political Economy:

My investigations led to the result that legal relations as well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the so-called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life.… The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structures of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure. ... The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual lif...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Nature of the State
• 2 Economics and Criminal Activity
• 3 Rights and Obligations
• 4 Police and Policing
• 5 The Aims of Punishment
• 6 The Concept of Censure
• 7 Desert and Proportionality
• 8 Fairness
• 9 Ethics and our Moral Actions
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index