ABSTRACT
0000-0001-8721-7066
The chapter is organized as follows. In the first part of the chapter Wright Mills’ influential programme and public rallying-call for reanimating American sociology in the late 1950s by means of the reaffirmation of classical sociology’s ‘imagination’ is revisited. In brief the argument is made for its continuing salience for sociological criminology today. The discussion then addresses the contemporary problem of ‘sociological amnesia’ and ‘criminological chronophobia’ in much current social scientific practice. As an alternative the case is made for the conceptual retrieval and adaptation of the work of earlier generations of key theorists and researchers (often termed derogatively ‘old white men’). In particular, the legacies associated with Max Weber and Norbert Elias are given centre stage in this book’s key ambition of reconnecting classical and contemporary practice in sociological criminology. The core argument with regard to my selective ‘appropriation’ of the classical sociological tradition is that Elias and Weber’s perspectives and concepts are the most productive resources in sociological classicality to deploy for contemporary sociological practice in criminology. They are the most germane classical sociological perspectives for sociological criminology, but this does not preclude the use of other concepts or perspectives from other classical sociologists. In part two I discuss how the conceptual recovery of the long-term perspective and the comparative programme of classical sociology can inform and reanimate contemporary criminological practice. Underpinning this discussion is a sustained call for what Linklater (2011: x) has termed the ‘rehabilitation’ of the sociological inquiry into long-term horizons and of developmental processes that have forged both modern societies. This chapter then develops and specifies further this programme in parts three and four by establishing the core concepts of the field of ‘the social’: power, interdependence, and process. I also examine how this conceptual tool-box can be put to work empirically and theoretically by exploring the crime and violence question through the lens of power struggles between status groups and their shifting ‘established-outsider’ figurations. In doing so it is contended that the central subject matter of sociological research in the field of criminology is thus always, ‘people-in-dynamic-interdependence’ (Mennell, 1992: 95). In brief this is the ‘radical figurational turn’.
