Reclaiming Critical Criminology: Social Justice and the European Tradition

This article seeks to examine the relevance of the continental European tradition in critical criminology for the theoretical elaboration of criminological theory today. The first step towards an answer is a rather descriptive one: how did critical criminology develop historically on the European continent? That is the theme of the first section. In the second section, the social and cultural developments which accompanied the heyday of critical criminology in the 1970s will be analysed, and an exposé will be given of the spectrum of the different critical perspectives on the continent. The same cultural sociological line of thought will be followed in the explanation of the rather abrupt decline of critical criminology shortly after in the third section. The need for a normative counter-weight to present-day, managerial political discourse which follows from these analyses also forms the prelude to a reaffirmation of critical criminology in section four. Because many of its original concepts and presumptions no longer fit very well to the changed political and socio-cultural reality of the late 1990s, a reconstruction of critical criminology is proposed in section five.