In intellectual and emotional honor of Jock Young

In re Theoretical Criminology

After I became co-editor of Theoretical Criminology (working initially with Tony Jefferson and then Eugene McLaughlin), I recall Jock seeking me out at American Society of Criminology (ASC) meetings to compliment and support our relatively young journal and then attending Board meetings with enthusiasm and interest. Jock clearly believed in the power, and the distinctiveness of theory: this section contains many analyses of continuities as well as variations in his work, fealty to the value of the enterprise figuring high among the former. And why this consistent valuing of the theoretical? It surely was not elitism, or a slighting of activism in favor of ideas. Rather, for Jock, theory was necessary, politically as well as analytically, to go beyond the particularities of the given so as to grasp, understand and have the capacity to envision social transformation. Nor was it that he stood above specifics, valuing only the global. More to the point, he questioned ‘impossibilist’ perspectives—sometimes as fashionable as they were ironically unthreatening—so immersed in the local that larger transformations became literally unimaginable. For him it was the connection, the ability to go back and forth between both levels that mattered and which, without theory, might itself be impossible to balance and ensure.

And so it seems appropriate to craft a section of Theoretical Criminology of all journals with Jock in mind—and to present a set of writings that explore his work in myriad ways, looking backward and forward with precision as well as perspective. These pieces are meant to be intellectually reflective more than only memorializing: here is a set of essays that Jock himself might have found intriguing about themes, changes, even contradictions in his own intellectual opus. What ensues is presented at once historically and substantively and, depending on which, highlights themes—or variations upon them—in Jock’s work. Reflecting the variety in these essays, some authors have referred to ‘Young’, others to ‘Jock’ and some go back and forth between the two scholarly and more affectionate usages. The section begins big, and thematically in fact, with Elliott Currie tracing threads that he sees throughout Jock’s work; commitments to morality and responsibility, Currie argues, were in evidence from beginning to end. He shows how Jock, in this sense ostensibly kindred with Bourdieu, theorized beyond false antimonies that could place too much imperative on specificity thereby occluding the general, or too much stress on particulars at the risk of ignoring ‘total structures’ (as Currie puts it). Likewise ongoing, Currie holds, was ‘fidelity to reality’ and ‘taking crime seriously’—concerns that extended from Jock’s early ethnographic work through left realism all the way through The Criminological Imagination (2011).

With Eugene McLaughlin, the section returns more overtly to chronological order exploring variations, not just consistencies, in Young’s work. This essay reads like a genealogy, of sorts, tracing the evolution of the moral panic notion for which Jock became well known—see Eugene titling his reflections ‘See Also Young, 1971’, it having become de rigueur to cite Jock on the topic—from his early ethnographic foray in The Drugtakers (1971), through Jock’s early work with Stan Cohen, through his left realist period and beyond. But McLaughlin argues that there were ebbs and flows in Jock’s sense of the concept’s utility: after Jock’s early discussion of moral panics in terms of deviance attribution, he withdrew from the idea’s implied moral relativism as he and John Lea were thinking through left realism. Then, after a period of not mentioning moral panics, Jock returned to it again but differently in the context of cultural criminology. McLaughlin concludes that ‘moral indignation’ more accurately denotes the common kernel across Young’s shifts in when and how he himself referenced moral panics.

Next we hear from John Lea, as the section moves from the period of Jock’s 1960s and 1970s interests in moral panics to his important 1980s writings on left realism. Proffering a finely honed sense of socio-historical context about left realism and its development, Lea holds that little altered from Young’s early radical, socialist leanings through his criticizing idealism and elaborating a ‘realist’ alternative to thinking about (and suggesting local community-level policies to handle) crime and its often destructive effects on disproportionately victimized working-class and poor communities. To Lea, and illustrating perhaps what Currie meant about ‘fidelity to crime’ and ‘taking crime seriously’, it was consistent for Jock to take a materialist (and not a romantic, or glorified) approach to the ‘realities’ of crime and What Is to Be Done about Law and Order? (see Lea and Young, 1981). Not in all cases (read: crime) were moral panics of a displaced or unjustified kind, as Jock showed—despite his having to bear, as a result, many idealist-oriented criminologists’ disapproval and anger during this embattled and notably brave period of his career.

By the 1990s, though, Jock was onto his ‘trilogy’: a set of ambitious theoretical diagnoses the criminological world came to know as The Exclusive Society (1999), The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007) and The Criminological Imagination (2011), respectively. Reflecting retrospectively on aspects of these works, especially Vertigo, are first, David Brotherton and Laura Naegler, and then Sara Salman. In Brotherton and Naegler’s hands, we find yet another emphasis on consistencies and continuities—this time in the form of a concept, social bulimia, that they argue has been relatively overlooked while nonetheless manifesting Jock’s radicalism and the ongoing influence of classical Marx on his thought. According to Brotherton and Naegler, social bulimia is connected with capitalist contradictoriness as depicted in Vertigo, recalling Bauman’s liquid modernity; it is about a restructured and restructuring late modernity, depicted in Jock’s work as maddeningly mixing the ideological promise of inclusiveness, on the one hand, and the material realities of exclusivity and more rigid-than-ever stratification, on the other. At once in-and-out, ingested and then regurgitated, porously intermingling and opaquely segregated: so are the processes of late modernity a living testament to both the survival and breaking down of contemporary late capitalism. Brotherton and Naegler exemplify the utility of the social bulimia concept through three concrete cases (terrorism, immigration and education). The idea—its sadomasochistic push-and-pull character—can at once, within late modernity, penetrate our minds/psyches/souls while at the same time suggesting, as it did for Jock, its tenuousness and escapability by human agents fully capable of apprehending the pattern and (re)acting differently.

Vertigo? Social bulimia? Why these as opposed to other conceptual names Young might have chosen to paint these ideas on his broad theoretical canvases? This said, why too, earlier on, references to panics (and, as McLaughlin emphasizes, indignation), anxieties and insecurities? For vertigo connotes overwhelming fear of falling, just as bulimia is associated with other serious fears (that of eating too much, and then needing to gorge right afterward): then, too, panics and insecurities are likewise viscerally evocative, denoting palpable emotional states. Still, as Sara Salman astutely posits, for all the theoretical associations made with Jock Young—with Marx, the Birmingham School, left realism, cultural criminology—rarely does his work tend to be associated with psychosocial studies of the kind lately attracting some renewed interest in the UK and USA. Interestingly though, and despite the many references to emotions, insecurities, fears and anxieties that pervade his work alongside analyses of late modernity’s structural dynamics, Jock is rarely if ever linked with the Frankfurt School’s well-known endeavors to link subjectivity-and-objectivity, the psychic and the social, the ideas of Marx and Freud. As Salman shows, Young was suspicious of essentialistic leanings in Freud that could freeze rather than free individual agents’ capacities for transformation and revolt; on the other hand, Salman argues, Jock had his own quite particular form of psychosocial leanings. For Young was certainly a phenomenologist, one who understood how Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness came to correlate with the evolution of existential psychotherapies. Thought-provoking, too, is Salman’s showing that while Young’s work may not resemble any and all Frankfurt theorists’ writings, kindred theoretical concerns connect a book like The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007) with Marcuse’s at once critical-and-respectful (of Freud) Eros and Civilization (1955).

Thus psychosocial leanings are arguably present in Young’s work, recognized or not, just as contradictions of his own may subtly appear amid sharp condemnation of the excesses of, and harms caused by, US positivist criminology a la the trilogy’s third volume The Criminological Imagination. In Kevin Moran’s essay, still another consistency is noted across Young’s work—that is, a career-long insistence on complex thought (political correctness be damned) and on rejecting simplistic categories if these seem unfaithful to, as per Currie’s characterization above, ‘reality’. Yet Moran also wonders if Young’s critique of quantitative criminology in The Criminological Imagination is relatively more one-dimensional than found in his typically more nuanced analyses overall. Does the ‘quantoid’ sometimes emerge as a cartoonish figure even as a quantitative data-driven approach can and has been used to fortify progressive arguments from, for example, their ‘left realist’ appearance in Elliott Currie’s indictment of US policies in Confronting Crime (1986) through Bruce Western’s quantitative connecting of incarceration and unemployment in Punishment and Inequality in America (2007)? Is it possible that at least in this respect, then, Young was unwittingly circulating another subtly ‘them/us’ dynamic with complexly psychosocial appeals? Moran concludes by calling for careful and intelligent repurposing of quantitative criminology within critical criminology, a line of argumentation with which he believes—as a former student (as were, likewise, Naegler and Salman)—Jock himself would have gladly, and with interest, engaged.

In re dual criminological consciousness

A second image springs to mind, this one related to why The Criminological Imagination offers such a passionate, strong critique. Here, I recollect criminologists asking me about Jock staying in the United States or returning to the UK—a dual identity he lived for many years, going back and forth between John Jay College in New York City and the University of Kent in Canterbury. In retrospect, Jock was not only a major figure in contemporary criminology and sociology intellectually but his political vision was probably also influenced by being immersed in both the UK and US criminological ‘fields’. As Simmel (1950) analyzed in The Stranger, such a position affords awareness about both familiar and relatively novel situations; then too, as discussed by Du Bois in the awful and wholly different context of institutionalized US racism, immersion in dual settings can facilitate distinctive insights.

Indeed, why did Jock concentrate the third volume of his sweepingly global theoretical trilogy on the historically specific context of US criminology—that is, on the sociological thought of Merton and Mills at Columbia from the 1940s to the 1960s, and on the building from the 1980s onward of a punitive, incarcerative US criminal justice Leviathan? It may be that The Criminological Imagination emanated from a dual criminological consciousness, from at once close-and-distant comprehension of the ‘social fact’ of positivistic US criminology within a sometimes dynamically seductive US culture (e.g. Jock lived in, and loved, New York). And it may be that the impassioned critique therein contained relates to directly knowing, and having experienced, an interdisciplinary and critical field Jock knew could be (because it was) different elsewhere. Perhaps, then, the book reflects moral indignation indeed at how and why US criminology came to correlate with, rather than boldly challenge, a ‘punitive turn’ held out—to the chagrin of Young and so many other critical criminologists—as though a ‘model’ for the world.

In re critical criminology and the future

A third image involves asking Jock before an American Society of Criminology-organized ‘Author Meets Critic’ session on The Criminological Imagination why it had no women panelists—and his reaction evincing at once concern, a weary-worn sense of embattlement (et tu, Lynn?) and a theorist’s wondering at a possibly knee-jerk reaction. It is a recollection that allows reflection on where ‘identity’ based discriminations of gender, race and sexuality fit into Jock’s work and, by extension, critical and theoretical criminology. Take gender: certainly this was not a foregrounded focus of Young’s work; however it was arguably, like the psychosocial, often present explicitly or implicitly across his writings. References to social movement biases including but not limited to gendered ones appear frequently, for example, in the first two volumes of the trilogy. But perhaps Jock’s concerns, widely theoretical and historical, provide most insight into how and why exclusion and ongoing oppression persist generally: at the same time, Young explored reactive anger against women as manifested in domestic violence, sexual assault and other sexist practices specific to gender as its own particular form of dominance/subordinate relationship.

On the one hand, then, value adheres in social theory that explores human oppression in general—in so doing remembering, non-essentialistically, feminist and other social movement goals to eventually, as such, wither away. On the other, and gesturing now toward the future, perhaps Young’s work like that of many other social theorists and criminologists would benefit from more thorough-going engagement with feminist theories—the latter tending to remain marginalized in what has been and in some ways remains (beyond Jock) a largely male-dominated discipline. For instance, at the heart of many feminist theories is a profound understanding of the entwined emotional-and-rational multi-dimensional character of consciousness and practices—a theoretical insistence that, if further incorporated into the heart of criminological perspectives, would allow feelings to be placed on an even firmer and more solid theoretical and empirical footing than presently. (Perhaps, too, this might better legitimize cultural criminology’s own insistence on incorporating emotionality, a proclivity that does not seem to consistently attribute feminist theories at, or near, its heart.)

But what can also be learned past Young and his work—as properly praised throughout this special section—is the value of careful analytic distinctions. Jock Young’s work may long endure within criminology as a symbol not of knee-jerk but courageous theorizing, and of willingness to think (and feel) through what makes sense where, when, and why. Perhaps, more than anything, this is what Jock leaves for critical and theoretical criminology, to those who share and admire the commitments he made—and, as these essays illuminate—to his students, to his field, to morality and responsibility, to public criminology, to change.