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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. Sumner and the Death of Deviance

Author : David Moxon

Published in: Colin Sumner

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Sumner’s best-known work, The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary (1994), is the focus of this chapter. Against a disciplinary backdrop where theoretical reflection was becoming increasingly marginalised, Sumner produced an epic intellectual history of the formation, heyday and demise of the sociology of deviance, arguing that the concept of deviance was bound up with the social democratic societies of modernity and was thus no longer an appropriate way of seeing. He suggested its replacement by the sociology of censures. The chapter guides the reader through this dense and detailed work, before ending with reflections on its reception and its ongoing intellectual legacy.

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Rock (2017: 25) suggested that Sumner was one of the few who did not become reconciled to this new reality. As we saw in Chap. 3, he had earlier described Sumner as having lost none of his “combativeness” (Rock 1988: 193). Sumner could not resist from commenting on this in the Preface to the Obituary (1994: ix).

This was an idea that had steadily gained prominence in Sumner’s writing. See, for example, the many scattered comments on deviance in his earlier works which culminated in a brief history of the concept in Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (1990b: 17–25). Sumner (1990a: 29) had also previously conceded, somewhat amusingly given what was to follow, that “the return of censure to its origins, involves an as yet unwritten history of the censure of deviance, well beyond my present competence”.

By modernity Sumner is referring to the set of processes involved in the rise of industrial or monopoly capitalism and the subsequent formation of the welfare state.

Sumner traces the lifecycle of the concept with another amusing metaphor in which deviance is reimagined as the troubled child of a lone parent. As O’Connell (1995: 549) put it, “Sumner playfully mocks the recurring right-wing moral panic about the moral laxity of single mothers by presenting deviance as a troublesome kid, born to a single mum (Durkheim), who crosses the Atlantic, gets somewhat pathological and smokes a few joints, returns to Europe to hang about with political types in the late 1960s before expiring in the mid 1970s.”

Note that some excellent summaries of the Obituary have already been produced, most notably by Roberts (1996). Readers requiring greater detail are referred to his piece.

Sumner’s (1994: 165) judgement of Parson’s 1951 work The Social System is particularly scathing: “The fact that it is almost unreadable because of its turgidly deployed jargon is precisely its exquisite beauty as an abstract art from of its time. It is abstract expressionism; the spectacle as reality; the advertising fantasy taken seriously. It has all the hallmarks of classic propaganda”.

Young (1998: 42) contested Sumner’s portrayal of The New Criminology and the work of the NDC more generally, although he agreed that the book was somewhat “unkempt”.

Of course, the Obituary was far from comprehensive in this regard. The sections on, for example, art, were inevitably far more impressionistic than those that discussed sociological and criminological texts. Roberts (1996: 140), however, suggested that “no work of this nature could ever be comprehensive (if comprehensiveness is a desirable goal). The absences in Sumner’s narrative merely scatter small question marks through the fabric of a very cogent argument; and suggest further lines of inquiry for others to pursue”.

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Title: Sumner and the Death of Deviance
Author: David Moxon
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Colin Sumner
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-36940-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-36941-5

Copyright Year: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36941-5_4