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Wacquant and civic sociology: 'Formative intentions' and formative
experiences
Ian Loader and Richard Sparks
Criminology and Criminal Justice 2010 10: 405
DOI: 10.1177/1748895810382366
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Article
Wacquant and civic sociology:
‘Formative intentions’ and
formative experiences1
Criminology & Criminal Justice
10(4) 405–415
© The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1748895810382366
crj.sagepub.com
Ian Loader
University of Oxford, UK
Richard Sparks
University of Edinburgh, UK
Our contribution to the now rather expansive activity of welcoming, critiquing, and
otherwise discussing Loïc Wacquant’s new books is devoted to exploring the conception
of sociology’s ‘civic’ roles that he says animates and underpins them. For this reason, we
will focus here in particular on the afterword to Prisons of Poverty (which itself is called
‘A civic sociology of neo-liberal penality’) (Wacquant, 2009b). Given that this is the
argument with which we primarily wish to engage, we will shortly devote a moment or
two to summarising the position.
Like many people, we think there is reason to be grateful that a sociologist of
Wacquant’s stature has chosen to devote a substantial portion of his career to analysing
the new penal politics. We believe that this has contributed significantly to our understanding of the issues and to the seriousness with which wider social scientific and public
discourse now have to treat ‘criminological’ questions. As far as space permits here, we
will go on to say a few words about what this means for sociological and criminological
work as agents of democratic deliberation and reflection. This happens to be the very
problem that has occupied our attention recently (Loader and Sparks, 2010), just as it
does, in one way or another, most people who think seriously about these issues at all.
We will then go on to argue in favour of a certain conception of the civic roles of
social science. This emphasises the connections between what we call an ‘academic
formative intention’, on the one hand, and a commitment to the enhancement of democratic deliberation on matters of common concern, on the other. Our argument, in brief,
is that the public value of sociology or criminology, in this case as applied to questions
of punishment and social control, is most coherently and convincingly described as that
of contributing to a better politics of crime and its regulation – or what we call ‘democratic under-labouring’ (we say a little more about this curious term below; for a fuller
exposition, see Loader and Sparks, 2010: Ch. 5). We think this is in many respects very
Corresponding author:
Richard Sparks
Email: [email protected]
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close to, perhaps even entirely compatible with, Wacquant’s view of the matter, notwithstanding some differences in vocabulary and style. However, it is also designedly inclusive and is by no means restricted to, and certainly does not automatically prefer, one
way of engagement over all others. We suggest that Wacquant has discovered – in a way
that is partly given by prior aspects of his intellectual orientation and theoretical convictions (his ‘approach’, or more technically his ‘formative intention’), and partly worked
out in response to some striking aspects of the acclaim, and no doubt opprobrium, that
greeted the publication of his work in various parts of the world (what we call here his
‘formative experiences’) – one important way of doing something that looks very like
what we mean by democratic under-labouring. We are aware that this sounds curious:
Loïc Wacquant as under-labourer, surely some mistake?
We borrow the term ‘formative intention’ from the work of Collins and Evans (2007:
116–7) in the sociology of natural science. Collins and Evans use this term to analyse what
is distinctive about particular sorts of knowledge production and claims to expertise – what
counts, for example, as properly conducted and reported science within the conventions
of what Merton termed ‘organised scepticism’ that structure a scientific community?
How does this differ from the intentions and expectations of art, or law, or ordinary discussion? We find this diction helpful in developing our own conception of the mission
and tasks of the democratic under-labourer. In our view, the special contribution that the
under-labourer as a social scientist can make to democracy presupposes a commitment
to the values of clarity, coherence, non-contradiction, evidence, and so on, that define her
activities as academic ones. She holds, that is to say, that when sociology, criminology,
and other disciplines intervene in public life, they need to do so in ways that remain
embedded in academic formative intentions and processes, and retain an overriding
interest in the production of knowledge. Yet this is not, as we hope to make clearer below,
in any sense an argument that scholarship stands above debate, or flourishes an expertise
that can trump other positions and bring an end to discussion, still less that it should
absent itself from public controversy (see also Edwards and Sheptycki, 2009).
How, then, does all this bear upon Wacquant’s objectives in writing these books? No
doubt there will be readers for whom Wacquant’s very eloquence, the vigour of his judgements and opinions, and the intensity of his objections to what he sees as the destructive
march of neoliberalism through the institutions and ways of life of many countries, casts
suspicion on his scientific credibility from the outset. Yet, at the same time, the vehemence
of his disapproval of what he sees as the evangelising and propagandist activities of many
of the neoliberal think-tankers, policy consultants, commentators, and others implicated in
this process, seems to us to result not just from disagreement, but from a sense that these
people are seeing the world through ideological blinkers, playing fast and loose with evidence and so on. That is to say, he does not see them simply as mistaken, but also as
somewhat fraudulent; as being so convinced of the correctness of the cause that they have
become indifferent to the quality of the evidence that supports it. The problems of their
politics, and the inadequacy of their social science, are for him bound up together. Thus,
although Wacquant may be seen from a certain point of view as an inveterate side-taker,
he does not see himself as inhabiting an epistemologically flat universe. He thinks, in
other words, that he has a better argument, not just a morally superior vantage point.
Yet at the same time, whilst no alert reader of Wacquant can generally be left in much
doubt as to what he is against, and despite his well-known taste for pugilism in all its
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forms, we see his outline of civic sociology as an accommodating, moderate, and quite
capacious one. Perhaps this seems surprising. We are certainly not suggesting that
Wacquant has ceased to express himself in a trenchant and on occasion combative manner. Certainly he intends us to be in no doubt as to where he stands on the big issues that
his books address. For him, the effects of the neoliberal ascendancy on the penal realm
have been disastrous, perhaps especially in their exported forms. The apologists and
ideologues involved in this movement (its ‘missionaries’, as he calls them) have in his
depiction characteristically been over-zealous, always highly instrumental, and often
downright unscrupulous. At the same time, he has some fairly unflattering things to say
even about those whom one might suppose to be closer to him, politically and intellectually. Certain other notable recent contributions in the sociology of punishment receive a
somewhat peremptory – and not always fair – dismissal. The entire debate on ‘public
sociology’ is cuffed aside in one rather disdainful footnote – even if the casual observer
might have some difficulty in grasping what is really at stake in the distinction between
‘public’ and ‘civic’ sociology (we return to each of these engagements in due course).
Yet, curiously, the appealing (to many readers) ebullience of Wacquant’s writing in
Prisons of Poverty (2009b) and elsewhere could easily lead one to suppose that civic
sociology here means something bigger and less intellectually modest than turns out to
be the case on closer examination. What then is civic sociology? What does it require and
preclude? Does it matter, and if so why?
We will seek briefly to locate both Wacquant’s conception of the civic role of social
science and ours in relation to certain current controversies and debates below. We have
in mind here not just those debates concerning the recent transformations of law and
order politics that are the substantive topic of his recent work, and as it happens of much
of ours, but also, and for present purposes more particularly, those that address questions
about the relations between social scientific work and public issues more generally. Let
us first remind ourselves of the essential features of the case.
Doing the Civic Sociology of Neoliberal Penality
Wacquant holds that the punitive turn in penal policy and the ‘glorification of the penal
wing of the state’ is not an adjunct or mere by-product of neoliberalism, but rather an
inherent component of a ‘larger revamping of public authority’ and a ‘re-engineering of
the state to promote and respond to the economic and sociomoral conditions ... of hegemonic neoliberalism’. For him, the growth and intensification of penal controls (the
‘right hand’ of the state) are not responses to ‘the evolution of crime’ (indeed, crime
rather drops out of Wacquant’s story altogether). Rather, they are ‘core political capacities through which Leviathan produces and manages inequality, marginality and identity’. The famous ‘rolling back’ of the state that is one of neoliberalism’s proudest claims,
is accompanied by a rolling out of ‘a new government of poverty wedding restrictive
“workfare” and expansive “prisonfare”, which ensnares the precarious fractions of the
post-industrial proletariat in a carceral-assistential net designed to steer them towards
deregulated employment or to contain them in their dispossessed neighbourhoods and in
the booming prisons that have become their satellites’ (Wacquant, 2008: 9).
Thus, Wacquant claims, whereas a number of influential readings of recent penal
change understand it as one of the manifestations of a deep-seated cultural shift, it is
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more appropriate to depict it rather as something purposefully pursued to consolidate the
dominance of neoliberal rule. In the face of that dominance, he argues, punitive policies
become more or less compulsory, thus acquiring a breadth of political support such that
‘penal severity is now presented virtually everywhere and by everyone as a healthy
necessity, a vital reflex of self-defence by a social body threatened by the gangrene of
criminality, no matter how petty’ (Wacquant, 2008: 11).
In Wacquant’s vision, the new penal state is one designed to deal with ‘castaway categories’ of unassimilated, unwanted, and unnecessary people. The historic interest of the
social state in inclusion or reintegration, however problematic and attenuated these may
have been in reality, now wanes to a residual level: as the welfare state retreats so the
penal state grows. Mass imprisonment is a key dimension, on this view, of the new government of poverty, with obvious correlative consequences for both indigenous and
immigrant minorities. ‘Logically’, Wacquant argues, ‘the prison returns to the forefront
of the societal stage, when only 30 years ago the most eminent specialists of the penal
question were unanimous in predicting its waning, if not its disappearance’ (2008: 15).
Wacquant insists that social policy and penal policy are not ‘separated and isolated
domains of public action’. Rather, ‘in reality they already function in tandem at the bottom of the structure of classes and places’. This has a bearing on the relations between
penal politics and, to mention but two, migration and public health. In that they are, in
Wacquant’s view, part and parcel of the neoliberal ‘rolling back’ of the social state, these
new institutional arrangements are also actively exported, for example to Europe and to
Latin America. Thus, the new gadgets and devices – and the think-tank pamphlets and
consultancy opportunities facilitated by the requirements of the expansion of the penal
field – impel the international circulation of expert discourse and academic apology, and
hence the phenomenon of ‘policy transfer’ (Jones and Newburn, 2007) to a new level of
intensity.
What follows is that these phenomena cannot be adequately named, tracked, analysed, or criticised so as to speak internally to a specialist discipline or activity of penology or criminology – they require the intellectual resources of a wider sociology of
politics and of state theory, or else they simply escape proper understanding. They also
demand rigorous comparative and trans-national or translational study in order to track
their global reach and diffusion in its variety and unevenness, and to apprehend the complexities of their local appropriations and resistances. It is for these reasons that Wacquant
is so critical of accounts of these transformations that seem to him to depend on notions
of evolution or succession. This is not, he insists, a question of transition to a new societal ‘stage’. What Wacquant calls ‘hazy disquisitions on late modernity’ do not meet the
need. What is required is a much more expressly political reading of recent events. The
issue concerns which vision of economic and social futures is winning, where, by whose
agency, with what effects and at whose expense.
What Do ‘Civic’ Sociologists Do Then?
How, then, is this a civic project and what is entailed in so naming it? At various points in
the afterword (2009b) Wacquant says that civic sociology is for him ‘an effort to deploy
the tools of social science to engage in, and bear upon, a current debate of frontline
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societal significance’, and that this involves ‘circumventing’ dominant policy and media
discourse and ‘alerting’ citizens and decision-makers to the dire consequences of current
trends. In other words, just as the ‘glorification’ of penality is not an adjunct or add-on
of neoliberalism, but rather something intrinsic to it, so ‘engagement’ (in debate) and
‘alerting’ are not, on this view, supplements to or optional extras of the sociological enterprise but constitutive of its basic character, and intrinsic features of the disposition of its
practitioners. These involvements do not belong only to some distinct activity of polemic
or prophecy – they are, for Wacquant, central to the academic formative intention of the
sociologist. We must take it that the words ‘deploying the tools of social science’ are no
less important than any other terms in this statement of intention. The scientific aspiration
and the civic mission both go, to paraphrase Richard Rorty, ‘all the way down’.
What follows? First of all, Wacquant naturally does not claim to be originating anything
wholly new. The notion of sociology as a civic enterprise refers directly to the Durkheimian
notion of ‘Professional Ethics and Civic Morals’ (1900/1957). Civic Sociology is also, as it
happens, the title of a book by E.A. Ross (1925).2 Of course, for Wacquant the most direct
antecedent and primary influence is Pierre Bourdieu. As Bourdieu and Wacquant had
already elsewhere reminded us, the element of engagement in sociological work does not
mean that such work is just about partisanship or side-taking in the ordinary sense, but
rather that it seeks to offer greater opportunities for ‘knowing what game we play’. We may
thus ‘minimis[e] the extent to which we are manipulated by the forces of the field in which
we evolve’, and ‘discern the sites in which we do indeed enjoy a degree of freedom’ to
develop our own dispositions and just possibly to engage actively as political subjects
(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 198–9). On this view, the sociological contribution in
civic deliberation is not about the advocacy of already-defined positions (becoming a
policy adviser or counsellor, still less the kind of well-resourced think-tank operative,
trader in policy ‘solutions’, or ‘guru’ to whom Wacquant refers as a ‘missionary’), as it is
an attitude of empirically informed scepticism towards dogmas, slogans, and prescriptions,
and an atmosphere of imposed consensus, and thus about carving our particular kind of
space for rational reappraisal and democratic discussion.
Wacquant’s account of the civic purposes of his work and in particular the fervid
reception of Prisons of Poverty3(2009b) in Latin America and elsewhere is an illuminating, and in certain respects exemplary, story. The intense and often fevered atmosphere
into which he stumbled on his many travels to discuss his work will be for many readers
amongst the most fascinating aspects of Prisons of Poverty. Wacquant insists that this
history stands not so much as a validation of the academic merits of the work, but as an
index of the reach and penetration of the issues with which it deals. His conclusion is that
just as small armies of consultants and sales-people were energetically working to import
the vocabulary and techniques of neoliberal crime control into Latin America and Central
Europe, others there (many of them state officials, including criminal justice officials)
were avidly seeking ‘civic firebreakers’ and ‘shields’. Thus:
The point of this recapitulation is emphatically not to suggest that the foreign reception of
Prisons of Poverty provides an apt measure of its analytic merits, but to give an idea of the wide
diffusion and fiery fever that the phenomenon it tracks evinces in the political, journalistic and
intellectual fields of First- and Second-World societies. A firestorm of ‘law and order’ has
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indeed been raging across the globe, which has transformed public debate and policy on crime
and punishment in ways that no observer of the penal scene could have foreseen a dozen years
before. The reason behind the unusual international engouement for the book was the same as
in France: in all these countries, the mantras of ‘zero tolerance’ policing and ‘prison works’,
lionised by US officials and showcased by the Giuliani-Bratton duet as the cause for the
seemingly miraculous crime drop in New York, were being hailed by local officials. Everywhere
politicians, of the Right and more significantly of the Left, were vying to import the latest
American methods of law enforcement presented as the panacea for curing urban violence and
assorted dislocations, while skeptics and critics of these methods were scouring for theoretical
arguments, empirical data, and civic firebreakers with which to thwart the adoption of punitive
containment as a generalised technique for managing rampant social insecurity. (Wacquant,
2009b: 166–7; original emphasis)
Yet, although this is a vivid story, energetically told, about an academic succès fou, it is
emphatically not a template or recipe or how-to manual. This is why we have emphasised
the superficially paradoxical modesty of Wacquant’s conception of the civic contribution
of sociology. Despite the intercontinental scale of the phenomenon to which it attends,
the assertiveness and confidence of its writing, and the certainty of many of its judgements, what matters practically in this story are the local appropriations of the analysis
by those involved in situ. And overwhelmingly, those uses and appropriations concern, it
seems, not an alternative blueprint, a sort of counter-‘panacea’ to the mantras of the ‘zero
tolerance’ lobby, but rather a ‘firebreak’, a way of moderating or holding back for a time
an otherwise seemingly unstoppable conflagration.4
Presumably these experiences are amongst the reasons why Wacquant rejects as inadequate the distinction drawn by his Berkeley colleague Michael Burawoy (2005a, 2005b)
between ‘public’ and ‘professional’ (not to mention ‘policy’ and ‘critical’) forms of sociology.5 On this point, Wacquant comments with characteristic trenchancy:
I prefer the term civic to public sociology (which has recently come into fashion among American
sociologists), since such sociology seeks to bridge the divide between instrumental and reflexive
knowledge and to speak simultaneously to both academic and general audiences – albeit in
different harmonics. The dichotomous opposition between ‘public’ and ‘professional’ sociology
is a peculiarity of the US intellectual field, expressive of the political isolation and social
impotence of American academics, that does not travel well outside of the Anglo-American
sphere and does not adequately capture the positional predicament of university sociologists in
America either. (Wacquant, 2009b: 204; emphasis added)
This seems a somewhat harsh evaluation, and one that makes too much of a minor difference. Nevertheless, it matters from Wacquant’s perspective that, for civic sociology, no
division of labour of quite the kind that Burawoy’s (2005a, 2005b) typology of sociologies appears to propose is really feasible. For example, picking up an instance mentioned
by Wacquant in the final chapter of Punishing the Poor (2009a), it is the richly empirical,
largely quantitative work by Tom Tyler and colleagues (1990, 2004, 2007) on procedural
justice, legitimacy, and law-abidingness that gives us rational grounds for suspicion that
evermore assertive styles of policing and prosecution (as proposed by advocates of zero
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tolerance) may be self-confounding (and hence why the current doctrines of neoliberal
crime control are likely to turn out to be self-limiting, whatever their ascendancy now).
The implicit message may be that Tyler’s work exercises the influence it now does in
large part because it is judged by so many readers to stand up as professional social science, as well as carrying vital implications for a field of policy and practice. So where
does it stand on this public–professional–critical–policy matrix? Is it perhaps something
like ‘professional social science undertaken for public purposes’? From Wacquant’s perspective, one could play such parlour games all day, but the outcome would still not
matter very much. Similarly, sociologists may well very often be people with a sense of
mission, but never missionaries in the sense intended by Wacquant in describing the
new profession of security and crime control ‘experts’. Civic sociology is not a special
sort of sociology, it is just sociology that remains true to its disciplinary moorings and
sources of insight, and declines to be excluded from public discourse by people with
something to sell.
Civic Social Science as ‘Under-labouring’?6
In our current work, we raise a number of questions about the ways in which social science (criminology in our case) participates in public life – which criminologies are taken
up and used? What are the filters that structure certain contexts of reception? What are
the ‘formative intentions’ of various participants in these conversations? If we begin
from an understanding that crime and its control partake of the basic stuff of politics (and
thus raise questions of order, authority, legitimacy, justice, freedom, power), what then is
the special contribution of systematic scholarship on those practices? It matters a good
deal, we suggest (unoriginally but not trivially), not only that crime risks are regulated
and controlled, but also how they are regulated and controlled, and which instruments of
government are used in doing this. How we contrive to get the results of research and
reflection to have any purchase on what practically happens in a policy environment that
has become volatile and unstable, one in which it becomes evermore difficult to make
reason and evidence the drivers of what is said and done (which seems to be how many
scholars experience it), is to say the least of it a hard question.
We argue (and we call the position, ruthlessly updating and ripping from its original
context a term borrowed from Locke (1690/1975))7 that the social scientist may aspire to
something like the role of an under-labourer for democracy. To pose this issue in these
terms is to try to think afresh about criminology’s relation to the present pathologies and
unrealised promise of modern politics. In the former case, this means trying to make
good on the rather remote and thin understanding that some social science disciplines
such as the one that has lately preoccupied us, namely criminology, too often have of the
world of practical affairs by fostering a better appreciation of the forces that shape the
treatment of crime in the contemporary public sphere and the reasons why (social) scientific knowledge about crime does or does not get taken up and used in political debate
and governmental action. This, in turn, means acquiring the will, and the necessary tools,
to develop understanding of the ‘circumstances of politics’ (Waldron, 1999: 106) and
cultivating a ‘qualified tolerance’ towards those who practise politics as a vocation (Swift
and White, 2008: 64). This does not, however, mean reconciling oneself to the status quo.
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In the latter case, re-appraisal means re-connecting with and developing those strands of
thought which have insisted that crime is ‘political’ (Taylor et al., 1973), and making
explicit the connections that exist – that cannot but exist – between crime and its control
and the repertoire of ideas (order, justice, authority, legitimacy, freedom, rights, etc.) and
traditions (liberalism, but also conservatism, socialism, social democracy, feminism,
republicanism, environmentalism, etc.) that comprise modern political thought. It
involves folding into our understanding of criminological research and public engagement the fact that any discussion of the criminal question encodes in miniature a set of
claims about the nature of the good society, and any attempt to answer it – however
apparently ‘dry’, technical, or limited in scope – carries and projects a possible world, a
desirable state of affairs that a political or criminological actor wishes to usher into
existence.
To think again and in these ways about the intersections between criminology (or socio­
logy, human geography, or whatever) and politics does not dispose of, or render secondary,
the question of knowledge and its uses. Having indicated why criminologists might better
understand the pathologies of modern politics and be clearer about the relationship of their
work to its ideals and possibilities, another set of questions shuffles into view. One presumes that most individuals who spend their time, or in many instances the greater part of
their working lives, practising criminology or an allied craft, do so because they believe
that acquiring knowledge about crime, or justice, or punishment has some value. It also
seems safe to suppose that they think the knowledge they produce and disseminate has a
quality – a methodological rigour, respect for evidence, or theoretical acuity, which enables
it to unearth things about the world or see that world in a revised light – that sets it apart
from other claims about crime and its control, such as those circulated by politicians, journalists, bloggers, victim groups, offenders, police officers, campaigners, or simply citizens
engaged in daily conversation. But what exactly is this ‘expertise’ and what value and
place does it have? Here the following questions begin to emerge: what contribution can
criminological knowledge make to shaping responses to crime in a polity which acknowledges crime and punishment to be properly political issues? What in a democracy is the
public value of criminology, or any other social science? What modes of intervention – and
what institutional arrangements – can best realise that good?
To be a democratic under-labourer is to be committed, first and foremost, to the generation of knowledge, rather than (first and foremost) to scoring a point or winning a
battle: if the distinction between sociologist and missionary is to mean anything, it must
entail something of this kind. What, then, of the question of public intervention in disputes about crime? We have three points to make on this. The first is that engaging in
public life – being ‘political’ in some broad sense – does not mean reducing the question
of crime to one of political preference, nor positing criminologists as quasi-politicians,
nor celebrating folk wisdom over professional judgement and hard-won knowledge. Our
task is to be bearers and interpreters of that knowledge and to bring it to bear on matters
of public concern and dispute, hence our insistence on the question of the scholarly
‘formative intention’. However, this does not – secondly – reduce what social scientists
can bring to public debate to matters of evidence narrowly construed. It seems clear that
the social scientist enjoys a degree of freedom that many participants in political and
professional struggles over crime and justice lack. They have a certain liberty to refuse
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to take the social world for granted or accept received political ‘imperatives’, to provoke
and unsettle, and pose questions about our responses to crime that neoliberal political
cultures increasingly seem to have forgotten how to ask. Being critical in this sense properly forms part of the social scientist’s DNA (see further Ericson, 2005). In other words,
we can and should bring to public discussion a scepticism that refuses to treat at face
value the categories, assumptions, and self-understandings that make up prevailing ‘common sense’ about crime and its control. We may, however, thirdly, have to give up an
illusion of mastery in which we somehow expect our knowledge to engineer outcomes,
end political discussion, and trump the ill-informed concerns and perspectives of others.
The public role of criminology involves generating controversy, opening up and extending debate, and challenging and provoking received public ‘opinion’ and political postures, not closing such discourse down.
So (to cut a much longer story very short indeed) it is a disposition and a practice whose
formative intention is the production of rigorous knowledge, but which understands itself
as engaging with a field in which applications of that knowledge never reduce to simple and
transparent calculations. Instead, the question always arises: ‘what is the collective good
that we want enquiry to promote?’ (Kitcher, 2001), and there are not only ever ‘matters of
fact’, but also always disputed ‘matters of concern’ (Latour, 2004). The social scientist as a
democratic under-labourer thus has a commitment both to rigour in knowledge production
and to a more deliberative politics of big public questions like the future of punishment
and crime control. She is necessarily implicated in what Hoppe (1999) calls the ‘argumentative turn’ in public policy. The under-labouring conception of social science is committed
both to participating within, and to facilitating and extending, institutional spaces that supplement representative politics with inclusive public deliberation about crime and justice
matters, whether locally, nationally, or in emergent transnational spaces.
In this regard, the public value of democratic under-labouring lies not primarily in
‘cooling’ down controversies about crime and social responses to it, notwithstanding
Wacquant’s terminology of ‘fire-breakers’ and the like,8 so much as in playing its part in
figuring out ways to bring their ‘heat’ within practices of democratic governance (Krause,
2008). Hence the seemingly paradoxical nature of our suggestion in this short article.
Although it seems odd to do so in the case of an undoubted academic ‘star’, and doughty
controversialist, such as Wacquant, nevertheless his ethnographer’s feel for the local uses
and appropriations of his work, and the often unexpected ways in which such work actually inserts itself into public consciousness or practical decision-making, allows us to
claim him for the side of the under-labourers, not so distant indeed from the various sites
in which the rest of us also toil.
Notes
1. Like other contributions to the present collection, this article is developed from remarks
prepared for the ‘Symposium on Neoliberal Penality’, which took place at Queen Mary,
University of London, on 7 October 2009. We would like to thank Leonidas Cheliotis for
having instigated and organised that occasion and created the platform for this discussion, and
for his comments on an earlier draft.
2. The full title of Ross’s (1925) book is Civic Sociology: A Textbook in Social and Civic
Problems for Young Americans. Ross’s book was an early attempt at publicising academic
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3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
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sociology for a wider readership, and was consistent with the distinctive views of theorists
of the Progressive period on the role of education in sustaining democracy in mass society
(Urbiel, 1998). There is little enough new under the sun. At one stage, colleagues (Sparks
included) in Scotland took it that in nominating ‘civic criminology’ as the defining mission
for the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (www.sccjr.ac.uk), we were doing
something novel and distinctively Scottish. In one sense, we were – yet avid discussion of the
civic missions of the social sciences has recurred at intervals ever since Durkheim.
Wacquant is punctilious in using the local title of the book – originally Les Prisons de la
Misère and subsequently Prisões da Miseria and so on – when describing its reception in
various parts of the world. This seems quite appropriate, but detailing the contextual features
of these narratives is not our main concern here, important as they clearly are, so we will stick
with the English translation for present purposes.
It is at this point worth posing the not insignificant sociological question of whether Wacquant’s
preferred vocabulary and style – the aforementioned assertiveness and certainty that his
writing displays – tends to attract and enchant those actors who are already on the lookout for
resources to hold back the punitive upsurge, while doing less to persuade – and maybe even
alienating – those who are still to be ‘awakened’ to the social costs of the neoliberal penal
experiment. We have no way of knowing for certain the answer to this question – and it may
even vary from place to place – but the suspicion that this may be so at least in part explains
the differences in vocabulary and style between Wacquant’s project and ours that we alluded
to at the outset.
There is now a very extensive literature on the topic of ‘public sociology’. Burawoy’s original
statements of the position (Burawoy, 2005a, 2005b) stand amongst the most highly cited
papers in the field in recent times. For a good conspectus of the issues and the arguments
ranged around the public sociology thesis, see Clawson et al. (2006) and Nichols (2007). As
we point out elsewhere (Loader and Sparks, 2010: Ch. 2), these issues have been keenly felt
in criminology (e.g. Chancer and McLaughlin, 2007), as in other neighbouring subjects, and
several of the more intriguing contributions have come from those whose work concentrates
upon crime and punishment issues, e.g. Braithwaite (2005) and Ericson (2005).
The following section largely condenses aspects of the argument of Loader and Sparks (2010:
Ch. 5). Those who wish to get the full story should go there.
For Locke, the task of under-labourers – roughly meaning here all who are concerned to
discover valid knowledge – consists in ‘clearing the ground a little, and removing some of
the Rubbish’ (Locke, 1690/1975: 10). Our position is that ‘the Rubbish’ is to be construed
as that which stands in the way of whatever one labours in the service of – in Locke’s case
‘Knowledge’, in the present case a better-informed democratic politics of crime control.
This is not to say that we see this terminology as necessarily misplaced in his account. Wacquant
sees his interlocutors as confronting a ‘conflagration’, not as engaging in a fire-side chat.
References
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Braithwaite, J. (2005) ‘For Public Social Science’, British Journal of Sociology 56(3): 345–54.
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Burawoy, M. (2005b) ‘Public Sociology: Populist Fad or Path to Renewal?’, British Journal of
Sociology 56(3): 417–32.
Chancer, L. and E. McLaughlin (2007) ‘Pubic criminologies: Diverse perspectives on academia
and policy’, Theoretical Criminology 11(2): 155–73.
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Biographies
Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Criminology at
the University of Oxford.
Richard Sparks is Professor of Criminology at the University of Edinburgh and CoDirector of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.
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