Critical Criminology

Historical Development

During the 1960s, the emerging criminological perspectives were usually oriented to one of two theoretical approaches. First, there were those based on Marxist principles, especially of the instrumental Marxist variety. An early form was that of Willem Bonger, reaching its epitome with Richard Quinney's Critique of Legal Order (1974). Second, conflict theories relied on the work of Max Weber (1864–1920), Georg Simmel (1858–1918), Lewis Coser, Ralf Dahrendorf, George Vold, and Austin Turk. The Marxist-oriented versions were more likely to have an assumption that society was divided into two major groups, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and that it was driven by dialectical materialism. The conflict version was more likely to have a plurality of groups (class, race, gender, and so on); these theorists saw conflict as ubiquitous, a normal occurrence in society. In both forms, however, these critical criminologists gained power and came to dominate the creation of law, definitions of crime, and the development of particular conceptions of the “criminal,” as well as notions of a particular desirable social order.

During the 1970s, there were several groundbreaking works: Richard Quinney's The Social Reality of Crime (1970), Herman and Julia Schwendinger's “Defenders of Order or Guardians of Human Rights?” (1970), and Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young's The New Criminology (1973). These writings dramatically changed the contours of oppositional perspectives to the consensus paradigm and even created intense internal discussions within critical criminology of issues on crime. By 1980, the instrumental Marxist perspective began to decline. The rediscovery of Evgeny Pashukanis's (1891–1937) “commodity exchange theory of law” led to a more structuralist variety of Marxist criminology. Unlike instrumental Marxism's more rigid reliance on economic factors, even in the “last instance,” structuralists were concerned with “relative autonomy,” the somewhat independent effects of several spheres (economic, ideological, juridical, and political) often having their effects in combination (“articulation of instances”). The structuralist variety of Marxism came to dominate for those who self-identified as “Marxists” throughout the 1980s up to the twenty-first century.

The leading figure in the development of oppositional forms of criminological thought could be Richard Quinney. He galvanized critical thought with each transition in his own thinking. In 1970, he wrote The Social Reality of Crime (integrating the labeling [Page 346]theory of the 1960s with elements of conflict theory). In 1974, he wrote the Critique of Legal Order (an instrumental Marxist perspective). In 1977, he presented a more structuralist Marxist perspective in Class, State, and Crime, which he rewrote in 1980 as a second edition even integrating spiritual concepts (a materialist critique and a spiritual reawakening). From the 1980s to the present, Quinney has developed the peacemaking perspective, heavily relying on spiritual and pacifist writings, personal experiences of struggles, and how to overcome them.

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