Abstract
It is not often that one of the big beasts of modern criminology lumbers back onto the stage. When one does it behoves us to pay attention. I will not outline Roger Matthews’ achievements and his influence on the discipline here, and instead of doffing my cap or offering some polite applause in the form of an anodyne and congratulatory review, I want to focus on the claims Matthews makes in this book and what we can learn from it that might be used to drive our discipline forwards. This is, after all, how one treats an intellectual with respect: not by withholding critical judgement and smiling politely but by taking his work seriously and, in criticizing it, working to keeping it alive.
Matthews’ book seeks to respond to the lazy, self-satisfied inertia of contemporary criminology. In particular he hopes to move beyond the reductive and non-dialectical interplay between critical criminology and administrative criminology. For Matthews, there are productive seams still to be mined, and if criminology is to progress it needs to move beyond the idealism of the left and the pragmatism of the right by working through a new realist agenda that he outlines in the book. The general framework he offers us owes much to the tradition of left realism, but the most important influence on Matthews’ thesis is the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and others. Matthews is one of the first criminologists to utilize this considerable body of theory. As a resolutely empirical social science, our discipline tends to scorn such abstraction. This is a great shame as Bhaskar in particular has much to teach us about everyday experience. Matthews does not talk in detail about critical realism, and he does not clearly identify which aspects of this quite substantial corpus are vital for the rejuvenation of our discipline. Instead he spends a significant portion of the book identifying the ubiquity of liberal thought in the discipline and its obvious limitations in addressing entrenched crime problems. Matthews pulls no punches, and he is brave enough to acknowledge that the anti-state liberalism that is so common on criminology’s social constructivist left-wing shares a common ideological root with the anti-statist neoliberalism that has come to predominate on the political right.
Much of Matthews’ book is pitched as a critique of contemporary criminology, and he should be warmly congratulated for slaughtering a few of criminology’s sacred cows. Of course, Matthews’ central concern is to reconstruct left realism on a solid, new epistemological foundation. He believes that realist criminology must be policy relevant, avoid the idealism of the radical left and the dour pragmatism of the administrative right, and move incrementally forwards by producing new theoretical insights and empirical data.
While I often found myself in agreement with Matthews’ determined critique of contemporary criminology, I disagreed with a number of key components of his overall thesis. First, in my view, Matthews’ focus on ‘policy relevance’ is a mistake. Anyone with experience of engaging with what we might term the ‘policy-making community’ will have come to the conclusion that policy makers have no great interest in the work of criminologists or academics working in the field of social policy. They are happy to accept brief bullet-point summaries, but ultimately they could not care less about the expansive and detailed work of social scientists. Rather than painstakingly constructing ‘evidence-based policy’, we face a situation in which academics are required to discover evidence that justifies existing policy proposals. Second, and related to the point above, Matthews makes a number of quite significant category errors. He confuses realism with pragmatism and idealism with utopianism. His focus on ‘policy relevance’ immediately suggests that his version of realism is really a disguised form of pragmatism, and in pursuing this line he appears destined to replicate the mistakes of left realism. He has no desire to change the world in order to address harms produced by global political economy. Rather he hopes to reform these problems out of existence with carefully calibrated policy suggestions. He must be aware that contemporary politics is completely disinterested in the policy suggestions of academics, and he must also be aware that neoliberal economic policy has managed to transform itself into basic common-sense for all mainstream politicians. Why then does he cling on to the unrealistic hope that one day mainstream politicians will dispense with their ideological attachment to neoliberalism and open up a genuinely progressive dialogue with social scientists? Should we continue to labour under the misapprehension that, if honest social scientists were to discover that dismantling the welfare state and offering tax-breaks to the super-rich actually exacerbated existing social problems, this new information would prompt a rapid about turn and the adoption of a new range of policies geared towards curtailing inequality and providing the poorest with a range of new welfare entitlements? Despite proclamations to the contrary, policy continues to spring from the disavowed ideological commitments of political elites. In this respect Matthews’ analysis is not realist in the proper sense. Instead it appears to be a strange mixture of pragmatism and utopianism. He is a pragmatist in the sense that he wants to focus on small but cumulative reforms, but equally he is a utopian in assuming that his policy suggestions will be listened to, and that the apparatus of the neoliberal state is indeed subject to progressive democratic reform.
As one might expect, Matthews is quite dismissive of idealism. For him, proposing significant social change is the hallmark of idealism, but actually what he means is that depth intervention of this kind is pure utopianism, an impossible dream that simply cannot come to pass. Again, Matthews’ account is built upon a fundamental category error. It is wrong to assume that all forms of depth intervention are ‘idealist’. Of course, if we take an honest look at the problems we face, we might, entirely reasonably, come to the conclusion that significant social change is the only means of preserving those things that are of genuine value to ordinary people. Indeed, we might even conclude that changing the foundations of our current way of life is the only realistic means of re-establishing the basic precepts of western civilization itself. A true realist is not dismissive of depth intervention; rather she is honest enough to recognize the point at which depth intervention becomes necessary, and then thinks and acts accordingly. Again, Matthews’ disavowed pragmatism appears strangely utopian. What could be more utopian than believing that the way we live now will continue indefinitely, or that what we have before us is the best of all available systems? Is there not an unworldly utopianism in assuming that, with a small reform here and there, we can correct the stark imbalances that are the product of the global free market?
These basic category errors disturb Matthews’ central thesis, and go some way to revealing his true political position. A further indication can be seen in a wonderful aside in which Matthews offers a robust defence of contemporary consumerism, arguing that ‘consumerism is one of the positive achievements of capitalism, and it is inconceivable that any future post-capitalist society would do away with consumerism’ (p. 100). Where to begin? Well, first, Matthews appears to be confusing consumerism with mere consumption. Consumerism absolutely cannot be reduced to the mere consumption of material goods. As a great many social analysts, from Baudrillard onwards, have stressed, consumerism is about symbolism, not materialism. Here it is the symbolism carried by material products that ‘contaminates communities’ (p. 100), because these symbols possess the capacity to mediate relationships, create new forms of distinction and encourage people to feel inadequate or incomplete. Of course, the new statuses and distinctions created by consumerism are based not simply on ownership, but the inability of others to own. Furthermore, Matthews’ defence of consumerism displays a staggering lack of awareness of the ecological outcomes of western consumerism. Consumerism, of course, involves a process of buying, discarding and buying again. The West’s attachment to cheap consumerism has, quite clearly, had a profound effect upon our natural environment. And how should we seek to justify the claim that consumerism is a ‘positive achievement of capitalism’ (p. 100) to those who work in near slave conditions in the developing world to service western consumer markets? According to Matthews a post-capitalist society must retain consumerism, so even the dream of revolution provides no respite for the developing world’s consumer workforce.
Matthews’ dazzling misunderstanding of consumerism reflects his unwillingness to engage in any forthright account of political economy. There is no discussion of western deindustrialization and rapid eastern industrialization, no discussion of the reversal of global trade flows and no consideration of the massive growth and staggering complexity of abstract financial markets. Ultimately, he refuses to engage with the fundamental realist question: how can we intervene and how deep do we need to go to improve significantly the social experience of ordinary people? For Matthews, realist criminologists must sit in a waiting room hoping for a brief conversation with a harried low-level administrator attached to the ‘policy-making community’. For me, realist criminology needs to drive new empirical and theoretical accounts of what exists, and what forces underlie our experience of social reality. We must be ready to engage with difficult and demanding topics, and we must be honest enough to recognize when depth intervention is necessary. Matthews is right to be dissatisfied with contemporary criminology, and his critique of our discipline deserves to be widely read, appreciated and discussed. His call for a new realist criminology is incredibly timely, and I hope his project enjoys success in the years ahead. However, for the reasons I have outlined above, I doubt this book will significantly reinvigorate our disciplinary dialectic or encourage criminology’s distinct factions to decamp from their traditional positions to pursue a new realist truth project.