ABSTRACT
Since the emergence of Radical Criminology in the late 1960s and early 1970s and its fissuring into Critical Criminology and ‘Left realism’ in the early 1980s, Critical Criminology has stood virtually alone in Criminology in showing sustained but episodic attention to the philosophy of curriculum. Drawing on Alvin Gouldner’s concept of ‘critical reflexivity’, I show that Critical Criminologists deploy the Socratic approach to good effect in the manifest curriculum. But, paradoxically, I suggest that Critical Criminologists fail to explore the ‘deeper structure’ of the latent and phenomenological dimensions of the curriculum in ways that might fulfil the aims of ‘authenticity’ and the onto-epistemic promise of ‘reflexivity’ that might liberate Critical Criminologists from the cognitive colonialism of the Criminological enterprise. I conclude that lacking a deeper overstanding of self and their relationship to the state and the imperative of totalitarianism, Critical Criminologists will not be able to go any further than the rhetoric of ‘decolonizing’ the curriculum of an enterprise whose modus vivendi is the violence of cognitive imperialism and epistemic colonialism.
