ABSTRACT
In the field of criminology, for example, the 'cutting edge' of theoretical advance is said, by some commentators, to lie with writers like Jack Katz, who wants to travel on an analytical quest, after the example of Norman Mailer, to understand 'the moral and sensual attractions of doing evil'. The definition, and subsequent treatment, of a particular incident as 'crime', has to be analysed as an outcome on the unfolding of specific processes of 'action and reaction' in particular historical and geographical contexts. The familiar 'progressive' response to the advance of private commercial interest during the Fordist period was usually to rehearse a set of familiar arguments emphasizing the moral or normative sovereignty of the 'public interest'. At the end of the 1990s, the field of professional criminology, and of popular talk about talk, reduces, with extraordinary predictability and lack of intellectual curiosity, into a practical discussion about some new idea about 'best practice' in the 'prevention of crime'.
