ABSTRACT

This fi fth part of the book has discussed ways of explaining crime and criminal behaviour in a contemporary era permeated by moral ambiguity and where there have been increasing doubts about the sustainability of the modernist project in an increasingly fragmented, complex and diverse social world. Central to the notion of the postmodern condition, there has been the recognition of a range of different discourses that can be legitimate and hence right for different people, at different times, in different contexts, and where the notion of the objective truth (or the competing objective realities) of modernity has been replaced by recognition of the multiple realities or moral ambiguities of postmodernity. Many postmodernists have indeed celebrated the failure of the modernist project to establish rational foundations for knowledge and have wholeheartedly embraced this trend towards human diversity and social fragmentation.