ABSTRACT

Accusation, from its past, signifies a cry of distress, and may be viewed as ‘that which serves to sift’. It derives from the Old French accuser that developed from the Latin accusare, ‘to call someone to account for their actions’. The terrain of criminal accusation is complex, changing and embraces multiple alliances between differing political rationalities. Consequently untangling the webs of its politics is fraught with difficulty. Even so, a governmental critique could initially focus on naming the interacting political rationales that constitute accusations around ‘crime’. The architectures of state-legal accusation coalesce around various notions of sovereignty. Classical liberal versions of this developed critiques of the limits to legitimate state power, and focused on maximising individual freedom within domain of civil society. Classical theories in criminology, associated with the likes of Beccaria and Bentham, helped to entrench a modern, rationalised version of medieval sovereignty.