Insecurity and the sociology of deviance: Jock Young against Talcott Parsons and the long shadow of C. Wright Mills – a comparative appreciation

Abstract

In The Criminological Imagination, Jock Young praises Charles Mills for his sociological imagination and refutes Talcott Parsons as an abstract theorist. This article focuses on a key concept of contemporary criminology and in the work of Parsons, the concept of insecurity and its relationship with deviance. Three facts have to be kept in mind: (1) Parsons’ work is based in methodology in which conceptual schemes and empirical facts are distinguished. (2) Modern society is pluralised and differentiated and so are the sciences of human action. (3) Since the 1930s, Parsons conceptualised the co-existence of pluralised and differentiated democracy in America and monolithic and totalitarian dictatorship in Germany. It shall be shown how Young’s understanding of insecurity as cause of crime and criminalisation converges with Parsons’ ideas and how some of Young’s psychological assumptions have an equivalent in Parsons’ uses of psychoanalysis. Finally, Young and Parsons address the problem of emotion and expressive action, the pleasures of deviance as well as the origins of punitive reaction formations.