Southern Criminology and the Complex Legacy of the Enlightenment

• In Event: Rethinking Deviance: Beyond Strain and Social Reaction Theory

Abstract

This paper explores the complicated legacy of the Enlightenment and recent developments in southern criminology. Attitudes towards the Enlightenment are complex and contradictory. Yet, we cannot escape its intellectual and political legacies for they ‘endure in our times’ and ‘whether we aspire to orient ourselves by them or contest their claims’ and ‘whenever norms of secularism, human rights, or justice are debated’ what we are doing is ‘positioning ourselves vis-à-vis the Enlightenment’ (Dhawan, 2014, p.9). On the one hand, the Enlightenment is considered representative of the start of the long march of progress: freeing individuals from the shackles of absolutism, religion and tradition. On the other, the Enlightenment’s claims of freedom, equality and fraternity are exposed as a ‘hollow myth’. The ideas of the Enlightenment translated into a revolutionary and transnational proclivity to advance across borders creating a strangle hold on ideas and how ideas translated into practice in the Global North and parts of the Global South. The Enlightenment was to mean imperial conquest, subjugation, and a Eurocentric creation of universal truths. Emerging out of the Enlightenment, classicism as a theory of crime signified the emergence of an imperialistic train of thought that was to ensure the dominance of European and North American ideas on the discipline of criminology.

Author

• Jayne Mooney, John Jay College of Criminal Justice