Deviant Behavior and the Remaking of the World

Abstract

My remarks tonight will consist of a critique of the societal reaction or labeling perspective on deviant behavior. The societal reaction school belongs almost exclusively to sociology, and I am not a sociologist. I am a political scientist. I do not want to claim great clarity about the scope and substance of my field, but I do know that it includes the study of power and the bases of power in social life; and it includes the study of the state and the uses of state force in social life. My discussion of the societal reaction school is shaped by these preoccupations. I will try to show that the arguments of the school are implicitly arguments about power and about the state, and thus about the central issues in the study of political life. But the particular understanding of the nature of power and of the nature of the state, in the world constructed by the societal reaction school, flies in the face of a good deal of human experience. In order to develop my critique, I first need to locate the ideas of the societal reaction school by retracing some of the main steps in the development of sociological thought on deviance. For a very long time and long before there were sociologists, social thinkers, usually out of an expressed concern for social order, have tried to understand why people sometimes break the rules of their society. The reason for this focus seems evident. Social order depends on the observance of rules. But inherent in the imposition of many rules is the exercise of power, the domination of some people by other people against their will, and the use of the state to enforce that domination. And inherent in the defiance of many rules is not only a threat to social order, but a challenge to the particular pattern of domination on which that social order rests. Domination and challenge, and thus conformity and deviance, are at the center of history. They are expressions of the basic dialectical movements through which societies change, or perhaps fail to change. Grand theories of state and society-because they are about the nature of social order and the nature of challenges to that order-are, however indirectly, statements about that basic dialectic. Grand theories of state and society are, in order words, also theories about the phenomena we have come to call deviance.