6. Sumner and the Looking Glass

Eagleton (2016a: 152), writing about the academy in general, was even more blunt: “A centuries-old tradition of universities as centres of humane critique is currently being scuppered by their conversion into pseudo-capitalist enterprises under the way of a brutally philistine managerial ideology. Once arenas of critical reflection, academic institutions are being increasingly reduced to organs of the marketplace, along with betting shops and fast food joints.”

In a similar vein, Sumner (2012: 169) criticised “the rich and powerful” who “often engage in anti-social behaviour but are rarely censured as anti-social for it in the popular media or in popular culture. […] They can send thousands to their deaths in war, ensure their friends and relatives obtain lucrative government contracts, or destroy the life-savings of millions of ordinary workers but none of that would ever be classified as deviance. That tells you all you need to know about deviance. It has a very specific meaning in Western cultures, one that most certainly does not include the habits of ‘high society.’” Sumner (2012: 176) also pointed to “the comfortable cluelessness of the politicians, intermarried and interlocked with the bankers and other wealthier classes in a culture of educated idiocy”; they are “out of touch and probably cannot hear even when they listen, because their world is so remote from ours” and have lost the ability to “steer the ship of hegemony”. As a result, “existing models of political domination through the power of ideology need re-writing. No one in casino capitalism is really ‘in charge’: there are just angry people censuring each other across various chasms. Those who can, leave for a beach, anywhere.”

Sumner (2012: 175) added that “by the end of the 1980s, our depoliticised cynicism meant that some had the confidence to celebrate their own censure, turning fate humorously and sardonically into the positive prize of identity. For after all, in the meaningless entropy of post-modernity, you were lucky to have an identity.”

Eagleton (2016a: 155) wrote in similar terms about the crash of 2008: “The momentary crack-up of the system revealed we are still languishing in a world of mass unemployment and obscenely overpaid executives, gross inequalities and squalid public services, one in which the state was every bit as obedient a tool of ruling-class interests as the most resolutely vulgar of Marxists had ever imagined. […] The true gangsters and anarchists wore pinstripe suits, and the robbers were running the banks rather than raiding them.”

This essay appeared in the edited collection The Poetics of Crime (Jacobsen 2014), a work that looked at creative methodologies and the use of art and literature in the analysis of crime. Sumner had made passing references to Measure for Measure previously: In his discussion of Foucault he referred to Lord Angelo as an example of cold, rational masculinity (1990: 33), and the play was also mentioned in the Obituary (1994: 300) and in his Sage Dictionary entry on social censure (2001: 266). Sumner’s earlier riots essay had noted how deviance was a distinctly twentieth century concept, and “censure is the general, trans-historical concept, the idea that is workable in all periods, the term that appears in Shakespeare, Sellin and Becker” (2012: 171).

Other themes in the play explored by Sumner included: Shakespeare’s distinction between the reason of the state and the “messy instincts, folk culture and home-made knowledge” of the “ungovernable” (Brewer and Styles 1980) English people (Sumner 2014: 113); the play’s demonstration that “there is no such thing as pure reason or pure legal truth: they are both pricked by the thorns of a dirty and bloody reality and, at a minimum, are in constant flux” (2014: 113), such that “all judgment is suspect and has its shadow” (2014: 114); Shakespeare’s message against authoritarianism at the play’s climax, where he shows that strict, excessive laws and decrees do not work as they pay the price of disrespect (2014: 115); the play’s sense that “laws and statutes require people to officiate” and those responsible for making decisions cannot hide behind the veil of legality, as when in the play Angelo says it is the law, and not he, who condemns Claudio. Rather, it is the case that “power must be responsible. Yet people, even the monarch, are too fallible to receive unrestrained power or unchallenged reason: thus even ‘brief’ authority cannot survive if it is too heavy or if, as the lawyers still say today, it does not come with clean hands. […] No authority escapes criticism or is above the law” (2014: 115).

Reading Ideologies had been written at a time when the question of science was very much a live one. If western Marxists wished to maintain that their work carried the standing of science despite no longer adhering to the cast iron laws of the orthodox tradition, then they needed to outline why that was the case. “It seems to me”, wrote Sumner in Reading Ideologies (1979: 90), “that Marx saw science as a serialized discourse of signs and ideological formations which grasped in thought the range and nature of the forms of appearance of a thing and the inner or hidden structure of that thing which gave it those forms of appearance. All sciences were of this nature: a science, for Marx, explains why things appear as they do and thoroughly describes those appearances. […] An explanation, in his conception, specified the latent causal mechanism and its necessary, perceptible effects. As such, it was capable of being tested in the light of the carefully established effects it supposed […] In short, Marx thought it was possible for things to be knowable and that science was the conscious, discursive explication of that knowledge.” It followed that “Marxists, therefore, rightly posit the possibility of a science of ideologies and reject the notion that observations on ideologies must be restricted to political, moral and aesthetic evaluations of their effects. One can go further than that and attempt to describe the inner structures and conditions of existence of ideology which necessitate certain identifiable consequences” (1979: 90). On this view, “science, then, for Marx, is accurate ideology or, more precisely, a series of ideologies which adequately approximate to their real referent in all its aspects” (1979: 92). Consequently, “science for him was only a rather special type of ideological formation (or complex signification) rooted in social practice, and as such it lost the reified and mysterious character granted to it by bourgeois social relations which set it on high apart from everyday practice and the common man. Thus, the distinction for him would not be between ideology and science, but between levels of approximation to an object and its mechanism” (1979: 92–3). The corollary of this was that “some ideologies were more accurate representations of reality than others and warranted the social label of science. Thus, although what counts as science is subject to all the economic, political and cultural determinations that affect the use of any term, relations of accuracy between discourse and reality are real phenomena” (1979: 290–1).

In their introduction to the volume, the editors termed Sumner a “pioneer” who, “in a series of path-breaking works”, was one of the few criminologists who had “deployed sustained philosophical reflection in an attempt to rethink the issue of just what it is that criminology is about” (Lippens and Crewe 2015: 3).

Sumner (2015: 205) wrote that “there were a few voices in criminology that stood for a critical realism, both philosophically and politically. […] My own writings on social censure […] were based on such a philosophy of social science.” It was, of course, in his PhD and Reading Ideologies that Sumner initially developed his underlying philosophical position in a manner congruent with critical realism, although no mention of critical realism is made in these works.

Sumner (2015: 200) suggests that “all in all, for the critical realist, Marx’s account of capitalism describes not just a mechanism, like a clock, but a multi-layered empire, an overdetermined social formation, revolving around a generative core, each layer with its own conditions of existence, each part of each layer also, and each layer linked with the other; a Star Wars-style ship so encrusted with its new technologies, its counter-products, barnacles and protections that they become integral to its make-up. No revolution would happen unless change (or Luke Skywalker) could fly into the centre and transform the generative core.”

The chapter brought to the fore and consolidated several ideas that had been bubbling away in his work for some time, for instance the sense that conflict and violence are inevitable when a new mode of production is set up or when a society is subjected to colonial domination. He had commented on this back in Reading Ideologies (1979: 51), and of course it was one of the leitmotifs of Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment (1982). It reappeared in Social Control and Political Order (1997a: 8), where he also suggested that criminology needed to decide whether it was on the side of marginalised groups or the state, “because it cannot be on both” (1997b: 140). In addition, he also returned to the ideas that “states are often established and developed through the use of crime” such as land grabbing (2004b: 142; see also 2006: 144), that the “historic sins” of the powerful were not really “our” crimes (2004b: 28), and that “in many of today’s western societies, crime matters are often upside down” (2004b: 26), each of which had been discussed in The Blackwell Companion. Marx and Engels’ sense that ideology may turn social relations “upside down as in a camera obscura”, outlined in The German Ideology and referred to by Sumner in Reading Ideologies (1979: 13), also made a reappearance.

Indeed, throughout the chapter there was a clear sense that Sumner had become frustrated by his somewhat marginal status in the discipline. See also his comment that “Jock Young once said to me he viewed my work on crime, justice and underdevelopment as of profound importance for criminology […]. So did Sir Leon Radzinowicz. Few have picked it up since, preferring the bland view of modernisation and then globalisation, with its general view of initial violence settling into stable and localised working-class property crime patterns” (2017a: 20).

Following van Onselen’s analysis, Sumner writes that in Southern Rhodesia, “by the late 1930s, it would have seemed that the nature of ‘crime’ was as it appeared on the surface (thefts, gambling, debts and fights between workers) and that the big crimes of invasion, conquest and appropriation of land and labour had been forgotten or airbrushed from a newly rewritten history. The serious crimes of colonisation had produced a new normality, where ‘crime control’ was the sustainable self-justification of the established, but eternally criminal, colonial state” (2017b: 27). The persecution of those involved in relatively inconsequential misdemeanours “is not selective vision but the reproduction in culture of a structure of domination so well established that its concrete real practical birth has been long forgotten, as history” (2017a: 19).

Of course, whilst it may be rare in criminology, such thinking is by no means unprecedented. As Eagleton (2016b: 71) has noted, even the philosophical godfather of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, “believes that most political states were founded by violence, invasion, revolution or usurpation. Their origins are thus illicit, and only the gradual passage of time can draw a veil over these blood stained beginnings. In the beginning was coercion, which later modulates into consent. Your landed estate is mine if I stole it from you a long enough time ago. If I purloined it only last week, then you have the right to demand it back. The longer a nation survives, the more acceptable its sovereignty becomes. […] Effective power rests on collective amnesia.” Nietzsche too saw that “culture is the fruit of a calamitous history of crime, guilt, debt, torture, violence and exploitation”, although he celebrated this fact as it allowed “the flourishing of superior types like himself” (Eagleton 2016a: 112). Even Marx recognised that socialism “must be built on the proceeds of exploitation. […] The prosperity which might one day lay the ground for freedom is itself the fruit of unfreedom” (Eagleton 2016a: 112).