5. After the Death of Deviance

Social Control and Political Order enjoyed a positive reception. Houchon (1999: 221), for instance, noted the “rare quality of the debate” and regarded Sumner’s contributions to the volume in the wake of the Obituary as a “twin achievement”. Calavita (1998: 348) highly recommended the book, although he took issue with Sumner’s reworking of the concept of social control. There was also a generous review from Garland (1998), who suggested that the first of Sumner’s two chapters was “well worth the purchase price alone”. He did, however, note that Sumner’s second chapter slipped “into an aspirational mode that sometimes becomes unrestrainedly Utopian” (1998: 323). He also felt that “Sumner has a tendency to slip into a rapid-fire mode of historical narration that takes for granted a readership which shares the collective memory, intellectual shorthand and sense of humour of the author” (1998: 322).

As one reviewer put it, “one of the attractions of the Sumner collection is precisely its refusal to round up the usual suspects [on the subject] and its commitment to breaking out of the parochial stockades of mainstream British criminology and cultural studies” (Murdock 1999: 674).

For instance, Price-Hanson (1999: 377) found the book “thought provoking” and “worthwhile reading”. Woodhouse (1999) felt it was a valuable addition to the literature despite its lack of focus on how violence should be responded to. Murdock (1999: 676) was generally positive, though he criticised the book’s silence on “the routinized violence and censure of markets and transnational capital”, which he felt required a “material turn” away from the cultural. Groombridge (1999: 471) suggested that greater editorial input would have been useful in what was an inevitably uneven collection of essays from young scholars.

Understandably in a reference work aimed squarely at undergraduates, there was no discussion in the Sage Dictionary entries of the historical materialist underpinnings of Sumner’s position, nor any explicit mention of Marxism.

Or, as he later put it, “crime talk is normally aimed at profit, not truth. It is a form of moral recycling. The media dig up the dirt, launder it free of social, political and cultural implications, and re-present it as the triumph of good over evil and the permanent futility of dissent” (Sumner 2012a).

Sumner notes in these passages how Durkheim saw that “the ‘social’ world, the realm of society, does not just produce offensive behaviours but also perceptions of offensiveness, and thus crime and deviance are always doubly socially constructed” (2004b: 6). The tumult of the twentieth century had “conspired and converged to confirm that crime and deviance are doubly socially constructed, as practical or behavioural responses to social conditions and as social censures reflecting the emotions, ideologies, and values of powerful social groups” (2004b: 9).

Despite this, Sumner (2004b: 27) also questioned the value in seeing crime as a cultural form: “Ultimately, despite its contemporary relevance, to say that crime and deviance are cultural forms tells us little in the long run when culture can mean anything and everything; and no more than the social did when it meant anything and everything.”

Sumner (2004b: 29) went on to suggest that “it is misleading to say that crime and deviance are social constructions when there is so much doubt, confusion, and fear, about what ‘the social’ actually is or when they are so often a response to social destruction”.

The Blackwell Companion which this remarkable chapter opened met with a generally enthusiastic response. Brown called it “sophisticated, challenging, and provocative” and praised its refusal to ‘dumb down’ (2007: 432; see also Chui 2005). Rock regarded the book as deserving of attention, but was disappointed by its lack of a “single narrative or theme” which rendered it as something of “a heterogeneous mass” (2004: 310).

Clearly relishing the freedom given to him by his retirement, he added that “criminology as a body of scholars exhibits the cold capriciousness of the Inquisition: Its lack of collegiality is exceptional, even by the miserably low standards of academia” (Sumner 2006: 141).

An exemplar of this tendency, according to Sumner (2006: 144), was criminology’s traditional focus on “poor boys who steal or destroy” as opposed to the significantly more damaging practices of the colonial and imperial powers; “could criminology talk of the funny shaped skulls of the colonialists or new imperialists?” he asks, rhetorically. In the original conference paper that this chapter was based on, he also amusingly pointed to criminology’s silence on the strange subcultures of the colonialists and wondered why the discipline had failed to question whether they had been insensitively labelled by working-class trade unions in ways which amplified their deviance (Sumner 2004c).

This argument was also restated several years later (Goode 2014).

See Best (2004) for criticism of Goode on this point.

In this light, it was perhaps unsurprising that textbooks (Goode 2019; Henry 2019) and edited collections (Dellwing et al. 2014) on deviance kept on coming.