ABSTRACT
0000-0001-8721-7066
In this chapter two closely inter-related issues are interrogated in the light of the methodological claims made in Chapter 4. In the first part of the chapter the relationship between what it is to be ‘critical’ and what it is to be ‘sociological’ in social science is addressed. I begin firstly by ‘unpacking’ the capacious uses (and abuses) of the term ‘critical’ in contemporary social science, and secondly by a reassessment of the strengths and limitations of the critical or radical criminological project. It is contended that the current radical criminological ‘orthodoxy’ (McLaughlin, 2011) is incapable of addressing some of the key empirical, theoretical, methodological and politico-normative challenges which contemporary sociological criminologists need to grapple with. However, I argue that all is not lost for a sociologically-infused, radical criminological legacy. I contend that the left realist programme offers some scope for the renewal of a politically and normatively engaged, and empirically-driven sociological criminology. This discussion of what it is to be respectively ‘critical’ and ‘sociological’ concludes by a reaffirmation of the inherently subversive nature of all ‘good’ sociological practice which makes the prefix of ‘critical’ largely redundant and unnecessary. Finally I argue against the claims of ‘side-taking partisanship’ in social scientific practice and instead argue for the necessity of balancing value neutrality and value involvement in the vocation of the sociological criminologist. In the second part of the chapter, the discussion examines the challenges associated with what has been termed the ‘normative turn’ (Sayer, 2000) in critical social science, when compared to the ‘value-neutral’ assumptions of the classical tradition. It is contended that a serious engagement with moral and ethical questions about the capacity of humans for both suffering and flourishing in collective life opens up new areas for empirically-informed theorizing around questions of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’, of the ‘just’ and ‘unjust’ and such like. Such questions represent important areas of social scientific enquiry but which for too long have been left to the abstract meditations of moral philosophers and ethicists. In order to add empirical substance to this call for normative deliberation on such questions, I draw on my own research on local communing and governmental strategies for community safety. In particular, the discussion revisits Smart’s (2007) concern that the ‘seriousness of sociology as a discipline seems to become compromised if it gets too close to the taken-for-granted stuff of everyday life’, and concludes that this ‘communing stuff’ is serious sociological and criminological business.
