ABSTRACT
The 1960s is remembered as a period which, more keenly than most, displayed the tensions between liberation and repression, between political idealism and political corruption. The battles of competing ideologies – exemplified by the Vietnam war – continued to rage overhead, the persuasive force of their claims matched by the minatory force of their warnings. Much of the philosophical and cultural debate of preceding decades was beginning to bear fruit in terms of the claims of the individual, yet anxiety concerning the effects of such freedom preoccupied the Establishment in a ‘battle’ between competing claims upon the meaning of progress and of progressive liberalism.1 The 1960s were a time of extraordinary theoretical tension between philosophy and scientific empiricism; the decade saw the passage of the Abortion Act, and the legalisation of homosexuality between consenting adults. Yet with regard to the criminal law, Lady Wootton’s conclusion2 that our understanding of agency and responsibility might be flawed drew TB Hadden to retort:
Wootton clearly attempted to undermine old certainties – certainties which the previous chapter revealed as mutable – such as the polar embodiment of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, the socially neutral vision of the citizen embodying ‘free-will’ – all classical conceptions of mankind owing as much to myth as fact and yet of central importance to law. Hadden, quoting Hart, saw himself as championing the freedom of the individual; that the notion of responsibility was reflected in the choice of the free-willing agent to transgress or not to transgress. Lady Wootton, on the other hand:
Certainly Lady Wootton’s notion of approaching offenders as persons in need of ‘treatment’ at worst could have opened policy to the danger of new forms of abuse; yet her warning concerning the indistinct boundaries between ‘psychopathy and wickedness’
– between ‘mental’ and ‘moral’ sickness – continues to haunt us. Philosophy squared up to science, the putative agent of free-will hovering uncertainly between them.3
