Colin Sumner: Criminology Through The Looking-Glass 3030369404, 9783030369408, 9783030369415

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
Chapter 1: Introduction......Page 9
References......Page 12
Chapter 2: Sumner and Ideological Censure......Page 13
Context......Page 14
Marxism......Page 15
Socio-Legal Studies......Page 16
Criminology......Page 19
Sumner’s Concept of Ideological Censure......Page 24
Ideology......Page 26
Censure......Page 31
To Cambridge......Page 39
References......Page 41
Chapter 3: After Censure......Page 46
Sumner as Critic......Page 48
Sumner as Theorist of Underdevelopment......Page 57
Sumner as Media Analyst......Page 60
Sumner as Theorist of Censure......Page 62
Shifting Sands......Page 67
References......Page 69
Chapter 4: Sumner and the Death of Deviance......Page 74
The Obituary in Brief......Page 76
Part One......Page 77
Part Two......Page 79
Part Three......Page 82
Observations on the Obituary......Page 86
References......Page 89
Chapter 5: After the Death of Deviance......Page 93
Continued Theoretical Development......Page 95
Censure in the Textbooks......Page 99
A Return to Old Themes......Page 103
A Retirement of Sorts......Page 105
The Continuing Controversy over the Obituary......Page 111
References......Page 114
Chapter 6: Sumner and the Looking Glass......Page 118
Censure and the 2011 Riots......Page 120
Measure for Measure......Page 123
A Return to First Principles......Page 126
Through the Looking Glass......Page 131
References......Page 134
Chapter 7: After Sumner?......Page 137
Sumner’s Work as a Cumulative Project......Page 138
A Commitment to Theory......Page 140
Sumner and Marxism......Page 141
Towards Moral Renewal?......Page 144
Sumner’s Influence......Page 145
The Future......Page 146
References......Page 147
Works by Colin Sumner......Page 151
Index......Page 157

Citation preview

PALGRAVE PIONEERS IN CRIMINOLOGY

Colin Sumner Criminology Through the Looking-Glass David Moxon

Palgrave Pioneers in Criminology Series Editors David Polizzi Indiana State University Terre Haute, IN, USA James Hardie-Bick School of Law, Politics & Sociology University of Sussex Brighton, UK

Palgrave Pioneers in Criminology examines the theorists and their work that has shaped the discussions and debates in the interdisciplinary, growing field of Criminology, focussing particularly on Critical Criminology. The pioneers range from established to newer academics in Criminology and beyond from other disciplines including Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy and Law. Each book in the series offers an overview of a pioneer and their contribution to the field of Criminology, from the perspective of one author or multiple contributors. The series charts the historical development of key theories and brings discussions up to the present day to consider the past, present and future relevance of these theories for society. This series presents in-depth, engaging, new discussions about this field and the directions that it will continue to grow in. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15996

David Moxon

Colin Sumner Criminology Through the Looking-Glass

David Moxon Sheffield, UK

Palgrave Pioneers in Criminology ISBN 978-3-030-36940-8    ISBN 978-3-030-36941-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36941-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I first encountered Colin Sumner’s work as an undergraduate whilst pottering around the law library in the Crookesmoor building at the University of Sheffield when I should really have been reading texts and cases on employment law, public law and the like. Since then it has been a constant companion, and although I no longer work in academia, it continues to inform my outlook. I have been fortunate enough to get to know Colin personally, and to assist in the preparation of this volume, he very kindly allowed me to borrow some papers and books that would otherwise have been all but impossible to get hold of. For this, and for all his work over the years, I thank him sincerely. Thanks also to Tony Amatrudo, who commissioned this book in the first place and has always been supremely encouraging and supportive. A number of other obscure papers were efficiently sourced by the British Library’s document supply service. The staff at the University of Sheffield’s Western Bank Library kindly facilitated access to Colin’s PhD thesis even though my credentials had long since expired. I am grateful to the typically hospitable Canadians who have hosted me and allowed me to set up shop in their homes: the Borody family—Marin, Cam, Brenner and Olen—in Toronto, and everyone at the cottage. I will try to have a proper holiday next time.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Finally, Jaime, Isla and Beth. Thanks as always for giving me the space and the support to do this. As Colin Sumner (1979: xi) himself once said, “I will organise it better next time.”

Reference Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies: An investigation into the Marxist theory of ideology and law. London: Academic Press.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Sumner and Ideological Censure  5 3 After Censure 39 4 Sumner and the Death of Deviance 67 5 After the Death of Deviance 87 6 Sumner and the Looking Glass113 7 After Sumner?133 Works by Colin Sumner147 Index153

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Sometime after the year 2000, a young criminologist will provide a biographical account of Colin Sumner’s contribution to critical criminology during his sojourn at the Cambridge Institute. Several dozen students […] from the UK and from other countries have now passed through postgraduate studies which were exceptionally informed by his presence. —Brogden (1993: 304)

Abstract  This chapter introduces the book. It outlines the intention of the book to take a fresh look at the work of Colin Sumner, placing it in its disciplinary and wider social context. The sometimes divisive and controversial nature of Sumner’s work is noted, and it is suggested that despite being a distinctive and important thinker who has produced works of great theoretical sophistication, his influence in criminology has not been as great as it might have been. It is suggested that Sumner’s work has involved a gradually deepening understanding of his core notion of ideological censure, which has given his career a remarkable consistency and clarity of purpose. An outline of the book is provided, and it is noted that the book will refer extensively to original sources, chiefly in order to act as a corrective to some of the misconceptions that abound about Sumner’s work. Keywords  Sumner • Criminology • Censure © The Author(s) 2020 D. Moxon, Colin Sumner, Palgrave Pioneers in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36941-5_1

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It was with a certain degree of prescience that Mike Brogden opened his review of Imperial Policing (Ahire 1991), a book written by one of Colin Sumner’s erstwhile students at Cambridge. While a digest of Sumner’s time at Cambridge has yet to appear, the present book at least partly affirms Brodgen’s confident prediction by offering an assessment of Sumner’s entire work and career to date, including but not limited to his Cambridge years. What Brogden did correctly identify was the sense that Sumner’s contribution to criminology, through both his writing and his teaching, had reached the point where it was deserving of recognition in some way. By 1993, Sumner was well known as a “combative” (Rock 1988: 193) criminologist who had long been part of the radical faction of the “fortunate generation” (1988: 190), but had counter-intuitively landed a position at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology where he had been in post for the best part of a decade and a half. What is now Sumner’s best-known work, The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary (1994), would be published just a year later. But this does not tell the whole story. Sumner’s direct and uncompromising style, his longstanding commitment to Marxism or at least a Marx-­ inspired worldview, his refusal to shy away from criticism of the work of others, and a barely disguised contempt for the direction of the discipline as a whole was not to everyone’s taste. Indeed, the reception to The Obituary only seemed to reinforce Sumner’s status as a polarising figure in the discipline, particularly in North America. As a result, his standing as one of criminology’s most distinctive and important thinkers was never really consolidated, and his early semi-retirement from academia in 2002, though later aborted, saw him increasingly move towards the fringes of the conversation in the discipline at a time when his contemporaries were cementing their legacies. Against this background, this book takes a fresh look at the entirety of Sumner’s work with the aim of restoring his standing in the discipline. He should be thought of as a criminological pioneer who has produced works of great theoretical sophistication which were well ahead of their time. By systematically considering Sumner’s entire output, the book will show how his thought has involved a gradually deepening understanding of his core notion of ideological censure, a slowly unspooling appreciation of the ramifications of that singular theoretical insight which first appeared in his PhD. This has given his career a remarkable consistency and clarity of purpose. His thinking has been vindicated by the rise of a hyper-­individualised, aggressive neo-liberalism where anxious, atomised subjects busy t­ hemselves

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by angrily censuring each other across vast chasms of misunderstanding; his latest works, dripping with contempt for late modern capitalism and its effects, are those of a scholar still aghast at the state of the contemporary social world and still restlessly trying to understand it. This book, then, is fundamentally a technical exercise designed to showcase Sumner’s work. It aims to re-present his arguments and ideas and act as a resource for those interested in exploring his thinking. At each step Sumner’s work will be situated in its disciplinary and wider social context, as he himself would no doubt recommend. Chapter 2 looks at his early work, up to and including Reading Ideologies (1979) and taking in his remarkable PhD (1976). During this period he outlined rigorous theoretical positions on deviance and ideology, underpinned by a non-­dogmatic Marxism. The rest of his career has seen him explore the ramifications of the perspective he developed in these early years, and apply his underlying methodological approach and theoretical position to related areas of thought. Chapter 3 focusses on his work through the 1980s and early 1990s, including the often-neglected Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment (1982) and the landmark collection Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (1990), where his theory of social censure was given its most comprehensive exposition. Chapter 4 turns its attention to his best known, most controversial and much misunderstood work, The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary (1994). Chapter 5 looks at what followed in the wake of the Obituary, including those works produced during his truncated retirement from academia, as well as the controversy that the Obituary itself had generated. Chapter 6 brings the story up to date, assessing his most recent contributions which were written after he returned to the academy with a post at Cork. The final chapter will make some concluding observations about the nature of Sumner’s oeuvre and its contemporary significance. Perhaps more than others, Sumner has suffered from the trend in academia towards simplified, textbook-friendly summations of scholarly work, for his is a complex, cumulative and multifaceted project. As Tierney (2010: 1) puts it, “sometimes the ideas and theories of classic, or at least frequently referred to, writers suffer the fate of messages in Chinese whispers: the original message becomes distorted, or caricatured or oversimplified.” Sumner himself, in an essay on Habermas, has suggested that “there is rarely a substitute for the original texts” (1983: 157). In this spirit, and in order act as a corrective to some of misconceptions that abound about Sumner’s work, this book refers extensively to the originals. It helps that Sumner is an endlessly quotable author who writes with force and panache.

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Thus it is better we allow him to speak for himself. This approach also has the advantage of bringing some of Sumner’s words, many contained in what are now difficult to find hard-copy editions of long-defunct publications, to a new audience and will hopefully help to preserve them for posterity. One consequence of this approach is that in places the book might appear somewhat repetitive. This is because Sumner’s body of work is characterised in part by a constant series of iterations as he continually refines his basic themes and as he responds to changed contexts with delicately shifting emphases. In this way the book should hopefully provide the reader with a reasonably accurate sense of the precise nature and feel of what we might refer to, hopefully not too bombastically, as the Sumnerian project.

References Ahire, P. (1991). Imperial policing: The emergence and role of the police in colonial Nigeria, 1860–1960. Buckingham: Open University Press. Brogden, M. (1993). Review of Ahire’s Imperial policing: The emergence and role of the police in colonial Nigeria, 1860–1960. British Journal of Criminology, 33(2), 304–305. Rock, P. (1988). The present state of criminology in Britain. British Journal of Criminology, 28(2), 188–199. Sumner, C. (1976). Ideology and deviance. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield. Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies: An investigation into the Marxist theory of ideology and law. London: Academic Press. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1982). Crime, justice and underdevelopment. London: Heinemann. Sumner, C. (1983). Law, legitimation and the advanced capitalist state: The jurisprudence and social theory of Jurgen Habermas. In D.  Sugarman (Ed.), Legality, ideology and the state (pp. 119–158). London: Academic Press. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1990). Censure, politics and criminal justice. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1994). The sociology of deviance: An obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Tierney, J. (2010). Criminology: Theory and context (3rd ed.). Harlow: Pearson.

CHAPTER 2

Sumner and Ideological Censure

Abstract  This second chapter focusses upon Colin Sumner’s work during the 1970s which furnished the methodological approach and the notion of ideological censure that  have provided the foundation stones for the remainder of his scholarly career. The chapter opens with a discussion about the context of Sumner’s early work in Marxism, socio-legal studies and radical criminology. Then, the development of his concept of ideological censure is explored. Three key works—his PhD, a short chapter on deviance and the book Reading Ideologies—are considered in detail to show how he fused his Marxian take on ideology and his dissatisfaction with radical criminological work on defining deviance to create a new notion of deviance as ideological censure. Keywords  Sumner • Ideology • Deviance • Censure

For the vast majority of scholars, their first steps into a field of study tend to be somewhat halting and tentative. It can take time for a clear direction of travel to be settled upon, if indeed one emerges at all, and there are often missteps along the way. The early work of Colin Sumner was quite different. With remarkable clarity of vision, Sumner offered up a comprehensively drawn theoretical framework, rooted in a reading of Marx that drew succour from the vigorous debates of the time. Read cumulatively, © The Author(s) 2020 D. Moxon, Colin Sumner, Palgrave Pioneers in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36941-5_2

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his PhD (1976a), a short chapter in a well-known edited collection (1976b) and his first major book, Reading Ideologies (1979a), furnish the notion of ideological censure as well as the methodological approach that has provided the bedrock for the entirety of Sumner’s corpus of work. As Sumner himself put it in the Introduction to his PhD, “for myself, I feel that I have turned over enough ground to keep me going in revealed research issues for at least one lifetime” (1976a: iv–v). As we will see in the chapters that follow, this has proven to be rather more prescient than even Sumner himself could have possibly realised at the time. For now, this chapter will focus upon Sumner’s early work during the 1970s as he mapped out a distinctive pathway in a series of remarkable interventions in the field.

Context Perhaps the most fundamental point made by Sumner in Reading Ideologies is that in order to properly grasp theories, ideas and attitudes, or what might be termed the “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977) of a given time and place, one must take full account of the socio-political and cultural milieu that they were generated within.1 This is, of course, particularly challenging when we are considering the early work of Colin Sumner given the amount of time that has passed since he worked up his initial position. As Roberts puts it, “the challenge of sympathetically reimagining the intellectual habitus of times gone by should not be underestimated. […] For readers much younger than me, I imagine the cultural milieu of critical criminology must be about as personally accessible as histories of the General Strike, or the battle of Agincourt” (2017: 22–30). Our task is made that much more difficult by the fact that we must consider not only the ‘cultural milieu of critical criminology’ during the late 1960s and 1970s, but also that of socio-legal studies, for it was there that Sumner staked out his intellectual base-camp. In both these disciplines, the increased academic interest in Marx and Marxism was beginning to have a profound influence at the time of Sumner’s emergence. 1  Indeed, in the Preface to Reading Ideologies, Sumner offered his acknowledgments to those who had assisted him before writing that, “if the arguments in the book are right […] one should also thank the social structure for reflecting this particular combination of ideas. Instead, I suppose I have to face up to my legal responsibility for the text—whether you grant me any more responsibility than that depends on how you read it” (1979a: xii).

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Marxism Several overlapping factors drove the revival of interest in Marx and Marxism in the British academy. The events of 1956, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, allowed those in the western Communist Parties “a new freedom of criticism and of intellectual movement” (McLellan 1999: 956–8). The Soviet invasion of Hungary in the same year also alienated many western Marxists and loosened their allegiance to the ‘actually exiting socialism’ of the USSR. Concomitantly, the Sino-Soviet split, which gathered pace through the 1960s, meant that for those in the west, “increasingly, China could be looked to as a model of socialist construction which challenged the paradigm status of the Soviet pattern” (Benton 1984: 3). Only later was the terror of the Cultural Revolution exposed. In addition, there was also increased working class unrest in the capitalist heartlands themselves, as “both the American ‘war on poverty’ and the Labour Government in Britain were seen as failing crucially to correct structural inequalities of class, status and power”; as such, the events in Paris in May 1968 “came to symbolise the possibility of revolutionary change in affluent, western societies” (Downes and Rock 2007: 231). More prosaically, the translation and publication in English of Marx’s early writings was also crucial. What became known as ‘western Marxism’ (Anderson 1976) increasingly focussed upon what classical Marxism had held to be peripheral, superstructural elements of society. This was exemplified in the work of the Frankfurt School and was intensified after the war in the pages of the New Left Review, launched in 1960. It was driven by the sense that investigations into what held capitalist social formations together even in times of crisis were urgently required given that, as Lindsay (1981: 159) put it, “history seemed in no haste to repeat 1917.” Analyses of the role of ideology became an increasingly important part of these efforts. Ideology, of course, had a long history in the Marxist tradition; indeed, it was the writings of Marx that “gave the concept of ideology the wide currency that it now enjoys” (McLellan 1995: 9). But now it became vital in understanding the durability of capitalism whilst avoiding the vices of a reductionist economism and the ossified diktats of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy (Hunt 1985: 13–14). There was growing awareness of the work of Antonio Gramsci, particularly his notion of hegemony (Vincent 1993: 374), which was fostered in the Anglophone world by the translation of his writings through the 1960s and 1970s; Selections from the Prison Notebooks, for

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instance, was published in English in 1971. The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, whose fusion of fashionable structuralism and Parisian philosophy proved an alluringly irresistible combination for many on the Anglophone left, also gave the concept currency among his growing and assertive band of ‘disciples’2 with his essay on Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1971). Of course, ideology is a notoriously slippery and elusive concept; in Reading Ideologies, Sumner (1979a: 4–5) identified 10 different definitions of ideology then in circulation, whilst a little later Eagleton (1991: 1–2) found 16. Within Marxism, there was a deepening rift between those who saw ideology as operating to mystify or conceal contradictions (Bottomore 1983: 220) and those who rejected this ‘critical’ and ‘negative’ approach in favour of a more ‘positive’ conception (Larrain 1983: 4). The result was an explosion of Marxian work on ideology, with Sumner’s Reading Ideologies just one of many contributions.3 Socio-Legal Studies Sumner’s academic journey began at the University of Birmingham, from where he took a law degree in 1970. From this distance we can only imagine how the rarefied surroundings of a law school at a British ‘red brick’ university must have seemed to a young working-class scholar from the town of Leigh in the industrial north west of England.4 Perhaps as a nascent radical Sumner found it a stifling environment, for as Cotterrell (2002: 633) relates, “legal scholarship and education” at the end of the 1960s was a “claustrophobic world”: “Most legal study […] at the end of the 1960s, seemed to focus on technicality as an end in itself and was unconcerned with fundamental questions about law’s nature, sources, and  A slightly scornful phrase that can be traced back at least as far as Lewis (1972: 16).  See also, for example, Lichtman (1975), Kellner (1978), Hirst (1979), Spitzer (1983) and Larrain (1983). Reading Ideologies was characterised as ‘Marxisant’ by Greenberg and Anderson (1981) and was likely considered ‘neo-Marxist’ by others; Sumner (1994: 303) himself later suggested that “it could have been seen as derived from the central principles of Marxian analysis as a dynamic scientific tradition”. 4  In the final chapter of Reading Ideologies, as part of a digression regarding appearance and perception, Sumner (1979a: 287) describes the act of using a map whilst driving: “You look at the map and it tells you that after 15 miles you will reach Manchester.” The distance from Leigh to Manchester, via the old East Lancs Road, is about 15 miles. Was this mere coincidence, or a clandestine homage to his hometown? 2 3

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consequences as a social phenomenon or about its moral groundings. […] Legal study [was] confined to interpreting rules and analysing their logical or plausible interrelations.” The slowly dawning recognition of the limits of this mode of study led to a “deeply felt crisis” (Hunt 1980: 49) in the discipline. The revitalised Marxism discussed above helped plot a route out of this crisis, despite the fact that law had typically been incidental to the key Marxist thinkers. This latter fact was rather surprising given the ‘superstructural turn’ of western Marxism and the fact that law, often seen as expressing and guaranteeing the supposed cohesiveness of advanced mid-­ twentieth century societies by mainstream sociology (Cotterrell 1992: 71–2), represented an obvious target for more radical thinking. But culture, not law, commanded the attention of western Marxism (Anderson 1976: 4), and Marxist jurisprudence entered something of a fallow period after the suppression of the commodity exchange school and the execution of Pashukanis as part of Stalin’s great purge in the USSR. As late as 1971, Currie (1971: 137) could quite plausibly claim that there were “very few Marxian analyses in the academic sociology of law”. Little did he realise that he was writing on the cusp of an enormous sea-change in which the rise of socio-legal studies represented a “breakout” from the crisis of legal scholarship (Cotterrell 2002: 633). The realisation that the strictly ‘black-letter’ approach to law was severely limited and the need of the nascent field of socio-legal studies for a guiding theory dovetailed neatly with the increased interest in Marxism. So-called instrumentalists (Gold et al. 1975) saw law as a tool of the ruling class (Pritt 1970, 1971a, 1971b, 1972), but they had to contend with the fact that, in an era of Keynesian welfarism and powerful trade unions, the state and the law had demonstrated themselves to be capable of securing very real gains for the working classes. Meanwhile Poulantzas, the most feted of Althusser’s “disciples” (Spitzer 1983: 108), produced a number of important ‘structuralist’ contributions (1973, 1978, 1982) that influenced scholars such as Balbus (1977), Edelman (1979) and Jessop (1980). Yet this proliferation of interest was short lived. Indeed, Collins’ Marxism and Law, published in 1982, was the last major Marxist treatise on law for a generation. Sumner’s first academic role was in the pioneering Socio-Legal Studies Group at what was Sheffield Polytechnic, where he assisted in the development of one of the first courses in the subject. In his first published work, which appeared in the journal The Law Teacher, he suggested that “law must be integrated with sociology in teaching and research” (1973a: 19).

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There was little real hint of what was to follow, although the soon to be familiar clarity of argument and incisiveness and the seeds of his dissatisfaction with functionalist sociology that would flower later were already evident. During his stint at Sheffield Poly, which lasted from 1970 to 1974 and was punctuated by a short spell as a lecturer in law at Bristol Polytechnic, Sumner lectured and worked as a research assistant whilst also commencing his PhD ‘up the road’ at the University of Sheffield. He authored a series of unpublished papers and conference presentations which deliberated on the ideological functions of law, the treatment of political demonstrations by the press and the judiciary, the nature of the relation between base and superstructure, the instrumentalist view of law, and the concept of culture as historically specific praxis, all the while deploying a Marxism flavoured with Saussureian and Barthesian semiology (see, e.g., 1973b, 1973c, 1973d, 1974a, 1974b).5 Sumner moved to University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1974 to take up a post as a lecturer in sociology whilst continuing to work on his PhD.  His growing assertiveness was in evidence in a series of book reviews. A review of the first major sociology of law textbook, Freeman’s The Legal Structure (Sumner 1974c), suggested that it often lapsed into functionalism and ignored some of the key thinkers and debates in sociology. The precise, sometimes blunt mode of argumentation and the linguistic flourishes were quickly developing. There followed a coruscating review of the feted Polish scholar Podgorecki’s Law and Society (Sumner 1975a) which featured withering denunciations of the book’s empiricism and tendency towards what he saw as “functionalist fantasy” (1975a: 250). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this review of a work by one of the fathers of the law and sociology movement caused something of a stir. Ziegert (1977), who conceded that Podgorecki’s research methods were questionable, argued that Podgorecki had to an extent turned away from Parsonian functionalism and suggested that Sumner’s was an “unduly parochial response to ideas that did not originate in the critic’s own

5  In an early paper that discussed the utility of semiology in the sociology of law, there was an early formulation of censure. Sumner (1974a: 16) wrote: “I wish to argue that particular laws can be seen as, inter alia, the institutionalisation by the members of the state institution of particular social meanings or taboo areas, according to the signification of the social world that is culturally dominant at the time. To put it another way law can be seen as the expression of the power of the state to signify and coerce, and laws can be seen as particular solutions to ideologically defined problems.”

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s­ cientific [that is, Marxist] culture” (1977: 152).6 Sumner would have to quickly get used to provoking reactions such as this, even when he was being far more circumspect in his criticism. Criminology Barely 20  years earlier, in the early 1950s, Hermann Mannheim at the LSE, Leon Radzinowicz at Cambridge and Max Grunhut at Oxford “were almost lone pioneering figures teaching criminology at British universities” (Reiner et al. 1997: 1). However, the government’s growing conviction about the value of scientific research and expertise in the policy-making sphere, allied with concerns about high levels of juvenile delinquency, sharpened the desire to fund criminological research (Garland 2002: 42–3). The Home Office’s own Research Unit was set up in 1957, and in 1959 the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge was founded under the directorship of Radzinowicz. These two institutions were, unsurprisingly, tightly focussed on empirical research that could act as a guide to social policy, rather than to the development of theories and explanations (Wiles 1976a: 4–5), and there was close co-operation between them to the extent that “Cambridge’s research programme was overwhelmingly a product of a process of negotiation with the Home Office” (1976a: 7). Whilst there were some dissenting voices, especially from those working under Mannheim at the LSE (Garland 2002: 42–3; Downes and Rock 2007: 232), there was a general acceptance that, as Radzinowicz (1961: 175) himself put it, “the attempt to elucidate the causes of crime should be put aside” and research should focus on “descriptive, analytical accounts of the state of crime, of the various classes of offenders, of the enforcement of criminal law [and] of the effectiveness of various measures of penal 6  More recently, in his biographical piece on Podgorecki, Wincenty (2018) argues that east European emigres to the west during this period were able to use Marxism to confer status even though this was a “shameful” and opportunistic choice (2018: 75). Thinkers such as Kolakowski (before he famously turned against Marxism) and Bauman were prepared to work within the Marxist tradition and were duly lauded and rewarded with security and promotions. Those, such as Podgorecki, who made the braver intellectual choice to shun the officially sanctioned ideology of their home country received less adulation but demonstrated their “courage and integrity” (2018: 75). Wincenty cites Sumner’s review of Law and Society as an example of how western academics of the time measured the merits of scholarly works by dint of their adherence to Marxism (2018: 76), thus somewhat glossing the nuances of their authors’ personal and political situations.

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t­ reatment”. This kind of research, with its relatively modest horizons and commitment to being relevant to policy was memorably termed “administrative criminology” by Vold (1958). By the late 1960s this settlement was being disrupted. There had been a rapid expansion in both the university sector and among the polytechnics and colleges of higher education. Posts were now available for young scholars with radical leanings in, for example, centres of criminology at Middlesex, Edge Hill and the newly founded Open University (Young 1988: 170), as well as in freshly enlarged traditional institutions (Rock 1988: 189; 2017: 25). And, with the so-called counter culture of affluent middle-class youth at its height (Tierney 2010: 140), prospective academics with a growing scepticism about the institutions of capitalism were not in particularly short supply. This “fortunate generation” of criminologists, “appointed in and around the single decade of the 1970s” (Rock 1988: 190), would have a seminal and long-lasting influence on the shape of the discipline. More immediately, there was a rather inchoate radicalism in much late 1960s criminology. It quickly began to seem that “once the balmy days of post-war reconstruction, intellectual agreement and political consensus had passed, the institutional structure of British criminological research became an anachronism” (Wiles 1976a: 8), even though criminology remained “a parvenu and somewhat precarious subject still in the process of constituting itself” (Garland 2002: 44). The “young turks” (Wiles 1976a: 12) nevertheless signalled their dissent from what they regarded as a powerful criminological establishment by adopting the symbolic interactionist theory that had made such an impact in North America. This “attentiveness” to American developments “reflected the marginality of sociology to the criminological traditions in Britain” (Downes 1988: 176), even though the interactionism that many found so alluring was not especially radical. But, given that both the Cambridge Institute and the Research Unit “owed their existence” to the “ideology of the welfare state”, any critique of that ideology, or any reassessment of traditional methods and the role of theory in intellectual inquiry, “were not only almost bound to originate outside the establishment, but also to assume the appearance of an attack on its very foundation” (Wiles 1976a: 8). Indeed, to an extent there was a mutual incomprehension between the radicals and those who were now seen, perhaps a little disingenuously, as establishment figures. As Radzinowicz (1999: 229) later recalled, “at the time it reminded me of a group of naughty schoolboys playing a nasty game on their stern headmaster. It was not necessary to go ‘underground’

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because we were not in any way opposed to discussing new approaches to the sociology of deviance.” Yet the young radicals were met with “heated counter-attacks” when they presented their rather sober accounts of labelling theory at the National Conference on Teaching and Research in Criminology at Cambridge in 1968 (Wiles 1976a: 12). An alternative meeting was quickly arranged and took place at York, becoming known as the National Deviancy Conference (NDC). There were seven participants at that initial meeting, largely “embryo criminologists in their last months of graduate research or in the very first months of teaching” (Rock 1988: 190), including Sumner’s soon-to-be PhD supervisor Ian Taylor. This increased to 20 at the second meeting, and there were 400 members by 1973 (van Swaaningen 1997: 78). As the number of posts in the sector continued to grow, and publishers increasingly sought out their works, their dependence on funding from state institutions such as the Home Office was broken (Tierney 2010: 144). As we have seen, the focus at the NDC was initially on the processes of social reaction, especially organised reaction, and the influence of Becker (1963) was great.7 As Stan Cohen (1967: 121) put it, “the audience, not the actor, is the crucial variable.” This eventually resulted in a “romanticisation of deviance, and a displacement of traditional criminology’s pathological view of the deviant, by an equally pathological view of the agents of social control” (Wiles 1976a: 25). What was generally not addressed at first was the nature of the social totality in which the interactive processes between rule definers, rule breakers and the social audience occurred (Beirne 1979: 375–7). As Tierney (2010: 136) suggests, the new deviancy theory “was subversive, though what was subverted was not so much the wider society as academic criminology”. Gradually, wider ranging analyses were produced. These were marked, in the wake of the Vietnam War and the struggles of the civil rights movement, by a certain hostility to the state as an oppressive force.8 The culmination of this intellectual ferment came 7  Reiner (1988: 138) notes that Becker’s famous suggestion that deviance was not a quality of the act “may have been news to criminology, but it was platitudinous to criminal lawyers”. He cites Lord Atkin’s well-known comments in a 1931 case that “the domain of criminal jurisprudence can only be ascertained by examining what acts at any particular period are declared by the state to be crimes, and the only common nature they will be found to possess is that they are prohibited by the State”. 8  In the US, the trend towards a more conflict-oriented, though crude, Marxist stance which better addressed issues of power was best expressed in the work of Quinney (1973)

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with the publication of The New Criminology (Taylor et al. 1973), something of a manifesto for the NDC. It was a “ground clearing critique” (Downes and Rock 2007: 233) which salvaged some elements of previous criminological work for incorporation into a ‘fully social’ neo-Marxist theory of deviance. Its focus was on how certain acts came to be classed as deviant, highlighting the role of the powerful in criminalising diverse forms of behaviour inimical to their interests, and there was an almost celebratory stance towards the deviants themselves. The three authors quickly responded to criticism in the follow-up volume Critical Criminology (Taylor et al. 1975), lamenting their individualistic idealism and focus on expressive deviance; Young (1975) in particular was especially keen to repudiate much of his earlier position in a chapter that became known as the foundation stone for ‘left realism’. Yet much of the NDC’s “radical critique” was “essentially an orientation”, a “mood” or “stance” rather than a fully worked up theoretical perspective (Hunt 1981: 95), and for all its flaws The New Criminology captured this with great clarity. Although the NDC ran until 1979, “the first three years were the most productive” (van Swaaningen 1997: 78), with ten conferences in held in York and occasionally in Sheffield (Downes 1988: 177). It received official recognition of sorts when some of its members were asked to arrange the British Sociological Association’s 1971 conference, an event which “seemed to mark the ‘coming out’ of the new sociology of deviance” (Rock 1988: 190). Yet beyond a “generalised stance of institutional and intellectual opposition” (Wiles 1976a: 13) there was little sense of any real coherence among the group. Different scholarly approaches were emerging, with some, for example, favouring the neo-Marxist approach of Critical Criminology, others such as Stuart Hall at Birmingham beginning to focus upon subcultural resistance, and still others such as Laurie Taylor, Stan Cohen, David Downes and Paul Rock continuing to explore the utility of interactionism. The NDC’s swansong was a 1979 conference held in tandem with the Conference of Socialist Economists, which arguably represented the high-water mark of the sociology of law’s fusion with the

and Chambliss (1975). These contributions came in the wake of Gouldner’s (1968) famous critique of Becker. In the debate that followed, note also how both Gouldner and Becker took up positions opposed to welfare interventions by the state “in a way which would make most present day British radicals feel distinctly uneasy” (Young 1988: 297). See also Beirne (1979: 377).

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sociology of crime and deviance (Tierney 2010: 170).9 By the end of the decade the influence of Foucault and feminism was rising, and in the meantime state funded research of a positivist bent in the establishment centres had continued largely unabated (Tierney 2010: 176). Nevertheless, “the institutional rift which the emergence of the NDC created did have considerable advantages for the developing sociology of deviance in Britain. In particular, it facilitated the emergence of new theoretical and methodological concerns unfettered by the old institutional constraints, and correspondingly, it provided an alternative institutional security and identity for those who wished to break with the focal concerns and ideology of traditional British criminology” (Wiles 1976a: 13). Criminology and sociological theory were now, for better or worse, inseparable bedfellows. This was the somewhat “dizzying scene” (Downes 1988: 179) that Sumner steadily moved towards over the course of the early 1970s. His growing concern with the issues that also occupied the NDC was marked by his review of Cohen and Young’s edited collection The Manufacture of News, which appeared in the British Journal of Criminology (Sumner 1974d).10 Perhaps more significant than his conclusion that this was a “theoretically unchallenging and disappointing book” (Sumner 1974d: 291) was his willingness to produce such an uncompromising take on the work of two of the most prominent figures of the new criminology. He was even more withering in his review of an American training manual for criminal justice students and new police recruits (Sumner 1975b), in which his contempt for what he is faced with is barely concealed. He suggests that “in a climate of intense animosity between the police and large sections of the American public”, not only are potential police “being dragged in off the streets” to prop up undermanned departments, but that they must also “be got through their exams by fair means or foul in order that they can be reinstated in their former position on the street, only this time dressed in uniform, invested with state power, and armed with a gun” (Sumner 1975b: 104). This young turk was beginning to make his mark, uniquely placed with his background in law, social theory, and Marxism to 9  The collection of conference papers published afterwards, Capitalism and the Rule of Law (National Deviancy Conference/Conference of Socialist Economists 1979), was subtitled From Deviancy Theory to Marxism, which “aptly summed up the journey taken by radical criminology over that decade” (Tierney 2010: 170). 10  This review was based upon research conducted for his PhD and was also subsequently worked up in greater detail for Chap. 3 of Reading Ideologies.

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traverse the rapidly shrinking distance between socio-legal studies, the sociology of deviance and an increasingly theoretically aware criminology. It was in his PhD and two works which flowed directly from it that he established his distinctive theoretical position and provided the foundations for the rest of his academic career.

Sumner’s Concept of Ideological Censure The three key works of Sumner’s early career are, to a large extent, of a piece. His PhD, titled Ideology and Deviance and supervised by Ian Taylor at the University of Sheffield, is something of a sprawling beast. Sumner’s initial intention had been to produce a semiological analysis of the press reporting of political demonstrations, as published in the national press from 7 March to 7 April 1973. This analysis had intended to show how the dominant ideology of the day was infused within such reporting (1976a: iii), but Sumner found the tools at his disposal to carry out such a reading wholly inadequate and he was dissatisfied with the results. It became clear to Sumner as his work progressed that the concept of deviance was vague and unexplicated, that the Marxist theory of ideology had been badly neglected, and that there was no developed historical materialist practice of reading ideology in discursive texts (1976a: iii). Thus, in addition to an autocritique of that earlier analysis, and inspired in part by a somewhat Althusserian desire to return to first principles, Sumner’s PhD contained his reflections on the state of the sociology of deviance and his own initial formulations that deviance is an ‘ideological formation’, a critique of the existing methods of reading ideology that Sumner had found so unsatisfactory,11 the development of a more thoroughgoing Marxian concept of ideology, and an application of his reformulated notion of ideology to the question of deviance. There was also a tentative start to developing a new method of reading ideologies (1976a: 321–3, 338–42) on the basis of these underlying theories and concepts (1976a: 247) that would be expanded later in Reading Ideologies. In short, the PhD was an exploration of the Marxist theory of ideology; it contained an attempt to produce a theory of deviance, a theory of ideology and a method for reading ideology (1976a: iii). This was very much an abstract task, “a purely 11  This involved critiques of content analysis, structuralism, structuralist semiology (including Barthes and his own 1973 reading) and neo-structuralism (including Derrida, Kristeva and Althusser).

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theoretical exploration” (1976a: 247), designed to provide more robust theoretical, epistemological and methodological underpinnings for future empirical efforts (1976a: iii). Sumner’s subsequent key works during this period were largely drawn from his PhD.  A short chapter entitled ‘Marxism and deviancy theory’ (1976b), which appeared in an edited collection on the “new criminologies” (Wiles 1976b), provided a highly condensed but rewarding discussion of Sumner’s position on deviance. The book Reading Ideologies (1979a) restated Sumner’s critique of extant reading methods and developed further his theoretical overhaul of ideology. It also focussed more keenly on law as a sophisticated form of ideological discourse and on the development of a structured approach to reading ideology. Thus, these two works effectively separated out the focal concerns of Sumner’s PhD, one dealing with deviance and one with ideology, whilst offering developments and refinements. Here, then, were the wellsprings of Sumner’s seminal notion of ideological censure. The remainder of this chapter will concentrate on the development of that notion. As a result, Sumner’s criticism of existing reading methods as “superficial” (1979a: 98),12 his prolegomenon for a new historical materialist method of reading ideologies in a discourse,13 and his work on the nature of ‘science’14 will be somewhat glossed over. These aspects of his thinking were integral to his overall 12  This appeared as Part 2 (Chaps. 3–6) of both his PhD and Reading Ideologies. The sections in the book are drawn almost verbatim from the earlier thesis. 13  This was discussed in embryonic form in his PhD and worked up in greater detail as Chap. 7 of Reading Ideologies. Sumner (1979a: 238) suggests that what is required are a series of “chronologically ordered stages which are geared to producing increasingly precise ‘approximations’ to the nature of the ideology being investigated”. In addition, in order to understand the socio-historical conditions which produce particular modes of seeing, “a constant dialectical to-ing and fro-ing between the socio-historical context and the ideology which hopefully deepens our understanding of the connection between them after each cycle” (1979a: 242) is needed. Sumner accepts that such recourse to history alone cannot provide a perfect scientific reading of ideologies, because all readings of history are themselves products of history in an eternal hermeneutic circle of uncertainty. However, immersion in that circle is the only realistic means available for decoding discourses within wider social conditions. The application of this methodology provides the foundation for Sumner’s entire scholarly career, though it often lurks quietly in the background in his later works. 14  See for example, Chaps. 3 and 9 of Reading Ideologies, where Sumner’s position on science is rooted in Marx’s writings. This will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 6.

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­ osition, but less prominent over the course of his career than the headline p notion of ideological censure. As ever, the best advice for interested readers is to return to the immensely rewarding originals. Ideology Sumner’s position on ideology represented the crystallisation of themes and ideas that had been developing with increasing vigour within Marxism. As we have already seen, the relation between the ‘base’ and the ‘superstructure’, and ideology’s place within that, was increasingly the subject of fierce debate as many Marxists began to move away from the strictures of orthodoxy. As Sumner (1979a: 286) himself put it in Reading Ideologies, “more and more modern Marxism is giving the lie to the classical criticism that it reduces ideology to a mere effect of class interests and structures. This book is part of that change.” Sumner’s intention was to avoid the difficulties encountered by Marxian work which reduced ideology and other superstructural phenomena to mere ‘reflections’ of the economic base, a kind of “limpet” (1979a: 33) of the economy. He also moved away from the so-called negative approach to ideology (Larrain 1983) which claimed that Marx saw ideology as concealing real relations. Sumner (1979a: 13) accepted that Marx and Engels often used ideology to refer to false representations, but “such statements do not warrant a conclusion that ideologies always mask and thereby sustain social structures”. Instead, Sumner drew a much richer notion of ideology; rather than being that which deceptively cloaked real social relations or the mere by-product of more fundamental processes in the economy, he saw it as integral to all levels of the social formation.15 Reading Ideologies can be a difficult book. It covers a huge amount of ground and Sumner’s critiques of the then extant reading methods are couched in highly technical language that can seem dated to contemporary readers. Nevertheless, Part 1 of the book, in which Sumner develops his concept of ideology, remains a stellar example of theoretical 15  This was analogous to the position famously argued by EP Thompson in Whigs and Hunters. For him, “law was deeply imbricated within the very basis of productive relations, which would have been inoperable without this law […] Rules and categories of law penetrate every level of society” (1975: 261). Later, as part of his memorable tussle with Althusser, Thompson returned to this theme. In his characteristically effervescent prose, he recalled that “law did not keep politely to a level but was at every bloody level; it was imbricated within the mode of production and productive relations themselves” (1978: 96).

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a­rgumentation. Chapter 2  in particular, which itself draws heavily on Chap. 2 of Sumner’s PhD, sees nuanced and complex ideas communicated with clarity and rigour; it is dense and detailed yet elegant and readable. That chapter’s purpose “is to outline a conception of ideology and its location within a social formation or society. […] It represents the result of an attempt to draw Marx to his logical conclusion on the question of ideology, whilst at the same time still making sense out of the appearances of social reality” (1979a: 10), a task made more difficult by the fact that Marx only provided “a signpost and a few odd clues” (1979a: 11). Sumner (1979a: 291) suggests that “on all these issues where I differ from orthodox Marxism, I would claim to be following the spirit of Marx’s own analyses, if not to the letter”. What follows is a necessarily brief overview. Sumner begins by drawing a distinction between two modes of consciousness. This distinction is traced back to The German Ideology and Marx’s 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the former, Marx and Engels talk of ‘ideology’ and the ‘forms of consciousness corresponding to these’ (Sumner 1979a: 13–4), and in the 1859 Preface Marx distinguishes spontaneous consciousness, which is practical and experiential, from philosophical consciousness, which is more organised and contemplative (Sumner 1979a: 15).16 Sumner (1979a: 20) captures this distinction with the terms “ideologies” and “ideological formations”. Following Saussure’s Geneva lectures of 1906–1911 (Saussure 1974), Sumner conceives of an ‘ideology’ as a sign. Unlike Saussure, however, he sees the relation between the signifier and the signified within each sign as an historical one that emerges from social practice (1979a: 20–1); signs are “the results of a practical process of socially contextualised signification” rather than being constituted merely by objects themselves or their outward forms, and “nothing is thought of as a sign of anything else without social intercourse” (1979a: 24). This entails that “ideology must be distinguished from appearance. […] Significations or ideologies are phenomena which specify the meaning of things: appearances are the other manifestations of situated phenomena” (1979a: 291). It follows that an ‘ideological formation’ “is a cluster or series of signs” (1979a: 21) or a

16  According to Sumner, for Marx “neither mode bore any necessary relation of ‘accuracy’ to the real world”, although of course if spontaneous consciousness was able to “grasp everything on sight” then there would be no need for scientific philosophy (Sumner 1979a: 15–6).

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complex systematisation of ideologies, themselves linked by social and historical relations. Sumner suggests that ideology is only produced when social relations are realised in practice. Ideologies have no ephemeral existence outside of this practice. “All ideologies originate within social practices”, he writes (1979a: 209), and furthermore “the emergence of an ideology has as a necessary condition of its existence a particular social relation” (1979a: 216). Yet once it has surfaced, an ideology can itself become an integral and determining facet of that practice; indeed, “once an ideology has emerged, out of certain social relations, those relations are only realised in practice under the guidance of that particular ideology” (1976a: 257). Ideologies may also go on to be operative in practices other than the one that they originated in, and they may play a role in the development of new practices (1979a: 209). Indeed, “as an element in practice, ideologies are always one of the determinants of its product. In this sense, all objects produced by human beings contain embedded ideologies” (1979a: 291–2). Furthermore, Sumner (1979a: 218) argues that for certain social relations to endure and become routine, particular ideologies are necessary. He gives the example of a generalised exchange relationship which cannot function properly in the absence of ideologies of ownership, of legal personality and of contract: “These three ideologies are inseparable from the regular practice of exchange. They are integral to its constitution. It cannot exist without them” (1979a: 220–2).17 Nevertheless, the effectivity of ideology and its essential role in social practice is not always easily perceived. This is because “an ideology’s forms of appearance are often discreet and shy: it is often too modest to reveal its true self. Its contexts of appearance often ensure the easy belief in that non-appearance: they can be the water which allows the pill of ideology to slide down the throat without catching the mind’s attention” (Sumner 1979a: 23). Clearly, this position has major implications for the place of ideology in the social formation. Sumner discusses this issue by way of an examination of Althusser’s evolving view of ideology, which saw the Frenchman unwittingly stumble upon a number of advances despite never truly escaping the vices of class reductionism and economism (Sumner 1979a: 45). Sumner (1979a: 33) argues that, in orthodox Marxism, “reflection has not been interpreted in its full dialectical sense as a relation between interpenetrating opposites. Thus the correct Marxian position, that ideology exists in  On this point see also Sumner (1976a: 251–5).

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all practices and that practice only works through ideology, has been ignored with inevitably economistic effects: ideology has become the ­plaything of economic forces and its determining force has been lost to debates over the falling rate of profit.” The orthodox position is rejected by Sumner (1979a: 35) because “the concept of the ideology-social formation link as a connection between externals is a false one”, and ideology “is not a thought-mirror of the social formation but an active aspect of social practice and hence an integral, determinant part of the social formation at various levels”. On this view the idea that ideology is exclusively a superstructural phenomenon, rising from the ‘economic base’ “just as steam rises from boiling water” (1979a: 28) is untenable. In the first place ideologies do not just arise from the economic system alone. Furthermore, ideologies and ideological formations “exist within people’s heads”, helping to determine the way people live out social relations and constraining their seemingly free choices (1979a: 21), and they are also “embodied within the material products of social practice […]. High rise flats, motorways and parks are obvious examples of material form which, structured by ideologies and their formations, in turn act as material elements structuring our social practice. […] Ideologies also exist in the embodied forms of [for example] language, film and painting. […] Ideologies are thus both mental and concrete, a creation and creator of social practice and produce” (1979a: 22). They both “structure our understanding of the world out there and also exist as constituent and embodied features of that world, determining the way it presents itself to us” (1979a: 286). Ultimately, then, “the old notion of ideology as a gaseous effect of the economic structure is inadequate and must be replaced by a conception of ideology as an integral and substantive element of all social practice. In this way, ideology is an active force within all aspects of social development and not just an animal that roams around the ephemeral reserves of the superstructure” (1979a: 290). On this basis, in an argot very much of its day, Sumner suggests that “the only scientific method can be one which identifies ideologies on the basis of a theoretically and historically grounded understanding of their specificity as elements of consciousness originating and existing within determinate social practices in specific historical conjunctures” (1979a: 293). The issue of class remains vital in Sumner’s conception of ideology, although ideologies cannot be treated, in Poulantzas’ (1973: 202) words, “as if they were political number plates worn by social classes on their backs”. For one thing, ideologies are often also patterned by non-class

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social divisions such as age, sex and race and the countless others that abound in developed capitalist economies (Sumner 1979a: 233). However, even these ideologies remain fundamentally grouped around the class axis; “for example, feminist ideologies are not simply a set of ideologies about women, but a set of ideologies about women that are differentiated along class lines” (1979a: 53). Of course, it remains the case that “the economically dominant classes have been able to make their power and ideology the dominant features of the society’s superstructure” (1979a: 53). Yet Sumner is at pains to point out that there is no grand bourgeois conspiracy. Indeed, “what is probably the hardest thing to grasp theoretically is the fact that all understandings, ideas and perceptions are obviously perfectly sensible and necessary in specific social situations” (Sumner 1979a: 287).18 In Chap. 8 of Reading Ideologies Sumner discusses the consequences of his theory of ideology for law. He is scathing of the typical Marxist approaches to law,19 and suggests that the growing interest in Gramsci has helped more recent thinkers move away from the cruder formulations of earlier writers and begin to recognise law’s ideological component (1979a: 256–9). Indeed, because law is “a form heavy with ideology” and not just a nakedly coercive instrument, then “without a developed theory of ideology the Marxist theory of law must be doomed to stagnate in the platitudes of economic determinism and class reductionism” (1979a: 293). For his part, Sumner is clear that “laws in modern societies are ideological formations given legal form and sanction by the state” (1979a: 251); law is “a conjoint expression of power and ideology, […] a hybrid phenomenon of politics and ideology: a politico-ideological artefact” (1979a: 267), although of course “legal enactments mostly respond to social problems and are not simply unilateral political declarations of ideology” (1979a: 269). In principle, law is capable of reflecting the ideologies of s­ ubordinate 18  Sumner (1979a: 287–8) continues: “I am alluding to what one might call the circle of social reality: things (people, events, matter, discourse) are seen in a particular way when perceived through the grid of a particular ideology, yet that ideology is at the same time active in the practice of another being and eventually embodied in the thing observed, so that the appearance of that thing matches its perception perfectly. […] There is, therefore, a very real sense in which understanding produces its own social reality at the same time as social reality produces its own understanding; this is the circle of social reality.” 19  For instance, of class instrumentalism he writes that “by no means do all laws function for the ruling class, nor did they all originate in the class struggle. This is so fantastically obvious that I refuse to waste time exemplifying it” (1979a: 254).

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groups, be they classes or other assemblages that have emerged in noneconomic spheres. However, in practice the ideologies that find their way into the law “tend to be those of the hegemonic class bloc and those which protect the reproduction of the dominant economic relations” (1979a: 294), and ultimately “when the chips are down, the essential function of the legal system is revealed as itself: the reproduction of class power” (1979a: 270). As Sumner (1979a: 276) laments, “perhaps because law holds out so many fake promises, people feel all the more disillusioned when they are broken. […] When [the ideologies of law] collapse as effective grips on one’s mind, then the whole ideological edifice collapses like a pack of cards. It becomes crystal clear that the whole business—the discourse, the procedure, the ceremony, the ritual, the prestige, the magic— is part of a colossal façade.”20 Censure Sumner’s renovated concept of ideology allowed him to address the deficiencies in the sociology of deviance that he had encountered during his research on the press reporting of political demonstrations (1976a: iii). This came at a time of vigorous and sometimes angry Marxian debate on law and crime; most famously, in the wake of Taylor, Walton and Young’s The New Criminology (1973), the Althusserian Paul Hirst (1975a, 1975b) had suggested that Marxism had no business in constructing a theory of crime and deviance. For his part, Sumner’s attempts to “establish a satisfactory paradigm” (1976a: ii) in the sociology of deviance resulted in the development of the theory of ‘censure’ which would become, at least for a time, his best-known scholarly contribution. Sumner (1976b: 160) argued that in The New Criminology “the concept of deviance in the text is unclear”. As he pointed out, in the well-­ known passages which outlined Taylor, Walton and Young’s seven requirements for a ‘fully social’ theory of deviance (1973: 270–8), as well as throughout the book as a whole, the words ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’ were frequently interchanged. Examples of deviance were given, such as bank robbing and marijuana smoking, but of course “mere illustrations do not 20  These sections on the ideological nature of law were later reprinted in Beirne and Quinney’s reader Marxism and Law (Sumner 1982). Writing a little later, Hunt (1985: 13–4) felt that it was “no accident” that advances in Marxist legal thinking were accelerated once ideology began to be taken seriously in texts such as Reading Ideologies.

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define a concept” (Sumner 1976b: 160). This ambiguity was compounded because Taylor, Walton and Young (1973: 147) stated that deviance is a “quality of the act” as deviants purposively “endow their acts with meaning”. They saw the criminal or deviant not as “a passive, ineffectual, stigmatised individual” but as a “decision maker who often actively violates the moral and legal codes of society”. This implied that deviants share the social stock of meanings and recognise that some actions are likely to be deemed as deviant. However, none of this specified what deviance actually is, because “purposiveness is merely a common element of all human practice and indicates nothing about deviance” (Sumner 1976b: 169). Sumner wondered what Taylor, Walton and Young considered to be the distinguishing features of deviance; what separated it, in their view, from purposive but non-deviant acts? As he put it, “they are simply attempting to attribute rationality to deviant behaviour, to see it as a form of rational action. That is all very well, except that it tells us nothing about deviance since they would argue that most actions are rational. Taylor, Walton and Young never clearly tell us which rational actions are deviant and in what sense those actions are deviant” (1976b: 162). Sumner did, however, identify an unspoken concept of deviance lurking in the background in The New Criminology. Despite elsewhere berating those who adopted a consensus model of society, Taylor, Walton and Young themselves hinted that deviance is an act that is widely disapproved of (Sumner 1976b: 162). To make this case, Sumner relied on evidence from another text co-authored by one of the new criminologists, The Manufacture of News (Cohen and Young 1973), where it was argued that the mass media conjure up a consensus in order to obscure class struggles. Sumner was dismissive of this approach: “The New Criminology contains a hidden concept of deviance as action disapproved of by the masses. Other representatives of the ‘new criminology’ present this consensual definition as a product of media indoctrination. […] This conclusion illustrates what happens when analysts do not clearly and rigorously define the concept of their theoretical object. We have discovered that a supposedly Marxist approach assumes vaguely that deviance is a behaviour disapproved of by society” (Sumner 1976b: 163), a position that was largely indistinguishable from that of orthodox criminology and functionalist sociology. Thus, the new criminology “has simply tried to adapt Marxism to a pre-given theoretical object” (1976b: 164). It was precisely this adaptation of Marxism to a pre-given theoretical object that so concerned Paul Hirst. In his response to The New Criminology

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he suggested that crime and deviance are not valid topics for Marxism because they are not objects specified by Marxist theory. Instead they “vanish into the general theoretical concerns […] of Marxism. Crime and deviance are no more a scientific field for Marxism than education, the family or sport. The objects of Marxist theory are specified by its own concepts: the mode of production, the class struggle, the state, ideology etc. Any attempt to apply Marxism to this pre-given field of sociology is therefore a more or less ‘revisionist’ activity in respect of Marxism;—it must modify and distort Marxist concepts to suit its own pre-Marxist purpose” (Hirst 1975a: 204). Hirst (1975b: 238–43) went on to suggest that Taylor, Walton and Young’s position reduced all social science to ideology, and despite its avowedly political objectives it was therefore epistemologically equivalent to the established traditions of mainstream social science. In the end, for him, “there is no ‘Marxist theory of deviance’, either in existence, or which can be developed within orthodox Marxism” (Hirst 1975a: 204).21 Hirst’s position unsurprisingly drew much comment and no little bemusement amongst criminologists, especially those who had emerged from the NDC. As Sumner (1976b: 165) put it, “Hirst’s language and tenor have left many scholars wondering what there is in deviance that is so repulsive to Marxism.” However, Sumner did not entirely reject Hirst’s position. As Wiles (1976a: 31) suggested, he “accepts, and indeed extends, many of Hirst’s criticisms of radical deviancy theory, but he also insists Hirst is wrong to argue that a Marxist criminology is not possible”. Indeed, Sumner (1976b: 165) was sympathetic to the idea that one should not act in an empiricist fashion and simply take theoretical objects as they are found. However, he felt that Hirst’s position risked closing off theoretical development because “‘deviance’ (like ‘crime’) is taken by Hirst to be a pre-given, eternal concept, rather than a term that, 21  Note Hirst’s use of the term “orthodox” here. According to Wiles (1976a: 30) this was vital because “at least in part, the argument hinges around how the grail of orthodoxy is to be defined”. In their reply to Hirst, Taylor and Walton (1975) suggested that his was an idiosyncratic use of Marxism and that their ideas belonged to an alternative Marxist tradition. Much later, Sumner (1994: 303) wrote: “Hirst’s argument amounted to a negative declaration from a rather self-satisfied ‘orthodox Marxism’; it was a censure from the safety of dogma rather than a reconstructive, progressive, argument using Marxism as a living tradition of value to the social sciences. It was indicative of the insularity and rather ecclesiastical nature of his standpoint at that time that he never considered that one could develop a Marxism that was unorthodox. No reason for clinging to orthodoxy was given, yet the world of Stalinism offered many political reasons against such an adherence to orthodoxy.”

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historically, has referred to particular concepts in particular theoretical formations. […] The term has never had one, pre-given eternal referent” (1976b: 165). Instead, he could “see no reason why Marxist concepts could not be employed to construct an object of knowledge that could be termed ‘deviance’. […] It may be politic to develop a new term, however, since old terms often carry old concepts and connotations: but this is a matter of the politics of discourse, not a matter of theory” (1976b: 165). Thus, despite having some sympathy with it, Sumner suggested that Hirst’s position did not actually preclude the possibility that Marxism was able to “construct an object of knowledge that could be termed ‘deviance’” (Sumner 1976b: 165).22 However, in order to circumvent Hirst’s concerns, such an object would have to be developed from within the conceptual categories of Marxism, rather than adopting or reworking a pre-existing concept. It was to this task that Sumner directed his attention. He proposed (1976b: 166) that “the key to the problem is this: If Hirst was arguing, as he clearly was, that deviance was an unfit topic for Marxism, then he must hold to a clear concept of deviance. To say that deviance is an alien matter for Marxist science is to know what deviance is; Hirst’s critique involves a Marxist concept of deviance.” According to Sumner (1976b: 166), Hirst held that deviance was a type of ideological formation: Hirst (1975b: 238–9) himself had argued that deviance was “constituted prior to theory” by what he called “practico-social ideologies”, though this notion remained undeveloped in his work; furthermore, as we have already seen Hirst (1975a: 204) had argued that ideology was one of the core categories of Marxism. By intimating that deviance was an ideological phenomenon, and holding that ideological phenomena were objects amenable to Marxist inquiry, Hirst effectively undermined his own position and hinted that a Marxist position on deviance might, after all, be feasible.23 Sumner’s own position represented something of a dialectical transcendence of two of the most influential criminological schools of the early  At this point Sumner’s concern was with ‘deviance’ alone.  Sumner’s was not the only potential response to Hirst. Hunt (1980: 43), for instance, argued that Hirst’s conclusion “is incorrect because it is premised upon an insistence that Marxism can only constitute objects of inquiry at the level of its own concepts; this suggests Marxism has a finite range or set of concepts and that they exist at the macro or general societal level”. What Sumner’s approach showed, however, was that Hirst’s conclusion was incorrect even on Hirst’s own terms. 22 23

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1970s. On the one hand was symbolic interactionism, particularly the notion of labelling. On the other, despite the issues discussed above, was the Marxism of The New Criminology. From symbolic interactionism Sumner took the notion that the essence of ‘crime’ or ‘deviance’ is the label itself. As Becker and others had argued, deviance is behaviour defined as such. However, Sumner (1976b: 168–70) rejected the implication of ‘passivity’ that this formulation contains. For symbolic interactionists, “deviance was not an objective fact until the individual had internalised the censure through interaction with the rule-enforcers and readjusted his symbolic universe in terms of its meaning”. On this view there was nothing purposive about initial acts of rule-breaking, in the sense that the rules themselves were not deliberately breached. No individual consciously sets out to be a criminal or a deviant, the argument went. Instead, individuals perform actions, some of which break rules; rule-enforcers react by stigmatising the rule-breaker; the rule-breaker internalises the stigmatisation and begins to perceive of themselves as deviant or criminal. In effect, the label generates the behaviour, or at least the self-definition (1976b: 168–70).24 This idea soon became untenable: “Mere empirical observation” of the “collective celebrations of deviance and political rebellion in the late 1960s were the final nail in the coffin: one could not make the label generate the behaviour” (1976b: 170). Many acts of deviance and crime were patently conscious and purposive. Some individuals and groups deliberately strove for the status of Becker’s ‘outsider’. In such a context, the sense of passivity implied by symbolic interactionism was doomed. As we have seen, this was precisely the issue that The New Criminology sought to resolve. For Taylor, Walton and Young (1973: 221), “deviance is a property of the act rather than a spurious label”, and criminals and deviants were fully aware of the choices they were making. Indeed, this argument was extended so far that the deviant was recast as an almost heroic, protorevolutionary actor, deliberately offending the norms of an oppressive society.25 Sumner too adopted the notion of the purposive actor, but as noted above he realised that this alone could not constitute a satisfactory definition of deviance. The New Criminology failed to furnish a clear and

24  Sumner consistently takes a strong line on this point. For criticism of this interpretation of interactionism, see Downes and Rock (2007: 164–75). 25  This trend was still evident in some strands of Young’s later work; see, for example, Ferrell et al. (2008).

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rigorous concept of deviance; pointing out the purposive nature of deviant and criminal acts was necessary, but not sufficient. Nevertheless, by drawing from these bodies of thought, Sumner was able to provide the basis for a revitalised Marxian comprehension of ­deviance. From symbolic interactionism came the notion of labelling, the sense that deviance is a quality of the label and not of the act (but not that deviance is therefore a passive activity that takes shape only when the label has been applied and adopted). From The New Criminology came the idea that deviance is purposive action (but not the idea that this alone constitutes deviance; criminal and deviant action must also be labelled as such). In addition, of course, was the idea derived from Hirst that a Marxist theory of deviance must be developed from within the categories of Marxism (but not the idea that this is impossible). Sumner allied these theoretical antecedents with his notion of ideology, deftly transcending the work of his forebears in the process. Not only did this satisfy Hirst’s requirements, but it led to a new understanding of deviance as the ideological ‘censure’ of certain (purposive) behaviours at certain times and places. In short, “Marxian analysis would seem to conceptualise deviance as a fragment of ideology, an ideological censure” (Sumner 1976b: 166). In his PhD, Sumner suggested that those ideologies which specify the unacceptability or the offensiveness of things, practices or other ideologies can be termed “negative ideologies” (1976a: 344). In what might be considered the foundational statement of censure, Sumner (1976a: 344–5) writes: “The practices whose manifestations constitute part of an ideological formation of deviance can be termed: censured practices. These are practices that have been subject to social disapproval or repression. The practices which employ, as part of their inherent structure, the negative ideologies of a society or community can be called: the censuring practices. The specific, structurally contextualised product which results from the initial application of a negative ideology to a particular social practice, either in the form of words or force, is an ideological formation. This ideological formation is composed of the relevant negative ideologies and the manifestations of censured practices; it is a practical impression produced by an observer filtering definite social realities through definite negative ideologies. Until now, this ideological formation has been termed (somewhat unhappily) a ‘deviance’. I shall in future refer to it as a censure.” Censure, then, is “the locally and historically specific social form of appearance of a particular negative ideology”

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(1976a: 344). So-called deviant behaviour “is composed of social practices censured in the dominant ideology” (1976b: 172).26 Whilst it preserved much that was valuable from previous approaches, Sumner’s position represented a decisive step forward in several respects. In the first place, Sumner’s position “rejects the conception of deviance as behaviour, and thus breaks with those sociologies that saw deviance as resulting from the breakdown of normative control mechanisms. Moreover, our emergent Marxist conception also denies the view that deviance can be defined as a quality of ‘action’ or purposive behaviour. It thus breaks with the anarchism of the new criminologists who viewed the conscious infringement of dominant morality as the essence of deviance” (1976b: 166). Furthermore, “in the Marxian conception proposed here, the ‘deviance-ness’ of deviance lies in the social censure, not in the ‘behaviour’ to which it is ‘applied’. There is nothing intrinsically ‘deviant’ in censured social practices—they acquire their stigma only from the emergence and application of the social censure” (1976b: 167). With the notion of deviant behaviour rejected as inadequate, Sumner’s position entailed that “each censured practice must be viewed as a separate form of social practice with its own specific conditions of existence” (1976a: vii), for “deviance is not eternal, it has an historical specificity corresponding to the development of its corresponding social relations” (1976a: 256). This point regarding the historical specificity of censure was vital: “different social practices are censured, formally or informally, at different times in history, and within the same society the same practice may not be equally censured depending on factors such as the class of the person, his age, sex, neighbourhood of arrest, etc. Therefore, we should treat each social practice in its own terms as a specific entity with unique historical and local-­ structural conditions of emergence. It is useless—and wrong in principle—to lump all the censured social practices together and call them ‘criminal’ or ‘deviant’ behaviour in order to form an object of investigation. Deviant or criminal behaviours are simply not a valid group, and thus the search for any common explanatory variables is futile. The only common aspects of ‘deviant behaviours’ are (i) they all have the characteristics 26  Negative ideologies can be considered as the inverse of what might be called ‘positive’ ideologies. It was noted earlier that generalised commodity exchange cannot function without the ‘positive’ ideologies of ownership, legal personality, and contract; “however, that same relation also necessitated a negative ideology: the ideology negating the non-consensual appropriation of another’s property. Negative ideologies are also necessary outcomes of social relations” (Sumner 1976a: 346).

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of a ‘behaviour’ and (ii) they have all been socially censured as ‘deviant’” (1976b: 169). Sumner notes that all individuals and groups of people can develop censures. After all, censure “is basically a subjective impression resulting from the objective clash of practical interests. It can take purely individual and limited forms or it can become widespread and achieve a social status” (1976b: 168). However, in class societies, the economically dominant class will have the greatest capacity to assert its censures, for instance through the legal system and through its control of media and communications (1976b: 170). In this way the sectional censures of the dominant class can become social censures, widely accepted and internalised even by subordinate classes (1976b: 170), and playing a role in the reproduction of hegemony. Sumner (1979a: 51) argues that as a mode of production becomes established, it “gradually extends its tentacles into every sphere of social practice”; ideological forms “antithetical to its existence will eventually be incorporated or abolished”. Those with the power to do so will seek to extinguish the competing ideologies of their subordinates, partly because such competing ideologies represent a threat, but partly because their own way of looking at the world—their “understandings, ideas and perceptions” (Sumner 1979a: 287)—appears, to them, to be perfectly reasonable. As Sumner put it in a passage that now sounds at once curiously dated and yet remarkably prescient, “the practical ideologies of the non-owning majority are now daily bombarded (opposed, mediated or reinforced) by a stream of practical and philosophical ideology from the powerful devices of the owners and controllers, the big and small bourgeoisie” (1979a: 52). Thus those ideological forms—including censures—that are necessary for the stability of a given mode of production come to establish themselves as pre-eminent. Seen in this light, definitions of crime and deviance, and indeed criminal justice itself, are always fundamentally political rather than mere “superstructural mist” (1976b: 173). Yet whilst these processes have the potential to turn the narrowly focused negative ideologies of the ruling class into widely accepted facets of ‘common sense’, we should not be blind to the real, underlying nature of censures: “Social censures that are successfully maintained in practice may eventually appear as ‘customs’, ‘eternal laws’ or ‘the categorical imperatives of social order’. However, that social disguise should not prevent us from seeing that, in essence, they are rich with the historical conflicts of a society. In both their form and their content, social censures embody in ideology the blood spilt in class struggle and group conflict;

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they are social institutions precipitated by structural antagonisms, historical monuments to the social divisions of wealth, power and consciousness” (1976b: 173). Censures can thus be read as the tightly focussed distillations of wider ideologies that are themselves embodiments of the tensions inherent in social relations (1976b: 173–4). Ultimately, in Sumner’s (1976b: 173) view, “what was the radical sociology of deviance must become the Marxist analysis of dominant ideologies, social censures and class conflict”. This is a project in which “the essential questions about ‘deviance’, in the light of the concepts developed here, relate to the historic origins of a censure, its role in the conflict between classes and its elevation to a fully social status” (1976b: 172). The same applied to crime, which for Sumner “is a social and legal censure, an ideological formation in law, not a ‘behaviour’” (1976a: 361).27 Law more generally could be viewed in similar terms (1976b: 171–2). As a consequence, “the sociology of law and the sociology of deviance thus collapse as separate topics in Marxian analysis into a focus upon the dominant ideology, its institutionalisation in law and its relation to class practices. As Hirst said, crime, law and deviance vanish into the general concerns of Marxism. That has been shown to be true here, but by reasoning and not by legislative fiat” (1976b: 172). The entire nature of the criminological project is thus transformed.

To Cambridge By the time Reading Ideologies was published in 1979, Sumner was already well ensconced at the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge, having moved there from Aberystwyth in 1977.28 On the face of it, his a­ ppointment 27  Indeed, some instances of behaviour are censured as both criminal and deviant, although often they are censured as one and not the other. 28  Perhaps unsurprisingly for such a wide-ranging book, Reading Ideologies provoked a variety of responses. Carlen (1980) was scathing, finding the book full of what she saw as ‘irritating faults” and a theoretical failure, despite the fact that she did not necessarily “disagree with the general drift about what Sumner writes about law” (1980: 201). Tushnet (1980) considered that Sumner’s basic position was “confused”, and stressed that concrete historical investigations of particular ideologies would be necessary to gain a better understanding of ideology in general, a point that Sumner would presumably have agreed with. Garland (1981) was also critical. Albrow (1981), however, was broadly sympathetic to Sumner’s position, though he regretted that Sumner had not offered a concrete example of his method. Greenberg and Anderson felt that “Sumner’s analysis of the concept is the finest treatment of ideology we know” (1981: 311), built upon “brilliant and incisive critiques”

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at Cambridge was a curious one. As we have seen, the Cambridge Institute was something of a bastion of establishment research, and “was not involved in the theoretical and methodological changes which occurred in British criminology” (Wiles 1976a: 8). However, for any self-­professed ‘institute of criminology’ it had quickly become impossible to ignore the developments of the late 1960s and 1970s. There was also a certain oldfashioned and somewhat inquisitive liberalism that had survived at Cambridge and, as one would expect, a number of high-class scholars who were intrigued by the new thinking in the discipline and wanted to engage with it. In addition, the Institute was now under the Directorship of Professor Nigel Walker, a former civil servant and “instinctive outsider” who was “was disinclined to call himself a criminologist” (The Telegraph 2014). So it was that by the end of the 1970s the foundation stones for Sumner’s career were firmly in place. His background in social theory, particularly Marxism, socio-legal studies and criminology had given him a singular viewpoint from which to critique the developments in the criminological field during this period. His notion of ideological censure represented the fusion of his disparate intellectual heritage into a distinctive theoretical object. What was also in evidence by the end of the 1970s was Sumner’s intense but often lyrical style of writing, the surgical precision of his critiques,29 and his stubborn and typically northern English refusal to be beguiled by fashion, trend and novelty in scholarship. Here was a young thinker ploughing his own unique furrow, a sense heightened by his move Cambridge. No doubt one or two fellow radicals felt somewhat affronted by one of their number ‘going to the other side’, but the relative isolation that Cambridge provided afforded him considerable freedom to begin to explore the implications and the nuances of his freshly minted theoretical position.

(1981: 312), but they were underwhelmed by his treatment of legal ideology, as it provided “only the sketchiest beginning of an analysis” (1981: 312); again, it is not clear that Sumner would have disagreed with this. Hunt (1985) was also positive although he felt that Sumner had overstated “the general function of legal ideology” (1985: 30); later, Hunt cited Reading Ideologies as an example of the “developing trend on the Left” (1992: 105) which was dealing with law in a more serious manner in the wake of E. P. Thompson’s (1975: 266) hugely controversial claim that the rule of law was an “unqualified human good”. 29  Indeed, the decade was rounded out with a couple of critical book reviews in his now familiar uncompromising style (Sumner 1979b, 1979c).

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The Telegraph. (2014). Professor Nigel Walker – Obituary. 4 November. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11203811/ProfessorNigel-Walker-obituary.html. Thompson, E. P. (1975). Whigs and hunters: The origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane. Thompson, E. P. (1978). The poverty of theory. London: Merlin. Tierney, J. (2010). Criminology: Theory and context (3rd ed.). Harlow: Pearson. Tushnet, M. (1980). Review of Cain and Hunt’s Marx and Engels on law, Hirst’s On law and ideology, and Sumner’s Reading ideologies. British Journal of Law and Society, 7(1), 122–126. Vincent, A. (1993). Marx and law. Journal of Law and Society, 20(4), 371–397. Vold, G. (1958). Theoretical criminology. New York: Oxford University Press. Wiles, P. (1976a). Introduction. In P. Wiles (Ed.), The sociology of crime and delinquency in Britain. Volume Two: The new criminologies (pp.  1–35). London: Martin Robertson. Wiles, P. (Ed.). (1976b). The sociology of crime and delinquency in Britain. Volume Two: The new criminologies. London: Martin Robertson. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wincenty, D. (2018). The experience of oppression and the price of nonconformity: A brief biography of Adam Podgorecki. Studies in East European Thought, 70(1), 61–81. Young, J. (1975). Working class criminology. In I. Taylor, P. Walton, & J. Young (Eds.), Critical criminology (pp. 63–94). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Young, J. (1988). Radical criminology in Britain: The emergence of a competing paradigm. British Journal of Criminology, 28(2), 289–313. Ziegert, K. A. (1977). Adam Podgorecki’s sociology of law: The invisible factors of the functioning of law made visible. Law and Society Review, 12(1), 151–180.

CHAPTER 3

After Censure

Abstract  This chapter focusses upon Sumner’s work during the 1980s and early 1990s. It details how Sumner continued to develop his position in a discipline increasingly turning away from contemplative scholarship and towards pragmatic, policy-oriented, research studies. Sumner’s work during this period can be loosely divided into four categories. There was a critical engagement with some of the then-prominent thinking on the social world, the deployment of the notion of underdevelopment, a return to an analysis of the media and the continued elaboration of his underlying theory of censure itself. The chapter outlines the nature of Sumner’s work in each of these four areas and shows how, despite the surface variety of his endeavours, all his work during this prolific period insisted on the centrality of ideology and was marked by the growing sophistication of the notion of censure. Keywords  Sumner • Ideology • Censure • Media • Underdevelopment Criminology in the 1980s was a discipline still dominated in many ways by the “fortunate generation” (Rock 1988: 191) and, in terms of teaching at least, the ideas of the NDC quickly became the new mainstream (Tierney 2010: 145). Newcomers to the discipline, however, now faced cutbacks in the universities and polytechnics which led to a reduction in the number © The Author(s) 2020 D. Moxon, Colin Sumner, Palgrave Pioneers in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36941-5_3

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of postgraduate programmes and new teaching posts (2010: 145). Younger criminologists were increasingly reliant on applied research contracts (Rock 1988: 63) and were faced with heightened pressure to publish. Inevitably, the policy-oriented studies of the new generation of professional researchers working to the agendas of external funding bodies were “conducted with a lower level of theoretical intensity but a greater attentiveness to method and project management” (Downes 1988: 179). As a result, more contemplative work became the exception. Unlike their 1970s forebears, the new criminologists in these straitened times were not “paradigm changers” or “virtuosi” but “professional scholars” who did “not appear to constitute a distinctive intellectual generation in their own eyes” (Rock 1988: 189). Commitment to a single school of thought or theoretical perspective quickly became outmoded (Tierney 2010: 243) and the outlook in criminology was increasingly characterised by a postmodern eclecticism. Radical thought in the discipline “pulled back from criticising such things as publicly owned industries, the teaching profession, social welfare programmes, council housing, the Labour Party and so on. In the climate of Thatcherism, previous arrangements suddenly looked more attractive than they had” (2010: 227). In this vein, left realism led a shift away from grand theory towards a more pragmatic orientation that focussed upon the criminal justice system and crime control (2010: 233–7).1 For Rock (1988: 192–3), “the emergence of a routine competence” was manifested in the publication of “professional studies produced in a matter of fact manner”, as opposed to the “bravura pieces, […] the bold creations of lone autodidacts” that had characterised the 1970s; “the era of manifestos passed largely because an ageing group of scholars in the prime generation had no need to repeatedly fight the battles of its youth.” Against this backdrop, the 1980s and early 1990s proved to be Sumner’s most prolific period. Perhaps counterintuitively, his position at Cambridge allowed him some freedom to pursue his radical theoretical agenda. There was a sense in which both “the Home Office itself and the university institutions which it helps to finance” remained “remarkably unaffected” 1  Many local authorities and agencies, often staffed by those who had studied in the expanded HE and FE sectors during the 1960s and 1970s (Young 1988: 170), became radicalised in opposition to Thatcherism. These bodies, despite their own limited resources, helped to fund some research such as the victim surveys carried out by the left realists (Rock 1988: 197).

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(Young 1988: 170) by the chill winds buffeting the discipline as a whole. The establishment centres carried on with business as usual to an extent, and Sumner was thus free to steadily refine and extend his theoretical position, losing none of what Rock (1988: 193) called his “combativeness”, despite the retrenchment occurring elsewhere. Nevertheless, even as his influence among the cohorts of young scholars at the Institute was rising, Sumner’s would often seem a somewhat lonely voice during the 1980s. Sumner’s work during this period can be loosely divided into four categories, which will be dealt with in turn in this chapter. Firstly, he critically engaged with some of the prominent thinkers and schools of thought of the day as well as addressing the central issues then facing Marxian legal and criminological analysis. This formed the bulk of his published output over the period. Secondly, he engaged with the notion of underdevelopment and produced a landmark criminological analysis of that process. Thirdly, he returned to his work on the media. This involved, among other things, finally bringing to fruition the abandoned analysis that inspired the theoretical work that became his PhD. Finally, he continued to develop his underlying theory of censure. On the face of it, this was a varied and eclectic programme of work. However, it was consistently underpinned by his core notion of ideological censure as he grappled with a growing unease about the hardening of the Thatcherite state, its sometimes brutal repression of dissent, and the growing polarisation of British society. These themes became steadily more prominent and urgent in Sumner’s writings as the decade progressed.

Sumner as Critic Sumner’s engagement with some of the contemporary thinking in the social sciences during this period commenced with a series of book reviews, the most substantial of which was an essay length discussion of Hall et al.’s Policing the Crisis (1978) and Pryce’s Endless Pressure (1979), both of which concerned themselves with the West Indian immigrant experience in Britain during the early 1970s. For Sumner, these works represented a shift away from the deviancy theory of The New Criminology towards what he saw as a more Marxian orientation (1981a: 277). He was particularly sympathetic to Policing the Crisis despite it resembling an “uneven” working paper and raising “so many problems that any fool could take it apart” (1981a: 278), which he duly did with devastatingly surgical precision (1981a: 280–6). Nevertheless, he applauded the book’s “crucial

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­ ethodological step” of suspending common-sense acceptance of the catm egories of crime and deviance and investigating “the social relationships, ideologies and contexts which combine to form them and give them specific historical meaning” (1981a: 279), which was precisely what he had been arguing for over the best part of the previous decade. Although the book’s famous claim, that the phenomenon of ‘mugging’ by West Indian youth constituted a moral panic rooted in a hegemonic crisis that the state attempted to stave off by adopting an increasingly coercive stance, is difficult to sustain in the light of Sumner’s critique, it was the overall tenor and approach of the book that he found so agreeable. If seen as a “developmental inquiry”, Sumner suggested that Policing the Crisis “will only add to the quality of Marxist analysis of crime and deviance and must be regarded as a major book” (1981a: 287).2 Endless Pressure, an ethnography of the West Indian community in Bristol between 1969 and 1974, was given a more lukewarm reception. Sumner (1981a: 289–90) questioned both its tendency to romanticise deviance in the style of The New Criminology, and its failure to properly evidence the crisis in hegemony it asserted in the style of Policing the Crisis. Nevertheless, taken together, Sumner felt that the two works “mark a distinct step forward in Marxist crime studies” (1981a: 291) along a path that he himself had been working to clear. Another review essay focussed on the work of Evgeny Pashukanis in the wake of the Soviet jurist’s ‘rediscovery’ during the 1970s (Sumner 1981b). Famously, in his General Theory of Law and Marxism (1978), Pashukanis had argued that law was a reflection of commodity exchange that reached its zenith in capitalism and, as such, it was a distinctly bourgeois form that would wither away once socialism swept away market relations. This kind of reductionist analysis was a natural target for Sumner, armed by now with his notion of law as a phenomenon thick with ideology. Unsurprisingly, Sumner rejected Pashukanis’ definition of law and his bluntly economistic approach. Sumner (1981b: 104) argued that “in selecting out the regulation of market relations as the essence of the juridical so as to regard other regulations as merely technical or politically expedient, his position looks rather like an ideal one for an ‘old Bolshevik’ to take when he wants to 2  Later, Sumner (1994: 295) would write that Policing the Crisis, with its central focus on the deviant category of mugging as an ideological or cultural formation within a period of hegemonic strain, was a marker of the transition from one field (the sociology of deviance) to another (the sociology of social censure).

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observe and encourage the withering away of law”. Sumner suggested instead that the logical economic precondition for bourgeois legal ideology is the generalised exchangeability of labour-power rather than the process of commodity exchange or even the notion of private property: “That is, for the legal ideological principle of equivalence of personalities to be extended beyond the privileged few, the masses had to be ‘free’. They had to be severed from their ties to the land and from any restrictions on the disposal of their labour-power” (1981b: 104). Such a view better allows for the analysis of, for instance, the historically delayed or incomplete achievement of legal personality by, among others, women or ethnic minorities, whereas “a general theory of commodity exchange cannot even approach an explanation of this phenomenon” (1981b: 105). As it turned out, Pashukanis’ position shifted significantly once it became clear that his vision of law withering away, and his practical attempts to help realise this as one of the key architects of the Bolshevik legal system after 1917, had brought him into direct opposition with Stalin. His adoption of the more orthodox position that each society’s legal system reflects its mode of production contributed to the emergence of a “jurisprudence of terror” (Beirne and Sharlet 1980: 29) in the Soviet Union, though even this was not enough to save him during Stalin’s purges. Sumner, however, suggests that the possibility of a state based on expediency and an associated “jurisprudence of terror” was latent even in Pashukanis’ earlier work. This was because “his view of law as a bourgeois form, the basic thesis, could only have had totalitarian implications since it precluded the defence of civil liberties in socialism. His analysis of the internal framework of the law (dominated by private law, with public law as a confused mystification) could only produce a cynicism about legal restrictions on state power” (Sumner 1981b: 103).3 Sumner developed this line of thinking further in an essay on the rule of law and civil rights in Marxist theory (Sumner 1981d).4 He surveyed 3  In addition to these review essays, two shorter pieces (Sumner 1980, 1981c) found him in typically “combative” (Rock 1988: 193) form. For example, he criticised Phillips’ Marx and Engels on Law and Laws for its portrayal of Marx “as a crude economic determinist who sees legislation as the product of class interest” (1981c: 293) whilst neglecting the wealth of commentary that rejected that idea including, of course, Sumner’s own. 4  This piece appeared in Kapitalistate, a journal produced between 1973 and 1983 by a rotating international editorial collective and aimed at furthering the Marxist analysis of the state. It was perhaps not the most conventional outlet for a Cambridge academic.

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the longstanding controversy in Marxism regarding the rule of law and legal rights, which had been energised by E. P. Thompson’s (1975: 266) claim that the rule of law was an “unqualified human good” and the emergence of an increasingly authoritarian state in Britain (Sumner 1981d: 86), and attempted to provide an outline of a coherent Marxian position on the matter. Whilst most Marxists had by now moved away from the crude position that the rule of law was a blunt bourgeois instrument or that rights were merely bourgeois ideology, there remained a split between those who focussed on the form of law (Pashukanis, Althusser, Poulantzas and Hirst) and those who focussed on its functions (Thompson and Habermas). Sumner aligned himself more closely with the latter camp, suggesting that “economic formalism in legal theory” (1981d: 86), which tended towards abstraction and largely divorced itself from context (1981d: 84), must be tempered with an historical awareness of the political character and role of law in the class struggle (1981d: 86). Sumner suggested that “the modern legal right or state-conferred capacity” was more the result of a balancing act of political power than the “eternal structure of commodity exchange”; on this view, rights are “key moments and weapons in the development of the working class as a many-sided, international, democratic, humane force for socialist progress. […] Legal rights must be seen as the gained territory of power struggle which only becomes a barren waste if its conquerors fail to settle upon it and cultivate it” (1981d: 68–9). For example, Sumner (1981d: 85) argued, “women had to be able to own property, had to be recognised as legal persons, had to get the vote, and had to get increased rights to initiate divorce before the kind of women’s movement we see today could exist”; he felt that “some substantial experience of winning and enjoying all these freedoms is a necessary precondition of the formation of a class culture with a full sense of socialist democracy”. In this light, Marxism must theorise the forms and principles of law that are immediately necessary to help foster a libertarian socialist future. This requires that “we should support rights struggles which effectively remove the legal inequalities between the different subordinate class fractions, and therefore remove one of the obstacles to united, revolutionary class action” (1981d: 88). Sumner (1981d: 89–90) acknowledges that “of course, ‘reformism’ can mean incorporation and submergence, but that is not all it can mean. Placed within Marxist theory and socialist strategy, it must play a part in the radical political growth of

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the oppressed and in generating out conceptions of a more just future— and therefore is not reformism at all.”5 There followed a detailed exposition and critique of the German critical theorist Jurgen Habermas’ work on law.6 Habermas, as Sumner (1983a: 158) wryly noted, had found some popularity at Cambridge after stepping outside of the narrow confines of orthodox Marxism, and Sumner’s piece was something of a tour de force, clearly and systematically outlining the nature of Habermas’ “brilliant and exhilarating analysis” (1983a: 146) before offering a typically uncompromising series of criticisms.7 Sumner outlined how, for Habermas, the fundamental weakness of Marxism is its unclear normative basis, and he was sympathetic to the overall tenor of Habermas’ project which involved an attempt to develop a moral-political underpinning to Marxist critique. He noted how “Habermas’ analysis illuminates the way in which the increasing distance between legitimate political process and technically effective administration involves an increasing sacrifice of democracy to the unthematized, concealed, sectional interests of international capital” (1983a: 146). Furthermore, there was the sense in Habermas’ work that “advanced capitalism has generated political and cultural needs which it cannot appease economically”, and this had resulted in a crisis in the steering mechanisms of the state (1983a: 147). 5  This is, quite plainly, work that is very much of its day. Consider also Sumner’s musings on the role of violence in socialist strategy which, to the contemporary reader, are quite remarkable. He writes: “It might be objected, against my suggestions, that rights struggles have been tried and failed and that, therefore, violence is the only answer. I am sympathetic to this view, and feel cynical about the fact that the current political debate amongst the (middle class) Left centres on law, rights, political organisation, reform and gradual change. There has hardly been a word about the value of armed struggle. That seems inexcusable when so many groups at the sharp end of the capitalist weal have been forced into violent resistance […]. Obviously, it seems to me, armed struggle is the only option for some groups and for some oppressed classes […]. However, successful armed struggle requires massive support from the whole community (or class base of the movement) and that support will not usually be forthcoming unless rights struggles or established channels of political action have been tried first” (1981d: 88). 6  This focussed on Habermas’ work up until the end of the 1970s, including Legitimation Crisis (1976), but was too soon for his important later works such as The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987) and Between Facts and Norms (1996). 7  Indeed, Sumner (1981d: 80) had previously argued that the “main problem” with Habermas was that he did not ground his visions of popular democracy and ideal communication situations “in an historical materialist analysis of the economic and political conditions under which they do or might come about in practice”. Here he returned to this theme with gusto.

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Like Sumner, Habermas refused to relegate law to the superstructure or to dismiss it due to its supposed class content or bourgeois form. Instead, Habermas granted law a major role in social development and the growth of capitalism, and suggested that it might assist in avoiding a drift towards fascism (1983a: 147). Nevertheless, Sumner (1983a: 147) was uncomfortable with Habermas’ somewhat sanguine view of ‘liberal’ nineteenth-century capitalism which largely ignored class conflict.8 Neither did Habermas make clear why this liberal capitalism suddenly collapsed, requiring the intervention of a reconfigured welfare state (1983a: 148). Sumner (1983a: 149) also felt that Habermas gave “no adequate grounds for saying that the key contradictions of capitalism have been displaced into the state” and it was therefore unclear why the state forms the centrepiece of his analysis. Perhaps most serious for Sumner was Habermas’ underlying idealism, which culminated in his idea of the development of normative structures as “the pacemaker of social evolution” (Habermas 1979: 120) and the basis of the ability to resolve crises. Drawing from his own position in Reading Ideologies, Sumner (1983a 149–50) saw this as an error as it was based upon an illegitimate distinction between purposive-rational action and communicative action; “the effect of this error is to reduce the Marxian concept of economic practice to a technical notion of work and to hive off its subjective/ideological component to communicative action”. Habermas went on to bind his legal analysis to a theory of communication. He argued that traditional legitimations were rooted in communicative action but had broken down in the face of modernising purposive-rational action, and problems of legitimacy thus resulted from a dearth of genuine communication and the ensuing lack of democratic consensus. The mistake here, according to Sumner (1983a: 150), was “the notion that traditional legitimations were rooted in reciprocal, consensual personal social relations”, not economic exploitation and political domination. Habermas’ resulting view of law as a key mechanism of normative integration failed to reconcile class exploitation in the economy 8  Habermas’ view that the capitalism of the nineteenth century was effectively depoliticised and free from issues of legitimation was rejected by Sumner in a memorable passage: “The bourgeois ideology of justice rooted in the exchange of equivalents legitimated precious little. Indeed, it required the formation of the police, extensive criminal law legislation, more prisons and reformatories, mental hospitals, considerable softening of bourgeois attitudes, Methodism, the legalisation of the unions, football, cricket and an awful lot of ale, before anything remotely like stability occurred” (1983a: 148).

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with his notion of consensus-based communicative action. The result was an unwieldy mix of American functionalist systems-theory and Marxian political economy. For his part, Sumner (1983a: 151–2) did “not accept that Marxism requires a normative critique of the modern state and its laws separate from its sociological, analytic expose of the weaknesses of bourgeois democracy and legality. […] To posit the possibility of a tribunal of Reason begs the whole question of democracy in a class state. […] If the analytic expose of law depends on a class analysis, how can it be supplemented with a normative critique resting on a consensus theory of truth? It is quite contradictory.” Habermas, on this view, “has dangerously separated his analysis of the political from his analysis of the economic. This cannot be justified by his assertion that the fundamental contradictions of our society have been displaced into the political sphere, because he needs to analyse the economy more closely to understand the form and effectiveness of such displacement.” Thus, in the end, Habermas’ model was no more than “thought provoking”, and Sumner (1983a: 154) pointed once again to the fundamental argument that he had outlined in Reading Ideologies: “Speech, discourse, reason, norms and values: none of these aspects of culture can be abstracted without regard for their contextualised, historical meaning in the structure of social relationships.” Indeed, “Habermas’ reverence for the tribunal of rational discourse might look to the enlightened worker like an academic’s professional ideology” (Sumner 1983a: 154). A little later, Sumner engaged with the thought of another giant of social theory, Michel Foucault. This essay exhibited a subtle shift in style, which as Sumner (1990b: 26) put it, “involves a mischievous play rather than a comprehensive review”. It also saw him further develop his notion of censure with the introduction of the concept of “master-censures” (1990b: 40), which he suggested are “central features of hegemonic ideology” (1990b: 26) and were anticipated by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977). There, Foucault (1977: 220–1) argued that every social practice is subject to discipline, a strategy of domination which homogenises, regiments and forges a degree of moral unity out of the messy practical world. Once established, this regimen “turns each technical infraction of its codes and procedures into a moral deviation and each errant subject into a deviant” (Sumner 1990b: 27). These are, in Sumner’s terms, the master-censures which, along with their associated moral tales or narratives, “have become deeply imbricated in the disciplinary system and its knowledges, profoundly shaping the criteria of gradation and e­ xplanation”

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(1990b: 28). In this way master-censures contribute to what Foucault described as normalisation, which operates across the whole social field to produce disciplined individuals operating under the illusion of a rationalistic voluntarism as they diligently perform the roles required of them in the service of capital accumulation. Sumner (1990b: 26–7) argued that “the censure of femininity” remained a master-censure, which entailed that “most hegemonic censures of deviance are, at a minimum, coloured at a deep structural level by the master-censure of femininity, in connection with other master-­ censures”. He suggested that criminological theory had yet to recognise the hegemonic masculinity of its central concepts and thus remained androcentric. Sumner (1990b: 30) went on to suggest that Foucault “misses a great opportunity to understand the construction and role of gender categories in the establishment of capitalism, disciplinary power and the modern state” because he ignores how the master-censure of femininity is operative in foundational capitalist notions such as right, personality, contract, property and equality. Consequently, Foucault misses how these notions are tied to the emergence of dominant masculinity and the suppression of femininity. This omission is all the more surprising given Foucault’s observations elsewhere on the suppression of unreason, the rise of military strategies of domination and the obsession with sexuality as the “unconscious truths of the rational modern individual without a soul” (1990b: 34). The result is that, for Sumner, Foucault’s analysis does not properly grasp that “the dominant gender norm within disciplinary power practices is that of hegemonic masculinity, which censures both the feminine and alternative masculinities” (1990b: 38), nor that the formation of the modern subject and state—and by extension forms of morality, criminal law, social regulation and social censure—is a “profoundly gendered process” (1990b: 31). Soon after, in an essay that was the result of work conducted at the revered Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Sumner (1991a) turned his attention to postmodernist social theory more broadly.9 This piece involved an acknowledgment that the sands were shifting and Marxism had been usurped by postmodernism in the realm of social theory. Nevertheless, Sumner defended his non-economistic variant of 9  Much of this essay was an adapted version of Chap. 3 of Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice, which will be dealt with later in this chapter. The sections concerning postmodern sociology focussed on here were novel.

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Marxism and the concept of ideology he had developed in Reading Ideologies, and suggested that they were perfectly capable of accommodating some of the observations of postmodernist sociology. This included the postmodern take on the collapse of grand narratives, the rise of post-­ Fordism, the increasing power of symbolism in the construction of individual subjectivities (1991a: 48), and the sense that these and other developments in tandem “have led to increasing emotional and intellectual bewilderment, fear and isolation in the face of the chaotic maelstrom of rapid political changes” (1991a: 49). Indeed, in the face of these changes Sumner (1991a: 49) felt that “a broad, practice-based theory of ideology which recognises the increasingly complex division of labour underpinning the formation of contemporary consciousness […] is valuable in comprehending post-modern realities”. He also pointed to the emergence of new “foundational ideologies”, such as “the ideology of the market and its alleged workings, the ideology of self-government, and the ideology of pragmatic personal autonomy. As at the end of the last two centuries, one set of grand narratives only collapses with the rise of another set” (1991a: 49). The essay also outlined his view of contemporary law as a complex and contested ideological form where the ‘commonsense’ ideology of professional practice was increasingly winning out over grand philosophical ideologies of political reform (1991a: 57); he suggested that “more than ever we need to hold on to our grasp of what is ideological before it becomes so integrated with practical realities that we lose sight of its sectional character in the face of its normalisation as ‘expedient practice’” (1991a: 71). Perhaps for the first time, there was also a note of despondency in his acknowledgment that “the radical socialist opposition to untrammelled capitalist expansion has virtually collapsed over the last twenty years, and it has only been replaced by a disunited melange of emancipation movements and single-issue campaign groups with little in common by way of a political philosophy and platform” (1991a: 52). Yet he still sounded mildly optimistic in his assessment of the prospects for moral renewal, the potential for an “emergence of a new collective ethics”, and a “renewed understanding of what is social and what is anti-social”. He saw promise in a ‘new age’ philosophy of “social holism”, and felt that such an outlook “would not be a surprising political alternative to the fin de siècle disintegration of so many taken for granted basic structures and ideologies” (1991a: 52). Whatever precise form it took, Sumner was clear that some kind of renewed normative thinking was necessary in order to properly “question the value of constantly using censures as a means of

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conflict resolution”, and to help finally move beyond the “inadequacies” of “negative ideological formations reflecting dominant interests and ideologies of class, gender, ethnicity, culture, age and region” (1991a: 73). This call for moral and ethical revitalisation would become a repeated motif of his work over the coming years.

Sumner as Theorist of Underdevelopment The second strand of Sumner’s work during this period saw him produce a landmark analysis of the process of underdevelopment. The first suggestions about the direction that he was moving in came during a conference on the subject held at Cambridge in July 1979. Then, in a review of The Imposition of Law, a volume edited by Burman and Harrell-Bond (Sumner 1981e), he praised the inclusion of seven chapters on colonial law but questioned the editors’ ill-defined and imprecise concept of ‘imposed law’. There followed a review of two works by Shelley (Sumner 1982b), written by Sumner in Tanzania whilst in a visiting post, which saw him reject, among other things, her underlying premise that development equals modernisation. This work culminated in Sumner’s edited volume Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment (1982a), the result of the earlier conference. As Sumner (1982c: xi) put it in the Preface, “the essays that follow make an attempt to get beyond the dominant view that the ‘crime problem’ in the third world primarily means urban, working class juvenile delinquency accelerating rapidly due to pressures of ‘modernisation’, and that the ‘justice problem’ concerns the inability of ‘native’ officials and politicians to grasp the rules and procedures that constitute the rule of law.” The writers shared a sense that “underdevelopment is grounded in the imperialists’ appropriation and exploitation of other people’s land and labour” (1982c: xii). On the face of it this seemed like a move into a rather esoteric specialist field, marking something of a step away from the concerns of the 1970s. But, over the course of Sumner’s own trenchant opening chapter (1982d),10 he clearly demonstrated how investigations into the forcible imposition of a mode of production, and the deployment of new criminal categories to support this, were the obvious place to begin thinking about

 This chapter was later reprinted in Worsley’s Modern Sociology reader (Sumner 1991b).

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his notion of censure and the role of the ideological in the very constitution of a social formation. Sumner (1982d: 2) began his chapter by noting how mainstream western criminological theory had remained almost completely silent on crime in underdeveloped countries, and looked “even more artificial and ideological when it has to play away from home”. He was particularly critical of Clinard and Abbot’s Crime in Developing Countries (1973) in this regard (Sumner 1982d: 12–22).11 Sumner’s own take on underdevelopment was based upon the idea that “economic systems do not work automatically” but need to be “created, protected and legitimated” (1982d: 4). He proposed that “certain political and ideological forms are so necessary to an economic system that they can be considered organic to it. These forms interpenetrate with the purely economic. In this sense, certain criminal (as well as civil) laws, and the violation of these laws, can be seen as components of the motor-force of economic development: the relations and struggles between classes constituted by the mode of production.” As a result, he held that “crime, whether as law or law violation, has historically been integral to the establishment of new economic formations” (1982d: 4). On this view, development in poorer countries was not just a delayed replay of western development. Instead, the development of western capitalism “has meant the underdevelopment of countries and regions exploited by it” (1982d: 5). Thus to study underdevelopment involved the investigation of “our own social structure as it plays itself out abroad, at an angle which makes our pretensions of civilisation look like a sick joke or, what they really are, a metropolitan-capitalist, ideological legitimation. Our freedom, human rights, industrial advancement and culture look quite different from the standpoint of those who paid for it with  For Sumner, the most obvious weakness of orthodox analysis was its failure to consider the crimes of the state itself, and the fact that huge inequality meant that such states rarely commanded consent. As a result, “domination has to rely heavily on various types of coercion” (1982d: 28). The criminal law had played an important role in the penetration of capitalism “by force not by consent”, perhaps second only to direct military conquest. Crime could therefore be seen as not only the result of ‘development’, but also a primary cause of it (1982d: 30). Sumner (1982d: 35) praises van Onselen’s (1976) account of the development of gold mining and the system of slavery in what was Southern Rhodesia between 1900 and 1933 for providing “a cameo of the whole process” and showing how “criminal laws were thus used and abused to provide labour for capital”. So-called modernisation, often regarded as the ‘civilising’ of a stagnant system by a dynamic one, is revealed as “the coerced growth of capitalist domination in areas of resistance” (1982d: 35–6). 11

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their lives, their labour, their freedom, their rights, and their culture. It was our crimes (literally) that enabled that freedom and our criminal laws which turned those who resisted or delayed it into common ‘criminals’” (1982d: 8–9). Just as E.  P. Thompson (1975) had showed how, in eighteenth-­century England, the traditional rights and claims of the poor were “simply redefined as crimes” such as poaching, wood-theft and trespass (Sumner 1982d: 9), so capitalist expansion had often involved the expropriation of land, the conversion of shared resources into commodities and the destruction of informal or communal modes of dispute settlements, all under the guise of ‘modernisation’. Attempts to resist such processes had invariably been transformed into “criminal behaviours” (1982d: 9). When viewed in this light, the fact that “crime is not a behaviour universally given in human nature and history, but a moral-political concept with a culturally and historically varying form and content” (1982d: 10) is brought into sharp relief. In this way, the study of underdevelopment was of a piece with Sumner’s existing work; indeed, it offered up ideal-typical cases of his notion of ideological censure. Sumner returned to these themes in his review of Jones’ Crime, Race and Culture (Sumner 1984), a study of crime in Guyana. Sumner welcomed the work as an addition to the “pitifully small” body of literature on crime in underdeveloped societies, describing it as “a thoughtful, honest book” that was superior to Clinard and Abbot’s earlier offering (1984: 126). Yet he remained dissatisfied. The book relied on an orthodox view of the crime problem in Guyana as a cultural phenomenon and it did not take sufficient account of the history of colonialism; as Sumner (1984: 127) suggested, “cultural correlates are not at all explanations but merely observable branches of a tree with quite definite economic roots.” In a later review of Mahabir’s Crime and Nation Building in the Caribbean (Sumner 1987), he praised the author’s account of the Emergency Powers Act 1970 in Trinidad and Tobago but was again disappointed by its theoretical contribution (1987: 79).12

12  For its part, Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment was generally well received. Solomos (1983: 489) suggested that Sumner’s chapter would become a “central text”, Mahabir (1984: 186) praised it as a “fine introduction” and there were generally positive reviews from Parsloe (1982), Jorgensen (1983) and Coleman (1984). Hill (1982) made clear that he would have preferred a work of a more practical and less theoretical bent, whilst the US-based academics Nanda (1983), Marenin (1983) and Vogel (1984) were uncomfortable with Sumner’s avowed Marxism.

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Sumner as Media Analyst This period also saw Sumner return to his oldest line of inquiry. Crime, Justice and the Mass Media (1982e) was a report, edited by Sumner, of the proceedings of the 14th Cropwood Round-Table Conference at Cambridge involving academics and leading industry figures. Sumner’s own paper in the collection was a reprise of his PhD study, with the focus this time on the media’s response to the riots in Toxteth in July 1981. Sumner (1982f: 25) argued that the press treatment of the riots, heavily based upon statements from state officials, “at best served to justify, or at worst to precipitate” the Home Office’s decision to provide the police with more riot gear and weapons; “other possible interpretations of the event and definitions of the problem were either relegated to secondary spaces in the newspaper or dealt with in low-circulation newspapers.” This chimed with Sumner’s overall finding, which as he admitted “may not be news to anyone” (1982f: 27), that “as a whole, the national press describe anti-establishment political demonstrations in a censorious way whereas it is capable of reporting some demonstrations (e.g. against abortion or against the effects of strikes) quite favourably” (1982f: 25). His concern was that the tone of reporting adopted by the national press “must inevitably be to encourage a coercive response to social dissent” (1982f: 27).13 In the discussion that followed, transcribed in the report (Sumner 1982e: 52–4), media figures defended their position in some forceful exchanges.14 The work that Sumner had undertaken in the early 1970s at the outset of his PhD studies was finally brought to full fruition in a piece written with his student Simon Sandberg in 1985. This was eventually published as Chap. 8 of Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (Sumner and Sandberg 1990: 167) and it was notable for its militant, stridently anti-Thatcher tone, which although hinted at before was far more marked here. In this chapter, the data that Sumner had gathered for his PhD were analysed in line with the method he had developed in Reading Ideologies and in the light of subsequent events such as the riots in Brixton and Toxteth and the 13  Sumner’s incredulity about the approach of one particular newspaper was barely concealed: “As the Mail’s ludicrous feature put it, the violence of the riots is linked with beating up old ladies, criticising the police, not wearing a tie and John McEnroe’s ‘curses at Wimbledon’—‘IT’S ALL PART OF THE SAME SICKENING MALAISE’” (1982f: 29). 14  In the Preface to Crime, Justice and the Mass Media, Sumner (1982g: ii) noted that “there were no holds barred during the discussions. […] I have had to sanitise it a little due to the laws of the land, principles of confidentiality, and fears of redundancy”.

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1984–5 miner’s strike. As Sumner and Sandberg (1990: 165) put it, “as history unfolds, the text permits a new reading.” They argued that the press censure of political demonstrations in 1973 was constructed within a hegemonic ideology that was shifting from “the persuasion of welfarism and technocratic reason to the shrill commands of a Victorian bourgeoisie committed to monetarism and militarism”, and which granted less importance to the winning of consent than it did to the restoration of untrammelled international capital accumulation and circulation (1990: 174). Extra-parliamentary politics in and of itself was not seen as problematic by the press, and some ‘moderate’ demonstrations in 1973, such as those about pro-establishment causes (1990: 181), received relatively favourable coverage. However, “militancy” (1990: 178–9) that challenged the authority of the hardening state was heavily censured. Of course, “militancy and moderation were not terms used in any scientific way to describe actions. […] They are not, in any sensible way, empirical terms; rather they are terms of moral-political judgement, belonging to quite a conservative political ideology, which are used to evaluate empirical reality” (1990: 184). This, then, was the “ideological work” (1990: 176) that paved the way for the Thatcherite restructuring of the state in the 1980s, the adoption of a paramilitary style of policing against those, such as the miners, deemed as the “enemy within” (1990: 163–4), and the construction of a “more repressive, more pro-active and more combative criminal justice system” (1990: 188). According to Sumner and Sandberg (1990: 187), this kind of ideological work was only possible because dominant ideologies are effectively “raw materials which are creatively deployed in the context of specific political conjunctures. […] In an older sociological language, the categories of deviance are not simply instruments of crime control, but play an important role in the construction and reconstruction of state power.” As part of the response to specific, concrete circumstances and political and cultural conflict, “the ideologies condense, focus and develop […] in the forms of succinct terms of abuse or social censures” (1990: 163). Therefore censures and criminal justice practices do not just define ‘deviance’ and ‘criminality’, but they “are more incisively conceived of as important ideological resources in the practical business of hegemonic politics” (1990: 190). Sumner and Sandberg (1990: 190) thus agreed with Hall (1985: 117–8), who had written that “the ways in which popular consent can be so constructed by a historical bloc seeking hegemony, as to harness to its support some populist discontents, neutralise the opposing forces,

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­ isaggregate the opposition and really incorporate some strategic elements d of popular opinion into its own hegemonic project” was the central issue which, “above all others, has defeated the left, politically, and Marxist analysis theoretically, in every advanced capitalist democracy since the First World War”.

Sumner as Theorist of Censure In the meantime, Sumner had continued to develop and refine his notion of censure. The dissemination of the concept was aided when a key passage from Reading Ideologies (1979: 266–77) was reprinted in Beirne and Qunney’s Marxism and Law reader (Sumner 1982h). In addition, Sumner’s paper on ‘Abandoning deviancy theory’ at the 1981 American Society of Criminology conference in Washington DC was developed into an essay, ‘Rethinking deviance’, for Spitzer’s edited collection on Research in Law, Deviance and Social Control (Sumner 1983b). The apogee of this process was represented by the book Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (Sumner 1990a), home to the Sumner and Sandberg chapter discussed above and other work done by Sumner and his doctoral students over the previous decade (Sumner 1990d: 1).15 Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice, in Sumner’s own words, took “a long time to come to fruition, and in many respects bears the marks of the middle 1980s” (1990c: xii). There was a noticeable shift from the precise delineations of his foundational principles that marked his work in the 1970s to a more robust and forthright style; this was, after all, work done during the height of Thatcherism in the UK.16 Sumner’s introduction to the book (1990d) distinguishes what he now called ‘socialist’ criminology from crude Marxist economism and class 15  Indeed, according to Sumner (1990d: 5), the book’s “most immediate aim was to counter the alienating and counterproductive individuation that is an acute feature of doctoral research in Cambridge”. 16  Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice was published as part of the Open University Press’ ‘New Directions in Criminology’ series, edited by Sumner and featuring socialist and feminist work carried out at Cambridge (Sumner 1990c: xi), in “an Institute not known for its role in the development of socialist criminology” (1990d: 5). Sumner (1990d: 5–6) maintained that socialist criminology was possible within an Institute that he felt was “fundamentally independent of the Home Office”, but nevertheless conceded that it had been “a struggle rather than an accommodation”. The series also included works by Gelsthorpe and Morris (1990), Green (1990), Ahire (1991), Vogler (1991), Sparks (1992), Lo (1993), and Cain and Harrington (1994).

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instrumentalism, as well as the new criminology of the 1970s and the left realism that had superseded it. He lamented the rise of the “Realpolitik of the 1980s” (1990d: 6) which had seen theoretical work sidelined in favour of an administrative criminology ill equipped to search for general truths or new insights (1990d: 3). Indeed, he felt that “any criminology which ignores the social roots and contested character of the criminal justice system, by taking state definitions of crime as adequate definitions of types of behaviour, is not only antediluvian but also discreditable as a dominant-­ ideological arm of the state” (1990d: 2). Sumner was also scathing of those, such as Young (1987: 355), who had come to the view that definitions of the major crimes, as reflected in the criminal law, were the result of a widely shared consensus. He argued that “people become ‘criminals’ because the state criminalises them. […] To believe that what is anti-social, wrong, wicked, dangerous or a nuisance is a matter of collective, transcendental, normative or moral agreement, and not a question of economic, political and ideological constitution, is contrary to the evidence of history, and is therefore a poor basis for a realistic politics of criminal justice” (1990d: 4). Sumner’s own aim was to move towards what “might loosely be called a crime and development perspective, which attempts to locate the censure of crime and deviance within the historic phases of social development that give rise to key national and international moments” (1990d: 6). Chapter 2 of Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice remains the single most accessible statement of Sumner’s theory of ideological censure, offering “a revised basic formulation of it” (Sumner 1990d: 6).17 The chapter is “an attempt to articulate something which many people now recognise in practice; a new conception of deviance which has emerged within the intellectual movement of what one might summarise as contemporary socialist criminology” (1990e: 25). In the wake of the new realist criminologies of the 1980s, Sumner (1990e: 16) reasserted the importance of theoretical work because “empirical research and political experience, however radical their concerns, are not enough on their own, and that theoretical renewal, or re-engagement with social theory, is vital in discovering, reflecting and interpreting good, new information”. 17  The chapter was the final iteration of his 1981 ASC conference paper and the subsequent essay on ‘Rethinking deviance’ (Sumner 1983b). Sumner (1990e: 37) states that “this revision improves the clarity and precision of the 1983 article considerably, with the benefit of its continued use in teaching, and thus supersedes it”.

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Sumner then restated the basic insights of the theory of ideological censure in a series of memorable passages, noting that “to describe the categories of crime and deviance as ideological is not simply to denounce them, or to explain them away, but to say something important about their nature and functioning” (1990e: 37). Censures are, he reminds us, notions of disapproval or disgust that are lodged within dominant ideological formations (1990e: 17); they are “negative ideological categories with specific, historical applications” (1990e: 26). Crucially, “censures such as militants, muggers, extremists, deviants, criminals, thieves, prostitutes, perverts, nutters, slags, delinquents, bastards, villains, the socially inadequate, freaks, rioters, loonies and scroungers (believe it or not) are not adequate behavioural categories” (1990e: 16–17). Indeed, “the categories of the criminal law and common morality are hopelessly inadequate as empirical descriptions of specific social behaviours” (1990e: 26).18 This is, of course, “stupendously obvious”, yet criminology still proceeds in large part “as if legal categories were scientific” (1990e: 37). Indeed, while censures themselves are often “presented in legal, technical or universal forms, as mere descriptions, they are organised slanders in what is essentially a political or moral conflict” (1990e: 17). Even within single societies, classifications of ‘deviant’ or ‘criminal’ behaviours inevitably “exclude what should be included, include what should be excluded, and generally fail to attain unambiguous, consistent and settled social meanings” (1990e: 26). In class societies, argued Sumner (1990e: 27), “it is inevitable that the class bloc which dominates the economy, owns the means of mass communication and controls the reins of political power, will have the greatest capacity to assert its censures in the legal and moral discourses of the day. […] Therefore the sectional censures applied by the white, male, bourgeoisie tend to become the social censures of capitalist society.”19 Nevertheless, historically, “because it is rarely morally acceptable to use 18  This applies even to those acts whose status as crime is generally uncontroversial. Murder, for instance, “is not a behaviour but a censure, applied to certain killings, whose pattern of application is thoroughly ideological” (Sumner 1990e: 34). 19  In a similar vein, Sumner and Sandberg (1990: 188) argued that “social censures are rarely simple class instruments expressing undiluted economic ideology. Class domination in Western societies is usually also the domination of white, male nationalists. Therefore, dominant class ideology does not just entail the censure of subordinate classes, but also of blacks, women, devolutionists, and all kinds of dissidents.” Indeed, because ideologies can emerge from all kinds of social relations, not just economic ones, “there will inevitably be some

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raw self-interest as a clinching argument, they usually invoke the widely accepted, general moral principles of an epoch […], albeit superficially, selectively and partially” (1990e: 28). However, “the demise of welfarism and the rise of the openly capitalist, morally aggressive Right in the 1980s” had created a climate where “the ideological and political character of moral censures is so open, and the rulers’ fear of their social divisiveness so minimal” (1990e: 16–17) that the Thatcherite state increasingly felt emboldened to censure in an assertive and aggressive manner.20 Against this backdrop of authoritarian neo-liberalism, the need for a “responsible normative debate about the moral censures which would be better in complex, post-industrial societies” (1990e: 17) was more pressing than ever. In short, “the old moral order, highlighted at its worst by the many evils of Thatcherism, needs a revolutionary overhaul” (1990e: 36). Chapter 3 of Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice saw Sumner discuss some of the nascent Marxist thinking on the criminal justice system in the context of the theory of censure. As he put it, “so many new pieces of a revised jigsaw are on the board, it is time we started to put them together to see what the new picture looks like” (1990f: 41). What emerged was arguably his most polemical work to date as he railed against the hardening of the state that Thatcherism entailed. Criminal justice, according to Sumner, is an active political and ideological force which helps to structure social practice and popular morality; it is symbolically powerful as the setting “where good is marked off from evil” and the dominant ideological definitions of acceptable behaviour are reiterated and reinforced (1990f: 47). Indeed, “the daily censure of crime in modern times attempts to unify and publicise the hegemonic bloc’s vision of the nation and its morality. […] It thus has a propensity to represent what are mostly either personal difficulties or political differences, both intimately related to the social structure and therefore essentially structural and sociological in character, as signs of moral degeneration, as ‘behaviours’ that are deeply unstructured, merely psychological, and a serious threat to the national health” unholy mixtures of ideology in individual consciousness and institutional practice” (Sumner and Sandberg 1990: 165). 20  In passages that hint at the direction he would soon take in the Obituary (1994), Sumner suggests that this increasing censoriousness had revealed how the concept of deviance was rooted in what were, on the surface at least, the relatively consensual politics of post-Depression, New Deal, social democracy; in the 1980s “ideology is again blatant, and the concept of social deviance stands disrobed, as rude as its forerunners, the concepts of moral degeneracy and social inadequacy” (1990e: 17).

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(1990f: 49). In performing this role criminal justice becomes “internal to the members of the body politic, in partially constituting their sense of order, safety, morality and unity as members of a collective unit”. This entails that the criminal law and the criminal justice system are not the mere weapons of the ruling class, for “they are too embroiled in the world of the public”, but neither do they represent the ‘will of the people’ because they are “too much in the hands of the powerful” (1990f: 41–2). As a result, on the one hand it is undoubtedly the case that “to the extent that criminal justice does not reflect the interests and opinions of all sectors of the polity, it becomes an instrument of sectional violence” (1990f: 43); on the other, any state which completely ignores popular opinion would find it almost impossible to command any assent and thus be in a position where it “loses the value of criminal justice as a hegemonic force, and converts it into a simple instrument of repression” (1990f: 46). The problem for analysts is that the ideology of neutrality, consensuality and the notion of criminal justice as a merely administrative, technical process buries “the truth of the predominance of interests and ideologies of the hegemonic bloc” (1990f: 51). The problem for the state is that in attempting to use censures to wring some form of consensus out of a fractured modernity, there are inevitable points of tension where state definitions rub up against “the alternative censures of counter-hegemonic groups which, for example, might define businessmen as ‘hard cases’, lawyers as crooks, and politicians as hypocrites”. In such instances, “the full result is a politically disintegrative tendency in modern life towards everyone seeing everyone else as morally degenerate, and thus towards national disunity”. The net effect of increasing censoriousness, then, is disintegrative rather than integrative, and it “tends to dissolve social organisations into mutually suspicious and hostile camps” (1990f: 50). For Sumner (1990f: 53), the fact that the criminal justice system in Britain so starkly exhibited all these traits was a somewhat inevitable result of its historical conditions of emergence, when after a period of militaristic pacification of the emerging working class, “civil policing and the expansion of the range of moral censures represent the Victorian ruling class’s long-term strategic response to the political instabilities and social problems arising from the maelstrom of full proletarianisation”. This was coloured from the outset “by the ideology of the white, imperial patriarchy which dominated the British state, and later half the world” (1990f: 52). The fact that the “so-called culture of civility was intimately linked to the regulation of proletarianisation in a capitalist economy” (Sumner

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1990f: 54) was clearest in the colonies, as Sumner had already shown in Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment. Sumner (1990f: 54) ended the chapter by sounding a warning regarding the “return to militaristic policing” and “direct state rule” that appeared to be accompanying “deproletarianisation in the age of multinational capital, computer technology, deindustrialisation and the dismantling of the welfare state”.

Shifting Sands Sumner’s work during this period, then, involved the steady development of his position on censure. The most obvious manifestations of this were his notion of ‘master-censures’, his identification of new foundational ideologies of the market and of individualism, and his hardening stance against the increasingly censorious neo-liberal state. Even those contributions which, at first glance, might have appeared tangential to his core project also served this fundamental purpose. His critiques of contemporary social thought, for instance, were consistent in stressing the often neglected role of ideology and socio-political context. His work on underdevelopment insisted that censure was vital in the establishment of new economic formations and was a seam that he would be steadily mining for years to come. His studies of the media suggested that it was deeply engaged in ideological work and the business of censure. In addition, work that directly utilised the censure perspective was beginning to emerge from Sumner’s students as they came of age. For example, Lo (1993) produced a Gramsican analysis of corruption and hegemony in China and Hong Kong, whilst Roberts (1993) analysed the ‘master’ or ‘primary’ censure of sex and gender and its “progeny of inter-related censure clusters, which systematically constitute, confine, oppress and manage subordinate sexualities with legal sanction and moral stigma” (1993: 182). Yet in many ways the arguments in the discipline had moved on. Sumner (1990e: 15) himself noted in Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice that “students still ask ‘whatever happened to the theoretical debates about deviance in the early 1970s?’”. They had dwindled as the discipline increasingly oriented itself around the pursuit of narrowly focussed, externally funded research contracts, and one-time radicals moved towards a ‘left realist’ position from where they were keen to address “the more routine forms of crime” (Stenson 1992: 233), as a critical review of Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice in the British Journal of Criminology put it. Of course, there was nothing fundamentally incompatible with all of this

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and Sumner’s more theoretical position, but that same review’s passing reference to the “crumbling edifice of Marxism” (Stenson 1992: 232) was perhaps indicative of a deeper problem for Sumner. The intellectual mood had changed across the board and Sumner, fighting the good fight to establish his programme at Cambridge, found himself increasingly adrift, even though the basic plausibility of his work was left untouched. Despite being faced with readily identifiable enemies in neo-liberalism and the repressive, Thatcherite state, theoretical Marxism in the social sciences gradually found itself eased aside by postmodernism and identity politics. Indeed, it seemed that at the very moment its worst fears about the capitalist state had been realised, Marxism lost much of its currency as a vibrant, living tradition.21 This was accelerated after the ‘fall of the wall’ in 1989, when many commentators were quick to point to the death of Marxism and its usurpation by neo-liberalism both theoretically and politically (Anderson 2000); Fukuyama, for instance, famously declared that we had reached the ‘end of history’, in the sense that ideological struggles were over and neo-liberalism had emerged victorious (1989, 1992). Outwith the academy, many of the communist parties of Europe, which had adopted reformist ‘eurocommunist’ policies in the late 1970s, wholeheartedly embraced social democracy after 1989 (Hough 2005). A theory that had once claimed it would be ultimately vindicated through practice was now in crisis (Douzinas and Warrington 1986: 802), and the pessimism that had been the natural tenor of western Marxism down the years (Anderson 1976: Chap. 4) now appeared to be well founded. Even Sumner’s own optimism regarding Marxian theory and the potential for a socialist transformation of society was waning by the end of the period under review in this chapter. Nevertheless, ensconced at Cambridge in isolation from other radical criminologists, he was at least 21  Sumner acknowledged this in the Introduction to Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice, noting that socialism was increasingly being questioned by those on the left. “Perhaps it was a political vision too closely tied to the limited goals of new proletariats”, he wrote; a more pluralistic route forward was required which needed to move beyond the “antiquated politics of the old men of the labour movement” (1990d: 2). Of course, noteworthy Marxist work, often with the explicit aim of reviving the tradition, did continue to appear during this period. See, for example, the work of the ‘analytical Marxists’ such as Cohen (1978), Wright (1985), Elster (1986) and Roemer (1988); the ‘post Marxism’ of Laclau and Mouffe (1985); the landmark studies of postmodern culture by Jameson (1984, 1991) and its socio-economic and political correlates by Harvey (1989). Meanwhile, Eagleton remained a staunch and elegant critic of postmodernism (see e.g. 1996).

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partly insulated from these rather abrupt shifts in scholarly orientation. Perhaps he was also sanguine about continuing to work within the parameters of Marxism; after all, he had always regarded Marxism as a dynamic tradition, and his foundational theory of ideology had already rejected much of the orthodox Marxism that was increasingly being viewed as obsolete.22 Or perhaps he was simply too busy to pay any great attention to all of this given that his next work—vast in scope, meticulously researched, and soon to be highly controversial—was under preparation.

References Ahire, P. (1991). Imperial policing: The emergence and role of the police in colonial Nigeria, 1860–1960. Buckingham: Open University Press. Anderson, P. (1976). Considerations on western Marxism. London: New Left Books. Anderson, P. (2000). Renewals. New Left Review, 1, 1–20. Beirne, P., & Sharlet, R. (1980). Editor’s introduction. In P. Beirne & R. Sharlet (Eds.), Pashukanis: Selected writings on Marxism and law (pp. 1–36). London: Academic Press. Cain, M., & Harrington, C.  B. (Eds.). (1994). Lawyers in a postmodern world: Translation and transgression. Buckingham: Open University Press. Clinard, M. B., & Abbott, D. J. (1973). Crime in developing countries: A comparative perspective. New York: Wiley.

22  Sumner (1993) suggested as much in his ‘Series editor’s introduction’ to Lo’s Corruption and politics in Hong Kong and China (1993). “This is not a time for socialistic capitulation on questions of theory”, he wrote. “The theoretical work done by socialists within sociology of crime and law […] remains the most vibrant and the most explanatory available. The old labels are becoming increasingly redundant and misleading. Until agreeable new ones evolve, we will retain the old one, insofar as it refers to and advances the values of cooperation, democracy, development and freedom from oppression” (1993: x). He went on, “for the many socialists who have for years been critical of the regimes in China and the former empire of the Soviet Union, and who have been developing Marxian social science as a rigorous form of sociological analysis, it now seems somewhat bizarre to be told that socialism is passé when all along we have been emphasising the importance of democracy in politics, the importance of ideological beliefs in social development, and the importance of justice in any critical analysis of any society. Our critics can say that what we were doing was not socialism, and that socialist theory and politics must always be economistic and dictatorial, but what nonsense! Life is just not that simple, and maybe now there is no cold war our critics on the right will be able to see that it is, ironically, they who are allied to a dirigiste economism. No doubt, we socialists will then be dismissed as idealists who overemphasise values and pluralism in the face of economic necessity. Such is politics” (1993: xii).

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Cohen, G.  A. (1978). Karl Marx’s theory of history: A defence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coleman, C. (1984). Review of Herbert’s The geography of urban crime, Jensen’s Sociology of delinquency: Current issues, and Sumner’s Crime, justice and underdevelopment. The British Journal of Sociology, 35(1), 153–154. Douzinas, C., & Warrington, R. (1986). Domination, exploitation, and suffering: Marxism and the opening of closed systems. American Bar Foundation Research Journal, 11(4), 801–828. Downes, D. (1988). The sociology of crime and social control in Britain, 1960– 1987. British Journal of Criminology, 28(2), 175–187. Eagleton, T. (1996). The illusions of postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell. Elster, J. (1986). An introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Allen Lane. Fukuyama, F. (1989). The end of history? The National Interest, 16, 3–18. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The end of history and the last man. London: Hamish Hamilton. Gelsthorpe, L., & Morris, A. (Eds.). (1990). Feminist perspectives in criminology. Buckingham: Open University Press. Green, P. (1990). The enemy without: Policing and class consciousness in the miner’s strike. Buckingham: Open University Press. Habermas, J. (1976). Legitimation crisis. London: Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1979). Communication and the evolution of society. London: Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action (volume 1): Reason and the rationalisation of society. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action (volume 2): Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason. Cambridge: Polity. Habermas, J. (1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge: Polity. Hall, S. (1985). Authoritarian populism: A reply. New Left Review, 151, 115–124. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. London: Macmillan. Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hill, R. (1982). Review of Sumner’s Crime, justice and underdevelopment. Probation Journal, 29(4), 151. Hough, D. (2005). Third ways or new ways? The post-communist left in central Europe. Political Quarterly, 76(2), 253–263. Jameson, F. (1984). Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. New Left Review, 146, 53–92.

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Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso. Jorgensen, B. (1983). Review of Sumner’s Crime, justice and underdevelopment. The Canadian Journal of Sociology, 8(1), 99–101. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. London: Verso. Lo, T. W. (1993). Corruption and politics in Hong Kong and China. Buckingham: Open University Press. Mahabir, C. (1984). Review of Sumner’s Crime, justice and underdevelopment. Contemporary Crises, 8(2), 186–187. Marenin, O. (1983). Review of Sumner’s Crime, justice and underdevelopment. Journal of Criminal Justice, 11(3), 274–277. Nanda, V. P. (1983). Review of Sumner’s Crime, justice and underdevelopment. The American Journal of International Law, 77(4), 965–967. van Onselen, C. (1976). Chibaro: African mine labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933. London: Pluto Press. Parsloe, P. (1982). Review of Sumner’s Crime, justice and underdevelopment. International Social Work, 25(4), 49–50. Pashukanis, E. B. (1978). Law and Marxism: A general theory. London: Pluto Press. Pryce, K. (1979). Endless pressure: A study of West Indian life styles in Bristol. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Roberts, P. (1993). Social control and the censure(s) of sex. Crime, Law and Social Change, 19(2), 171–186. Rock, P. (1988). The present state of criminology in Britain. British Journal of Criminology, 28(2), 188–199. Roemer, J. (1988). Free to lose: An introduction to Marxist economic philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Solomos, J. (1983). Review of Sumner’s Crime, justice and underdevelopment. Third World Quarterly, 5(2), 489–490. Sparks, R. (1992). Television and the drama of crime: Moral tales and the place of crime in public life. Buckingham: Open University Press. Stenson, K. (1992). Review of Sumner’s Censure, politics and criminal justice. British Journal of Criminology, 32(2), 231–233. Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies: An investigation into the Marxist theory of ideology and law. London: Academic Press. Sumner, C. (1980). Review of Rennie’s The search for criminal man and Sleffell’s The law and the dangerous criminal. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 19(3), 178–179. Sumner, C. (1981a). Race, crime and hegemony: A review essay. Contemporary Crises, 5(3), 277–291. Sumner, C. (1981b). Pashukanis and the jurisprudence of terror. Insurgent Sociologist, 11(1), 99–106.

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Sumner, C. (1981c). Review of Phillips’ Marx and Engels on law and laws. British Journal of Criminology, 21(3), 293–294. Sumner, C. (1981d). The rule of law and civil rights in contemporary Marxist theory. Kapitalistate: Working Papers on the Capitalist State, 9, 63–91. Sumner, C. (1981e). Review of Burman and Harrell-Bond’s (eds.) The imposition of law. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 9(4), 442–443. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1982a). Crime, justice and underdevelopment. London: Heinemann. Sumner, C. (1982b). Review of Shelley’s Crime and modernisation and readings in comparative criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 22(4), 409–411. Sumner, C. (1982c). Preface. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Crime, justice and underdevelopment (pp. xi–xiii). London: Heinemann. Sumner, C. (1982d). Crime, justice and underdevelopment: Beyond modernisation theory. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Crime, justice and underdevelopment (pp. 1–39). London: Heinemann. Sumner, C. (ed.) (1982e). Crime, justice and the mass media: Papers presented to the 14th Cropwood round-table conference, December 1981. University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology: Cropwood Conference Series No. 14. Sumner, C. (1982f). “Political hooliganism” and “rampaging mobs”: The national press coverage of the Toxteth “Riots”. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Crime, justice and the mass media: Papers presented to the 14th Cropwood round-table conference, December 1981 (pp. 25–35). University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology: Cropwood Conference Series No. 14. Sumner, C. (1982g). Editor’s preface. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Crime, justice and the mass media: Papers presented to the 14th Cropwood round-table conference, December 1981 (p. ii). University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology: Cropwood Conference Series No. 14. Sumner, C. (1982h). The ideological nature of law. In P. Beirne & P. Quinney (Eds.), Marxism and law (pp. 255–261). New York: John Wiley. Sumner, C. (1983a). Law, legitimation and the advanced capitalist state: The jurisprudence and social theory of Jurgen Habermas. In D.  Sugarman (Ed.), Legality, ideology and the state (pp. 119–158). London: Academic Press. Sumner, C. (1983b). Rethinking deviance. In S. Spitzer (Ed.), Research in law, deviance and social control (volume 5). Greenwich: JAI Press. Sumner, C. (1984). Review of Jones’ Crime, race and culture: A study in a developing country. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 23(2), 126–127. Sumner, C. (1987). Review of Mahabir’s Crime and nation building in the Caribbean: The legacy of legal barriers. Contemporary Crises, 11(1), 77–81. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1990a). Censure, politics and criminal justice. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990b). Foucault, gender and the censure of deviance. In L.  Gelsthorpe & A.  Morris (Eds.), Feminist perspectives in criminology (pp. 26–40). Buckingham: Open University Press.

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Sumner, C. (1990c). Series editor’s introduction. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. xi–xii). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990d). Introduction: Contemporary socialist criminology. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 1–12). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990e). Rethinking deviance: Towards a sociology of censure. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp.  15–40). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990f). Reflections on a sociological theory of criminal justice systems. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 41–56). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1991a). Ideology and law: Some reflections on postmodernist sociology and the ideological character of criminal justice. In R.  Bergalli (Ed.), Sociology of penal control within the framework of the sociology of law (pp. 47–77). Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law: Onati Proceedings Vol. 10. Sumner, C. (1991b). Crime, justice and underdevelopment: Beyond modernisation theory. In P. Worsley (Ed.), The new modern sociology readings (pp. 496– 499). London: Penguin. Sumner, C. (1993). Series editor’s introduction. In T. W. Lo (Ed.), Corruption and politics in Hong Kong and China (pp. ix–xii). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1994). The sociology of deviance: An obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C., & Sandberg, S. (1990). The press censure of “dissident minorities”: The ideology of parliamentary democracy, Thatcherism and “policing the crisis”. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 163–193). Buckingham: Open University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1975). Whigs and hunters: The origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane. Tierney, J. (2010). Criminology: Theory and context (3rd ed.). Harlow: Pearson. Vogel, R. (1984). Review of Sumner’s Crime, justice and underdevelopment. Crime and Delinquency, 30(1), 154–155. Vogler, R. (1991). Reading the riot act: The magistracy, the police, and the army in civil disorder. Buckingham: Open University Press. Wright, E. O. (1985). Classes. London: Verso. Young, J. (1987). The tasks facing a realist criminology. Contemporary Crises, 11(4), 337–356. Young, J. (1988). Radical criminology in Britain: The emergence of a competing paradigm. British Journal of Criminology, 28(2), 289–313.

CHAPTER 4

Sumner and the Death of Deviance

Abstract  Sumner’s best-known work, The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary (1994), is the focus of this chapter. Against a disciplinary backdrop where theoretical reflection was becoming increasingly marginalised, Sumner produced an epic intellectual history of the formation, heyday and demise of the sociology of deviance, arguing that the concept of deviance was bound up with the social democratic societies of modernity and was thus no longer an appropriate way of seeing. He suggested its replacement by the sociology of censures. The chapter guides the reader through this dense and detailed work, before ending with reflections on its reception and its ongoing intellectual legacy. Keywords  Sumner • Sociology of deviance • Censure

By the turn of the 1990s, there was a sense that most of those working in the criminological field were becoming “progressively reconciled to one another as new facts became available through instruments such as crime surveys, battle fatigue set in, scholars mellowed with age, and the pragmatics of having to work together continually in departments, committees, and journals began to supersede the earlier, heady excitement of

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intellectual struggle” (Rock 2017: 25).1 As Rock’s (1994) surveys of British criminology had shown, the discipline was still dominated by those of the fortunate generation and as a consequence there could be little doubt that a certain “youthful vigour” had been lost; after all, that generation was “now in comfortable middle age”, seemingly “without heirs to their intellectual heritage” (Roberts 1996: 126). As recruitment into the discipline steadily ratcheted up during the 1990s, a “third generation in criminology” began to emerge, made up of those who had grown up “excited by critical and radical criminology”, but who were “also carefully trained in multiple methodologies and understood the requirements of and opportunities presented by funded research” (Liebling et al. 2017: 4). The overall effect was a growing sense that “theorising has been de-­ emphasised by criminologists eager to compete for research grants” (Roberts 1996: 126). Yet this shift was fraught with risk, for departmental budgets were becoming increasingly reliant on success in the competition for grants that were “shrinking in number relative to demand” (1996: 126) as part of the “remorseless pruning” (Downes 1988: 180) of social science research funding. Moreover, criminology was now operating in a climate where its “status as a policy science” could not be reliably counted on in an era where, “if government consults anybody at all, it prefers accountants’ calculations to social science research as the basis for policy-­ making” (1996: 126). The phasing out of academic tenure (Downes 1988: 180) added to the precarity. Nonetheless, as Roberts (1996: 127) suggested, accounts of “the parlous state of criminological theorising” were perhaps “unduly pessimistic because important work continues to be done”. Precious little, however, matched the ambition and scale of Sumner’s The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary (1994). Yet despite its catholic scope, the ideas contained in the Obituary were not entirely new. To those who had been following closely, it was clear that the notion of the death of deviance was always implied as the counterpart of censure, the other side of its coin.2 But it was only in 1  Rock (2017: 25) suggested that Sumner was one of the few who did not become reconciled to this new reality. As we saw in Chap. 3, he had earlier described Sumner as having lost none of his “combativeness” (Rock 1988: 193). Sumner could not resist from commenting on this in the Preface to the Obituary (1994: ix). 2  This was an idea that had steadily gained prominence in Sumner’s writing. See, for example, the many scattered comments on deviance in his earlier works which culminated in a brief history of the concept in Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (1990b: 17–25). Sumner (1990a: 29) had also previously conceded, somewhat amusingly given what was to

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the Obituary that Sumner finally and decisively sounded the death-knell for deviance in systematic and rigorous fashion.

The Obituary in Brief The Obituary is an intellectual history of the formation, heyday and demise of the sociology of deviance. Its starting point is the publication of Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method in 1895, and it ends in 1975 with “the publication of a number of texts which effectively killed off the field” (Sumner 1994: viii). As Sumner (1994: viii) pointed out in the Preface to the book, this “history of the social logic of ideas” was very much an application of the methodological approach developed in Reading Ideologies. Sumner insisted that “the history of a social-scientific field is not driven by a series of cumulative academic debates” (1994: vii) but rather by the social, political, economic and ideological context of the day. As Roberts (1996: 127) explained, Sumner’s project therefore involved “re-reading sociological and criminological writings against the backdrop of their historical context” with the aim of tracing “the dialectic between the material […] conditions in which a set of ideas was developed and the effects and influence of those ideas on the material conditions which produced them”. The very first line of the book outlined its premise in the starkest terms: “Deviance is a feature of modernity”, Sumner (1994: 3) suggested, and is “totally bound up” with it.3 He argued that “we are only just beginning to realise the full meaning of this, as modernity is challenged by the fragmentations and reconstructions of the fin de siècle. It follows that as the modern phase of capitalism ends, or is in the process of being superseded by its next phase, we will see signs that deviance is no longer an appropriate way of seeing. Its sense, its referents and its social context are already changing greatly, with the consequence that we begin to cast our vision in other terms” (1994: 3). Nevertheless, he was prepared to concede to deviance a “zombified afterlife” (Roberts 2017: 9) and he noted that “there are still courses on the subject, there are still journals devoted to its exotic mysteries and discoveries, and there are still textbooks under its name” (Sumner 1994: ix). But the point was that “its vitality as a concept seems follow, that “the return of censure to its origins, involves an as yet unwritten history of the censure of deviance, well beyond my present competence”. 3  By modernity Sumner is referring to the set of processes involved in the rise of industrial or monopoly capitalism and the subsequent formation of the welfare state.

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to have expired” (1994: 3). As he put it, “the lack of sustained warfare over the terrain of the sociology of deviance is actually due to the fact that the combatants over the years, in their enthusiasm for the fight, have completely demolished the terrain, rather than to any peace treaty. The terrain now resembles the Somme in 1918. It is barren, fruitless, full of empty trenches and craters, littered with unexploded mines and eerily silent. No one fights for hegemony over a dangerous graveyard. It is now time to drop arms and show respect for the dead” (1994: ix).4 What follows in this chapter is a concise summary of Sumner’s argument as he attempted to show what the sociology of deviance was trying to achieve, why it failed in that task, and why it had perished, “in order that we might move on with clarity and awareness” (1994: x).5 Part One The Obituary was organised into three parts. The first detailed the formation of the field which took place from 1895 to 1940. In Chap. 1, Sumner showed how Durkheim, “writing at a time of profound and rapid social change in France” (1994: 7), created the conceptual space in which the notion of deviance could flourish. Durkheim conceived of deviance as a fully social phenomenon, defined not against transcendental moral values, universal norms or the statistical average, but instead in opposition to the collective sentiment of the group in question; deviance was thus a “fundamentally sociological matter” (1994: 17). Some differences from the collective norm would be tolerated and some would be heavily censured as criminal (1994: 16); deviance was the “barely and infrequently named […] moral space somewhere between crime and difference” (1994: 19). In Chap. 2, Sumner described the angst-ridden malaise of the years after the great war. In Chicago, for instance, Capone’s criminal ­corporatism 4  Sumner traces the lifecycle of the concept with another amusing metaphor in which deviance is reimagined as the troubled child of a lone parent. As O’Connell (1995: 549) put it, “Sumner playfully mocks the recurring right-wing moral panic about the moral laxity of single mothers by presenting deviance as a troublesome kid, born to a single mum (Durkheim), who crosses the Atlantic, gets somewhat pathological and smokes a few joints, returns to Europe to hang about with political types in the late 1960s before expiring in the mid 1970s.” 5  Note that some excellent summaries of the Obituary have already been produced, most notably by Roberts (1996). Readers requiring greater detail are referred to his piece.

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“profoundly compromised any conception of crime as a prerogative of individual pathology, or, indeed, as a category that made sense outside of political judgement” (1994: 34). The same city birthed the sociology of the Chicago school which developed further Durkheim’s idea of an indeterminate space between crime and difference. Petty criminals and delinquents were recast as normal people who had become caught up in difficult and competitive social environments; as a result the focus shifted from degenerate individuals to degenerate cultures (Roberts 1996: 130), an idea perhaps best captured in the seminal work of Wirth (1931). Ultimately, however, Chicagoan sociology still relied on a model of a degenerate and defective class, even though it turned this class into an effect of social ecology rather than individual pathology; pathology had simply been relocated to the social level (Sumner 1994: 53), and the “social destructiveness of raw, free-market, individualism and, of course, the contradictory logic of capitalism itself” was glossed over (1994: 49). By the end of the 1930s, against the backdrop of the New Deal and the wider shift away from the frontier economy in the United States, the concept of degeneration finally gave way to the concept of social deviation, as Sumner charted in Chap. 3. In the America of the 1930s the connections between the individual and the social structure were blatant, as such vast unemployment could hardly be put down to individual fecklessness (1994: 66). Wirth (1940) provided a classic statement of the emerging position, and the emerging sociology of deviance seemed to hold out the hope of social organisation and control in a highly diverse society. Another strand of intellectual development during this period saw the work of Freud and the psychoanalytically influenced sociology of Fromm come to the fore as the west wrestled with its demons, particularly in the light of the horrors of the Second World War. Chapter 4 discussed the growing articulation between psychiatry and sociology, and the increasingly psychiatric overtones in conceptualisations of deviance that resulted. Frank (1936), for instance, argued that the personality types and specific behaviours of the day were responses to cultural disintegration and the emergence of a sick, individualistic, acquisitive society (Sumner 1994: 105–6). A 1937 special issue of the American Journal of Sociology developed these themes. In addition, the sense that crime was a thoroughly social artefact was becoming stronger, although the proposed solutions tended not to recommend addressing the iniquities of class, but instead the development of shared normative understandings (1994: 111).

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The sociology of deviance came of age in a number of texts which formed the focus of Chap. 5. As it became clear that the New Deal had only partially beaten the depression and the class structure remained intact, the terminology of deviance finally began to replace that of individual pathology and degeneration within the sociological arena. For instance, in his famous essay on ‘social structure and anomie’ in which a number of emerging themes and arguments cohered, Merton (1938) openly defined his field of interest as “deviate behaviour”. Sellin (1938) argued that legal definitions were not valid sociological definitions of behaviour, so there could be no grounds for limiting criminology to the study of legally defined crimes. Tannenbaum (1938) implied that American society itself, with its relentless industrialisation, urbanisation, immigration, individualism, acquisitiveness, instability, its drive for incessant economic growth and its pioneer, frontier values, was inherently criminogenic (Sumner 1994: 127). Although it was not explicitly stated in these works, it was clear that a concept of social deviation had now been adopted (Sumner 1994: 121). In Chap. 6 Sumner considered how, despite representing an advance over rightist concepts of racial degeneration and offering a view of deviants as products of the social, the sociology of deviance “still rested within a problematic of capitalist domination and did not challenge the political-­ economic constitution of society” (1994: 134). In its attempts to convert “threatening difference into a socially controlled object”, it was a liberal, modernist mode of crisis resolution operating within the confines of corporatist capitalism (1994: 136), and therefore analogous with the emerging social democracy of the day. In the end, “liberalism was of course flawed. It never severed its ties to the capitalist patriarchal state which gave it so much to study. It was still in the business of management and social control, rather than liberation from the blinkered categories and practices of oppression. But at least it could see that society needed a doctor and that to accept the targets of its abusive pathological raving as really, scientifically, criminal or degenerate was somewhat mistaken” (1994: 137). Part Two The second part of the book focussed on the heyday of the sociology of deviance from 1941 to 1967. Chapter 7 explored the now globally dominant America of the post-war years, a time of McCarthyism and the supposed end of ideology (Bell 1962). Correspondingly, the conservative

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functionalism best exemplified in the work of Parsons (1951) and Cohen (1955) had come to dominate the sociology of deviance. Although the conservatives took for granted the legitimacy of dominant norms (1994: 180), it remained wishful thinking to imagine that a single set of values was being created (Sumner 1994: 146).6 Social control “was being redefined as a scientific, systems-management exercise from above”, and limited forms of pluralism and diversity were to be allowed provided that workers “produced goods and did not rock the boat” (1994: 151). Yet there remained an alternative, if cowed, liberal take on the sociology of deviance which drew on Wirth, Sellin, Tannenbaum and Mills and found its most cogent expression during this period in the work of Lemert (1942, 1945), who was the first to offer a completely relational and therefore structural definition of deviance (Sumner 1994: 154); “what both sides clearly shared, however, was a recognition that the criminality of an action lay in its official definition by the legal system, or that deviation was only so defined by the dominant culture of the day, a position which was to become the anchor for all post-war American sociology of deviance, whatever inferences different political animals were to draw from it” (1994: 156). Alongside commentary on the significant contributions of Becker (1953) and Finestone (1957), Chap. 8 was dominated by an assessment of the quickly maturing work of Lemert, part of the liberal tendency in the sociology of deviance that for Sumner represented the true inheritance of the Durkheimian legacy. Lemert (1948: 24) argued that there was an “absence of any usable distinction between normal and abnormal human behaviour” and thus reached the “brink of a revolution in the sociology of moral judgements”. But he “lost his nerve” and instead settled for a typically liberal emphasis on the way that modern society renders us all different (Sumner 1994: 186). A little later, in Social Pathology (1951), Lemert abandoned all notions of degeneration and psychopathology and thus carried Durkheimian logic to its apex. For Sumner (1994: 190), “Lemert took the field to the point where it required a concept of social censure, but he himself did not deliver it”. However, Lemert’s challenge to the 6  Sumner’s (1994: 165) judgement of Parson’s 1951 work The Social System is particularly scathing: “The fact that it is almost unreadable because of its turgidly deployed jargon is precisely its exquisite beauty as an abstract art from of its time. It is abstract expressionism; the spectacle as reality; the advertising fantasy taken seriously. It has all the hallmarks of classic propaganda”.

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notion of collective consensus did suggest that “the conception of deviance was beginning to look inappropriate at the very same moment that it was being elevated to the status of a full-fledged sociological concept; for how could substantial social difference in a context of multicultural pluralism be translated as social deviation?” (Sumner 1994: 192). The post-war American fantasy of consensus, that chimera of the conservative middle class, was, slowly, being unmasked. In Chap. 9 Sumner’s focus turned to the labelling perspective that flowered during the 1960s and reasserted the sociology of deviance’s liberal bent in the face of the conservative functionalism that had pointed it down a different path. By the 1960s Sumner himself was a young man with a nascent interest in the issues at hand, and correspondingly the book became increasingly personal. He recalled (1994: 219) that “we were all in social exile from a very crazy world that said to preserve peace it had to drop thousands of tons of bombs on a poor underdeveloped country thousands of miles away, and that our protests against this genocide were subversive violence”. Yet even in the wake of Vietnam and the civil rights movement, labelling theory’s aim was not to subvert historically established structures but simply to modernise and rationalise the operation of power and protect everyday life from the intrusion of the state (1994: 204). In the spirit of west coast, Haight-Ashbury hippiedom, this was very much a defensive mode of politics in search of a little personal space (Sumner 1994: 206). In terms of theory, Goffman showed how “mundane interpersonal interactions contained systematic ritual support for collective representations and symbols” (Sumner 1994: 206), yet there remained a blind spot regarding the structural forces that were at play (1994: 220). Becker’s work, lacking depth but expressing key ideas with great clarity and simplicity, propelled the sociology of deviance “to the centre of the sociological stage by 1970” (1994: 231). His classic line, that “deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label” (Becker 1963: 9), did not really offer any great advance on the arguments already made by Lemert and Goffman, but his formulation was striking. It firmly drove home the point that “judgements of deviance arose from value-conflicts rather than from any universally disapproved features of behaviour, or the principles and codes of the criminal law” and “this left social deviance as mainly a political function of moral ideology” (Sumner 1994: 232). Yet at the very same moment, Goffman (1963) was arguing that deviants were too diverse to warrant a general theory of deviant behaviour and that core deviants were politically self-defined (Sumner 1994: 227), thus calling the

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integrity of the entire field into question even as its star burned at its brightest. A little later, Matza (1969) suggested the openness and flexibility of the deviant career, and finally introduced, albeit in a thoroughly disguised form (‘Leviathan’), the state. This conceptually undercut the field even further, “for if deviance was really a system of signs used to sustain state power and legitimacy then it had no coherent logic as a general concept intended to describe a class of internally deficient behaviours” (Sumner 1994: 244). Deviance had now been thoroughly politicised, and, “as such, its meaning as an infraction of generalised social norms collapsed, and, quite plainly, it became a social censure of threats to authority. […] The sociology of deviance had thus reached its nemesis” (1994: 246). It had been exposed as just another means of handling the enemy within, and “there was no turning back. Either it somehow reconnected itself to a new justificatory norm or it went the way of all hegemonic apologias and exploded on exposure to light. But there were no new justificatory norms in sight” (1994: 247). Part Three The final part of the book looked at the period from 1968 to 1975. Chapter 10 described how, in an America coming to terms with My Lai and Watergate, Gouldner (1968) attacked the labelling theorists as romantic liberals and Quinney (1970) and Chambliss and Seidman (1971) began to talk more explicitly about the social reality of crime being defined by those in positions of power. Liazos (1972) and Thio (1973) then brought the sociology of deviance to “the brink of a dissolution”, but failed to take the crucial step of abandoning the search for a general theory of deviance (Sumner 1994: 262). The concept of deviance remained superficially attractive due to its vision of resistance to the established order during this time of social and political upheaval in the United States. Meanwhile, Europe had witnessed its own tumult in Prague and Paris, and as we have already seen its sociologists were increasingly returning to Marx and rejecting the diktats of orthodoxy. The work of Young (1971) and Cohen (1973) on deviancy amplification suggested that the deviant labels applied by the powerful represented their sublimated fears about subordinate populations (Sumner 1994: 269). Hall (1974) advanced this position further, arguing that the rendering of a group as deviant was a question of open political struggle, a matter of hegemonic contestation in which deviance was constructed as an ideological category. For Sumner (1994: 271),

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Hall’s essay “marked the beginning of a whole new, coherent, framework for the sociological analysis of the attributions of deviance” which would come to full fruition in Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978). In addition, the lingering medical-scientific validity of deviance had also been undercut by the discrediting of psychiatry in, for example, the work of Pearson (1975). This was a line of thought that would soon be buttressed further by Foucault once his work became widely read in English. Without any psychiatric validity, it was difficult to see what was left of deviance other than a moral-political judgement (Sumner 1994: 272). Yet the concept limped on despite its fundamental incoherence having been revealed (1994: 281); as we saw earlier, The New Criminology (Taylor et al. 1973) offered a definition of deviance that was something approaching “a parody”, arguing that it was a form of political resistance “against the numbing structures of alienation” (Sumner 1994: 281).7 As Chap. 11 argued, by this point it had become abundantly clear that what constitutes deviance “is a series of normative divides or ideological cuts, cuts made in social practice—and the dominant cuts in our society are those made by the rich, powerful and authoritative. It is their distinctions which create the divide between deviance and normality. It is their distinctions, forged in the heat of driving interest and conflictful practical enforcement, in the practice of conquest, domination and possession, which divide the world up into the positive and the negative, right and wrong, normal and deviant” (Sumner 1994: 299). Indeed, the ideological character of deviance was even clearer than that of crime, given that it concerned itself with the woolly world of moral ambiguity and not just with those behaviours which had been criminalised. Deviance was defined against a consensus, but “that consensus was a mere dream in a world which was in the process of dissolution and decay”. Sociologists of deviance may well have called for normative consensus to be hitched to an integrated social organisation, but “it was always a demand, never an empirical reality” (1994: 302). While students of crime, rather than deviance, were at least able to simply take as their object that which had been criminalised, this did not insulate them from a similar battery of criticisms. Thompson (1975: 193– 4) had argued that crime was a disabling category for historians to employ, for it “concealed the moral judgements of those with the interest to 7  Young (1998: 42) contested Sumner’s portrayal of The New Criminology and the work of the NDC more generally, although he agreed that the book was somewhat “unkempt”.

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­ ortray their victims as criminals” (Sumner 1994: 301). Sumner (1994: p 301–2) took this argument even further, insisting that “in my terms, to take the politically organised categories of state domination and the categorisations of the law enforcement officials as scientific notions is to convert the sectional and historical tools of the state into universally valid behavioural concepts. It is to take the state as God of all knowledge and to assume that even popular assent to legislation automatically transforms context bound political judgement into universal truth. As such, it is an act of blind faith in the modern political order—or the abandonment of all principles of morality and research to the gods of career, money and ascent.” The discipline of criminology, on this view, was the mere plaything of the powerful, blown hither and thither by their categorisations and their political needs, lacking in moral scruples and requiring a constant supply of victims to remain vigorous; it was “a male prostitute with a heart of ice. Little wonder it was to have little good to say about women; little wonder its deterministic aetiological theories of crime lacked emotion. A science of psychopathy? More of a psychopathic science” (1994: 300). By 1975, the concept of deviance was being quietly abandoned. Hirst (1975a, 1975b) declared that there could not be a Marxist theory of deviance and, despite the flaws in his argument identified by Sumner (1976), the field was thus “denied the stamp of legitimacy by the orthodox left” (Sumner 1994: 302–3). In Critical Criminology (Taylor et al. 1975), the new criminologists all but dropped the term deviance, and it appeared in only the first few pages of the book’s editorial essay (Sumner 1994: 305). Yet the real mark of deviance’s demise was the concept’s theoretical exhaustion. Sumner (1994: 309) acknowledged that deviance’s “ghost lives on in American sociology courses”, but suggested that “it is irrelevant how many scholars continue to use it as opposed to how many do not—popularity or unpopularity should never be taken as a test for genuine conceptual vitality. In this case, the decline in the significance of the sociology of deviance is an effect of its conceptual bankruptcy. It no longer reflects the dynamics of our lived history. […] Fatally damaged by waves of successive criticism and undercut by its own logical contradictions it ceased to be a living force.” Sumner’s “epitaph” (1994: 309) to the concept of deviance in Chap. 11 listed some of its important weaknesses. Chief among them, as we have seen, was the fact that “the consensus against which it was to be set had never materialised. This meant that always the question was: deviant from

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what?” (1994: 309). Consequently, “what was defined as criminal, deviant or different was all beginning to look very arbitrary. It seemed to depend upon who was judging and when; so we appeared to just have a morass of censures” (1994: 309–10). In any case, “the search for a general concept to encompass such widely varying practices, problems and situations was itself logically misguided”. There was no unity to what were a manifestly diverse array of behaviours and so “the search for a general theory of deviance was a major conceptual error; such a search only made sense as a political imperative” (1994: 310). Whilst “there may have been a time and a place when a concept of social deviance as behaviour appeared to make sense”, the politics of the 1980s had made it clearer than ever that moral judgements were politically loaded: “Now, the ideological and political character of moral censures is so open to view, and the rulers’ fear of their social divisiveness so minimal, that the concept of social deviance is revealed as a notion within the politics of social democracy and therefore truly a creature of the post-Depression era, of the ‘end of ideology’ phase. Ideology, as Sumner had previously pointed out in Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice, was blatant once more” (1994: 310–1). The final passages of the Obituary were “devoted to singling out political correctness and the ‘politics of victimism’ as the epitome of censure-­ infested modern life” (Roberts 1996: 142). For Sumner (1994: 311) “the late modern nightmare has begun” in disintegrating societies “which often seem to be spinning out of control”. Increasing polarisation accompanied a growing sense of atomisation, hegemonic majorities felt threatened by immigrants, there was a lack of national identity, the loss of a sense of moral community and recalcitrant indigenous peoples beginning to assert themselves, all underpinned by mounting economic problems (1994: 311). Censure had become the key form of politics amongst anxious, competing narcissists, despite the dearth of shared norms or notions of justice to which disputes could be referred; “we now live in a world of censure. It is a concept whose time has come, unfortunately. The Cold War between the two Superpowers has been replaced by a multiplicity of censorious mini-wars between aggressively selfish smaller units. […] The unprincipled, pluralistic, amoral, politics of blaming have taken over and the only currency now is the censure” (1994: 314). Against this backdrop, Sumner (1994: 314–5) concluded the Obituary with a recognition that “the sociology of deviance was a child of its time. It had its faults. But it took us away from the psychopathology of degeneracy, threw attention on to the agencies of social regulation, taught us

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that most social deviation is merely the clash of differences in complex societies and urged us to think twice before stigmatising people, especially when our own interests were involved. The sociology of censure that will succeed it must take that legacy as part of its starting point. In a world with few bearings, we would do well to remember the history of the sociology of deviance as we begin any new analysis. Any movement against excessive censoriousness must develop a new social ethics: the struggle, as always, begins there.”

Observations on the Obituary The Obituary caused something of a stir. It was widely reviewed and for the most part reactions were positive. Loader (1995: 402) was particularly approving. He described the work as “an erudite, engaging and provocative history of sociological ideas”, and an “outstanding piece of sociology”. Snider (1998: 124) suggested that “this is a learned book, in the best sense of the term, integrating knowledge from an impressively wide range of disciplines, perspectives and historical periods”. She felt that “the book is beautifully written, informed by finely honed moral outrage and accompanying (and persuasive) moral vision” (1998: 125). O’Connell (1995) was also favourable, although he felt that the sections in which Sumner tied the concept of deviance to broader developments in the cultural world were “somewhat impressionistic” (1995: 550) and less successful than the sections of textual analysis. Roberts (1996), in a detailed, thoughtful, and at times playful review article, was extremely positive. He considered that the Obituary’s “principal achievement” was “its provision of a detailed argument to support Sumner’s claim that the future of criminology lies in a sociology of censures. […] For the sociology of deviance was in truth a sociology of censure all along” (1996: 141). There were also those who resisted Sumner’s analysis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they tended to be US-based proponents of the sociology of deviance, and although not all the American reviewers were negative (see, e.g., Venkatesh 1995 and Jones 1996), it would have been odd if they had responded meekly to the news that their disciplinary home was dead. Conklin (1996: 200) suggested “that this is one book most readers can skip” and somewhat confusingly castigated Sumner for not providing any “data” in support of his arguments. The most aggressive response, however, came from Erich Goode. Although he seemed to confuse Sumner’s rhetorical flourishes with attempts at providing proofs (1995: 1630), he

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was quick to condemn what he felt was an “at times tortured argument” and “a whirlwind of confusion” (1995: 1629). He described the work as a whole as “a turgid piece of Hegelian flimflam” (1995: 1630). We were yet to hear the last of this. What several reviewers missed was that these were not exclusively Sumner’s ideas, nor did he claim them to be; the Obituary was effectively a piece of reportage. Indeed, it was not a particularly revelatory account of the demise of the sociology of deviance. A decade and a half earlier, Nelken (1980: 198) had noted how the new criminologists had abandoned deviancy theory, and Hepworth (1980: 206) was pondering whether “any regeneration of the sociology of deviance” was possible. Furthermore, Bendle (1999) located the Obituary in the broader context of a more fundamental crisis in criminology and sociology where, for example, the failure of state interventionism to control crime (Braithwaite 1989), the drift towards punitiveness that helped to reveal this underlying ineffectiveness (Garland 1996), and even the disintegration of the ‘social’ as a pivotal master concept (Bauman 1992; Faubion 1995; O’Malley 1996) had been much discussed. If it was the case that Sumner’s position seemed to take some of his American critics by surprise, then it was perhaps because the wider intellectual climate of the day had somewhat passed them by. It is also vital to stress again that the Obituary was highly appreciative of the sociology of deviance and its achievements. As noted above, the final few lines of the book recounted some of the significant advances that the sociology of deviance had made. Indeed, the Obituary did the sociology of deviance a great service by salvaging its history in great depth and detail, returning to original texts and in the process giving oxygen to many long buried pieces of work by ignored or marginalised scholars. The Obituary was, then, a deeply “respectful” (Sumner 1994: ix) work, reinforcing the sociology of deviance’s central importance in the intellectual history of its parent discipline and operating as a “recovery of a culture as well as an attack on its failings” (1994: 4). Of course, rather than being a straightforward history of ideas, which may imply a kind of idealism, Sumner’s project was more a materialist history of a body of thought, an intellectual archaeology. In this light, Sumner’s passages on the “parallel ideas and feelings” (1994: vii) in the realms of art, technology, culture, politics and social history, far from being superfluous asides, were integral to his methodological approach which required him to draw the fullest picture possible of the spirit of the

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age; context was all.8 Nevertheless, some reviewers were uncomfortable with this. Venkatesh (1995: 1633–4), for example, felt that “Sumner crosses a wide terrain, at times clumsily and with no apparent theoretical guidance. […] The reader is hard pressed to locate his adherence to a dialectical or historical materialist framework for the study of intellectual history. A well-developed justification for his metatheoretical categories would have been welcome.” But, as noted above, Sumner (1994: viii) had pointed out in the Preface to the Obituary that the book drew on the methodological approach developed in Reading Ideologies. It was there, and also in his PhD, that the justification for the method existed, rooted in a rigorous historical materialism. Although the Obituary was not presented in the schematic style of Reading Ideologies, and its methodological commitments were not spelled out as explicitly, to those familiar with his oeuvre the Obituary immediately made perfect sense as the culmination of a two-decades long project; in the argot of his 1970s work, the Obituary effectively treated deviance as a ‘negative ideology’, and its ‘generative relations’ were uncovered by progressing through a series of ‘approximations’. Thus, whilst the Obituary can be read profitably in standalone fashion, because it represented the fullest expression yet of Sumner’s ‘reading method’ it makes most sense when considered alongside his earlier work. But, of course, why would American sociologists of deviance have cause to familiarise themselves with the methodological principles that were set out so painstakingly in Reading Ideologies and quietly underpinned the Obituary? Instead, a number of them simply saw the thrust of the argument alongside the book’s subtitle, surely intended as darkly humorous rather than as an act of provocation, and went on the offensive. Twenty years into his career, the difficulties caused by the cumulative nature of Sumner’s work were now becoming evident. The style of the Obituary is also worthy of comment. As Roberts (1996: 140) put it, “Sumner’s bricolage technique, approaching his subject matter from different perspectives and building up the overall picture layer by layer, is at once both effective and challenging.” Whilst acknowledging the vast scale of Sumner’s undertaking and the fact that history 8  Of course, the Obituary was far from comprehensive in this regard. The sections on, for example, art, were inevitably far more impressionistic than those that discussed sociological and criminological texts. Roberts (1996: 140), however, suggested that “no work of this nature could ever be comprehensive (if comprehensiveness is a desirable goal). The absences in Sumner’s narrative merely scatter small question marks through the fabric of a very cogent argument; and suggest further lines of inquiry for others to pursue”.

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does not develop with a “tidy teleology”, Roberts was “still left with a sense that the structure of the argument could have been made clearer, especially in the earlier sections of the book”. One consequence of this was that the book demanded repeated reading, in order that the overall line of argument could emerge from the thicket of detail. Also of note was the Obituary’s more lyrical style, at least when held up against the highly structured and schematic passages that characterised Sumner’s 1970s work, and the slightly morose, dry, northern English humour which was perhaps misread at times by some of his American critics more used to taking things at face value, especially in an academic text. There were also passages containing autobiographical and anecdotal reflection, particularly in Part 3, by which point in the story Sumner had become personally involved in what he was now describing. In a book so concerned with context, this deep feeling for the material was undoubtedly a strength. During 2015, a symposium on Sumner’s work was held at Middlesex University. Sumner himself was asked what he thought of the Obituary’s relationship to what was, by 1994, a rapidly disintegrating Marxian tradition. Sumner (2015) suggested that the book’s fidelity Marxism had never been uppermost in his mind, even at the time of writing. He said simply that “I’d like to think it was good sociology”. On that, he should rest easy.

References Bauman, Z. (1992). Intimations of postmodernity. London: Routledge. Becker, H. (1953). Becoming a marihuana user. American Journal of Sociology, 59(3), 235–242. Becker, H. (1963). Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance. New York: The Free Press. Bell, D. (1962). The end of ideology: On the exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties. New York: Free Press. Bendle, M. F. (1999). The death of the sociology of deviance. Journal of Sociology, 35(1), 42–59. Braithwaite, J. (1989). Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambliss, W. J., & Seidman, R. B. (1971). Law, order and power. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Cohen, A.  K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. New  York: Free Press.

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Cohen, S. (1973). Protest, unrest and delinquency: convergences in labels and behaviours. In P. Wiles (Ed.), The sociology of crime and delinquency in Britain. Volume Two: The new criminologies (pp. 108–123). London: Martin Robertson. Conklin, G. H. (1996). Review of Sumner’s Sociology of deviance: An obituary. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 543, 200. Downes, D. (1988). The sociology of crime and social control in Britain, 1960– 1987. British Journal of Criminology, 28(2), 175–187. Faubion, J. D. (Ed.). (1995). Rethinking the subject: An anthology of contemporary European social thought. Boulder: Westview. Finestone, H. (1957). Cats, kicks and color. Social Problems, 5(1), 3–13. Frank, L.  K. (1936). Society as the patient. American Journal of Sociology, 42(3), 335–344. Garland, D. (1996). The limits of the sovereign state. British Journal of Criminology, 36(4), 445–471. Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Goode, E. (1995). Review of Sumner’s Sociology of deviance: An obituary. Social Forces, 73(4), 1629–1630. Gouldner, A. (1968). The sociologist as partisan: Sociology and the welfare state. The American Sociologist, 3(2), 103–116. Hall, S. (1974). Deviance, politics and the media. In P.  Rock & M.  McIntosh (Eds.), Deviance and social control (pp. 261–306). London: Tavistock. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. London: Macmillan. Hepworth, M. (1980). Review of Ditton’s Controlology. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 8(2), 205–206. Hirst, P. Q. (1975a). Marx and Engels on law, crime and morality. In I. Taylor, P.  Walton, & J.  Young (Eds.), Critical criminology (pp.  203–232). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hirst, P. Q. (1975b). Radical deviancy theory and Marxism: A reply to Taylor and Walton. In I.  Taylor, P.  Walton, & J.  Young (Eds.), Critical criminology (pp. 238–244). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jones, R.  L. (1996). Review of Sumner’s Sociology of deviance: An obituary. Contemporary Sociology, 25(2), 244–245. Lemert, E.  M. (1942). The folkways and social control. American Sociological Review, 7(3), 394–399. Lemert, E. M. (1945). The grand jury as an agency of social control. American Sociological Review, 10(6), 751–758. Lemert, E. M. (1948). Some aspects of a general theory of sociopathic behaviour. Proceedings of the Pacific Sociological Society, 16, 23–29. Lemert, E. M. (1951). Social pathology: A systematic approach to the theory of sociopathic behaviour. New York: McGraw Hill.

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Liazos, A. (1972). The poverty of the sociology of deviance: Nuts, sluts and preverts. Social Problems, 20(1), 103–120. Liebling, A., Maruna, S., & McAra, L. (2017). Introduction: The new vision. In A. Liebling, S. Maruna, & L. McAra (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (6th ed., pp. 1–17). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loader, I. (1995). Review of Sumner’s Sociology of deviance: An obituary and Nelken’s The futures of criminology. The Sociological Review, 43(2), 400–404. Matza, D. (1969). Becoming deviant. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672–682. Nelken, D. (1980). Review of NDC/CSE’s Capitalism and the rule of law. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 8(2), 193–200. O’Connell, M. (1995). Review of Sumner’s Sociology of deviance: An obituary. Discourse and Society, 6(4), 549–550. O’Malley, P. (1996). Post-social criminologies. Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 8(1), 26–38. Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Pearson, G. (1975). The deviant imagination: Psychiatry, social work and social change. London: Macmillan. Quinney, R. (1970). The social reality of crime. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. Roberts, P. (1996). From deviance to censure: A “new” criminology for the nineties. Modern Law Review, 59(1), 125–144. Roberts, P. (2017). Thinking through critical criminology. In A. Amatrudo (Ed.), Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner (pp.  1–45). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rock, P. (1988). The present state of criminology in Britain. British Journal of Criminology, 28(2), 188–199. Rock, P. (1994). The social organization of British criminology. In M. Maguire, R. Morgan, & R. Reiner (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (pp. 125– 148). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rock, P. (2017). The foundations of sociological theories of crime. In A. Liebling, S. Maruna, & L. McAra (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (6th ed., pp. 21–56). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sellin, T. (1938). Culture conflict and crime. New  York: Social Science Research Council. Snider, L. (1998). Review of Sumner’s Sociology of deviance: An obituary. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 23(1), 121–125. Sumner, C. (1976). Marxism and deviancy theory. In P. Wiles (Ed.), The sociology of crime and delinquency in Britain. Volume Two: The new criminologies (pp. 159–174). London: Martin Robertson. Sumner, C. (1990a). Foucault, gender and the censure of deviance. In L. Gelsthorpe & A.  Morris (Eds.), Feminist perspectives in criminology (pp.  26–40). Buckingham: Open University Press.

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Sumner, C. (1990b). Rethinking deviance: Towards a sociology of censure. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp.  15–40). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1994). The sociology of deviance: An obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (2015). Paper at Colin Sumner: The critical left and criminology. Seminar, Middlesex University, 26 March. Tannenbaum, F. (1938). Crime and the community. New  York: Colombia University Press. Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (1973). The new criminology: For a social theory of deviance. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Taylor, I., Walton, P., & Young, J. (Eds.). (1975). Critical criminology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Thio, A. (1973). Class bias in the sociology of deviance. American Sociologist, 8(1), 1–12. Thompson, E. P. (1975). Whigs and hunters: The origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane. Venkatesh, S. A. (1995). Review of Sumner’s Sociology of deviance: An obituary. American Journal of Sociology, 100(6), 1632–1634. Wirth, L. (1931). Clinical sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 37(1), 49–66. Wirth, L. (1940). Ideological aspects of social disorganisation. American Sociological Review, 5(4), 472–482. Young, J. (1971). The drugtakers: The social meaning of drug use. London: Paladin. Young, J. (1998). Breaking windows: Situating the new criminology. In P. Walton & J.  Young (Eds.), The new criminology revisited (pp.  14–46). Basingstoke: Macmillan.

CHAPTER 5

After the Death of Deviance

Abstract  This chapter focusses on the work of Sumner in the period immediately after the publication of The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary. In 1995, Sumner left the Cambridge Institute of Criminology after 18 years for a new role as Head of School at the University of East London, whilst continuing to explore the ramifications of his underlying theoretical position in the context of a growing pessimism about the direction of late modernity. The theory of censure was becoming more widely known as evidenced by its increasing presence in textbooks. Sumner also returned to two of the recurring themes in his work, the media and underdevelopment. In 2002 Sumner took early retirement from academia but even then he was unable to escape the continuing controversy over the Obituary. The chapter deals with each of these aspects of his work in turn. Keywords  Sumner • Censure • Media • Underdevelopment • Deviance In the wake of the Obituary, there was no pause in Sumner’s work as he continued to steadily develop his central theoretical insights. However, in 1995, after 18 years in the somewhat rarefied surroundings of Cambridge, Sumner left the Institute of Criminology and took up a post as Professor of Criminology and Head of the School of Law at the University of East London. This institution had recently been formed out of the old North East London Polytechnic, and under its “far-sighted” Vice Chancellor © The Author(s) 2020 D. Moxon, Colin Sumner, Palgrave Pioneers in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36941-5_5

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Frank Gould it had ambitions to expand the educational opportunities available to the old working classes and the newer migrant communities who had been otherwise left in the shadows as the Docklands redevelopment transformed the area (Floud 2008). Remarkably, Sumner’s move was covered in an article in The Independent newspaper (Izbicki 1997). In it, Sumner suggested that he had felt increasingly “undervalued and over-­ administered” in his previous role, and pointed to the ‘myths’ of Cambridge, where his undergraduates had been “crammed into crowded lecture theatres, or in a one-to-one tutorial. Seminars where, say, seven to a dozen students may discuss a problem and spark vibes off each other are almost non-existent.” He suggested that the students at East London, many of whom had already experienced working life, brought “a wider range of perspective” and were “more aware, more streetwise”; this was particularly the case among a large cohort of part-time postgraduates which included police officers, journalists and administrators. He noted East London’s high proportion of entrants from state schools, access for those “who might have missed out on educational opportunities the first time round, and to those from minority ethnic groups” as well as the far greater proportion of women. With refreshing candour, he admitted that the offer of a chair and the accompanying increase in remuneration was also a factor in his decision to go to East London, having been stuck at the top of the Cambridge lecturer’s scale for years with little prospect of promotion. Perhaps the ‘new university’ sector also offered a more congenial home for his politics at this point. Sumner’s work during this period, as ever, involved the continuing exploration of the ramifications of his underlying theoretical position. There was also a growing sense that the notion of censure was beginning to become an accepted part of the criminological canon, as evidenced by its increasing presence in the textbooks of the day. Sumner also returned to two of the recurring themes in his work, the media and underdevelopment. Increasingly, Sumner’s work stood out due to the nature of his insistence that the social developments of late modernity, and the modes of thought and action that accompanied them, were generated by the underlying motor of a constantly revolutionising capitalism; whilst other criminologists of the ‘fortunate generation’ made similar arguments (see, e.g., Taylor 1999; Young 1999, 2007), only Sumner hitched them to the thoroughgoing Marxian historical materialism that was contained in his earlier work. There was to be another surprise during this period, when in 2002 Sumner took early retirement from academia to pursue other inter-

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ests. Even then, however, he was unable to escape the continuing controversy over the Obituary. This chapter will deal with each of these aspects of his work in turn.

Continued Theoretical Development The post-Obituary period was marked by a series of works that saw Sumner continue to explore how his fundamental theoretical insights could be developed and extended. The edited collection Social Control and Political Order, edited with Roberto Bergalli, arose out of a conference convened by Bergalli in Barcelona, followed by a meeting at the Onati Institute. Just as Sumner had already shown how the death of deviance was the flipside to censure, so the notion of social control had long been considered as the counterpart to deviance. There was thus a certain inevitability that Sumner’s investigations would lead him to the subject. It had featured prominently in the Obituary, and Sumner’s vision of censure had always provided the theoretical space for a version of social control as he insisted like Durkheim that, properly deployed in a democratic context, censure could have social value in expressing the boundaries of acceptable conduct and perceptions of right and wrong (van Swaaningen 1997: 210). Sumner contributed two chapters to the book. The first (Sumner 1997a) was a critical history of the concept of social control in which he argued that its ubiquity had caused it to lose vitality (1997a: 1). Sumner began by questioning whether we still hold to a concept of society in a postmodern world where the relative stability of post-war modernity has been replaced by flexibility and fluidity. In this changed context, the notion of social control, which in its early guise “assumed a certain fixity of place and time” (1997a: 2) as its foundation, is revealed to be a product of its material context, historically, culturally and politically specific. As such, “we may have to develop general concepts which are more appropriate to our time and place” (Sumner 1997a: 3). He then traced the history of the concept in a manner familiar to readers of the Obituary, noting its origins as the brainchild of American liberals and progressives, aimed at producing conformity through consensus and collaboration as in the work of Ross (1901). He showed how, after the war, its vision of self-discipline within the parameters of capitalism, patriarchy and state power became articulated with the social democratic project. It developed into a mere “technical instrument” for the managerialist state (Sumner 1997a: 19) and, in Parsons’ work, the counterpoint to a deviance it was designed to

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thwart. Its origins in the attempt to provide a moral-ethical normative foundation for social regulation were forgotten (1997a: 24). In this guise, the concept not only supposed a normative consensus that, as the Obituary showed, was mere fiction, but it was also applied far too widely; everything from mass extermination events to simple gossip were characterised as being instances of social control, and thus the concept lost its analytical bite. Simultaneously, a liberal variant of social control was developing which saw it as an oppressive, unwelcome intrusion by the state into people’s affairs; “the wheel had turned full circle. Far from being a restraint on power, an expression of popular value and the basis of welfare-state social democracy […] it had become the vacant look, the blank stare, behind which hid the animated machinations of serious business and big power” (1997a: 32). At its extreme, this tendency also over-extended the concept, regarding every state policy, even ameliorative ones, as concealing the hidden hand of capital and furthering the interests of the powerful. So it was that by the mid-1980s, Cohen (1985: 2) was able to describe social control, overused and with no specific referent, as something of a “Mickey Mouse concept”. Yet despite this, Sumner (1997a: 7) maintained that “if the major problem with the intellectual conception and the political project of social control lay within the economic, political and normative parameters it accepted as axiomatic for its operationalisation, one can imagine that there could—in principle, if we change the parameters—be a renewed and, in my view, transformed concept of social control in the next century which would focus upon both the values necessary for human health and the systematic daily contravention of those values and ethics by people in powerful but anti-social institutions and systems”. Sumner picked up this idea in his second contribution to the volume, a self-confessed “polemic” (1997b: 131) in which he suggested that any reworking of the concept of social control, “an historically loaded artefact of modern culture” now inextricably linked with American social democracy (1997b: 131–2), should be connected to a project to restrict elite power. According to Sumner (1997b: 134), the very notion of the social itself was now at risk; without a new vision of coherence and co-operation which might be forged out of the chaos of a constantly revolutionising capitalism, a descent into a “parochial micro-pragmatism” was possible. Indeed, he suggested (1997b: 149) that “the destruction or absence of a truly social process leads to a decline in social control. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The new conservatives cannot complain of the rise in crime when they have done so much to destroy the social bonding which disin-

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clined people to commit it.” Drawing on the work of the early social control theorists such as Ross and Park, Sumner (1997b: 144) proposed that a renovated social control should be based on “the collective discipline required for resistance and self-protection”. This was an essentially defensive notion designed to protect communities from the new dominant ideology of the free market (1997b: 145). The social, seemingly reduced to “the fearsome swirl of an inhuman free market” (1997b: 145), had become, for the unincorporated and disadvantaged, “part of their oppression and therefore, their task, in so far as it constitutes a generalizable unity, is either to recover the social and to reconstruct it in the process, or, more pessimistically, to distance themselves from the social and construct their own alternative bonding system. It is that future we must face head­on in the twenty first century” (1997b: 146).1 The year 1997 also saw the release of another collection edited by Sumner. Violence, Culture and Censure consisted of essays from Sumner’s MA students that had emerged from discussions during graduate seminars at Cambridge immediately prior to his departure.2 Sumner’s own introductory chapter explored some familiar themes but he extended his analysis of censure in two notable ways. Firstly, he argued that even those censures that command wide assent are not responses to acts that are self-­ evidently wrong but are, like all censures, very particular negative ideological attributions. In his words, “even a serious matter like violence is not a simple fact that speaks loudly for itself” (1997c: 1). Sumner (1997c: 3) expanded on this point in an important passage: “Violence, it seems to me, is best understood as the censure of some forms of human practice as 1  Social Control and Political Order enjoyed a positive reception. Houchon (1999: 221), for instance, noted the “rare quality of the debate” and regarded Sumner’s contributions to the volume in the wake of the Obituary as a “twin achievement”. Calavita (1998: 348) highly recommended the book, although he took issue with Sumner’s reworking of the concept of social control. There was also a generous review from Garland (1998), who suggested that the first of Sumner’s two chapters was “well worth the purchase price alone”. He did, however, note that Sumner’s second chapter slipped “into an aspirational mode that sometimes becomes unrestrainedly Utopian” (1998: 323). He also felt that “Sumner has a tendency to slip into a rapid-fire mode of historical narration that takes for granted a readership which shares the collective memory, intellectual shorthand and sense of humour of the author” (1998: 322). 2  As one reviewer put it, “one of the attractions of the Sumner collection is precisely its refusal to round up the usual suspects [on the subject] and its commitment to breaking out of the parochial stockades of mainstream British criminology and cultural studies” (Murdock 1999: 674).

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unacceptable forms or levels of aggression. Violence is a cultural and historical sign, subject to the usual filters of interests, prejudice and principle; as a sign of disapproval, it is more arbitrary and capricious than a simple effect of its referent or target. Of course, this does not mean that its target or referent does not precipitate the censure or that such a censure would not command popular assent, but it does mean that what counts as violence is subject to the acculturated or political understandings and standpoints of the viewer. […] Some censures of violence may be agreeable to us but that would not alter one iota the fact that they are still signs lodged within a culture’s moral orthodoxy or political creed; signs of human passion, interest, custom and disorder. They remain moral or ethical judgments of practice.” Thus, as ever, all depends on the context, the circumstances and who is doing the censuring; “One man’s ‘healthy aggression’ is another woman’s ‘mindless violence’. […] One person’s ‘necessary law and order’ is another person’s state violence” (1997c: 3–4). This is revealed with great clarity if we consider how censures are often turned on their heads. As Sumner (1997c: 2) put it, “yesterday’s ‘terrorist’ often becomes tomorrow’s leader; the slum culture’s ‘delinquent’ turns out to be less reprehensible than the corrupt politician […] and the ‘deviance’ of many, when put under the spotlight of research, reappears as an editorial selection from a choice of a thousand normalities.” Sumner’s second advance in this chapter picked up on themes contained in the Obituary. He suggested (1997c: 3) that the practice of censure generally does not involve the cold, clinical application of rigorous, rational rules, but instead tends to be thoroughly bound up with the emotional and passionate world of unreason. This remains the case even in the supposedly rationalised, scientised, bureaucratic world of modernity. Censures are therefore best considered as partly “passionate categories of blaming, reflections of anger, angst and frustration”, and partly “attempted descriptions of their targets”. Similarly, ‘violence’ itself is “partly a censorious categorisation of aggression and partly a form of aggression”, and “there is an uncomfortable proximity between the politically legitimatised practices of censure, trial and punishment and the practices of socially proscribed violence” (1997c: 1). In this light, it becomes difficult to sustain the idea that violence is a behavioural abnormality or that it can be attributed to a minority of people (1997c: 6). Sumner’s overall position on censure, then, “is premised neither upon the value of the rational nor the celebration of its opposites. It is underpinned by scepticism about a hard distinction between the violent and the non-violent; the reasonable

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and the insane; the healthy and the sick; abuse and use; civilised and barbaric. […] Its standpoint is that there is a latent violence in censure and a latent censure in violence; reason and unreason married as one, for better and for worse” (1997c: 3). Violence, Culture and Censure was generally well received.3 However, as noted in Chap. 4, the cumulative nature of Sumner’s body of work was beginning to raise issues and this was astutely observed by one reviewer. Soothill (1998: 698) wrote that “it needs to be recognized that the historical sociology of censures has itself a history which started much earlier than this volume and those new to the enterprise are likely to find this book an off-putting introduction. Indeed, the brief [introductory chapter] makes no serious attempt to contextualize the overall debate in which Sumner has been a leading protagonist over the past two decades. I suspect that those who continue to embrace behaviourist approaches need a more seductive courtship to be persuaded to consider other pathways! This is a book which will appeal much more to the cognoscenti who already appreciate the developing programme on the sociology of censures. For an introduction one needs to look elsewhere.” Happily, a couple of texts that promised such an overview would soon be published. Soothill’s own suggestion was that readers look to Sumner’s chapter in the second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology, and Sumner’s contributions to the The Sage Dictionary of Criminology were also in the offing.

Censure in the Textbooks Sumner’s inclusion in the second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Criminology represented one of the high-water marks of the theory of censure. The book was intended, as the editors put it, to “provide students with authoritative reviews of the major issues that most criminology courses cover”, and it had quickly become a standard text. Sumner’s ­chapter appeared in a “symposium section” devoted to “some of the key 3  For instance, Price-Hanson (1999: 377) found the book “thought provoking” and “worthwhile reading”. Woodhouse (1999) felt it was a valuable addition to the literature despite its lack of focus on how violence should be responded to. Murdock (1999: 676) was generally positive, though he criticised the book’s silence on “the routinized violence and censure of markets and transnational capital”, which he felt required a “material turn” away from the cultural. Groombridge (1999: 471) suggested that greater editorial input would have been useful in what was an inevitably uneven collection of essays from young scholars.

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frontiers of theoretical development and controversy” (Reiner et al. 1997: 5). Encouraged by this remit, Sumner took the opportunity to clarify censure’s relationship to the state, taking account of the fracturing processes of late modernity. Sumner began by pointing out that the notion of censure was conceptually independent from the state or governance, for censures are “emotional-­conceptual constructions largely framed within the ideological terrain of that society’s hegemonic groups” (1997d: 499). Of course, censures are often sanctioned by the state through the medium of law (1997d: 501), a process which has frequently blinded criminologists to their historical contingency (1997d: 500). Sumner argued that radical criminology’s abandonment of Marxist state theory had been a mistake, for despite that theory’s weaknesses “the state is still with us and we still need to find the concepts to think it. Power is not now so dispersed, fragmented and disjointed that we can celebrate an era of individual growth: it remains summarised and consummated at the summit, and that summit is not randomly constituted or random in its effects” (1997d: 505). Returning to the fundamental Marxist idea that social phenomena are grounded in social practices and drawing on Poulantzas, Foucault and Jessop, Sumner (1997d: 506) defines the state as “an ensemble of practices and institutions which acts as the socially recognised summit and summation of a number of social powers themselves rooted in widespread social practices”. He suggests that this does not suppose “any ultimate telos or logos, or any single motor (of class or gender) which might drive this ensemble” (1997d: 506); at root, “the state’s role and its place in hegemonic struggle are always an historical issue” (1997d: 507). He goes on to argue that if the state’s function is to “define and enforce collectively binding decisions on the members of a society in the name of the common interest or general will” (Jessop 1990: 341), then hegemonic projects are “vital to secure the constitution of the state as a political and moral force, that is, a force which can have effects within social practices. These projects tend to be attempts to address and resolve, in favour of the directive or ruling groups, ideological conflicts arising from deep tensions or antagonisms within the social relations which structure concrete economic, political or cultural practices. If they are successful they give the state a certain power to create societal effects or, in other words, to codify, order, and regulate social practices in ways which are legitimised as socially or generally beneficial” (Sumner 1997d: 507). In this way the social censure of crime can be read as a vital factor in the very constitution of the state; it

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marks off those practices which challenge the state’s material or ideological foundations, or which offend those groups who support it, whilst portraying itself as dealing in rational universals or as having nation-building effects. Thus, “social censures are not important simply because they are often sanctioned by the state as law; nor because they are predominant in a society. More subtly and profoundly, they are important because they are vital components of the constitution of the ‘social’ field of practices which defines and constructs the state itself as a crucial, usually the crucial, site for the codification, integration, articulation, and enforcement of powers with societalizing effects. […] Censure is involved in the very definition of the state itself. […] What makes censure ‘social’ is the capacity of particular sites of power to deploy it in ways which give it societalizing effects, and in that respect the state, whether it be national, local, or international, still plays an important role” (1997d: 508). After ploughing what must have, at times, seemed like a rather lonely theoretical furrow through much of the 1980s and 1990s, Sumner’s inclusion in the Oxford Handbook marked a significant moment. Yet despite the elegance and forcefulness of his argument in the chapter, in some ways it represented a missed opportunity. Sumner’s efforts to refine and develop his theoretical position in line with the remit of the section felt curiously out of step with the more straightforward review-type chapters that made up the rest of the volume, and the more general introduction to censure that Soothill (1998) had called for remained unwritten. While the other authors featured in the symposium were invited to expand their chapters into to full length essays for the next edition (Maguire et al. 2002: 3), for whatever reason Sumner was not; censure’s status as a central notion in the criminological canon remained tentative at best. There were at least some markers of growing influence, however. For example, Sumner’s formulation of censure from Censure Politics and Criminal Justice (1990b) was used as one of Muncie’s (2001: 18) 11 definitions of crime in the textbook The Problem of Crime. Tierney’s Criminology: Theory and Context (2010), first published in 1996, frequently referred to Sumner and its consistent focus on the material context of theoretical developments in the field betrayed his inspiration. In Critical Criminology: Visions from Europe, van Swaaningen (1997: 210) discussed the potential linkages between Sumner, Durkheim and Braithwaite. Sumner’s ascension towards some kind of belated prominence in the discipline was also furthered when, as co-editor with Piers Beirne, he launched the journal Theoretical Criminology in 1997. In the

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opening editorial statement, Beirne and Sumner wrote that, “within a chaotic and besieged academia” (1997: 7), the journal was to be an internationalist “forum for the advancement of the theoretical aspects of criminology” (1997: 5). Sumner’s influence was particularly evident in both the hope that the journal would help to “reconnect criminology with a wider world of theoretical thought” (1997: 6) and in the suggestion that “crime may be a form of social censure but censure is often morally supportable. We want TC to explore the moral-ethical justifications for censure as well as the social division of class, ethnicity, gender, age, region and culture which produce a body of social censures that so often sustain inequitable social relationships and an uncivilised planet” (1997: 8). Happily, the missed opportunity of the Oxford Handbook was partially corrected in another text that would soon become popular among undergraduates, McLaughlin and Muncie’s Sage Dictionary of Criminology (2001), in which Sumner had two entries.4 These provided concise and extremely quotable summaries of his positions on deviance and social censure. In his entry on deviance, which provided a brief overview of the themes of the Obituary, Sumner (2001a: 89) suggested that the concept had “advanced criminology away from the naïve idea that crimes were unambiguous acts of evil committed by born criminals” and highlighted “the social roots of misbehaviour”. Furthermore, in a highly differentiated, globalised, multicultural world where authority had lost its power over popular morality and culture, “who is to say what is now deviant?” The priority, according to Sumner, should be those “areas of social agreement which might constitute the basis of social censure and control for a more healthy, secure and peaceful society”, and the exposure of “social norms and systems of social control which are discriminatory, hypocritical and oppressive” (2001a: 90). The Sage Dictionary entry on censure provided the general introduction that the Oxford Handbook chapter had not, albeit in highly compressed fashion. Sumner (2001b: 265) wrote that “to censure is to blame, criticize, express disapproval, or condemn. A social censure is a category expressing cultural disapproval, or a sign of blame. […] The concept of social censure refers to those censures which are common within a culture and which reflect the dominant or key relationships or structures of the society. Censures mostly reinforce the established order and its institu4  These entries also appeared, in updated form each time, in later editions of the Sage Dictionary in 2006, 2013 and 2019.

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tions. […] Some can be seen as master-censures in that they are so deep-­ rooted within the culture and its forms of thought that they permeate many other forms of censure. However, some are counter-censures, expressing the opposition or criticism of subordinate social groups to the social system or its institutions.” He went on to distinguish censure theory from labelling theory by virtue of the fact that it does not emphasise conscious, voluntarist practices of blaming but instead the unconscious and the emotional as rooted in social structures that “by their very nature imply, and predispose us to, certain categories of blame. […] Social censures come to us already steeped and rooted within the structures and events of social history and thus coated with acquired meanings and implications” (2001b: 265). This was, he argued (2001b: 265–6), particularly so in modern disciplinary societies which are deeply permeated by normative judgements, perhaps to the point of being structured by them (2001b: 265–6). Sumner also noted that during the twentieth century in the west, the dominant social censures were arguably those of property crime and communism, and were thus concerned with the fundamental structures of private property. These were buttressed by censures of women, homosexuals and immigrants, groups which challenged the established order of white patriarchal power. Censure “thus designates cultural packages of blame which […] amount to ideological formations which target groups or acts or styles perceived by the dominant culture to be its enemies. As such, their function is usually to denounce and regulate rather than to explain or understand” (2001b: 266). This makes them poor foundations for open-minded or scientific analysis as they are not neutral, descriptive categories; “censures are objects of study not tools of enquiry” (2001b: 266).5

A Return to Old Themes Meanwhile, Sumner returned to a couple of the recurring if slightly less prominent themes in his work. A paper published in the journal Franco-­ British Studies (Sumner 1996) was effectively a follow up to Crime, Justice and the Mass Media (1982) and Chap. 8 of Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (Sumner and Sandberg 1990). Sumner (1996: 56) suggested that 5  Understandably in a reference work aimed squarely at undergraduates, there was no discussion in the Sage Dictionary entries of the historical materialist underpinnings of Sumner’s position, nor any explicit mention of Marxism.

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criminalisation, or the process of “criming things”, is intimately related to the concept of theatre; “it seems to me that it is the very essence of criminalisation that it involves publicity.” To this end, criminal justice agencies and media institutions collaborate, in a “mundane and regular” way through a general structural collusion of interests and processes, to promote the ideology of the ‘war against crime’ as an essential pre-requisite of liberal democracy.6 This is particularly the case in economically straitened times (1996: 64). Furthermore, according to Sumner (1996: 58) we were witnessing “the gradual merging of real crime and media crime” with, for example, the so-called true crime genre and live action shows permeating the official criminal justice system’s consciousness. In this context, and against those who argued that in an ephemeral postmodern world news was largely inconsequential, Sumner (1996: 62–3) considered social censure and stigma as being increasingly definitive of social relations; even in postmodernism, censures have concrete consequences, and so the moral or ideological output of the media still mattered. In the edited collection Multicultural Policing in a Democracy (Sumner and Lorenzo 2000) Sumner turned his attention once again to the subject of underdevelopment. The book itself was a somewhat curious piece of work. It was born of conference proceedings that were initially envisaged whilst Sumner was at Cambridge and were eventually conducted in 1996 at East London, and it intended to expand the knowledge base of the police in the Philippines. Earlier, in Social Control and Political Order, Sumner (1997a: 17) had briefly alluded to the idea that in the aftermath of colonial conquest, once local resistance had been pacified, there was potential for a shift from a militaristic style of policing to a more civil style. This idea was picked up in Sumner’s chapter in Multicultural Policing, where it was rooted in evidence from Ahire’s study of Nigeria. Ahire (1991: 17) had argued that such a shift represented an attempt to obtain some degree of ideological hegemony as new forms of social organisation began to be created out of the ruins of indigenous societies. Sumner added that, any move, however limited, beyond the raw brutality associated with colonial policing “can amount to a serious improvement even if it does not alter the country’s class system or position within the international econ6  Or, as he later put it, “crime talk is normally aimed at profit, not truth. It is a form of moral recycling. The media dig up the dirt, launder it free of social, political and cultural implications, and re-present it as the triumph of good over evil and the permanent futility of dissent” (Sumner 2012a).

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omy” (2000: 15). This was because “what it replaces is the raw booty capitalism of the ‘gold rush’ and its accompanying ‘might is right’ violence. But no one should get too carried away: policing is intimately tied up with social structure and a lack of economic independence can block the development of a professional, service-oriented, police force” that “serves the mass of the people and not the private interests of the rich elite” (2000: 23–4).

A Retirement of Sorts The capacity to surprise had always been a feature of Sumner’s academic career, as far back as his appointment at Cambridge in 1977. It was certainly eye-opening when, in 2000, he left UEL before taking up a part-­ time visiting professorship close to his childhood home at the University of Salford.7 Then, in 2002 and in his early 50s, Sumner took retirement from academia in order to pursue other interests. He later wrote (2010) that this decision was prompted, in part, by his “disgust” at the “over-­ marketisation and commercialisation of the university system”. However, it turned out that Sumner’s ‘retirement’ simply meant that he was not employed by an academic institution and, perhaps less surprisingly, it did not prevent him from continued scholarly productivity. He began this period by editing The Blackwell Companion to Criminology (Sumner 2004a), being listed on the cover as an ‘investment manager and writer’. His own essay in the volume (Sumner 2004b) picked up on an idea he had first aired in Social Control and Political Order, where he suggested that the concept of social control faced two major problems, “one concerning the nature of control and the other, much less discussed one, concerning the character of the social” (1997a: 5). Here he deliberated over the second question, discussing the changed nature of the ‘social’ in late modernity and its implications for the notion of social censure. It was written in a looser, more contemplative style that was accessible, cynical and entertaining, the culmination of a gradual shift that could arguably be traced back to his essay on Foucault (1990a) and was no doubt accelerated by his new-found freedom from the strictures of academia. Sumner (2004b: 3) began by suggesting that “too often the meaning of the social nature of crime and deviance is taken for granted and the professional usage of the term ‘social’ has become sloppy, with the result  His role as co-editor of Theoretical Criminology also ended in 2000.

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that it is too often unclear that anything specific is being gained by describing crime and deviance as ‘social’ problems” requiring social explanations. In passages reminiscent of the Obituary in which he suggested that “what the social means at any point in time is very much an expression of its historical milieu” (2004b: 13), Sumner traced how the social had, by the late twentieth century, come to be regarded as the “interactive field of all human relations”, a notion which itself became the criminological grundnorm (2004b: 7–9).8 As such, it had lost any sense that it was a kind of goal to be realised, and had instead become a rather bland reference to aggregate conditions (2004b: 14), “a neutral term, devoid of its normative reforming message” (2004b: 24). The social now “connotes a bygone age of integrated communities, welfare states, militant trade unions, and class politics. In the UK, politicians avoid it for electoral success and the public associates it with a bleeding-heart liberalism exempting offenders from individual responsibility. If it has any residual active and positive meaning in a contemporary sociology that has largely rendered it an anodyne abstraction, it refers to the cultural dimension of human life, standing in opposition to the economic and political. In a multicultural globalised world that means differences of style; no longer differences in essence. Diversity is now the anti-norm, or the norm, depending on how you look at it. The social as the fabric of society, the state-backed political consensus of welfarism, has been replaced by the idea of the universality of difference or the normality of deviation” (2004b: 23–4).9 The demise of the social as an aspirational, progressive project had clear consequences for our understandings of crime and deviance. In the absence of a “monolithic and absolute moral syntax”, crime and deviance were plainly revealed as “contested moral judgments, censures […] that mean different things to different people in practice” (2004b: 25). 8  Sumner notes in these passages how Durkheim saw that “the ‘social’ world, the realm of society, does not just produce offensive behaviours but also perceptions of offensiveness, and thus crime and deviance are always doubly socially constructed” (2004b: 6). The tumult of the twentieth century had “conspired and converged to confirm that crime and deviance are doubly socially constructed, as practical or behavioural responses to social conditions and as social censures reflecting the emotions, ideologies, and values of powerful social groups” (2004b: 9). 9  Despite this, Sumner (2004b: 27) also questioned the value in seeing crime as a cultural form: “Ultimately, despite its contemporary relevance, to say that crime and deviance are cultural forms tells us little in the long run when culture can mean anything and everything; and no more than the social did when it meant anything and everything.”

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Furthermore, where moral norms and their forms of enforcement were disputed, “the effect of this is to dissolve moral certainty and moral positions themselves, the very cement of ‘the social’, without which ‘the social’ can have no binding material foundations” (2004b: 25). As Sumner had argued time and again throughout his oeuvre, “crime in this way became more of a censure authorised by the powerful than a behaviour peculiar to the poor—in an antisocial world no behaviour has uncontested meanings and disapproval is more a sign of powerful interest than moral purity” (2004b: 20). As a result, “crime and deviance are much better understood not as social constructions but as the dominant censures of the day, reflecting dominant economic, political and cultural interests and preferences and targeting the groups, individuals, and acts offending those interests and preferences. A particular censure of crime or deviance, and the level of its enforcement, may approximate to some democratically shared ‘social’ value to some degree, and may even contribute to some poorly defined social health, but as a whole censures and their enforcement tend to reflect the antisocial interests of capital, patriarchy, and ethnicities. In that way, the major ‘crimes’ often remain uncensored and unpunished. The body of dominant censures in the capitalist world is barely more social than it ever was” (2004b: 28).10 The sense of despondency that had steadily become central to Sumner’s outlook was now given its full expression. For Sumner (2004b: 28), “whether we use the word ‘social’ in any meaningful way or even at all, today most of us believe that society as we knew it has gone”. He felt that its “key indicator” was the privatisation of public services; “as one ex-­ health service worker said to me, explaining why she had quit: ‘the feeling has gone’. No academic has summarised it more succinctly. […] We are back to a new type of Hobbesian war of all against all, with the power of commercial interests winning most battles. […] The idea of a society has become a mere dream again, not a reality. The reality is a continuous struggle to maintain associations, and the values and norms of association, in an increasingly materialistic but immaterial world. Many of us understand those values, both as principles and things of great worth, whether as forms of social capital, spiritual sustenance, or pleasure, but the world of globalised capitalism constantly pulls us in other directions toward that 10  Sumner (2004b: 29) went on to suggest that “it is misleading to say that crime and deviance are social constructions when there is so much doubt, confusion, and fear, about what ‘the social’ actually is or when they are so often a response to social destruction”.

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all-consuming black hole that is the dominance of things, individualist greed, and impersonal organisation” (2004b: 28). Nevertheless, even in the face of this, Sumner (2004b: 28) maintained that “we have a dream to achieve. A reconstructed ‘social’ has to become a strong utopia again.” This required the construction of “some new universals which might act as guides and restraints; otherwise anything could be censured or approved, depending on the political and cultural standpoint of the decision-maker” (2004b: 27).11 Sumner’s ‘retirement’ continued with a chapter in a festschrift to his erstwhile collaborator Roberto Bergalli, itself based on a paper he had delivered earlier at the University of Turin (Sumner 2004c). In it, Sumner offered a concise, forceful restatement of some of the fundamentals of his position; it was perhaps a shame that the chapter appeared in a publication that was, in the Anglophone world at least, such a niche one. Sumner began with a withering critique of the criminological mainstream, whilst reserving praise for those critical criminologists who have “put the concept of crime in doubt” (2006: 142). He suggested that “permitting the state to define the categories of science is exactly what criminologists do when they use criminal law categories in the constitution of their research samples of offenders or when their research objectives and conclusions are restricted by their service to the state”. As a result of this, criminology “has not yet established that it has any more scientific basis than religion, politics, or astrology” (2006: 141) and it is effectively “based on farce” (2006: 146). Sumner (2006: 141) then denounced what he called the “po-faced, middle-class ‘God squads’” who spend their time “in search of the petty delinquencies of the devil within the lives of the lower working classes, immigrants, ethnic minorities, sexual deviants, general eccentrics and dissidents of the world. They conform all too enthusiastically with the demands and limits of the managerial state, nobly serving time for a pittance and a pension whist giving the legitimacy of science to an essentially political operation by their paymasters, who will do what they were going to do anyway.”12 Sumner saw criminologists of this ilk unashamedly taking 11  The Blackwell Companion which this remarkable chapter opened met with a generally enthusiastic response. Brown called it “sophisticated, challenging, and provocative” and praised its refusal to ‘dumb down’ (2007: 432; see also Chui 2005). Rock regarded the book as deserving of attention, but was disappointed by its lack of a “single narrative or theme” which rendered it as something of “a heterogeneous mass” (2004: 310). 12  Clearly relishing the freedom given to him by his retirement, he added that “criminology as a body of scholars exhibits the cold capriciousness of the Inquisition: Its lack of collegiality

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“grants from government bodies to study petty ‘anti-social’ behaviour by the governed or despairing classes, using the government’s definition of ‘anti-social behaviour’”, in a world “ridden with exploitation, genocide, child poverty, imperial abuse of the rule of law, environmental degradation, racism, war, rape and slavery, and of course serial disrespect for politicians” (2006: 146).13 As a consequence, “whether it be due to faith or funding, criminology consistently refuses to wrestle with the fundamental and profoundly important Nietzschean truth that crime is defined and proclaimed by those with the power to make legal definitions, and that those with such power are usually at least as mad, bad and stupid as those they persecute. Criminology has not yet reached a level of maturity as a field of knowledge where it can contemplate for very long the possibility that the system of moral categories society deploys are basically the censures developed by the rich and powerful for the protection of their interests and the defence of their prejudices, and therefore for the control of the poor and rebellious, and that by using those censures uncritically, in their guise as legal terms, criminology is not a bystander science but an instrument of political domination” (2006: 142). Sumner’s theory of censures was then given a succinct, punchy restatement. “Censures”, writes Sumner (2006: 143), “are ideological symbols, signs in a partisan discourse, icons in a moral narrative, and designations of inferiority, evil, sickness and weakness. The dominant censures of a society are those of the dominant class, gender, ethnic, regional and age groupings and therefore are a direct refraction of the fundamental structures and processes of the society. As such, they are not only a part of that society’s dominant culture, and of the hegemonic spin put on that culture put by its leading political parties, but also a decisive element in the ­structuration of society itself through both the moral-entrepreneurial and routine daily activities of that structure’s dominant agencies and their followers. To paraphrase Foucault, moral work is being done all the time is exceptional, even by the miserably low standards of academia” (Sumner 2006: 141). 13  An exemplar of this tendency, according to Sumner (2006: 144), was criminology’s traditional focus on “poor boys who steal or destroy” as opposed to the significantly more damaging practices of the colonial and imperial powers; “could criminology talk of the funny shaped skulls of the colonialists or new imperialists?” he asks, rhetorically. In the original conference paper that this chapter was based on, he also amusingly pointed to criminology’s silence on the strange subcultures of the colonialists and wondered why the discipline had failed to question whether they had been insensitively labelled by working-class trade unions in ways which amplified their deviance (Sumner 2004c).

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throughout society’s systems and processes but in a judgmental society, where social control embraces all in an allegedly participatory democracy, moral judgment is everywhere and reflects the master-structures of capitalism, patriarchy, and globalization. Social censures are formed at points of contestation; they arise from and reflect social divisions; they are instruments of combat. Censures are cultural expressions of disapproval; terms or concepts embedded within wider ideas or prejudices and general marks and indicators of social division.” In this way, according to Sumner (2006: 143), “they reiterate the virtue of the censorious and the evil of the censured. As such, they do not so much describe the behaviours of the offensive as express the beliefs, interests and emotions underpinning the definition of the offence. Whether they become criminal law categories or remain just terms of informal abuse, they cannot be taken literally as descriptors of behaviour labelled in their name. Calling someone a murderer no more means that they have killed someone than calling your enemy a bastard means they were born out of wedlock. Branding people is not a scientific exercise.” Ultimately then, “social censures are judgmental not neutral terms” (2006: 144). Sumner (2006: 145) went on to suggest that because “a science of crime without a politics of morality is mere quackery”, then in order to “grow beyond criminology we need to begin a conscious re-assessment of which censures we wish to retain and which we wish to qualify or dismiss as problematic”. As we have seen he had made this point before, but his position was becoming increasingly emphatic. He now recommended (2006: 146) that this reassessment should focus upon the vocabularies of struggle and the counter-censures developed by ordinary working people, the so-called underclasses, and new social movements which together offer “a different view of the world, one with a different prioritization of social harms, one which defines violence differently, and one calling for a recovery of criminal law and its enforcement to the people and away from the bureaucracies of injustice”. Yet Sumner recognised that any alternative concepts of serious crime, social harm, violence, and fundamental rights would remain ideological weapons of combat and persuasion, albeit ones in the hands of currently subordinated populations. Thus, “at the end of the day, there is no alternative but to face up to the painful task of deciding whether we still need to censure certain things, whether we still need to assign blame to our enemies, and to explore a vision of the world which delivers either another alternative set of censures or modes of dispute resolution which reduce the blaming of others and the rate of recidivism. The

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fundamental need analytically is for a renewed normative jurisprudence, something which has become rather unfashionable, to specify what we want to censure and assess whether that censure needs to be expressed through the principles and concepts of the criminal law” (2006: 146).

The Continuing Controversy over the Obituary In the meantime, the arguments over the death of deviance continued unabated in the US. Mitchell Miller, Wright and Dannels (2001) attempted to empirically test the contention that the sociology of deviance was dead using citation analysis and found some support for the claim. This, of course, ignored the fact that Sumner had granted the concept a “zombified afterlife” (Roberts 2017: 9); citation counts and the like were largely irrelevant to Sumner’s thesis which concerned deviance’s conceptual expiry, as he later pointed out himself (Sumner 2012b: 168). Hendershott (2002) argued for a renewed focus on deviance from a socially conservative, Catholic position. As against the tolerant liberalism that had emerged in the 1960s, she felt that this would contribute to a renewal of social stability based upon a consensual moral order. Goode (2003: 527; see also Best 2003) rejected this as a “hodgepodge of balderdash”, but later noted that it had been a harbinger of the revitalisation of the religious right in the US (Goode 2004a: 48). For his part, Sumner (2012b: 173) later wrote of Hendershott that, “given the cultural diversity of US society, doesn’t her position mean the only way her favoured politics can succeed is through the suppression of other cultures, for a ‘shared moral order’ is not likely to be voluntary? […] That’s the problem with a return to moral absolutism; there are no moral absolutes, and there never were.” Goode’s hostility to the Obituary, discussed in Chap. 4, continued unabated. He described the work as “inane and flatulent” (1997: ix) and dismissed Sumner as a “crackpot” (2003: 511). Although Goode did concede that the concept of deviance’s influence was waning, he suggested that Sumner’s argument did not mean what Sumner claimed it to mean and was in fact about a decline in the supposed ideological function of the field for the ruling elite (2002, 2003: 511).14 For Goode (2003: 518–9), because behaviour that breaches norms has always existed, deviance was a “basic fundamental and ineradicable social process” that could not die.  This argument was also restated several years later (Goode 2014).

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Goode (2003: 507) also argued that the death of deviance claim was a red herring, or what he termed a ‘MacGuffin’, repeated as a mantra not because it was a genuinely held belief but because it indicated where one stood on symbolic issues. He felt that course offerings and enrolments at prestigious US institutions pointed to deviance’s continued health (2003: 513–7).15 Somewhat confusingly, in amongst what had become the almost routine misrepresentation of Sumner’s argument, Goode later appeared to advocate a position almost indistinguishable from Sumner’s. He argued (2004a: 47) that definitions of right and wrong are “constructed as a result of clashes of ideologies, interests—economic, social, cultural, political—the outcome of struggles between and among categories in the society, each vying for dominance, or at least acceptance, of the views and behaviours that characterize them as a social entity”. As Sumner (2012b: 171–2) later put it, “his trans-historical, universal, concept of deviance had become a historically specific social censure!” Goode appeared not to recognise that these passages, which in later pieces he seemed to gloss over, were in line with Sumner’s thinking. They were accompanied by another tortuous survey of the number of articles and books published on deviance, which led him to conclude that the decline in the field’s intellectual vigour was partly the result of “obliteration by incorporation”, as deviance’s once radical ideas became a taken-for-granted part of accepted knowledge (Goode 2004a: 54). In another piece, Goode (2004b: 506) suggested that the deviance is dead claim was not about the decline in the intellectual vitality of the field but about political correctness; this was because sociologists mistakenly supposed that the sociology of deviance was about pathologising people and were thus reluctant to invoke it. He continued to repeat, among other things, his rather disingenuous argument that Sumner’s analysis was “based largely on analogies and wordplays” (Goode 2006: 548). He dismissed the idea that deviance and social censure were anything other than “the same thing with different names”, accusing Sumner of “a sleight of hand, bait and switch operation” (2006: 550). He stressed again that the death or decline of the concept of ­deviance, “that is, non-normative behaviour that attracts condemnation”, was “a literal impossibility” (2006: 553). As Best (2006: 534) put it, defenders of the concept of deviance “seem to protest too much”.

 See Best (2004) for criticism of Goode on this point.

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Perhaps wisely, having lit the blue touch paper with the Obituary, Sumner largely stayed out of the ensuing debate which was, at times, extremely polemical with surprisingly little direct engagement with Sumner’s work. However, he did finally have his say in a chapter written for the edited collection New Directions in Criminological Theory (Hall and Winlow 2012). He noted how, “in short, my work re-defined the concept of deviance and its status, it did not just dismiss it. The censure of deviance was revealed as part of the heat of the battle not the lens of a neutral observer. The concept thus died from natural causes, re-worked in the cause of scientific activity, and had no life-support from current social conditions” (2012b: 167). He again stressed his admiration for the achievements of the sociology of deviance. This included its shift away from moral absolutism towards a “pragmatic tolerance” that was vital in the New Deal and in attempts to “defuse structurally profound social divisions”, and, in its liberal guise, its stance that “variance, diversity and resistance to conformity were actually positive human attributes of any healthy society” (2012b: 168). On Goode’s idea that the death of deviance is an impossibility Sumner (2012b: 170) bluntly stated that “he is wrong” and maintained that “the behaviour is not the key to the censure; […] Therefore it is misleading to refer to ‘deviant behaviour’ when any behaviour could be censured as deviant depending on the context and when there are many moralities in an amoral world.” In a forthright footnote (2012b: 178) he noted that “I had a few years earlier been dismissed as a ‘crackpot’, so clearly Goode is prone to the unprofessional habit of dismissing his opponents as mentally ill. This matters because it demonstrates how much the concept of deviance, and the concomitant sense of moral superiority, meant to—what looks like to the rest of us—a redneck, imperialist, America threatened by its decline and the rise of a new world order.”16 A little later, Sumner also reviewed Goode’s Justifiable Conduct (2013). In this work, Goode looked at the process of self-vindication in the writing of memoir and argued that in the authors’ redemptive accounts the basis of a shared normative order could be detected. Thus, the book operated as a defence of the concept of deviance. Sumner suggested that all Goode had succeeded in observing was the “power of the social censures of deviance and crime”, because “the self-vindications might indeed be proof that transgressors, and their publishers, are aware of dominant 16  In this light, it was perhaps unsurprising that textbooks (Goode 2019; Henry 2019) and edited collections (Dellwing et al. 2014) on deviance kept on coming.

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social censures and their attached stigmas, but that idea says nothing about their sharing of those censures, the really interesting part” (2014: 1820). “Ultimately”, wrote Sumner, “he cannot see how rooted in American social history the concept of deviance is” (2014: 1821).

References Ahire, P. (1991). Imperial policing: The emergence and role of the police in colonial Nigeria, 1860–1960. Buckingham: Open University Press. Beirne, P., & Sumner, C. (1997). Editorial statement. Theoretical Criminology, 1(1), 5–11. Best, J. (2003). Review of Hendershott’s The politics of deviance. Society, 40(3), 94–96. Best, J. (2004). Deviance may be alive, but is it intellectually lively? A reaction to Goode. Deviant Behaviour, 25(5), 483–492. Best, J. (2006). Whatever happened to social pathology? Conceptual fashions and the sociology of deviance. Sociological Spectrum, 26(6), 533–546. Brown, M. P. (2007). Review of Sumner’s The Blackwell companion to criminology. Criminal Justice Review, 32(4), 431–432. Calavita, K. (1998). Review of Bergalli and Sumner’s Social control and political order: European perspectives at the end of the century. Crime, Law and Social Change, 29(4), 348–350. Chui, W. H. (2005). Review of Sumner’s The Blackwell companion to criminology. The Howard Journal, 44(5), 558–559. Cohen, S. (1985). Visions of social control: Crime, punishment and classification. Cambridge: Polity. Dellwing, M., Kotarba, J. A., & Pino, N. W. (Eds.). (2014). The death and resurrection of deviance: Current ideas and research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Floud, R. (2008). Obituary: Professor Frank Gould: Visionary vice-chancellor of the University of East London. The Independent, 30 July. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-frank-gouldvisionary-vice-chancellor-of-the-university-of-east-london-880267.html. Garland, D. (1998). Review of Bergalli and Sumner’s Social control and political order. British Journal of Criminology, 38(2), 321–324. Goode, E. (1997). Deviant behaviour (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Goode, E. (2002). Does the death of the sociology of deviance make sense. The American Sociologist, 33(3), 116–128. Goode, E. (2003). The MacGuffin that refuses to die: An investigation into the condition of the sociology of deviance. Deviant Behaviour, 24(6), 507–533.

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Goode, E. (2004a). Is the sociology of deviance still relevant? The American Sociologist, 35(4), 46–57. Goode, E. (2004b). The “death” macguffin redux: Comments on Best. Deviant Behaviour, 25(5), 493–509. Goode, E. (2006). Is the deviance concept still relevant to sociology? Sociological Spectrum, 26(6), 547–558. Goode, E. (2013). Justifiable conduct: Self-vindication in memoir. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Goode, E. (2014). The meaning and validity of the death of deviance claim. In M. Dellwing, J. A. Kotarba, & N. W. Pino (Eds.), The death and resurrection of deviance: Current ideas and research (pp.  11–30). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Goode, E. (2019). Deviant behaviour (12th ed.). New York: Routledge. Groombridge, N. (1999). Review of Sumner’s Violence, culture and censure. British Journal of Criminology, 39(3), 469–471. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2012). Introduction: The need for new directions in criminological theory. In S. Hall & S. Winlow (Eds.), New directions in criminological theory (pp. 1–13). Abingdon: Routlegde. Hendershott, A. (2002). The politics of deviance. San Francisco: Encounter. Henry, S. with Howard, L. M. (2019). Social deviance (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity. Houchon, G. (1999). Review of Bergalli and Sumner’s Social control and political order: European perspectives at the end of the century. Theoretical Criminology, 3(2), 221–229. Izbicki, J. (1997). Cor blimey, prof. What made you do it? The Independent, 13 November. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/cor-blimey-prof-what-made-you-do-it-1293648.html. Jessop, B. (1990). State theory: Putting the capitalist state in its place. Cambridge: Polity. Maguire, M., Morgan, R., & Reiner, R. (2002). Introduction to the third edition. In M. Maguire, R. Morgan, & R. Reiner (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (3rd ed., pp. 1–4). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLaughlin, E., & Muncie, J. (Eds.). (2001). The Sage dictionary of criminology. London: Sage. Mitchell Miller, J., Wright, R. A., & Dannels, D. (2001). Is deviance dead? The decline of a research specialization. The American Sociologist, 32(3), 43–59. Muncie, J. (2001). The construction and deconstruction of crime. In J. Muncie & E. McLaughlin (Eds.), The problem of crime. London: Sage. Murdock, G. (1999). Review of Turpin and Kurtz’s The web of violence and Sumner’s Violence, culture and censure. Sociology, 33(3), 672–676. Price-Hanson, D. (1999). Review of Sumner’s Violence, culture and censure. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 9(4), 376–377.

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Reiner, R., Morgan, R., & Maguire, M. (1997). Introduction to second edition. In M. Maguire, R. Morgan, & R. Reiner (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (2nd ed., pp. 1–7). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, P. (2017). Thinking through critical criminology. In A. Amatrudo (Ed.), Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner (pp.  1–45). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rock, P. (2004). Review of Sumner’s The Blackwell companion to criminology. British Journal of Sociology, 55(2), 309–311. Ross, E.  A. (1901 [1918]). Social control: A survey of the foundations of order. New York: Macmillan. Soothill, K. (1998). Review of Sumner’s Violence, culture and censure. The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology, 9(3), 697–699. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1982). Crime, justice and the mass media: Papers presented to the 14th Cropwood round-table conference, December 1981. University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology: Cropwood Conference Series No. 14. Sumner, C. (1990a). Foucault, gender and the censure of deviance. In L. Gelsthorpe & A.  Morris (Eds.), Feminist perspectives in criminology (pp.  26–40). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990b). Rethinking deviance: Towards a sociology of censure. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp.  15–40). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1996). Collaboration, criminalisation and social comfort. Franco-­ British Studies: Journal of the British Institute in Paris, 21, 55–65. Sumner, C. (1997a). Social control: The history and politics of a central concept in Anglo-American sociology. In R. Bergalli & C. Sumner (Eds.), Social control and political order: European perspectives at the end of the century (pp. 1–33). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (1997b). The decline of social control and the rise of vocabularies of struggle. In R. Bergalli & C. Sumner (Eds.), Social control and political order: European perspectives at the end of the century (pp. 131–150). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (1997c). Introduction: The violence of censure and the censure of violence. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Violence, culture and censure (pp. 1–6). London: Taylor and Francis. Sumner, C. (1997d). Censure, crime and state. In M.  Maguire, R.  Morgan, & R. Reiner (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (2nd ed., pp. 499–510). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sumner, C. (2000). From militaristic to civil policing: A general view. In C. Sumner & H.  Lorenzo (Eds.), Multicultural policing in a democracy (pp.  7–24). Missouri: The Institute for International Studies. Sumner, C. (2001a). Entry on ‘Deviance’. In E. McLaughlin & J. Muncie (Eds.), The Sage dictionary of criminology (pp. 89–90). London: Sage.

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Sumner, C. (2001b). Entry on ‘Social censure’. In E. McLaughlin & J. Muncie (Eds.), The Sage dictionary of criminology (pp. 265–266). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (2004a). The Blackwell companion to criminology. Oxford: Blackwell. Sumner, C. (2004b). The social nature of crime and deviance. In C. Sumner (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to criminology (pp. 3–31). Oxford: Blackwell. Sumner, C. (2004c). Social censure and political domination. Paper delivered at the University of Turin, 12 March. Sumner, C. (2006). Censure, criminology and politics. In I. Rivera, H. C. Silveira, E. Bodelon, & A. Recasens (Eds.), Contornos y pliegues del derecho: Homenaje a Roberto Bergalli (pp. 140–146). Barcelona: Anthropos. Sumner, C. (2010). The editor, Colin Sumner. CrimeTalk. Retrieved from https://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/office-stuff/the-editor-colinsumner. Sumner, C. (2012a). Media, policing and politics (part 1). CrimeTalk, 19 February. Retrieved from http://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/library/ editors-blog/664-holding-others-to-account. Sumner, C. (2012b). Censure, culture and political economy: Beyond the death of deviance debate. In S. Hall & S. Winlow (Eds.), New directions in criminological theory (pp. 165–180). Abingdon: Routledge. Sumner, C. (2014). Review of Goode’s Justifiable conduct: Self-vindication in memoir. American Journal of Sociology, 119(6), 1819–1821. Sumner, C., & Lorenzo, H. (Eds.). (2000). Multicultural policing in a democracy. Missouri: The Institute for International Studies. Sumner, C., & Sandberg, S. (1990). The press censure of “dissident minorities”: The ideology of parliamentary democracy, Thatcherism and “Policing the Crisis”. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp.  163– 193). Buckingham: Open University Press. van Swaaningen, R. (1997). Critical criminology: Visions form Europe. London: Sage. Taylor, I. (1999). Crime in context: A critical criminology of market societies. Cambridge: Westview Press. Tierney, J. (2010). Criminology: Theory and context (3rd ed.). Harlow: Pearson. Woodhouse, T. (1999). Review of Sumner’s Violence, culture and censure and Turpin and Kurtz’s The web of violence. Sociological Research Online, 4(1), 1–2. Young, J. (1999). The exclusive society: Social exclusion, crime and difference in late modernity. London: Sage. Young, J. (2007). The vertigo of late modernity. London: Sage.

CHAPTER 6

Sumner and the Looking Glass

Abstract  This penultimate chapter focusses on Sumner’s work following his decision to abort his retirement and take up a post at University College Cork. This helped foster a renewed wave of writing in which he considered the 2011 UK riots in the light of his theory of censure, explored the criminal justice system and social control through an analysis of Shakespeare, returned to his philosophical and methodological underpinnings in a discussion of critical realism and hinted at a significant new phase in his work that harked back to Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment. The chapter deals in turn with each of these endeavours which served to further sharpen and refine Sumner’s underlying theoretical position. Keywords  Sumner • Censure • Social control • Critical realism • Underdevelopment Sumner’s retirement proved not to be a lasting affair. In 2012 he joined University College Cork in the Republic of Ireland as a senior lecturer in Sociology, soon becoming Head of the School of Sociology, Philosophy, Criminology, Government and Politics. In this role, Sumner was central in the development of, in Irish terms, a pioneering offering in criminology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He had returned to a discipline where, due to the retirement and, sadly, the deaths of several prominent scholars, “the torch lit by the ‘fortunate generation’” was at last © The Author(s) 2020 D. Moxon, Colin Sumner, Palgrave Pioneers in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36941-5_6

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being passed on to what Liebling, Maruna and McAra (2017: 4) had called the “third generation”. The discipline had also undergone a period of intense growth, particularly in the UK where, assisted by the government’s commitment to expanding higher education and the increasing centrality of crime in popular culture, there had been a significant increase in the number of academic posts (Tierney 2010: 326). Yet the demands of heavy undergraduate teaching loads, the increasing pressure to bring in research monies, the Research Excellence Framework and its focus on ‘impact’, the growth in short-term research contracts and the emergence of the enterprise university with its focus on serving business and the state meant that “curiosity-driven research appears to have largely given way to somewhat more instrumental concerns” (Liebling et al. 2017: 7). As Rock (2017: 48–9) put it, “there was a time when [academics] could work relatively unhindered in what was a rather poorly funded research environment that was spared the blunter impact of market forces. […] There is not much room here [in current academy] for scholars who wish to work on time-consuming, open-ended and theoretically driven projects propelled chiefly by a sense of intellectual curiosity.” Radical criminological work, of course, fared particularly badly in this new context.1 In the face of these headwinds, Sumner had spent much of his retirement developing the CrimeTalk website, which was launched in 2010. It was intended as a broad “educational resource in criminology”, free from the bureaucracy of academia and something “that went beyond the many things that irritated me in teaching, researching and publishing […]; the elements of those creative processes that give me pleasure still inspire this project” (Sumner 2010a). More journalistic in style, it published work from established and well-known academics as well as young scholars and those from outside of the academy; as such it was a place where “everyday experience meets scientific research, and where professional practice mixes with popular feeling and academic thought” (Sumner 2010b). Whilst continuing to develop CrimeTalk, Sumner’s appointment at Cork prompted a renewed wave of academic writing published through the more traditional outlets. In these writings he discussed censure in the light 1  Eagleton (2016a: 152), writing about the academy in general, was even more blunt: “A centuries-old tradition of universities as centres of humane critique is currently being scuppered by their conversion into pseudo-capitalist enterprises under the way of a brutally philistine managerial ideology. Once arenas of critical reflection, academic institutions are being increasingly reduced to organs of the marketplace, along with betting shops and fast food joints.”

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of the 2011 UK riots, explored the criminal justice system and social control through an analysis of Shakespeare, returned to his philosophical and methodological underpinnings and hinted at a significant new phase in his work.

Censure and the 2011 Riots As we saw in Chap. 5, in his contribution to the edited collection New Directions in Criminological Theory (Hall and Winlow 2012) Sumner had addressed his critics in the death of deviance debate. In addition to this, the chapter also offered a commentary on the 2011 riots that had recently taken place in the UK. Sumner had long insisted that because the social world generates offensive behaviours as well as perceptions of offensiveness, crime and deviance are always “doubly socially constructed” (2004a: 6), and the 2011 riots offered up a stark illustration of this, for the acts that constituted the riots as well as the censures that followed were manifestly and decisively shaped by their socio-historical setting. Unsurprisingly, according to Sumner (2012: 167), “riot is not a descriptive neutral term that formed and survived through agreement, but a selective and partisan ideological category based on the perception of ‘disorder’ from the top.” He suggested (2012: 169) that “market societies will generate different censures and forms of regulation from those societies where the state allocates goods”. Thus the censure of the 2011 riots, like any other, was very much of its time and place; in Sumner’s (2012: 169) view, “‘riot’ in modern capitalist societies is a censure of chaotic, public, free, collective movement, whether or not it destroys shops and liberates commodities or is anti-authority or just drunken; it is punished by depravation of freedom, and both the event and its censure happen mainly in the market society which generates them. Riots, whether as the censure or the censured actions, do not tend to occur in a satrapy or a Soviet Union. In societies of that type, it is best to be organised, armed and popular if you want to revolt or have a drunken brawl because you are more likely to be censured as dissidents or saboteurs and shot. […] Riots are as much a part of capitalism as boom and bust.” Indeed, he felt (2012: 176) that, “insofar as you can sensibly lump the different behaviours together under one censorious umbrella, the ‘riots’ are to some extent a direct expression of a free market economy working as you expect it to, i.e. chaotically. They are not a clear sign of sickness in society, nor that it is broken; they are a sign it is working fairly normally, with opportunistic materialism as the norm and unequal

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access to goods as the fact. The shops most targeted seem to show that the adverts have worked.” Referring to the looting that characterised the riots as “aggravated shopping” (2012: 172), Sumner denied that it was underpinned by any broader political motive. In fact, the rioters’ behaviour “showed as much sign of radical consciousness as your local Tory MP. Many actually did seem conservative or at least depoliticised in outlook: opportunist consumers rather than street-fighting alternative culture, Thatcher’s babies not Trotsky’s cadres. […] This was not even an attempt to stick two fingers up to the establishment; rather, it stuck two fingers into the pie of Western affluence” (2012: 177). That people had behaved in such a manner “in an aggressively entrepreneurial free-market economy that openly and committedly despises state regulation and worships de-regulation” could hardly be considered a surprise; indeed, “few at the top recently have displayed any sense that there were any rules or common-sense about when and how you did acquisitive opportunism. Indeed, the message from the top for years has been ‘help yourself’” (2012: 176).2 The censure of the riots had taken place against the backdrop of a fracturing and increasingly censorious late modernity. As Sumner (2012: 175) put it, “many new social conditions, such as lack of trust, heightened insecurity and perceived proximity and degree of risk, have maximised an inclination to censure, wherever and whenever, always others first of course”, to the extent that censure “has become a key weapon in politics, almost a mode of politics”.3 Yet, by the 1980s and 1990s, “we had moved from 2  In a similar vein, Sumner (2012: 169) criticised “the rich and powerful” who “often engage in anti-social behaviour but are rarely censured as anti-social for it in the popular media or in popular culture. […] They can send thousands to their deaths in war, ensure their friends and relatives obtain lucrative government contracts, or destroy the life-savings of millions of ordinary workers but none of that would ever be classified as deviance. That tells you all you need to know about deviance. It has a very specific meaning in Western cultures, one that most certainly does not include the habits of ‘high society.’” Sumner (2012: 176) also pointed to “the comfortable cluelessness of the politicians, intermarried and interlocked with the bankers and other wealthier classes in a culture of educated idiocy”; they are “out of touch and probably cannot hear even when they listen, because their world is so remote from ours” and have lost the ability to “steer the ship of hegemony”. As a result, “existing models of political domination through the power of ideology need re-writing. No one in casino capitalism is really ‘in charge’: there are just angry people censuring each other across various chasms. Those who can, leave for a beach, anywhere.” 3  Sumner (2012: 175) added that “by the end of the 1980s, our depoliticised cynicism meant that some had the confidence to celebrate their own censure, turning fate humorously

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moral conflict to deep uncertainty about the idea of morality itself” (2012: 175) and as a result, “today moral judgements are no longer authoritative and very few pronunciations from authorities are granted any moral weight. Like the staircase outside the building in ‘postmodern’ architecture, morality is now on the outside of society trying to get back in. It is no longer a key foundation of the whole structure” (2012: 174). Thus, “in that quagmire of censoriousness without normative security we try to find our judgemental feet to this day. We live in a world of censure” (2012: 175). Sumner also argued that the authorities’ response to the riots was, perhaps predictably, both heavy handed whilst being simultaneously insufficient; it ignored underlying issues “around polarisation of wealth, advertising standards and the proliferation of advertising, the need for protection of our core values and services from the remorseless logic of business, the concentration of jobs in already privileged regions, the declining health and integrity of families, and the public provision for young unemployed in a post-manufacturing world of vastly different life chances” (2012: 177). Indeed, for Sumner (2012: 170) “the very censure of riot speaks first and foremost of lack of authority. Authority without fairness or integrity provokes mischief, theft, damage, protest and rebellion; this is duly censured as ‘rioting’, and the cycle continues.” But, more fundamentally, he argued once again “for a critical re-moralisation of society, and for a major review and restatement of the criminal law—to reverse the influence of the amoral culture of the rich and powerful at all points” (2012: 174). In some of his most explicit comments yet on such a programme, he wrote that “my own view is that we need a democratisation and rationalisation of social censures. For example, we might incarcerate the investment bankers who so recklessly destroyed our economy, with the MPs who fiddled their expenses so outrageously, as well as the rioters who engaged in violence, arson and serious malicious damage. If our sentencing tariff prioritised damage to society over public disorder, the sentences for reckless bankers would be much longer than those of most rioters. We need to debate the censures we wish to enforce and those that we can relax” (2012: 174).4 It is precisely because “the concept of social censure and sardonically into the positive prize of identity. For after all, in the meaningless entropy of post-modernity, you were lucky to have an identity.” 4  Eagleton (2016a: 155) wrote in similar terms about the crash of 2008: “The momentary crack-up of the system revealed we are still languishing in a world of mass unemployment and

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does not imply a critique of all censuring” that Sumner was able to argue, in a clear echo of his work on social control, that “in today’s world, the task for authorities, including those in micro-systems, is to find censures that will connect, win respect, bind, justify, authorise and, ultimately, evoke self-discipline and motivation” (2012: 174).

Measure for Measure Sumner’s sense of the need for a renewed form of social control, and the potential contribution of censure to this, was foregrounded in his essay on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, a play first performed in 1604 which provides “a rich resource for understanding the meaning of criminal justice, whilst remaining thoroughly a creature of its time” (Sumner 2014: 97).5 Sumner (2014: 97) saw Measure for Measure as expounding the “old-fashioned idea that ‘law-and-order’ must be in balance with the freedom to make mistakes or to experiment”. In his estimation, Measure for Measure helps to illustrate “the age-old truth that moral judgments have a nasty habit of being profoundly situated within the culture, context and history of the judge, of being constantly in movement, of revealing an hypocrisy of purity caught in the shifting sands of time, memory and change, and of being frequently a site of contestation between different pretenders to whatever local or global throne is at stake” (2014: 97). An appreciation of this truth did not, however, require one to “ignore or undervalue the ‘obscenity of the real’ or the malevolence of motive” but it simply highlighted the uncertainties inherent in the “definition, character and causation of both obscenity and malevolence” (2014: 97–8). Too often such issues are ignored and “it has always been all-too-easy to cast obscenely overpaid executives, gross inequalities and squalid public services, one in which the state was every bit as obedient a tool of ruling-class interests as the most resolutely vulgar of Marxists had ever imagined. […] The true gangsters and anarchists wore pinstripe suits, and the robbers were running the banks rather than raiding them.” 5  This essay appeared in the edited collection The Poetics of Crime (Jacobsen 2014), a work that looked at creative methodologies and the use of art and literature in the analysis of crime. Sumner had made passing references to Measure for Measure previously: In his discussion of Foucault he referred to Lord Angelo as an example of cold, rational masculinity (1990: 33), and the play was also mentioned in the Obituary (1994: 300) and in his Sage Dictionary entry on social censure (2001: 266). Sumner’s earlier riots essay had noted how deviance was a distinctly twentieth century concept, and “censure is the general, trans-historical concept, the idea that is workable in all periods, the term that appears in Shakespeare, Sellin and Becker” (2012: 171).

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blame and much harder to undo the damage it causes. It is much easier to condemn and exclude rather than to explain in depth and do justice to all sides” (2014: 98). Thus, the play enjoins the reader to find balance in judgement in a complex social world, and “it is Shakespeare’s great triumph in Measure for Measure to have achieved so inclusive and delicate a complexity […] with so sure and subtle a touch” (2014: 97). For Sumner, its messages remained germane in a contemporary society so thoroughly suffused with censure and yet, bedevilled by “short attention spans and austerity budgets” (2014: 99), often wilfully ignorant of complexity and context. In the end, “censure, of self or others, is necessary, but in just measure, metered in moderation, and appropriate to the fault” (2014: 99). Within this overarching focus, Sumner explored many of the play’s themes. One of the most prominent was how “two models of authority and justice are juxtaposed throughout the play and articulated through the two leading characters” (2014: 100), Angelo and the Duke of Vienna.6 The young, scholarly soldier Angelo is left in charge of the city in the supposed absence of the Duke on a diplomatic mission. He is “anxious to rule with reason, tape measure and science” (2014: 100), a kind of “heartless rigour” (2014: 103) which leads him to make an example of Claudio in order to deter others. Angelo thus embodies the “penality of terror” (Foucault 1977) through his coldly rational, politically motivated practice of censure (2014: 103), although of course he secretly fears that “his authority would be lost for lack of relentless assertion” (2014: 104). Indeed, “he may even be aware that all politicians are actors on a stage with only a brief tenancy on any authority, whose lasting grounding is 6  Other themes in the play explored by Sumner included: Shakespeare’s distinction between the reason of the state and the “messy instincts, folk culture and home-made knowledge” of the “ungovernable” (Brewer and Styles 1980) English people (Sumner 2014: 113); the play’s demonstration that “there is no such thing as pure reason or pure legal truth: they are both pricked by the thorns of a dirty and bloody reality and, at a minimum, are in constant flux” (2014: 113), such that “all judgment is suspect and has its shadow” (2014: 114); Shakespeare’s message against authoritarianism at the play’s climax, where he shows that strict, excessive laws and decrees do not work as they pay the price of disrespect (2014: 115); the play’s sense that “laws and statutes require people to officiate” and those responsible for making decisions cannot hide behind the veil of legality, as when in the play Angelo says it is the law, and not he, who condemns Claudio. Rather, it is the case that “power must be responsible. Yet people, even the monarch, are too fallible to receive unrestrained power or unchallenged reason: thus even ‘brief’ authority cannot survive if it is too heavy or if, as the lawyers still say today, it does not come with clean hands. […] No authority escapes criticism or is above the law” (2014: 115).

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social justice, and that criminal justice is therefore theatre, and crime a plot device, masking a deeply social script. He knows that what is criminalized is hardly an abstract matter of pure definition, but something deeply corrupted, to him perhaps inspired, by the visceral socio-economic inequities of both ‘the vale of tears’ (Friedrich Engels), that hotbed of criminogenesis, and of the state and its officials. Yet none of that stands in his way or mellows his style” (2014: 104). Angelo nonetheless becomes captivated by Isabella, who exposes the fragility of his rationalist machismo “as pliable, context-specific, self-interested and fallible” (2014: 105), as well as “the sheer moral hypocrisy involved in the corruption of holding state power” (2014: 110). The older Duke of Vienna, on the other hand, is possessed of a “prudence and wisdom fine-tuned and chiselled smooth through decades of difficult discretion and tasteful caprice” replete with “some feeling of the sport” (2014: 100). The Duke goes undercover as a friar in order to secretly view Angelo’s administration of the city and his strict application of the law. Upon his ‘return’ he treats the protagonists with leniency and understanding and refuses to punish them to the extent that the harsh laws allow. He represents the idea that “the social institutionalization of virtue and prudence occurs through the humane and pragmatic administrative exercise of power in complex situations. It is not to be abandoned to some doctrinal logic or rational but terroristic simplification” (2014: 101). Instead, “throughout the play, the Duke’s role is to produce a just result, even if it involves some disguise, a little deceit, inconsistency, and a bit of public display; everyone gets their just deserts and no one is hung” (2014: 102). This is the case even though “the prudent Duke, our kindly representative of mediaeval natural law, is actually resorting to a most unnatural and devious political artifice to rediscover the meaning of justice” (2014: 111), and despite the fact that, from today’s vantage point, his dénouement looks somewhat harsh on the women involved (2014: 103). In measured passages, Sumner (2014: 101) suggests that “science without art and magic in the practices of governance is irredeemably flawed. Power itself, exercised without the wisdom of the ages, the lessons of history and the cultural accretions of community, is mere abstraction gone mad, literally logic without its senses. […] A just measure is not quantifiable.” Sumner (2014: 116) located Measure for Measure in the context of a significant historical moment in legal thought. At the time of its writing, law was increasingly being used as a tool of social control by the “emergent, commercial-military, urban legislators” (2014: 106) who were

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usurping the old community-based forms of law and ecclesiastical courts in seventeenth-century Europe, and saw their mission as one of “nation-­ building, scientific population management and social progress” (2014: 107). This involved what Habermas described as the “positivization of natural law” and it was characterised by a wave of moral crackdowns, including on matters relating to sexuality, as the play makes clear (2014: 106–7). Concomitantly, there was a shift “towards an abstract logical formalism” which “mapped out the abstract logic of capitalism that reduces so much to exchange, commodity, universal values and rights” whilst leaving untouched class rule (2014: 116). In the play, “the Duke’s tricks display the autocratic, if benevolent, paternalism of an older period; the prudence of landed patriarchal wealth in the land of the unfree”, and his artifice and deceit are “rendered virtuous through the exercise of mercy, foreshadowing the patron-client relations of eighteenth-century England, as Angelo is finally excused his errors. But in other hands they could be lethal, such as those of the Whig oligarchy a hundred years later (see Thompson 1975)” (Sumner 2014: 116). It was in fact Angelo’s “dogmatism” that was “the voice of a new age. For all the callousness of his measure, and the condescension of his class, his laws were public and he valued the publicity of law. What of publicity in the Duke’s Machiavellian scheming?” (2014: 116). This move “beyond both moral absolutism and pragmatic liberal prudence” and towards a rationalised legal sphere, “opened up the revolutionary question of the General Will: […] A veritable babble of discourses that constantly demand their voice and at the same time close down those of others.” Today’s rulers and leaders continue the longstanding failure to reflect the contradictions of the General Will, and “crime continues to sit on the tightrope over the chasm between a faulty censure and a dangerous problem” (2014: 117).

A Return to First Principles For the first time since Reading Ideologies, Sumner returned to the philosophical underpinnings of his work in a sustained manner with a chapter in the edited collection What is Criminology About? (Lippens and Crewe 2015).7 Sumner’s chapter was written in a spare, economical, precise style 7  Reading Ideologies had been written at a time when the question of science was very much a live one. If western Marxists wished to maintain that their work carried the standing of science despite no longer adhering to the cast iron laws of the orthodox tradition, then

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and made explicit his commitment to a form of critical realism whilst also reiterating the central role of Marx in his thinking.8 Sumner (2015: 196) began by bemoaning those contemporary positivists, administrative criminologists and “police scientists” who had abandoned any belief in causal sequences and busied themselves by “integrating their observations of surface patterns within the political needs and parameters of their funding agencies and what they would see as the necessary political authority”. Indeed, “the orthodox grant getting criminologist might say that their criminology ‘works’—because it gets funding, it gets published as criminology, it wins prizes and the state treats it as scientific criminology. Even though reading your horoscopes and watching Luther or The Wire might give you as much if not more insight into crime, if it looks like criminology, pays like criminology and is called criminology, then it is ­criminology” they needed to outline why that was the case. “It seems to me”, wrote Sumner in Reading Ideologies (1979: 90), “that Marx saw science as a serialized discourse of signs and ideological formations which grasped in thought the range and nature of the forms of appearance of a thing and the inner or hidden structure of that thing which gave it those forms of appearance. All sciences were of this nature: a science, for Marx, explains why things appear as they do and thoroughly describes those appearances. […] An explanation, in his conception, specified the latent causal mechanism and its necessary, perceptible effects. As such, it was capable of being tested in the light of the carefully established effects it supposed […] In short, Marx thought it was possible for things to be knowable and that science was the conscious, discursive explication of that knowledge.” It followed that “Marxists, therefore, rightly posit the possibility of a science of ideologies and reject the notion that observations on ideologies must be restricted to political, moral and aesthetic evaluations of their effects. One can go further than that and attempt to describe the inner structures and conditions of existence of ideology which necessitate certain identifiable consequences” (1979: 90). On this view, “science, then, for Marx, is accurate ideology or, more precisely, a series of ideologies which adequately approximate to their real referent in all its aspects” (1979: 92). Consequently, “science for him was only a rather special type of ideological formation (or complex signification) rooted in social practice, and as such it lost the reified and mysterious character granted to it by bourgeois social relations which set it on high apart from everyday practice and the common man. Thus, the distinction for him would not be between ideology and science, but between levels of approximation to an object and its mechanism” (1979: 92–3). The corollary of this was that “some ideologies were more accurate representations of reality than others and warranted the social label of science. Thus, although what counts as science is subject to all the economic, political and cultural determinations that affect the use of any term, relations of accuracy between discourse and reality are real phenomena” (1979: 290–1). 8  In their introduction to the volume, the editors termed Sumner a “pioneer” who, “in a series of path-breaking works”, was one of the few criminologists who had “deployed sustained philosophical reflection in an attempt to rethink the issue of just what it is that criminology is about” (Lippens and Crewe 2015: 3).

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(2015: 196). Much of this kind of work ignores the truth that “crime itself is unobservable—because it is an evaluative category” (2015: 196) and relies instead on “the convention that crime is defined by the state and committed by the poor, and that this is not theoretically significant, or a theory. This is a state of denial, driven by politics and vested interest. It expresses itself in the most bizarre claim, or psychological projection, that it is the criminological opposition that is driven by partisan interest, politics and ideology. RealPolitik thus portrays its critics as unrealistic when the only reality is decreed by the state. Power equals rationality and knowledge; critique equals irrationalism and ideology” (2015: 197). Supposed ‘radicals’, meanwhile, all too often fail to escape the hermeneutic circle that Sumner described back in Reading Ideologies. As he put it (2015: 197), too often “the interpretive sociologist or the Foucauldian has to rely on or suppose given facts or data, or else their output becomes a mere string of subjectivities mapping out some other subjects’ string of subjectivities, and so gives no reason to be compelled by it, other than as an intuitively attractive graphic”. The radicals’ characteristic lack of commitment to scientific truth, based on the assumption that “all truths are reducible to terms within discourses, supported by institutional practices, and thus can bear no relationship to any social reality outside the discourse”, leaves them “open to the charges of selectivity of data and amoral or disingenuous descriptiveness” (2015: 197). Sumner (2015: 195) went on to locate his own work as belonging to the critical realist tradition, as developed by Bhaskar (1975, 1989).9 He argued that this represented a better starting point for deliberations in a criminological discipline so often ignorant of the philosophy of social science, particularly in the face of intractable capitalist crisis and the continuing delusions of free market economics. For the critical realist, “science is concerned to detect and outline the generative mechanisms or internal structures of phenomena that explain their surface manifestation; the roots, photosynthesis and stems that give rise to surface flowers” (Sumner 2015: 199). According to Bhaskar (1989: 19), critical realism’s essence “consists in the movement, at any one level of enquiry, from manifest 9  Sumner (2015: 205) wrote that “there were a few voices in criminology that stood for a critical realism, both philosophically and politically. […] My own writings on social censure […] were based on such a philosophy of social science.” It was, of course, in his PhD and Reading Ideologies that Sumner initially developed his underlying philosophical position in a manner congruent with critical realism, although no mention of critical realism is made in these works.

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phenomena to the structures that generate them”. It holds that historical things are structured and differentiated “ensembles of tendencies, liabilities and powers, and historical events are their transformations”; it therefore explores “causal laws as expressing the tendencies of things” (Bhaskar 1989: 19). On this view positivist statistical correlations, for example, are not dismissed, “but merely seen as surface manifestations in need of explanation” (Sumner 2015: 199), and there is held to be a real, material natural world as well as a social one constantly in flux and made up of reflexive subjects who can adapt their behaviour in myriad ways; “the Higgs boson might stay the same but people deflect, lie, spin and rationalise” (2015: 199). Marx and Freud, who took as their starting points concrete historical phenomena and worked to expose their generative mechanisms and the contradictions within those mechanisms, are the archetypal critical realists (2015: 200).10 Just as Marx began with an analysis of the commodity in Das Kapital, so “in the case of any would-be critical realist criminology, the equivalent would be crime, and the task would be to unpack its generative structures and mediating conditions of existence” (2015: 199). More precisely, “the starting point has to be the social censures of crime in practice, or concrete criminalisations. Not social censure in general; not crime in general; but rather the specific social censures of crime in an epoch or period as expressed in the vernacular in their contexts in use. Criminology must begin with crime, but not with such crude and politically loaded an abstract idea of crime as a behaviour but crime as a condensed, overdetermined, situated and motivated social censure containing signifier, intended referent, historical traces or antecedents, and context or conditions of existence” (2015: 201–2). Furthermore, because realism in philosophy holds that there is such a thing as “reality” which is independent of our concepts and research methods, “for a realist social scientist, the establishment of any social truth must bear some relationship to the full social reality it purports to describe or explain”, although that social truth “is only ever an approximation of reality” (2015: 202). This implies 10  Sumner (2015: 200) suggests that “all in all, for the critical realist, Marx’s account of capitalism describes not just a mechanism, like a clock, but a multi-layered empire, an overdetermined social formation, revolving around a generative core, each layer with its own conditions of existence, each part of each layer also, and each layer linked with the other; a Star Wars-style ship so encrusted with its new technologies, its counter-products, barnacles and protections that they become integral to its make-up. No revolution would happen unless change (or Luke Skywalker) could fly into the centre and transform the generative core.”

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that whilst “some knowledges really are more accurate than others” (2015: 202), in the end “a properly realist position accepts that all we can try to do is move towards closer and closer approximations to the object of our enquiry through deeper and deeper immersion into the subject matter” (2015: 203). From this standpoint criminological theory should be assessed as to what extent it has begun to “integrate deep structures”, such as a criminogenic global capitalism, “into the theorising of surface expressions; to explain the well-springs and conditions of existence of contemporary social censures and pathologies” (2015: 205). Few criminological works have been grounded in the critical realist perspective. Sumner’s own work aside, the notable exception is Policing the Crisis (Hall et  al. 1978) which, for Sumner (2015: 206), “broke the mould of social science research into crime and deviance […] by starting with a specific social censure of crime or at least anti-social behaviour— mugging—and analysing the cultural and historical traces and elements condensed within its overdetermined form”. Although “the work is not fully theorised or systematic or explicit about its own commitments”, the manner in which it worked through “the complex ways that deep structure was mediated by institutions and culture before it delivered surface patterns” (2015: 205) was critical realist in nature. Ultimately, in Policing the Crisis, “the moral panic around mugging was revealed as the condensation of multiple layers of determination and constitution, each with their own relation to the final form. A contemporary social censure was shown in detail to represent the contradictions and anxieties of its age” (2015: 207). In similar fashion, “social censures could easily be seen as compacted, contested and fragmented ideological formations, with no single source or logic” (2015: 207). Sumner ended optimistically, suggesting that in the wake of Policing the Crisis and his own analysis of censures, “criminology could and would never be the same again”. He argued that “the ‘causes of crime’ gradually lost its meaning and value as an intelligible research agenda” and was replaced, at least in principle, by “two new seminal research programmes that go hand in hand”; the first involved the “historical etymology and structural elucidation of the social censures of crime”, and the second concerned “zemiology, the study of social harms and the way societies selectively neglect some and punish others”. He felt that “these programmes in tandem will eventually move us beyond the behavioural concept of crime forever. The moral-political component of orthodox or state criminologies had been revealed and there is no going back. In years to

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come, even though we will probably still be struggling with questions of what to criminalise, and how, we will smile at the very idea that the state categories of crime dominated our moral compass and governed our criminology for so long.” Sumner drew succour from the fact that “critical criminologists have begun to plough this furrow, without necessarily being conscious of their philosophical position, and much good work has been done already that never even mentions critical realist philosophy” (2015: 207).

Through the Looking Glass In his contribution to the edited collection Law in Popular Belief (Amatrudo and Rauxloh 2017), Sumner produced something of a manifesto for a bold new direction, though as ever with Sumner the signposts had been pointing this way for some time.11 Comparable in style, if angrier in tone, to his chapter on Measure for Measure, this time Sumner invoked Lewis Carroll’s 1950 novel Through the Looking Glass. He reminded us that in criminology “the master narrative is protected, relentlessly affirming that crime is a by-product of contingent and minor structural glitches and of eternal lower-class inadequacies—one that can be managed out or de-risked” (2017a: 16). This “conventional or canonical criminology” ignored the work of the “black cats” (2017a: 17) which highlighted “the obscene reality of normal life through the looking glass where everything we cherish is upside down and in reverse”. This black cat criminology lacked textbooks, “for fat cat publishers in the white world prefer saleable 11  The chapter brought to the fore and consolidated several ideas that had been bubbling away in his work for some time, for instance the sense that conflict and violence are inevitable when a new mode of production is set up or when a society is subjected to colonial domination. He had commented on this back in Reading Ideologies (1979: 51), and of course it was one of the leitmotifs of Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment (1982). It reappeared in Social Control and Political Order (1997a: 8), where he also suggested that criminology needed to decide whether it was on the side of marginalised groups or the state, “because it cannot be on both” (1997b: 140). In addition, he also returned to the ideas that “states are often established and developed through the use of crime” such as land grabbing (2004b: 142; see also 2006: 144), that the “historic sins” of the powerful were not really “our” crimes (2004b: 28), and that “in many of today’s western societies, crime matters are often upside down” (2004b: 26), each of which had been discussed in The Blackwell Companion. Marx and Engels’ sense that ideology may turn social relations “upside down as in a camera obscura”, outlined in The German Ideology and referred to by Sumner in Reading Ideologies (1979: 13), also made a reappearance.

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lowest common denominator safety”, and its monographs were published “as ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ criminology, as if not mainstream or ever establishable”. Furthermore, “its proponents are smeared and their works ignored or talked about as if they are not science. It is ultimately sidelined from the mainstream and its contribution airbrushed from institutional histories. It is not widely read or understood, or accepted as scientific, on the right side of the mirror. I know, for this is my world, the realm of criminology in reverse, of black cat criminology, of criminology by and for Others” (2017a: 18).12 But, as Carroll pointed out, “only the black kitten can see behind the mirror!” (2017a: 16), and Sumner (2017a: 18) went on to offer an outline of “the criminology they do not want us to see”. Censure, of course, provided the foundation stone for the whole enterprise; “crime is not a behaviour; it is a social censure. Anything in principle could be picked out and censured as crime, anything could be criminalised: what is censured depends on the historical period and culture, the context, the level of outrage, the depth of interest and the perspective of the viewer. It is rather like beauty—very much in the eyes of the beholder. […] White cats do not just label black cats, they made them black in the first place. The social construction of crime is not mere words or naming and shaming, it is the creation and establishment of social facts worthy of a bad name” (2017a: 18). Echoing Thompson (1975) and his own arguments in Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment (1982), Sumner (2017a: 20) suggested that “crime is not so much the mirror of society as the result of its inversion”, because “the great crimes enable their perpetrators to rewrite legislation and history itself so that the damaged, victimised and landless rebels become the criminals. Crime in this way redefines the language of the law” (2017a: 21). As a result highly destructive actions are often not crimed at all, whilst the trivial and peripheral are routinely met with the full force of the authorities’ power; for example, taking someone else’s property has come to be regarded as a “fundamental outrage”, whereas when viewed through the looking glass, “the fundamental outrage is the taking of 12  Indeed, throughout the chapter there was a clear sense that Sumner had become frustrated by his somewhat marginal status in the discipline. See also his comment that “Jock Young once said to me he viewed my work on crime, justice and underdevelopment as of profound importance for criminology […]. So did Sir Leon Radzinowicz. Few have picked it up since, preferring the bland view of modernisation and then globalisation, with its general view of initial violence settling into stable and localised working-class property crime patterns” (2017a: 20).

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­ eople’s land and calling it private property, and the subsequent denial of p the dispossessed’s humanity, described by white cats as evolution and development” (2017a: 19). Sumner considered the Native American genocide and its associated land-grab (2017a: 22), and the history of gold mining in Southern Rhodesia as described in van Onselen’s Chibaro (1976) (2017a: 26–7) as emblematic of this process. This was the history of “not a voluntary evolution but a coerced insertion, after much resistance, into the capitalist mode of production, into someone else’s future” (2017a: 27).13 Sumner lamented the inability of establishment criminology to see how “the roots of modern crime categories lay not in some deep-rooted ontological moral disorder, or some psychological depravity of the landless poor, nor in some abstracted and anodyne legal logic freed from the messy social class reality, but in the situated ideology of the newly rich mercantilists, the new white fat cats in wonderland, obsessed with property and the accumulation of wealth” (2017a: 28). Sumner (2017b) subsequently refined the themes of the Law in Popular Belief chapter in a paper delivered at the launch event for his festschrift, Social Censure and Critical Criminology: After Sumner (Amatrudo 2017). He argued that critical criminology’s observations of, among other things, how elites have the power to define crime and how law reflects dominant ideology, had laid the groundwork for a paradigm shift in the discipline. However, they had not actually disturbed the fundamental grundnorm of sociological criminology, namely the idea that society causes crime. He implicated himself in this failure, noting that even censure theory did not challenge this foundational notion. History tells us, he now suggested, that crimes cause societies, not the other way around, and this was glaringly evident at times of social transformation.14 Furthermore, 13  Following van Onselen’s analysis, Sumner writes that in Southern Rhodesia, “by the late 1930s, it would have seemed that the nature of ‘crime’ was as it appeared on the surface (thefts, gambling, debts and fights between workers) and that the big crimes of invasion, conquest and appropriation of land and labour had been forgotten or airbrushed from a newly rewritten history. The serious crimes of colonisation had produced a new normality, where ‘crime control’ was the sustainable self-justification of the established, but eternally criminal, colonial state” (2017b: 27). The persecution of those involved in relatively inconsequential misdemeanours “is not selective vision but the reproduction in culture of a structure of domination so well established that its concrete real practical birth has been long forgotten, as history” (2017a: 19). 14  Of course, whilst it may be rare in criminology, such thinking is by no means unprecedented. As Eagleton (2016b: 71) has noted, even the philosophical godfather of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, “believes that most political states were founded by violence,

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the ­traumatised responses and resistances of those who are subjugated as a result of this are censured, among other things, as crime, often over many generations as in the case of, say, the Canadian First Nations. Criminology, then, is upside down, in reverse order. Only a ‘black cat criminology’, peering through the looking glass and inverting the camera obscura, can see this. The seeds of a major new phase in Sumner’s career have clearly been sown.

References Amatrudo, A. (Ed.). (2017). Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Amatrudo, A., & Rauxloh, R. E. (Eds.). (2017). Law in popular belief: Myth and reality. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bhaskar, R. (1975). A realist theory of science. Leeds: Leeds Books. Bhaskar, R. (1989). The possibility of naturalism. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Brewer, J., & Styles, J. (Eds.). (1980). An ungovernable people: The English and their law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. London: Hutchinson. Eagleton, T. (2016a). Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eagleton, T. (2016b). Materialism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Allen Lane. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2012). Introduction: The need for new directions in criminological theory. In S. Hall & S. Winlow (Eds.), New directions in criminological theory (pp. 1–13). Abingdon: Routledge. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order. London: Macmillan. Jacobsen, M. V. (Ed.). (2014). The poetics of crime: Understanding and researching crime and deviance through creative sources. Farnham: Ashgate.

invasion, revolution or usurpation. Their origins are thus illicit, and only the gradual passage of time can draw a veil over these blood stained beginnings. In the beginning was coercion, which later modulates into consent. Your landed estate is mine if I stole it from you a long enough time ago. If I purloined it only last week, then you have the right to demand it back. The longer a nation survives, the more acceptable its sovereignty becomes. […] Effective power rests on collective amnesia.” Nietzsche too saw that “culture is the fruit of a calamitous history of crime, guilt, debt, torture, violence and exploitation”, although he celebrated this fact as it allowed “the flourishing of superior types like himself” (Eagleton 2016a: 112). Even Marx recognised that socialism “must be built on the proceeds of exploitation. […] The prosperity which might one day lay the ground for freedom is itself the fruit of unfreedom” (Eagleton 2016a: 112).

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Liebling, A., Maruna, S., & McAra, L. (2017). Introduction: The new vision. In A. Liebling, S. Maruna, & L. McAra (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (6th ed., pp. 1–17). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lippens, R., & Crewe, D. (2015). Introduction. In D.  Crewe & R.  Lippens (Eds.), What is criminology about? Philosophical reflections (pp. 1–9). Abingdon: Routledge. van Onselen, C. (1976). Chibaro: African mine labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900–1933. London: Pluto Press. Rock, P. (2017). The foundations of sociological theories of crime. In A. Liebling, S. Maruna, & L. McAra (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (6th ed., pp. 21–56). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies: An investigation into the Marxist theory of ideology and law. London: Academic Press. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1982). Crime, justice and underdevelopment. London: Heinemann. Sumner, C. (1990). Foucault, gender and the censure of deviance. In L. Gelsthorpe & A.  Morris (Eds.), Feminist perspectives in criminology (pp.  26–40). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1994). The sociology of deviance: An obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1997a). Social control: The history and politics of a central concept in Anglo-American sociology. In R. Bergalli & C. Sumner (Eds.), Social control and political order: European perspectives at the end of the century (pp. 1–33). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (1997b). The decline of social control and the rise of vocabularies of struggle. In R. Bergalli & C. Sumner (Eds.), Social control and political order: European perspectives at the end of the century (pp. 131–150). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (2001). Entry on ‘Social censure’. In E.  McLaughlin & J.  Muncie (Eds.), The Sage dictionary of criminology (pp. 265–266). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (2004a). The Blackwell companion to criminology. Oxford: Blackwell. Sumner, C. (2004b). The social nature of crime and deviance. In C. Sumner (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to criminology (pp. 3–31). Oxford: Blackwell. Sumner, C. (2006). Censure, criminology and politics. In I. Rivera, H. C. Silveira, E. Bodelon, & A. Recasens (Eds.), Contornos y pliegues del derecho: Homenaje a Roberto Bergalli (pp. 140–146). Barcelona: Anthropos. Sumner, C. (2010a). About CrimeTalk: Acknowledgments. CrimeTalk. Retrieved from https://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/office-stuff. Sumner, C. (2010b). Welcome to CrimeTalk. CrimeTalk. Retrieved from https:// www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/of fice-stuf f/help/64-welcome-tocrimetalk.

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Sumner, C. (2012). Censure, culture and political economy: Beyond the death of deviance debate. In S. Hall & S. Winlow (Eds.), New directions in criminological theory (pp. 165–180). Abingdon: Routledge. Sumner, C. (2014). Measure for measure: Justice in the society of censure. In M. V. Jacobsen (Ed.), The poetics of crime: Understanding and researching crime and deviance through creative sources (pp. 97–118). Farnham: Ashgate. Sumner, C. (2015). Critical realism, overdetermination and social censure. In D. Crewe & R. Lippens (Eds.), What is criminology about? Philosophical reflections (pp. 195–209). Abingdon: Routledge. Sumner, C. (2017a). Criminology through the looking-glass. In A. Amatrudo & R.  E. Rauxloh (Eds.), Law in popular belief: Myth and reality (pp.  15–29). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sumner, C. (2017b). A new paradigm in criminology: Censure, harm and pathology. Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner book launch event, University of Nottingham, 10 November. Thompson, E. P. (1975). Whigs and hunters: The origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane. Tierney, J. (2010). Criminology: Theory and context (3rd ed.). Harlow: Pearson.

CHAPTER 7

After Sumner?

Abstract  The final chapter of the book takes stock of Sumner’s achievements to date, making some concluding observations about the nature of Sumner’s oeuvre and its contemporary significance. It considers Sumner’s work as a cumulative project, his long-standing commitment to theory, his relationship to Marxism, his belief that a thoroughgoing moral renewal of society has become necessary and his somewhat uneven influence in the discipline. The chapter concludes by suggesting that, in a fracturing late modernity where censoriousness has reached a new pitch, Sumner’s work is more relevant than ever. Keywords  Sumner • Criminological theory • Censure • Late modernity In 2018 Sumner left University College Cork and, the following year, became Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Sheffield, back in the city where so much of his early thinking had been developed. His festschrift, Social Censure and Critical Criminology: After Sumner (Amatrudo 2017a) had showcased the continuing utility of his work (particularly in Amatrudo 2017b; Chan and Wing Lo 2017; Farmer 2017; Lippens 2017; Moxon 2017; O’Neill 2017; Roberts 2017; Tombs 2017), and at its launch event Sumner (2017) remarked that, despite the book’s title, he still considered himself an active scholar. Nevertheless, in © The Author(s) 2020 D. Moxon, Colin Sumner, Palgrave Pioneers in Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36941-5_7

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the wake of his second retirement from full-time academic employment, it seems an appropriate time to take stock of Sumner’s achievements to date.

Sumner’s Work as a Cumulative Project Sumner’s body of work is best seen as cumulative in nature and, as he said himself of Reading Ideologies (1979: 6), “what fruits it bears are strewn throughout”. This is not particularly a la mode in contemporary academia, where harassed academics compete to publish ever-more tightly focussed, discrete, self-contained articles from which they will be able to rapidly demonstrate easily quantifiable ‘impacts’. Nevertheless, the main elements of Sumner’s project were arguably in place by the time he had finished his PhD. As Chap. 2 discussed, Sumner had joined the criminological ranks after the heady, early days of the NDC had passed and the field had entered a period of intense theoretical ferment. As a result he took great care to work out and meticulously explicate his underlying theoretical position, and these robust foundations have helped to ensure that there have been no headline-grabbing lurches from one position to another over the years, unlike some of his contemporaries. Instead, his oeuvre can be read in terms of the steady, progressive unspooling of his core idea of ideological censure. Unfortunately, this has led to some difficulties for readers perhaps not familiar with Sumner’s entire corpus of work and therefore not clear how, for instance, the Obituary is of a piece with Reading Ideologies. Once Sumner’s work is viewed as a cumulative project, the interconnections between the different elements become clearer. His underlying, historical materialist, position on ideology resulted in the development of a distinctive methodological approach to ‘reading ideology’ as well as the idea that deviance and crime were forms of ideological censure. This gave Sumner a clear standpoint, articulated in great detail, from which to critique the work of others as well as, for example, the output of the mass media. It also quickly led to his work on underdevelopment, in which he showed how censure had been used in the process of colonisation to help render the society in the colonist’s image. After all, those places where a mode of production had been forcibly imposed were the obvious ones in which to observe the role of the ideological in the constitution of a society. Later, the Obituary fully worked up an idea already implied by the theory of ideological censure; this was that deviance as a conceptual category was redundant as it was a form of censure specific to modern social democratic societies. Sumner demonstrated this through a broad-brush application of

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the methodological approach detailed in Reading Ideologies. More recently, Sumner has explored how the fracturing processes of late modernity, and our concomitant drift towards a post-social war of all against all, have helped to reveal the need for a renewed form of social control not reliant on divisive and sectional forms of censure but on renovated moral-­ ethical normative foundations. His latest proposals for a ‘black cat’ criminology represent the extension of the logic of his position on censure to its extremes; in a world where the winners of historical struggles, no matter how their victory came about, get to divide up the resulting social formation into right and wrong and good and bad, one must be suspect of their ideologies and the accompanying censures that are so integral to those social formations. Ideology always was in the material base; crimes always did cause societies. As such, Sumner’s underlying position on ideology and censure has remained consistent, but the full implications of it have been painstakingly revealed over the longue duree. Of course, this is merely a sketch, but the general line of development it portrays is clear. Yet that development has not been as ordered and neat as this suggests. Instead, his oeuvre has something of the feel of a musical composition: certain themes and ideas have sometimes risen to the fore, and sometimes become subdued or dormant; motifs have intermittently been repeated over the years; different elements have interplayed with each other to reveal themselves in new light; gradual shifts of emphasis have ensued in response to changed contexts. The resulting body of work is complex, nuanced, operative on many levels, and can only be properly comprehended in its entirety. Sumner (1983: 157) himself once wrote of Habermas that his work was so “interconnected and cumulative” that it was “difficult to read any section of it without reading the whole corpus”; it is a passage that could equally be applied to his own writings. Sumner (1983: 157) also wrote of Habermas that he “has a language of his own”, and this “perhaps explains why many find a total read daunting. However, he is very consistent and precise, so that once the reader has cracked his codes the experience is not that difficult and well worthwhile.” Again, much the same could be said of Sumner, whose style has always stood out as distinctive. As he put it in his PhD (1976: iii), “at times the work is pedantic and at times it is polemical.” The early years were marked by a certain punctiliousness, as he developed his underlying theoretical position, his own terminology and register, and carried out forensic critiques of the work of others. In more recent years his work has tended towards the polemical and angry, although the two elements have always

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existed side by side to a large extent. His work is also highly quotable and stuffed full of metaphor and inventive wordplay which makes for an entertaining read, although this should not divert attention from the rigour with which the underlying arguments are constructed. Furthermore, as we have already seen, the fact that, as Garland (1998: 322) put it, “Sumner has a tendency to slip into a rapid-fire mode of historical narration that takes for granted a readership which shares the collective memory, intellectual shorthand and sense of humour of the author” is problematic now that the bulk of criminologists are not erstwhile radicals of the 1960s and 1970s.

A Commitment to Theory Throughout his scholarly career, Sumner has held to the view “that criminology cannot be limited to policy-oriented studies and must retain its integrity as an area of independent, critical inquiry of interest to scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. A criminology that wants to remain dynamic and worthy of its complex subject matter must therefore constantly renew theoretical debate, explore current issues, and develop new methods of research. To allow itself to be limited by the often narrowly political interests of government departments or the funding agencies’ need for a parochial ‘relevance’, […] is to promote its own destruction as an intellectual enterprise. A criminology which is not intellectually alive is useless to everybody” (1990c: 37). This position is in turn based upon a fundamental commitment to the idea that “criminology’s job is to inform” (1990b: 10). As such, theory has always been at the very heart of his endeavours, as against the “empiricist particularism” (Hall et al. 2008: xiii) that is so common in contemporary academia. Indeed, once the NDC had folded it seemed for a time that Sumner was ploughing a particularly lonely furrow; in the Preface to his textbook on criminological theory, Tierney (2010: xii) felt moved to thank him “for helping to keep key conceptual debates alive”. Nevertheless, Sumner is emphatically not against empirical research in principle; after all, it was the difficulties he encountered in his own empirical study of the press reporting of political demonstrations that prompted his own theoretical advances in the first place. His position is that empirical research and theory are symbiotic. Sumner’s fundamental theoretical contribution to criminology is arguably the answer he provides to the thorny ontological question: what are crime and deviance? (Moxon 2011, 2017; Reiner 2016: 64–7). That there

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are no universally accepted definitions of ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’ may surprise those with only a passing acquaintance with criminology. Instead, those engaged in the criminological endeavour are faced with a wealth of debate over what intuitively seem like straightforwardly ‘common sense’ notions. As Reiner (2016: 3) puts it, crime is an “essentially contested concept”. Of course, a degree of theoretical eclecticism is undoubtedly healthy in any field of study, but there can be few such fields where the actual nature of the object of inquiry itself is contested as keenly, or indeed sidelined or simply ignored. Sumner, as we have seen, sees crime and deviance as instances of ideological censure. The notion of censure is “basically a simple one” (Roberts 1993: 171), and despite the sometimes highly abstract nature of the historical materialism that underpins Sumner’s entire position, and the exhaustive, meticulous way in which he presents it, his is very much a criminology of the everyday which makes sense on an intuitive level and refrains from over-theorising; Sumner (1990c: 37) himself has suggested that many of his basic points are “stupendously obvious” and they can be fruitfully read without any great knowledge of the underlying theoretical position. That said, one of the great strengths of his work is that what at times might seem self-evident and perhaps almost banal can always be traced right back to rigorously delineated first principles. On the other hand, the historical materialist method for ‘reading ideology’ that he developed is inherently imprecise and open-ended, but it allows for fuller, richer analyses of the wellsprings of censure; no wonder some American sociologists, with their love of quantifiable, hard data, were so utterly bemused by the Obituary.

Sumner and Marxism Marxism’s decline as an intellectual force in the west has rendered Sumner’s relationship to it problematic. In the first place, Sumner was always a scholar rather than a political activist; in its early guise his own work, which he saw as “following the spirit of Marx’s own analyses, if not to the letter” (1979: 291), was but a small contribution to the wider theoretical shift of western Marxism away from the dogmas of orthodoxy and the economistic straightjacket (1976: v). As a result of this shift, the boundaries between Marxist and non-Marxist thought have gradually become almost imperceptible and “it is more difficult than in the past […] to see where Marxism begins and ends” (Downes and Rock 2007: 324). Some of the core insights of Marxist theory are now widely adopted by social theorists of all

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hues. As Roemer (1988: 124) put it, “a materialist explanation is one in which the motive forces are competition, scarcity, supply and demand; […] it is questionable what it means to take a specifically Marxist approach to history when the materialist axiom, the cornerstone of the Marxist approach, has become central to almost all contemporary social thought.” Indeed, like any theoretical approach, Marxism will disappear if it is not plausible. On the other hand, if it is plausible, it is likely to enter into the mainstream of social science and cease to be specifically Marxist (Elster 1986: 5; see also Roberts 2017: 30).1 Attitudes towards contemplative work in criminology, particularly that which was informed by Marxism, began to harden in the 1980s as the discipline became increasingly technocratic in orientation and reliant on external funding bodies. Large swathes of criminology’s supposedly radical wing were happily complicit in this. But, as the world around him shifted, Sumner seemed to simply carry on doing what he had always done, no doubt confident in the robustness of his theoretical foundations, although by the 1990s he certainly wore his Marxism considerably more lightly than he had done before.2 As Chap. 4 noted, he was more concerned that the Obituary was “good sociology” (2015) rather than with its fidelity to some supposedly proper Marxist line. Yet he had never felt bound by the diktats of Marxist orthodoxy; early in his career he had talked approvingly of the rise of civil liberties, women’s and black power movements and their potential contribution to socialism (1981) and, albeit in passing, he advocated the “greening” of criminology (1990c: 37) long before this became a commonplace. Today, there are signs of a revival of classical political economy in criminology (Reiner 2017: 117; 2012a, 1  Amusingly, this is redolent of Goode’s (2002: 114–5) view that deviance was being “obliterated by incorporation”! 2  As Eagleton (1996: 19) reflected of this period, “I have spoken of symptoms of political defeat; but what if this defeat never happened in the first place? What if it were less a matter of the left rising up and being forced back, than a steady disintegration, a gradual failure of nerve, a creeping paralysis? What if the confrontation never quite took place, but people behaved as though it did? As though someone were to display all the symptoms of rabies, but had never been within biting distance of a mad dog.” Scholars who continued to use the Marxist label during this period tended to do so as a vague term of political reference that also situated one’s work in an intellectual tradition (Tushnet 1980: 123); for instance, Wright (2003: 19) felt that “what was really at stake to me was the nature of the constituency or audience to whom I wanted to feel accountable”. Simultaneously, there can be little doubt that Marxism was quickly becoming increasingly incomprehensible to the students of the day; as Roberts (2017: 41) put it, they were very much “Thatcher’s children!”

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2012b), perhaps best exemplified in the work of the self-styled “ultra realists”, and Sumner’s work is well placed to make a renewed contribution.3 Sumner’s Marxism has always remained committed to public opinion, which marks it as distinct from some variants that often display a certain “elitism about working class consciousness”, a reluctance to permit reactionary opinions a hearing and an “eagerness to define anything other than ‘correct line’ as defective” (1983: 152). Nevertheless, he has expressed doubts about what constitutes the ‘public’ “in a morally and culturally pluralistic world without much political consensus” (Sumner 2012b). Eagleton (2016: 153–4) has written with great insight on this very issue, suggesting that “there is a necessary tension in socialist thought between affirming everyday experience and distrusting it”; Eagleton considers that “Gramsci […] is in search of a critique of everyday practice which would not simply upbraid it from some metaphysical height, but which would also do more than merely consecrate popular prejudice. Instead, it would seek out what was already critical in a form of life, not least the sense of agency and transformative possibility implicit in its workaday activities, and elaborate it to the point where it might constitute an 3  Ultra realism (see, e.g. Hall et al. 2008; Winlow and Atkinson 2012; Hall 2012; Hall and Winlow 2015, 2018) has an interesting relationship with the work of Sumner. Sumner championed the early work of Hall, as Hall has acknowledged (Hall et al. 2008: xiii). Later, as we have seen, Hall and Winlow invited Sumner to contribute to their New Directions in Criminological Theory collection, describing his concept of social censure as “a useful homegrown idea unwisely neglected by criminology’s narrowband mainstream” (2012: 11). Despite this, ultra realist works very rarely refer to Sumner despite sharing a somewhat bleak view of late modern capitalism. Indeed, Horsley (2014a) has criticised Sumner’s work for helping to shift the focus of the discipline away from the issue of motivation. Yet Sumner has always insisted that because the social world generates offensive behaviours as well as perceptions of offensiveness, crime and deviance are always “doubly socially constructed” (2004a: 6); on this view crime and deviance can be seen “as practical or behavioural responses to social conditions and as social censures reflecting the emotions, ideologies, and values of powerful social groups” (2004a: 9). Ultra realists would presumably concur with the idea that “the practices of offenders also reflect social tensions, and express particular political and ideological interpretations of those tensions. As Engels made clear in 1844, these responses are not necessarily any more or less progressive than those of legislators or the police. […] We may, indeed, all agree, in some cases, that they are instances of practices that we thoroughly deplore” (1990d: 46). Furthermore, if ultra realism seeks to understand how, in advanced capitalism, “the competitive individual gauges her success relative to the downfall and subjugation of others” (Hall and Winlow 2018), then censure theory might assist in understanding how these subjugations are realised. Horsley missed these potential points of articulation between Sumner and ultra realism. Nevertheless, Sumner charitably published a version of Horsley’s argument on CrimeTalk (Horsley 2014b).

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alternative form of ‘common sense.’” Sumner walks a similar tightrope in his own work, for he is keenly aware that censure is typically divisive and sectional, particularly in capitalism, but also fully conscious that the progressive censures of subordinate groups must take their place in any democratic renaissance.

Towards Moral Renewal? Sumner’s foundational work on censure “merely outlined a general theory” and did not provide the particulars of what should and should not be censured, despite some fairly strong indications (2006: 145). However, he has consistently maintained that “censure, of self or others, is necessary”, but also that this must be “in just measure, metered in moderation, and appropriate to the fault” (2014: 99). As he put it in the festschrift to Bergalli (2006: 146), “at the end of the day, there is no alternative but to face up to the painful task of deciding whether we still need to censure certain things, whether we still need to assign blame to our enemies, and to explore a vision of the world which delivers either another alternative set of censures or modes of dispute resolution which reduce the blaming of others.” On this basis Sumner has called for the renewal of normative jurisprudence (2004b, 1997b: 4; 2006: 145) in order to demonstrate “that there are alternative values and ethics available which would enable quite different decisions to be made in practice, decisions which would really promote social health, balance and growth” (1991: 73). However, as Farmer (2017: 51) has suggested, “the grounds for this remoralisation, or its connection to the broader sociology of censure project, are only gestured at”. Sumner has merely hinted that “the new vision of social control […] must be an expression of the popular moral critique of laissez-faire politics” (1997a: 147), rooted in the “common sense and moral-political instincts of the disenfranchised publics” (1997a: 149). It is possible that even this somewhat sketchy proposal is reliant on slightly too rosy a view of a body politic which has been brutalised by decades’ worth of exposure to neo-liberalism. More fundamentally, there is a tension here between Sumner’s desire to address what seems, on the face of it, to be obvious unfairness, and his theoretical inheritance as a Marxist sociologist which effectively commits him to the position that values and morality are historical, social products (Lukes 1985). Indeed, the very structure of Marxism has long frustrated

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attempts by Marxists to explicate coherent moral positions and concepts of justice, or to promote particular values and ends and the appropriate means for pursuing them (Moxon 2013), and the bulk of Marxist theory has tended towards the active avoidance of moral discourse as a result (Anderson 1980).4 It remains to be seen whether Sumner will return to such matters in greater depth.

Sumner’s Influence The impact of Sumner’s work has been decidedly uneven, and it is often ignored.5 It is possible to at least speculate on why this might be. As noted in Chap. 2, the move to Cambridge so early in his career might have had the effect of isolating him from other radicals of the ‘fortunate generation’. Perhaps, as Marxism increasingly came to be seen as antediluvian and antiquated, his refusal to disavow it was a barrier to more widespread acceptance. Perhaps the polarising effect of the Obituary was also a hindrance; that Sumner’s name and his position on deviance have become so provocative in certain circles has not helped the dissemination of the notion of censure that arguably remains his fundamental contribution and underpins the position on deviance which was expressed so forcefully in the Obituary. At the very least, however, Sumner must be applauded for keeping the theoretical conversation going in criminology at a time when others were turning away from such concerns (Tierney 2010: xii). It is important to remember that Sumner’s defining ideas have effectively been the result of a sophisticated type of reportage. He did not come up with a Marxian theory of ideology in isolation, but consolidated some of the then-contemporary thinking on the subject; the notion of censure and his position on deviance were born of similar circumstances. His approach has been to take an overview of the direction of travel in the discipline and rigorously work through its consequences. As a result, it seems wide of the mark to suggest that his relative lack of influence is down to any fundamental implausibility in his theoretical position. Indeed, 4  The debate on whether Marx thought capitalism unjust, briefly summarised in Moxon (2013: 45–6), is a fine example of the difficulties that abound when such issues are engaged with. 5  For example, there is no mention whatsoever of Sumner in some criminology textbooks, such as the otherwise remarkably comprehensive Criminology by Newburn (2013), and in works that focus on Marxism and criminology (see, e.g., Cowling 2008). Even several chapters in Sumner’s own festschrift (Amatrudo 2017a) do not mention him or utilise his ideas!

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many scholars continue to see crime categories as socially constructed ideological censures and utilise this conception routinely in their work. Of course, many do not use the term censure, less still actually refer to Sumner’s work. It would also be remiss not to mention the influence of Sumner’s teaching over the decades. His citation counts may not match those of some of his contemporaries, but his teaching and mentoring is revered by many of those he has supported. Indeed, Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice and Violence, Culture and Censure were made up of essays by his students. His various roles as visiting professor, research fellow and external examiner at, amongst others, Victoria, Queen’s, St Mary’s, and Simon Fraser Universities in Canada, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Hamburg in Germany, the University of California Berkeley in the United States, Barcelona in Spain and the Chinese University of Hong Kong have ensured that his influence in this regard is not limited to the UK.

The Future Sumner’s work on censure, despite being rooted in the criminological debates of the 1970s that are now but a distant memory, is beginning to seem remarkably prescient. We live in a social world that is increasingly generative of censoriousness. As Sumner (2012a: 165) has argued, “out there, censure is ubiquitous. […] This new century is a time of censure both in thought and in action”, and not just among those with institutional, political or economic power. And, at the very moment that censure has become omnipresent, we appear to have lost any common ground that might help determine what should and should not be censured, and the appropriate mechanisms for doing so. There is no shared moral code or set of normative prescriptions that, when breached, result in censure. Thus, there is a sense that, in the absence of shared social understandings of appropriate conduct, we are left with only opposed censures issued by groups who fundamentally do not recognise or understand the others’ point of view (2012a: 168–9). Crucially, Sumner (2014: 110) has argued that “critique of social censure should never ignore the problem such censure responds to or tries to resolve”. He has recognised for decades (see, e.g., Sumner 1979: 295) that in today’s “post-social” age (2004a: 23–4), the old axes of work, family and community are no longer able to provide fixity of condition or a stable basis for identity formation, and it is far easier in a social world of

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fragmented individualism to see others as one’s enemies, or as somehow “morally degenerate” (1990a: 50). Little wonder that the toxic soil of late modernity allows a whole host of harmful subjectivities and behaviours to flower, and little wonder too that individuals are quick to denounce and condemn. In this context, the real nature of crime and deviance as censures will only become clearer as the fracturing processes of late modernity intensify and the once solid structures and relative accord of modernity melt into air. Sumner himself long ago promised to write the definitive book on social censure (1994: 295, 303–4). Alas, this text has yet to appear, but it could scarcely be more relevant at a time when it is clearer than ever that “crime continues to sit on the tightrope over the chasm between a faulty censure and a dangerous problem” (2014: 117). Or perhaps Sumner will continue to peek through the looking glass and develop his sense of a ‘black cat’ criminology finally turned the right way up. Whichever way he turns next, and however much his work is ignored by the criminological mainstream, we need his ideas more than ever to help make sense of these ugly times.

References Amatrudo, A. (Ed.). (2017a). Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Amatrudo, A. (2017b). Two accounts of censure. In A. Amatrudo (Ed.), Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner (pp. 93–114). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, P. (1980). Arguments within English Marxism. London: Verso. Chan, G. H., & Wing Lo, T. (2017). The social censure of hidden youth in Hong Kong. In A.  Amatrudo (Ed.), Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner (pp. 139–189). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cowling, M. (2008). Marxism and criminological theory: A critique and a toolkit. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Downes, D., & Rock, P. (2007). Understanding deviance: A guide to the sociology of crime and rule breaking (5th ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eagleton, T. (1996). The illusions of postmodernism. Oxford: Blackwell. Eagleton, T. (2016). Materialism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Elster, J. (1986). An introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Farmer, L. (2017). Censure: Moral and sociological. In A. Amatrudo (Ed.), Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner (pp. 47–65). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Garland, D. (1998). Review of Bergalli and Sumner’s Social control and political order. British Journal of Criminology, 38(2), 321–324. Goode, E. (2002). Does the death of the sociology of deviance make sense. The American Sociologist, 33(3), 116–128. Hall, S. (2012). Theorizing crime and deviance: A new perspective. London: Sage. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2012). Introduction: The need for new directions in criminological theory. In S. Hall & S. Winlow (Eds.), New directions in criminological theory (pp. 1–13). Abingdon: Routledge. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2015). Revitalizing criminological theory: Towards a new ultra-realism. Abingdon: Routledge. Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2018). Ultra realism. In W. S. DeKeseredy & M. Dragiewicz (Eds.), Routledge handbook of critical criminology (pp.  43–56). Abingdon: Routledge. Hall, S., Winlow, S., & Ancrum, C. (2008). Criminal identities and consumer culture: Crime, exclusion and the new culture of narcissism. Cullompton: Willan Publishing. Horsley, M. (2014a). The ‘death of deviance’ and stagnation of twentieth century criminology. In M. Dellwing, J. A. Kotarba, & N. W. Pino (Eds.), The death and resurrection of deviance: Current ideas and research (pp.  85–107). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Horsley, M. (2014b). Censure and motivation: Re-balancing criminological theory. CrimeTalk. Retrieved from http://crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/library/ section-list/933-censure-motivation. Lippens, R. (2017). Sensure? Public art, territorial coding, and censure. In A.  Amatrudo (Ed.), Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner (pp. 333–350). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lukes, S. (1985). Marxism and morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Moxon, D. (2011). Marxism and the definition of crime. In-Spire Journal of Law, Politics and Societies, 5(2), 102–120. Moxon, D. (2013). Marxist criminology: Whose side, which values? In M. Cowburn, M. Duggan, & A. Robinson (Eds.), Values in criminology and community justice (pp. 39–55). London: Policy Press. Moxon, D. (2017). What is crime, what is deviance? Reflections on the development and contemporary relevance of Sumner’s notion of social censure. In A.  Amatrudo (Ed.), Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner (pp. 303–331). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Newburn, T. (2013). Criminology (2nd ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. O’Neill, M. (2017). Sex work, censure and transgression. In A. Amatrudo (Ed.), Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner (pp. 191–215). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Reiner, R. (2012a). Casino capital’s crimes: Political economy, crime and criminal justice. In M. McGuire, R. Morgan, & R. Reiner (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (5th ed., pp. 301–335). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Reiner, R. (2012b). Political economy and criminology: The return of the repressed. In S. Hall & S. Winlow (Eds.), New directions in criminological theory (pp. 30–51). Abingdon: Routledge. Reiner, R. (2016). Crime: The mystery of the common sense concept. Cambridge: Polity. Reiner, R. (2017). Political economy, crime, and criminal justice. In A. Liebling, S. Maruna, & L. McAra (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (6th ed., pp. 116–137). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, P. (1993). Social control and the censure(s) of sex. Crime, Law and Social Change, 19(2), 171–186. Roberts, P. (2017). Thinking through critical criminology. In A. Amatrudo (Ed.), Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner (pp.  1–45). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Roemer, J. (1988). Free to lose: An introduction to Marxist economic philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sumner, C. (1976). Ideology and deviance. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield. Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies: An investigation into the Marxist theory of ideology and law. London: Academic Press. Sumner, C. (1981). The rule of law and civil rights in contemporary Marxist theory. Kapitalistate: Working Papers on the Capitalist State, 9, 63–91. Sumner, C. (1983). Law, legitimation and the advanced capitalist state: The jurisprudence and social theory of Jurgen Habermas. In D.  Sugarman (Ed.), Legality, ideology and the state (pp. 119–158). London: Academic Press. Sumner, C. (1990a). Series’ editor’s introduction. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. xi–xii). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990b). Introduction: Contemporary socialist criminology. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 1–12). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990c). Rethinking deviance: Towards a sociology of censure. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp.  15–40). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990d). Reflections on a sociological theory of criminal justice systems. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 41–56). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1991). Ideology and law: Some reflections on postmodernist sociology and the ideological character of criminal justice. In R.  Bergalli (Ed.), Sociology of penal control within the framework of the sociology of law (pp. 47–77). Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law: Onati Proceedings Vol. 10. Sumner, C. (1994). The sociology of deviance: An obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1997a). The decline of social control and the rise of vocabularies of struggle. In R. Bergalli & C. Sumner (Eds.), Social control and political order: European perspectives at the end of the century (pp. 131–150). London: Sage.

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Sumner, C. (1997b). Introduction: The violence of censure and the censure of violence. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Violence, culture and censure (pp. 1–6). London: Taylor and Francis. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (2004a). The Blackwell companion to criminology. Oxford: Blackwell. Sumner, C. (2004b). The social nature of crime and deviance. In C. Sumner (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to criminology (pp. 3–31). Oxford: Blackwell. Sumner, C. (2006). Censure, criminology and politics. In I. Rivera, H. C. Silveira, E. Bodelon, & A. Recasens (Eds.), Contornos y pliegues del derecho: Homenaje a Roberto Bergalli (pp. 140–146). Barcelona: Anthropos. Sumner, C. (2012a). Censure, culture and political economy: Beyond the death of deviance debate. In S. Hall & S. Winlow (Eds.), New directions in criminological theory (pp. 165–180). Abingdon: Routledge. Sumner, C. (2012b). Media, policing and politics (part 2). CrimeTalk, 9 March. Retrieved from https://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/library/editorsblog/698-media-policing-and-politics-part-2. Sumner, C. (2014). Measure for measure: Justice in the society of censure. In M. V. Jacobsen (Ed.), The poetics of crime: Understanding and researching crime and deviance through creative sources (pp. 97–118). Farnham: Ashgate. Sumner, C. (2015). Paper at Colin Sumner: The critical left and criminology. Seminar, Middlesex University, 26 March. Sumner, C. (2017). A new paradigm in criminology: Censure, harm and pathology. Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner book launch event, University of Nottingham, 10 November. Tierney, J. (2010). Criminology: Theory and context (3rd ed.). Harlow: Pearson. Tombs, S. (2017). Mitigating and responding to corporate violence: Beyond crime and criminology. In A. Amatrudo (Ed.), Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner (pp. 217–245). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tushnet, M. (1980). Review of Cain and Hunt’s Marx and Engels on law, Hirst’s On law and ideology, and Sumner’s Reading ideologies. British Journal of Law and Society, 7(1), 122–126. Winlow, S., & Atkinson, R. (Eds.). (2012). New directions in crime and deviancy. Abingdon: Routledge. Wright, E.  O. (2003). Falling into Marxism; Choosing to stay. In S.  Turner & A.  Sica (Eds.), The disobedient generation (pp.  325–352). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.



Works by Colin Sumner

Sumner, C. (1973). Law and sociology—The cases for partnership. The Law Teacher, 7(1), 7–19. Sumner, C. (1973). “Fact” and value in judicial decisions: The case of public order law in the UK. Unpublished working paper, Socio-Legal Studies Group, Sheffield Polytechnic. Sumner, C. (1973). Demonstrations and the law: An examination of some aspects of political justice. Unpublished working paper, Socio-Legal Studies Group, Sheffield Polytechnic. Sumner, C. (1973). The press signification of political demonstrations: A working paper. Unpublished working paper, Socio-Legal Studies Group, Sheffield Polytechnic. Sumner, C. (1974). Semiology in sociology of law research: An initial investigation of the possibilities. Fourth conference of the Socio-Legal Studies Group, Manchester, 6 January. Sumner, C. (1974). Concepts of culture in theories of law and society: Notes towards a Marxist position on law. Unpublished working paper, Socio-­ Legal Studies Group, Sheffield Polytechnic. Sumner, C. (1974). Review of Freeman’s The legal structure. British Journal of Law and Society, 1(2), 205–207. Sumner, C. (1974). Review of Cohen and Young’s The manufacture of news: Deviance, social problems and the mass media. British Journal of Criminology, 14(3), 289–291.

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Sumner, C. (1975). Review of Podgorecki’s Law and society. British Journal of Law and Society, 2(2), 246–250. Sumner, C. (1975). Review of Seitzinger and Kelley’s Police terminology: Programmed manual for criminal justice personnel. British Journal of Criminology, 15(1), 103–104. Sumner, C. (1976). Ideology and deviance. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield. Sumner, C. (1976). Marxism and deviancy theory. In P. Wiles (Ed.), The sociology of crime and delinquency in Britain. Volume two: The new criminologies (pp. 159–174). London: Martin Robertson. Sumner, C. (1979). Reading ideologies: An investigation into the Marxist theory of ideology and law. London: Academic Press. Sumner, C. (1979). Review of Stockdale’s A study of Bedford prison 1660–1877. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 18(1), 56–58. Sumner, C. (1979). Review of Solomon’s Soviet criminologists and penal policy. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 7(1), 111–112. Sumner, C. (1980). Review of Rennie’s The search for criminal man and Sleffell’s The law and the dangerous criminal. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 19(3), 178–179. Sumner, C. (1981). Race, crime and hegemony: A review essay. Contemporary Crises, 5(3), 277–291. Sumner, C. (1981). Pashukanis and the jurisprudence of terror. Insurgent Sociologist, 11(1), 99–106. Sumner, C. (1981). Review of Phillips’ Marx and Engels on law and laws. British Journal of Criminology, 21(3), 293–294. Sumner, C. (1981). The rule of law and civil rights in contemporary Marxist theory. Kapitalistate: Working Papers on the Capitalist State, 9, 63–91. Sumner, C. (1981). Review of Burman and Harrell-Bond’s (eds.) The imposition of law. International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 9(4), 442–443. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1982). Crime, justice and underdevelopment. London: Heinemann. Sumner, C. (1982). Preface. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Crime, justice and underdevelopment (pp. xi–xiii). London: Heinemann. Sumner, C. (1982). Crime, justice and underdevelopment: Beyond modernisation theory. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Crime, justice and underdevelopment (pp. 1–39). London: Heinemann.

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Sumner, C. (1982). Review of Shelley’s Crime and modernisation and readings in comparative criminology. British Journal of Criminology, 22(4), 409–411. Sumner, C. (ed.) (1982). Crime, justice and the mass media: Papers presented to the 14th Cropwood round-table conference, December 1981. University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology: Cropwood Conference Series No. 14. Sumner, C. (1982). Editor’s preface. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Crime, justice and the mass media: Papers presented to the 14th Cropwood round-table conference, December 1981 (p. ii). University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology: Cropwood Conference Series No. 14. Sumner, C. (1982). “Political hooliganism” and “rampaging mobs”: The national press coverage of the Toxteth “Riots”. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Crime, justice and the mass media: Papers presented to the 14th Cropwood round-table conference, December 1981 (pp.  25–35). University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology: Cropwood Conference Series No. 14. Sumner, C. (1982). The ideological nature of law. In P.  Beirne & P.  Quinney (Eds.), Marxism and law (pp.  255–261). New  York: John Wiley. Sumner, C. (1983). Law, legitimation and the advanced capitalist state: The jurisprudence and social theory of Jurgen Habermas. In D.  Sugarman (Ed.), Legality, ideology and the state (pp.  119–158). London: Academic Press. Sumner, C. (1983). Rethinking deviance. In S. Spitzer (Ed.), Research in law, deviance and social control (volume 5). Greenwich: JAI Press. Sumner, C. (1984). Review of Jones’ Crime, race and culture: A study in a developing country. Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 23(2), 126–127. Sumner, C. (1987). Review of Mahabir’s Crime and nation building in the  Caribbean: The legacy of legal barriers. Contemporary Crises, 11(1), 77–81. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1990). Censure, politics and criminal justice. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990). Series editor’s introduction. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. xi–xii). Buckingham: Open University Press.

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Sumner, C. (1990). Introduction: Contemporary socialist criminology. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp.  1–12). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990). Rethinking deviance: Towards a sociology of censure. In C. Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 15–40). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990). Reflections on a sociological theory of criminal justice systems. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 41–56). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C., & Sandberg, S. (1990). The press censure of “dissident minorities”: The ideology of parliamentary democracy, Thatcherism and “policing the crisis”. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Censure, politics and criminal justice (pp. 163–193). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1990). Foucault, gender and the censure of deviance. In L. Gelsthorpe & A. Morris (Eds.), Feminist perspectives in criminology (pp. 26–40). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1991). Ideology and law: Some reflections on postmodernist sociology and the ideological character of criminal justice. In R. Bergalli (Ed.), Sociology of penal control within the framework of the sociology of law (pp. 47–77). Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law: Onati Proceedings Vol. 10. Sumner, C. (1991). Crime, justice and underdevelopment: Beyond modernisation theory. In P. Worsley (Ed.), The new modern sociology readings (pp. 496–499). London: Penguin. Sumner, C. (1993). Series editor’s introduction. In T.  W. Lo (Ed.), Corruption and politics in Hong Kong and China (pp. ix–xii). Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1994). The sociology of deviance: An obituary. Buckingham: Open University Press. Sumner, C. (1996). Collaboration, criminalisation and social comfort. Franco-British Studies: Journal of the British Institute in Paris, 21, 55–65. Bergalli, R., & Sumner, C. (Eds.). (1997). Social control and political order: European perspectives at the end of the century. London: Sage. Sumner, C. (1997). Social control: The history and politics of a central concept in Anglo-American sociology. In R.  Bergalli & C.  Sumner (Eds.), Social control and political order: European perspectives at the end of the century (pp. 1–33). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (1997). The decline of social control and the rise of vocabularies of struggle. In R. Bergalli & C. Sumner (Eds.), Social control and

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political order: European perspectives at the end of the century (pp. 131–150). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (1997). Violence, culture and censure. London: Taylor and Francis. Sumner, C. (1997). Introduction: The violence of censure and the censure of violence. In C.  Sumner (Ed.), Violence, culture and censure (pp. 1–6). London: Taylor and Francis. Sumner, C. (1997). Censure, crime and state. In M. Maguire, R. Morgan, & R.  Reiner (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of criminology (2nd ed., pp. 499–510). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beirne, P., & Sumner, C. (1997). Editorial statement. Theoretical Criminology, 1(1), 5–11. Sumner, C., & Lorenzo, H. (Eds.). (2000). Multicultural policing in a democracy. Missouri: The Institute for International Studies. Sumner, C. (2000). From militaristic to civil policing: A general view. In C. Sumner & H. Lorenzo (Eds.), Multicultural policing in a democracy (pp. 7–24). Missouri: The Institute for International Studies. Sumner, C. (2001). Entry on ‘Deviance’. In E. McLaughlin & J. Muncie (Eds.), The Sage dictionary of criminology (pp. 89–90). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (2001). Entry on ‘Social censure’. In E.  McLaughlin & J.  Muncie (Eds.), The Sage dictionary of criminology (pp.  265–266). London: Sage. Sumner, C. (Ed.). (2004). The Blackwell companion to criminology. Oxford: Blackwell. Sumner, C. (2004). The social nature of crime and deviance. In C. Sumner (Ed.), The Blackwell companion to criminology (pp.  3–31). Oxford: Blackwell. Sumner, C. (2004). Social censure and political domination. Paper delivered at the University of Turin, 12 March. Sumner, C. (2006). Censure, criminology and politics. In I. Rivera, H. C. Silveira, E.  Bodelon, & A.  Recasens (Eds.), Contornos y pliegues del derecho: Homenaje a Roberto Bergalli (pp.  140–146). Barcelona: Anthropos. Sumner, C. (2010). The editor, Colin Sumner. CrimeTalk. Retrieved from h t t p s : / / w w w. c r i m e t a l k . o r g . u k / i n d e x . p h p / o f f i c e - s t u f f / the-editor-colin-sumner. Sumner, C. (2010). About CrimeTalk: Acknowledgments. CrimeTalk. Retrieved from https://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/office-stuff.

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Sumner, C. (2010). Welcome to CrimeTalk. CrimeTalk. Retrieved from h t t p s : / / w w w. c r i m e t a l k . o r g . u k / i n d e x . p h p / o f f i c e - s t u f f / help/64-welcome-to-crimetalk. Sumner, C. (2012). Media, policing and politics (part 1). CrimeTalk, 19 February. Retrieved from http://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/ library/editors-blog/664-holding-others-to-account. Sumner, C. (2012). Censure, culture and political economy: Beyond the death of deviance debate. In S. Hall & S. Winlow (Eds.), New directions in criminological theory (pp. 165–180). Abingdon: Routledge. Sumner, C. (2012). Media, policing and politics (part 2). CrimeTalk, 9 March. Retrieved from https://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/ library/editors-blog/698-media-policing-and-politics-part-2. Sumner, C. (2014). Review of Goode’s Justifiable conduct: Self-­vindication in memoir. American Journal of Sociology, 119(6), 1819–1821. Sumner, C. (2014). Measure for measure: Justice in the society of censure. In M.  V. Jacobsen (Ed.), The poetics of crime: Understanding and researching crime and deviance through creative sources (pp.  97–118). Farnham: Ashgate. Sumner, C. (2015). Critical realism, overdetermination and social censure. In D.  Crewe & R.  Lippens (Eds.), What is criminology about? Philosophical reflections (pp. 195–209). Abingdon: Routledge. Sumner, C. (2015). Paper at Colin Sumner: The critical left and criminology. Seminar, Middlesex University, 26 March. Sumner, C. (2017). Criminology through the looking-glass. In A. Amatrudo & R. E. Rauxloh (Eds.), Law in popular belief: Myth and reality (pp. 15–29). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sumner, C. (2017). A new paradigm in criminology: Censure, harm and pathology. Social censure and critical criminology: After Sumner book launch event, University of Nottingham, 10 November.

Index1

A Althusser, Louis, 8, 9, 16n11, 18n15, 20, 44

Critical realism, 122, 123, 123n9 Cumulative nature of Sumner’s work, 81, 93

B ‘Black cat’ criminology, 126, 127, 129, 135, 143

D Death of deviance debate, 115 Deviance, 3, 13–17, 13n7, 23–31, 26n22, 42, 42n2, 48, 54–57, 58n20, 60, 67–82, 68–69n2, 70n4, 87–108, 100n8, 101n10, 103n13, 115, 116n2, 118n5, 125, 134, 136, 137, 138n1, 139n3, 141, 143

C Censure, 2, 3, 5–32, 39–62, 68, 69n2, 73, 75, 78, 79, 88, 89, 91–101, 93n3, 100n8, 103–108, 114–119, 118n5, 123n9, 124, 125, 127, 128, 134, 135, 137, 139n3, 140–143 CrimeTalk website, 114, 139n3 Criminal justice system, the, 40, 54, 56, 58, 59, 98, 115 Criminology, discipline of, 39, 68, 77, 123

F ‘Fortunate generation,’ in criminology, 2, 39, 68, 88 Foucault, Michel, 15, 47, 48, 76, 94, 99, 103, 118n5, 119

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

G Gramsci, Antonio, 7, 22, 139 H Habermas, Jurgen, 3, 44–47, 45n6, 45n7, 46n8, 121, 135 Hirst, Paul, 23–26, 25n21, 26n23, 28, 31, 44, 77 I Ideology, 3, 7, 8, 11n6, 12, 15–23, 17n13, 23n20, 25, 26, 28–31, 29n26, 31–32n28, 42–44, 46n8, 47, 49, 54, 57–58n19, 58n20, 59, 60, 62, 72, 74, 78, 81, 91, 98, 114n1, 116n2, 122n7, 123, 126n11, 128, 134, 135, 137, 141 Influence of Sumner, 141–142 L Late modernity, 88, 94, 99, 116, 135, 143 Law, 8–11, 10n5, 14, 15, 17, 18n15, 22, 22n19, 23, 23n20, 30, 31, 31–32n28, 42–52, 45n5, 46n8, 51n11, 53n14, 56, 57, 59, 62n22, 74, 77, 92, 94, 95, 102–105, 117, 119n6, 120, 121, 124, 127, 128 M Marxism, 2, 3, 6–10, 11n6, 15, 18–20, 23–28, 25n21, 26n23, 31, 32, 44, 45, 47–49, 52n12, 61, 62, 97n5, 137–141, 138n2, 141n5 Master-censures, 47, 48, 60, 97

Measure for Measure (1604), 118–121, 118n5, 126 Media, 24, 30, 41, 53–55, 60, 88, 98, 98n6, 116n2, 134 N Negative ideology, 28, 29n26, 81 Neo-liberalism, 2, 58, 61, 140 The New Criminology (1973), 14, 23, 24, 27, 28, 41, 42, 76, 76n7 New Deviancy Conference (NDC), 39, 76n7 Normative jurisprudence, 105, 140 P Pashukanis, Evgeny, 9, 42–44 Policing, 54, 59, 60, 98, 99 Policing the Crisis (1978), 41, 42, 42n2, 76, 125 Post-modernity, 117n3 Psychiatry, 71, 76 R Riots, 53, 53n13, 115–118, 118n5 Rule of law, 32n28, 43, 44, 50, 103 S Science, nature of, 17, 122n7 Social control, 13, 72, 73, 89–91, 96, 99, 104, 115, 118, 120, 135, 140 Social, demise of, 100 Socio-legal studies, 6, 8–11, 16, 32 State, the, 3, 9, 10n5, 13, 13n7, 14n8, 22, 25, 42, 43n4, 45, 46, 51n11, 54, 56, 58, 59, 74, 75, 77, 90, 94, 95, 100, 102, 114, 115, 118n4, 119n6, 120, 122, 123, 126, 126n11

 INDEX 

Symbolic interactionism (labelling theory), 13, 27, 28, 74, 97 T Thompson, Edward Palmer, 18n15, 32n28, 44, 52, 76, 121, 127 Through the Looking Glass (1950), 126–129, 143

155

U Underdevelopment, 41, 50–52, 60, 88, 98, 127n12, 134 V Violence, 45n5, 53n13, 59, 74, 91–93, 93n3, 99, 104, 117, 126n11, 127n12, 128–129n14