The Instinctive Criminal and the Collective Drive

• In Event: Critical Criminology: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives

Abstract

A dominant paradigm within criminology been the idea of the rational criminal, weighing costs against benefits, waiting for opportunities, and making decisions to offend on that basis. Whilst there have been attempts to formulate alternative perspectives to this, such as criminology of the emotions, the sub-doxastic, instinctual level of motivations, where agency is explained more in terms of our drives and impulses has been a far less well trodden path. In this I consider what a criminology of the drives might look like and suggest that it offers a far more complex and persuasive aetiology of criminal action. I also consider a secondary, still more radical version of this position, one where its framework is extended to collective agents like institutions, corporations, and states. Whilst the suggestion that attributing drives like desires, fears, or resentments to ostensibly abstract social formations faces the charge of an invalid slide into psychologism, I conclude by suggesting that it may be the only way to make sense of collective malfeasance at a point in history where irrational forces appear to have gained an upper hand.

Author

• Michael R. McGuire, University of Surrey