Criminology

Abstract

A century after classicism, though, criminology was to claim for itself another beginning and another set of influences. But the preoccupations of classicism – whether they appear in utilitarianism, Kantianism, liberalism, anarchism or indeed any political philosophy at all – have remained a constant thread in criminology. At the centre of the criminological enterprise now was the notion of causality. The whole of the last century of criminology can be understood as a series of creative, even brilliant, yet eventually repetitive variations on these late nineteenth-century themes. The criminological theories and methods draw on Freudianism, behaviourism, the Chicago school of sociology, functionalism, anomie theory, interactionism, Marxism and much else. The classical tradition was alive in another sense: modern criminologists became the heirs of the Enlightenment beliefs in rationality and progress. It is the simultaneous claim to knowledge and power which links the two sides of criminology: causation and control.