Abstract
As I write this review, a new age of nationalism has dawned in the United States, bolstering right-wing populism in Europe. Large numbers of westerners and their leaders have adopted a cold and wary stance toward the suffering of others, including refugees from abroad, minorities at home, women, and poor people. If ever we needed to take harm seriously, to get a grasp on it and launch an offensive against it, we do now. Along comes Simon Pemberton’s outstanding book, Harmful Societies: Understanding Social Harm, which urges and models all three of these things.
The central argument of Harmful Societies is that social harms proliferate under capitalism, but they also vary by strain of capitalism. The emergent social harm perspective, of which Pemberton is a pioneer, frames the book. That perspective (sometimes called zemiology, but see Pemberton’s helpful clarification of differences on pages 6–7) opposes myopic and decontextualized views of harm, such as those associated with mainstream criminology.
Harms, according to Pemberton, are “specific events or instances where ‘human flourishing’ is demonstrably compromised” (p.9). Social harms, the object of Pemberton’s concern, are preventable. Capitalism per se causes (social) harm—through its relentless extraction of surplus value, compelling exploitation, commodification, and alienation. Yet capitalism comes in more and less deleterious strains; it can be hedged in, its adverse effects ameliorated. For instance, even where income in old age is tied to having been in the labor force, societies can guarantee an adequate income in old age to all—or not.
Pemberton assesses levels of preventable physical/mental health harm, autonomy harm (i.e., low opportunities for self-actualization), and relational harm (i.e., social exclusion or stigma) across seven types of capitalist regimes in place today—neoliberal, liberal, post-socialist corporatist, southern corporatist, meso-corporatist, northern corporatist, and social democratic. These are ideal regime types that Pemberton constructs with guidance from available models. With data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, he derives societal-level indicators of harm reduction/production, such as trade union density and spending on social services. He then runs statistical tests of the incidence of harms in 31 nations across the regime types.
Pemberton finds that the least harmful regime is the social democratic (e.g., Norway, Finland), which is “distinguishable in terms of its harm reduction features, particularly in relation to high levels of social expenditure, high trade union membership, low levels of inequality and high levels of trust” (p.143). The liberal regime, especially the United States, is associated with high levels of harms such as infant mortality and homicide. Post-socialist regimes (e.g., Hungary, Poland) are relatively high in physical harm and relatively low in autonomy harm. Southern corporatist societies (e.g., Greece, Spain) have high levels of autonomy and relational harm, a fact that illuminates the harmful impact of austerity policies adopted there and portends more harm if such policies continue or are adopted elsewhere, as Pemberton emphasizes in a crucial Afterword.
As clear as his discussion is, Pemberton usefully complicates it for the reader, specifying, for example, how actual regimes do not generally fit neatly into an assigned type and how a supposed harm reduction measure such as welfare spending might front a well-funded bureaucracy more attuned to withholding relief than providing it. Whereas Pemberton aims to understand the relationship between harm reduction/production measures and harm, some phenomena straddle these constructs. For example, the rate of imprisonment is both a harm production indicator and itself a harm. Harms intersect, and their impacts augment one another across the life course. Thus, child poverty promotes school dropout, which promotes adult unemployment. By its very nature, the analysis delivers a sharp rebuke to single-factor reasoning, individualistic theories of crime, and criminology’s overemphasis on intended “violence.”
The intellectual movement toward a criticaland interdisciplinary social harm approach is very much furthered by this empirically precise book. Pemberton’s study shows beyond a doubt that harm is a political feat. I wish only that the scope of study were even broader than it is. Pemberton’s concern is altogether with human suffering. Yet, humans are causing untold suffering and devastation to nonhumans, animals and others, as never before, especially under capitalist arrangements. I see no good reason to exclude these harms.
In general, the social harm perspective has tended toward an exclusive focus on human experience, sometimes considering harm to nonhumans (e.g., the sickening of nonhuman animals as part of industrialized agriculture) only in terms of harm to humans. Fortunately, nothing about the perspective necessitates such a focus. I do wonder, however, if global increases in harm to humans, given recent events, will fuel a kind of principle of less eligibility concerning harms to nonhumans—that it will nurture the idea that “animals” should not garner more consideration than “we” do.
The matter of competition between harms is highly political. In the present-day western political context, claims are being made that harm remedies for some people (e.g., minimum wage increases) are harmful to others. Such claims galvanize social movements, and they inform policy. Hence the movement to defeat legislation designed to stem bullying of LGBT youth (see Lai 2015). Of course, at the heart of such movements is the question of which victims matter. Alongside claims to being harmed by harm reduction is a revitalized attitude of contempt for elites, including academics. Today’s political climate, therefore, requires that we demonstrate the value of thoughtful and systematic inquiry on harm and society. Lucid appraisals like Pemberton’s and his core message of hope for change are a good place to start.