New deviancy, Marxism and the politics of left realism: Reflections on Jock Young’s early writings

The lives of many intellectuals of Jock Young's generation appear to have followed a familiar transition from radical 1960s youth to more conservative adulthoods often accompanied by political shifts to the right. Jock's intellectual career bears only a superficial resemblance to this pattern. Rather, I detect a remarkable consistency over the years. Articulated in different forms and with different emphases in changing social and political circumstances, certain core themes developed years prior are re-stated and returned to after a period of abeyance. For example, an engagement with cultural criminology in the early 2000s re-elaborated and developed themes that had been announced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Similarly, an apparent move away from the radicalism of that period to the more sober left realism of the mid-1980s in fact elaborated themes at the heart of Jock's critical view of early new deviancy theory. It is this period -- from his early writings to the development of left realism -- that is my focus in this essay. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]