ABSTRACT
This text has presented a narrative of criminology’s theoretical development through modernity to post-modernism; the story has not been simple, and there are, undoubtedly, competing versions. What, however, cannot be doubted is the complexity and ambiguity of our contemporary social context. How shall we face this ambiguity? To some social observers post-modernism denotes a crisis of confidence which threatens to undercut the tremendous advances of modernity. We inhabit the future the philosophers of the enlightenment dreamed of; yet feel we can no longer dream of a truly modern social solidarity. Certain commentators even blame the very idea of a normative social project itself for the new tensions threatening our sociality. Murray (1988) and others argue our problems of social order are attitudinal; a matter of the failure of individuals themselves to assume moral responsibility and enter into social interactions which do not rely upon force or fraud. Murray demands we do not deny that even the worst-off in modern western societies enjoy a standard of living beyond the dreams of their Victorian counterparts; if, therefore, the problems are of relations between people, late-or post-modern social problems do not require the state to take responsibility. We must rather seize back the moral task from the state. At present ‘we’ do not take sufficient trouble over the variety of social interactions and networks a healthy, spontaneous, social solidarity would require; the decline of family life is one symptom. To the writers of the right, in the name of a social construction project,
modernity has stripped the self of moral responsibility: ‘functions that people as individuals and as communities are able to carry out on their own should be left to them to do as individuals and communities.’ (1988:272)
But what of social distance in late-modernity? What of the chains of mediation which obscure the morality of the social; which make it easier for the individual to act in an inhuman manner; and easy for the state to forget the reality of social interdependence? Not only does the scale of problems involved in the growth of the underclass and globalisation (including the globalisation of organised crime and multi-national corporations) make this argument to leave individuals, and the groups they form, alone to get on with their lives appear naive, but it poses the question: in whom, or what, has responsibility for articulating, and taking responsibility for, the increased range of social suffering the destruction of a public normative project might well involve.
