Troubling the psychosocial: Jock Young’s late modern subjectivity from Sartre to Marcuse

Jock Young's well-known trilogy The Exclusive Society (1999), The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007), and The Criminological Imagination (2011) signals a turn from criminological theories that have historically divided the individual and the social, the symbolic and the material, the affective and the rationalistic, and the 'subjects' and 'objects' of research. For Young, the social sciences are in crisis, replete with positivism, banality and one-dimensional scholarship. Young's radical anti-positivist critiques are well known; less analyzed if equally bold are investigations of social and psychic dynamics that pervade his trilogy. As articulated most forcefully in The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007), Young diagnosed deep emotional uncertainties corresponding to glaring structural inequalities and repression in late modern society. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]