Suchergebnisse

AbstractFollowing a series of transformative political and legal battles, California's overcrowded prison system has moved in the direction of moderate decarceration. A softer stance on punishment means that thousands of previously ineligible inmates serving indeterminate sentences are now being considered for release on parole. Drawing on ethnographic observations of twenty parole hearings in one California men's prison, this study outlines how rehabilitation has come to be enmeshed in a logic of punitivity, as parole commissioners subject inmates to an individualizing gaze that misrecognizes the socially embedded nature of their performance. Parole commissioners are tasked with assessing dangerousness, deploying a multifaceted conception of risk that combines formalized actuarial instruments and evaluative judgments to form the inchoate and contradictory notion of "insight." Inmates are expected to demonstrate this if they are to be released, but what is insight? Parole boards assume that it is a valid indicator of future behavior and probable recidivism, and parole commissioners posit that successful inmates will be capable of demonstrating authentic remorse and insight, unimpeded by the constraints of an austere and dangerous carceral environment. However, the discretionary criteria established by the penal system are limited by the deleterious living conditions established by this same penal system.

Surplus populations are back on the political agenda. With the rise of automation technologies and the advent of the hyperflexible 'gig economy', millions of individuals across the post-industrialised world will likely become supernumerary or consigned to low-quality jobs in the service sector. Neoliberalism signalled the abdication of the state's responsibility for ensuring full employment and providing high-quality employment. However, criminology has largely forgotten the central roles played by both in preventing the spread of social pathologies. Against the logic of neoliberalism, what is needed is a state capable of counteracting the formation of surplus populations, or an anti-surplus state. A second New Deal would enact infrastructure investments and re-embed superfluous populations into meaningful employment relations. Following Bourdieu's criticism of a scientistic 'flight into purity', criminologists should adopt the lessons learned by Sweden's interwar social democrats and advocate policies capable of preventing the augmentation of social superfluity.

Bourdieu's anthropology of the state can be interpreted as a form of political theology, premised on a panentheistic conception of the state, which is transcendental to social reality while simultaneously being lodged in all social matter. The state is a Leviathan that imposes a horizon of meaning beyond which social agents rarely, if ever, move. The anthropologist must transcend the doxic structures of the state by engaging in a labor of anamnesis, enacting a bringing-to-consciousness of the invisible and occluded operations of the state in its deployment of symbolic power, which serves to naturalize a series of dominant (yet arbitrary) categories, concepts, and representations. Bourdieu's ontological vision can be summarized in the concise formula, 'state = society = God.' A guiding methodical imperative for sociologists of the state-as-divinity is extracted from Bourdieu's lectures on the state: the Deus Absconditus Principle, which mandates detecting and uncovering the veiled divinity of the state in all aspects of social reality. It is the task of the anthropologist to channel, interpret, and challenge the panentheistic state.

Bourdieu's anthropology of the state can be interpreted as a form of political theology, premised on a panentheistic conception of the state, which is transcendental to social reality while simultaneously being lodged in all social matter. The state is a Leviathan that imposes a horizon of meaning beyond which social agents rarely, if ever, move. The anthropologist must transcend the doxic structures of the state by engaging in a labor of anamnesis, enacting a bringing-to-consciousness of the invisible and occluded operations of the state in its deployment of symbolic power, which serves to naturalize a series of dominant (yet arbitrary) categories, concepts, and representations. Bourdieu's ontological vision can be summarized in the concise formula, 'state = society = God.' A guiding methodical imperative for sociologists of the state-as-divinity is extracted from Bourdieu's lectures on the state: the Deus Absconditus Principle, which mandates detecting and uncovering the veiled divinity of the state in all aspects of social reality. It is the task of the anthropologist to channel, interpret, and challenge the panentheistic state.

Surplus populations are back on the political agenda. With the rise of automation technologies and the advent of the hyperflexible 'gig economy', millions of individuals across the post-industrialised world will likely become supernumerary or consigned to low-quality jobs in the service sector. Neoliberalism signalled the abdication of the state's responsibility for ensuring full employment and providing high-quality employment. However, criminology has largely forgotten the central roles played by both in preventing the spread of social pathologies. Against the logic of neoliberalism, what is needed is a state capable of counteracting the formation of surplus populations, or an anti-surplus state. A second New Deal would enact infrastructure investments and re-embed superfluous populations into meaningful employment relations. Following Bourdieu's criticism of a scientistic 'flight into purity', criminologists should adopt the lessons learned by Sweden's interwar social democrats and advocate policies capable of preventing the augmentation of social superfluity.

Axel Honneth's (2017) The Idea of Socialism is a timely reflection on a puzzling state of affairs: Perhaps at no time in the past several decades have so many sensed that there is something terribly wrong with global capitalism – from mounting inequalities to runaway climate change – and yet rarely has the resolve to think through workable alternatives to the global capitalist order been weaker. But the "sudden decline in utopian energy" (p. 2), or withering away of the millenarian impulse, is perhaps not so difficult to explain. As Honneth recognizes, it is incredibly hard to re-engineer vastly complex, mutually interdependent systems of political governance, economic production, and sociocultural reproduction – perhaps so difficult that the very idea of fashioning ideological blueprints for the refabricating of the world has itself grown outmoded.

N/A (as per author instructions: submissions of 3000 words to be submitted without abstract)

Guy Standing's (2017) The Corruption of Capitalism gets it wrong from the very beginning: the title suggests that the social ills emanating from capitalism should be ascribed not to capitalism working according to plan, but to something, somewhere along the way, having gone wrong with capitalism, in the movement from truly free markets to their disfigured progeny. It is never clear whether Standing wants to rid capitalism of its perversions, and thereby restore markets to their purified form, or whether this ethical-moral framing is a rhetorical strategy—a form of immanent critique – aimed at exposing the hypocrisies of those proselytizing the free market creed. At times, Standing sounds like a cross between Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman. It is this schizoid movement from left to right and back again – a dialectical intertwining – that gives rise to what one might call Standing's centrist libertarianism. He borrows from both right and left, ultimately serving up a strange ideological brew, advocating for the idea that markets should be made free, restoring the welfare state of postwar social democracy, freeing all manner of "commons" (from nature to intellectual property), enclosed within a universal basic income scheme. Common to all these proposals is the idea that capitalism can still be redeemed.

Capitalism in northern societies is entering an age of advanced precarity. On the one hand, postindustrial societies are confronted by growing surplus populations for whom there exist few positive functions in the market. These new 'dangerous classes' are increasingly subject to surveillance, discipline, and exclusion as the policing and penal instruments of the state are called upon to detect and contain risk. On the other hand, capitalism's 'insiders' are increasingly consigned to a precarious life of hyperflexible labor and generalized insecurity. Confronted with a growing mass of 'social detritus', augmented by advances in automation and catalyzed by accelerating flows of capital, states in the Global North will increasingly be forced to mobilize the disciplinary instruments of policing and punishment to contain the swelling ranks of problem populations.