Ideology and Crime: A Further Chapter
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In 1965, Leon Radzinowicz delivered the James S. Carpentier Lectures to an Ivy League audience in uptown Manhattan. The venue was Columbia University Law School--a great and venerable institution that my colleagues at New York University now think of, fondly, as the second best law school in the City. Back in 1965, however, Columbia was the unchallenged centre of legal education in New York, and the Carpentier Lectures were a prestigious occasion that bestowed considerable honour upon both the lecturer and the subject of his lecture. The following year these Columbia lectures were published as a short book entitled Ideology and Crime: A Study of Crime in its Social and Historical Contexts. When I took my first class in criminology in 1974, as a student in the newly formed Department of Criminology at Edinburgh University (headed by Derick McClintock, who had worked with, or for, Radzinowicz for 25 years) Ideology and Crime was at the top of the reading list. If the point of an introductory text is to give an accessible overview of the subject and to convince the reader of the subject's importance in the wider scheme of things, then Ideology and Crime did its job brilliantly. In 1965, a person taking a cool, hard look at criminology would probably have described the subject as a fledgling sub-discipline with a dubious history, uncertain scientific credentials, and a very tenuous claim to academic respectability. Needless to say, this was not the image evoked by Ideology and Crime. In Radzinowicz's urbane, polished prose, criminology is portrayed not as an upstart subject, scrambling to claim a place in the academy, but as a central current in mankind's struggle for enlightenment, a crucial element in the formation of a modem civilisation, a humanistic science connected to the very heart of cosmopolitan culture. As Radzinowicz tells it, criminology's story is set amid the grandeur of European culture, in an age of scientific progress and social reform. And, in the process of telling this story, using all his considerable powers of language and imagery and historical allusion, Radzinowicz ensures that the prestige of these noble origins is effectively transferred to the struggling new subject. In the span of this short book, and in an impressive feat of rhetorical power and historical conjuring, criminology's status and significance come to take on world-historic dimensions. This is institution-building raised to a fine art—firing the imagination as a preliminary to raising the funds and building the buildings. It seems likely from the circumstances that Radzinowicz's appointment as a Carpentier Lecturer had been the result, at least in part, of urging by members of the New York Bar Association, who were at that time campaigning to establish an 'Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice' in New York City and who had already commissioned Radzinowicz to produce a short report on that subject. If so, his sponsors must have been delighted by his bravura performance. Ideology and Crime opens with a characteristically arresting passage: “The first modem penal ideology [which he calls ‘the Liberal Position’ or ‘classicism’] was forged during that memorable turning point in human affairs, the eighteenth century, and tempered in the fires of more than one revolution. It was forged in Europe at a time when Europe was the centre of the world. Its precursors were French philosophers at a time when France was the centre of Europe. Negatively it was part of the revolt against many ancient abuses, positively it was part of a new view of man in relation to himself and to society.” Undergraduate readers coming to this story for the first time could be forgiven for being swept away by Radzinowicz's magisterial prose and fully convinced of the subject's world-historic importance. And why not? Government ministers, major philanthropists, charitable foundations and university authorities were also moved by claims such as these. Indeed, in the catalogue of causes that produced the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and the criminological establishment that has emerged in Britain over the last 40 years, Radzinowicz's rhetorical skill, his historical vision and his demonic energy must certainly figure as forces that played a key role. Ideology and Crime remains today my favourite historical introduction to criminology. To describe it as a history of criminology isn't exactly correct, however. Rather, it is a succinct outline of the intellectual and political frameworks that have shaped penal policy and practice from the eighteenth century to the present day or rather, to the day before yesterday, since the penal landscape of 1965 is very different from the one that we now confront, as Radzinowicz himself would later point out.
Source Publication
Ideology, Crime and Criminal Justice: A Symposium in Honour of Sir Leon Radzinowicz
Source Editors/Authors
Anthony Bottoms, Michael Tonry
Publication Date
2002
Recommended Citation
Garland, David W., "Ideology and Crime: A Further Chapter" (2002). Faculty Chapters. 682.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/682
