Abstract
Today, the pursuit of private rather than public ends unquestionably drives the joint ventures of government and the market across much of the world – the resulting grievances fester amongst the populace, manifesting themselves in the global spread of warring factions, paranoia, and general inequality. As many have claimed, the state, unmoored from citizenship has created these dangers. Braithwaite, reading this current state of affairs from the lens of institutional anomie, and drawing on a bevy of criminological thought – in no small part, his previous research – throws his hat into the ring with Macrocriminology and Freedom, an 814-page book Francis Cullen describes as a “criminological epic”.
Relying on his previous works to help elucidate the larger production, Braithwaite sets out to define macrocriminology – a theoretically inclusive lens which he argues can help us confront many of the fundamental crises facing the planet. Reanimating many concepts criminologists are familiar with, Braithwaite incorporates an interdisciplinary approach that spans an array of temporal and geographical milieu, with the overarching goal of advancing a theory of how to build a society free of domination. Replacing crime with domination allows Braithwaite to cut across the restrictions of micro and macro analysis that has long hindered criminology. As a result, Braithwaite writes, many of the key insights the book offers are “not about the criminal justice system, but about theorizing disparate institutions with a curiosity that ranges across all these preferred disciplinary lenses” (p. 54).
In Braithwaite’s characteristic style, it is direct, personal, inclusive, and encyclopedic. Through a combination of personal vignettes, large quantitative analysis, and data from smaller-scale studies, Macrocriminology and Freedom lays out an accessible new theoretical trajectory capable of understanding state, non-state and market violence, and authoritarianism within one paradigm. Stylistically, Braithwaite helps guide the reader through an immense amount of literature. Each chapter returns to these points, reintroducing each concept into the conversation about increasing freedom and controlling domination. Even as he urges criminologists to look past the justice system for the solutions to crime – what might feel like an uphill battle – he remains hopeful.
At the start of each of the 12 chapters, Braithwaite lays out the key points (what he later describes as tributaries), bringing the propositions together in the conclusion of each chapter in engaging ways for the reader. Ultimately, it is these 150 total propositions that make up the larger concept of macrocriminology, which situates its broad formula for reducing crime and domination quite simply: “strengthen freedom to prevent crime; prevent crime to strengthen freedom” (p. 665).
To strengthen freedom and reduce crime, Braithwaite simultaneously pulls us into and pushes us beyond previous criminological thought. Arguing authoritatively for its role in “preventing catastrophes that cascade from the criminalization of states, the criminalization of markets, and the cascading of violent imaginaries on social media” (p. xv), Braithwaite pulls us in to the criminological fold. Yet, his macro-level approach, in turn, pushes us beyond the field’s reactionary focus on prevention of environmental and financial crimes, which includes the single-mindedness of deterrence theory. Beyond asking how to prevent an individual from committing crime, we might also ask “macro-questions about whether some transformations of markets, of the state, of corporate power, communal life or family cultures and structures at the meso-level might expand horizons of understanding beyond individualist crime prevention” (p. 56). What is required here, he argues, is a constitutive power intent on creating equilibrium out of the current, imbalanced system of global capitalism and state authoritarianism. Tempering and separating power, imposing checks and balances, both incorporated and independent of government is necessary.
What, then, does Braithwaite suggest we focus on? The answer is quite simple, everything: “Criminalized markets, criminalized states, criminalized norms, criminal organizations and criminalized spaces, times, life-course, and macro-historical trajectories” (p. 54). In his defense, he told us from the outset that this was a macro-criminological approach. Chapter two illuminates the greater problem with criminological thought, helping to reintroduce collective efficacy and institutional anomie within the broader concept of macrocriminology. Importantly, Braithwaite defines freedom for the reader – not in a freedom of choices, but a return to the republican ideal of freedom from the arbitrary imposition of power. His concept of freedom is what propels the narrative forward, as it is the established goal of macrocriminology. In chapter three, Braithwaite uses Durkheim’s definition of anomie (anomie ancienne) to remind us of the cascading effects of violence and war – a point he draws from his previous works. Once established, such effects become cyclical. Before moving into his points of focus, Braithwaite brings us back to criminological thought, advancing the likes of Anomie Americaine, the compliment to Durkheim’s own position, made by the likes of Merton and Messner and Rosenfeld. Chapter four, thus, brings us back to his argument for the tempering of domination via both governmental and non-governmental forms.
With the legwork out of the way, Braithwaite uses chapters five through 11 to take us from the micro-level of individual criminal behavior to the macro-level structures of criminalized states and markets. Throughout, he showcases how the directional tempering of power, taking place at both levels of behavior, the individual and institutional, can work to stabilize an order angling ever faster towards complete criminalization. Relying heavily on his previous work, Braithwaite pinpoints the issues of anomie and domination, while addressing the possibilities to temper such domination for the hope of true freedom.
The appendix functions as helpful guide for those needing a refresher–an interesting strategy to connect and further strengthen his argument. Here, the tributaries finally come together, the “propositional rivers” flowing forward as macrocriminological thought. In the end, Braithwaite leaves us with hope, helping us recognize that micro-measures cannot eliminate 99% of crime and domination on their own, but “macro transformation can and does” (p. 663). The goal is clear for Braithwaite: a return to normative order where “ordinary people can enjoy a less alienated life” (p. 636).
The goal of obtaining freedom, then, lies in the ability to maintain equilibrium. And yet, if an argument for a horizontal form of justice that sees the individual and the institution travel between formal law and informal rules is to work, how does one suppose this occurs without a larger question about capital, or the system that powers it? Such a question is not a new line of critique for Braithwaite’s work – Ian Taylor suggests just that in his review of Braithwaite’s dissertation turned book, Inequality, Crime and Public Policy. In it, Taylor finds that the lack of critical left theory results in “a curiously anachronistic text” (Taylor, 1980, p.185). Like then, Braithwaite’s engagement with critical, radical work in the field of criminology – an issue that has long defined criminology as anachronistic – is often lacking.
To be fair, Braithwaite saves the majority of his critique of leftists for the penultimate chapter, where such statements capture the author’s feelings fairly succinctly: “leftists who want to drain the swamp will bequeath us undrained swamps and unregulated malaria just as surely as will rightist swamp-drainers” (p. 630). Many are probably familiar with the dismissal of left thought embodied by this line of reasoning. Yet without this critical approach, Braithwaite is unable to reach the macro in meaningful ways.
For instance, Marx’s fundamental innovation was not to name capital, nor to demonize the institutions of its economic system. Rather, what Marx introduced was a means of thinking beyond both individual intentions and collective strategies. Marx inspired us to think of capitalism as a system of economic and social conditions that also exist beyond any real intentionality. For instance, wages are not set by employers but rather by the demands of the market. Sure, these can provide ideological cover, but the larger point stands: greed is not a moral failing, but a structural condition that propels the capitalist forward to seek cheaper workers, and then to demand more from them, regardless of the capitalist’s moral character. Crisis scholar, Robert Kurz, description of domination is informative here: The essential point is not that individuals mutually use one another for their individual objectives, but rather, to the extent that they seem to do so, that they themselves execute a totally different, supraindividual and subjectless objective: the autonomous movement (valorization) of capital (Kurz, 1993).
For Braithwaite control is the creator of freedom, but the problem is not lack of control over capital, but of capital’s own compulsion to grow – the product of which is the climate crisis, the failed state and an economically superfluous humanity. A failure to acknowledge this aspect would mean that no matter how “democratized” capital becomes, exposure to the crisis of capitalism remains intact. This is all to say that power and domination – unfreedom – are not bugs of this system to be tempered out, but the features that order it. The result of this missing piece leaves a powerful work “curiously anachronistic.”