7. After Sumner?

Amusingly, this is redolent of Goode’s (2002: 114–5) view that deviance was being “obliterated by incorporation”!

As Eagleton (1996: 19) reflected of this period, “I have spoken of symptoms of political defeat; but what if this defeat never happened in the first place? What if it were less a matter of the left rising up and being forced back, than a steady disintegration, a gradual failure of nerve, a creeping paralysis? What if the confrontation never quite took place, but people behaved as though it did? As though someone were to display all the symptoms of rabies, but had never been within biting distance of a mad dog.” Scholars who continued to use the Marxist label during this period tended to do so as a vague term of political reference that also situated one’s work in an intellectual tradition (Tushnet 1980: 123); for instance, Wright (2003: 19) felt that “what was really at stake to me was the nature of the constituency or audience to whom I wanted to feel accountable”. Simultaneously, there can be little doubt that Marxism was quickly becoming increasingly incomprehensible to the students of the day; as Roberts (2017: 41) put it, they were very much “Thatcher’s children!”

Ultra realism (see, e.g. Hall et al. 2008; Winlow and Atkinson 2012; Hall 2012; Hall and Winlow 2015, 2018) has an interesting relationship with the work of Sumner. Sumner championed the early work of Hall, as Hall has acknowledged (Hall et al. 2008: xiii). Later, as we have seen, Hall and Winlow invited Sumner to contribute to their New Directions in Criminological Theory collection, describing his concept of social censure as “a useful home-grown idea unwisely neglected by criminology’s narrowband mainstream” (2012: 11). Despite this, ultra realist works very rarely refer to Sumner despite sharing a somewhat bleak view of late modern capitalism. Indeed, Horsley (2014a) has criticised Sumner’s work for helping to shift the focus of the discipline away from the issue of motivation. Yet Sumner has always insisted that because the social world generates offensive behaviours as well as perceptions of offensiveness, crime and deviance are always “doubly socially constructed” (2004a: 6); on this view crime and deviance can be seen “as practical or behavioural responses to social conditions and as social censures reflecting the emotions, ideologies, and values of powerful social groups” (2004a: 9). Ultra realists would presumably concur with the idea that “the practices of offenders also reflect social tensions, and express particular political and ideological interpretations of those tensions. As Engels made clear in 1844, these responses are not necessarily any more or less progressive than those of legislators or the police. […] We may, indeed, all agree, in some cases, that they are instances of practices that we thoroughly deplore” (1990d: 46). Furthermore, if ultra realism seeks to understand how, in advanced capitalism, “the competitive individual gauges her success relative to the downfall and subjugation of others” (Hall and Winlow 2018), then censure theory might assist in understanding how these subjugations are realised. Horsley missed these potential points of articulation between Sumner and ultra realism. Nevertheless, Sumner charitably published a version of Horsley’s argument on CrimeTalk (Horsley 2014b).

The debate on whether Marx thought capitalism unjust, briefly summarised in Moxon (2013: 45–6), is a fine example of the difficulties that abound when such issues are engaged with.

For example, there is no mention whatsoever of Sumner in some criminology textbooks, such as the otherwise remarkably comprehensive Criminology by Newburn (2013), and in works that focus on Marxism and criminology (see, e.g., Cowling 2008). Even several chapters in Sumner’s own festschrift (Amatrudo 2017a) do not mention him or utilise his ideas!