Social Crime Revisited

Abstract

This article attempts a critical re-evaluation of the concept of social crime. A brief review of the deployment of the concept by radical historians in studies of crime in 18th-century England is followed by an analysis of attempts to apply the term to crime in modern industrial capitalism. The article concludes with an attempt to rehabilitate the concept as useful in the present context in particular as a counterbalance to an overemphasis on the victim perspective in contemporary critical criminologies.