Perspectives traditionnelles et perspectives critiques en criminologie

Abstract

Is critical criminology “passée”? Have its fathers, the British and American sociologists who wrote Critical Criminology in the mid seventies exhaust its potential interest and flavour? It would be too bad because critical criminology never really took place. There never was a serious and rigorous attempt at unfolding the historical, epistemological, socio-political roots of the discipline, a critical look at it that took nothing for granted. Reminding the readers of the very serious and highly publicised debate around Traditional and Critical Theory in the late thirties launched by the sociologists and philosophers of the Frankfurt School, the author shows that, far from being outdated, critical theory is of the utmost practicality in criminology, even more so because its founding fathers have taken, since, a less partisan and doctrinaire view of it. The applications of their intellectual and socio-political orientations to criminology are numerous, calling for a serious socio-historical analysis of the discipline and of its academic origins that should throw light on where it is going and its impotence at developing a paradigm.