Steve Hall

Winlow and Hall argue that the only way to resurrect leftist politics is to begin from the beginning again. They identify the root causes of its maladies, describe how new cultural obsessions displaced core unifying principles, and outline how a new reincarnation of the left can win in the twenty-first century.

Many left liberals in academia, politics and the mass media are certain that the populist revival among the working class in the post-crash era has been driven by a regressive nostalgia for a time when they were wealthier, more secure, more valued and more firmly established in the social hierarchy. Some of these commentators have even gone as far...

During much of the twentieth century, the left in the United States and Great Britain grew, evolved, splintered and shrank while being partly overshadowed by events in Russia. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the most transformative events of the modern age. There could be no going back. The established movement of history was knocked off...

In Chapter 7, we noted that postmodernism accelerated existing processes that were already liberalising the left and moving it further away from its traditional values, policies and sources of support. In advocating a creative individualism free from the intrusions of the state and the judgements of the social order, it also paved the way for conte...

As the 1970s progressed, the economic liberalism of Milton Friedman and his colleagues in the Chicago School moved closer to overcoming the Keynesian orthodoxy. Many notable figures in the left’s mainstream political parties were happy to see the back of what they had come to believe was an economic model that created coddling dependencies and curt...

Leftist politics changed at a fundamental level as the post-war era unfolded. In the previous chapter we explored some of the contextual factors that shaped these changes, but to develop a more detailed understanding of precisely how the left changed, we need to look more closely at the development of what became known as ‘The New Left’. In this ch...

It is still possible that the left will rise to the historical challenges that define the present. However, our rather dour conclusion is that it will not. All indications suggest that the mainstream left maintains a deep but often disavowed commitment to the present status quo. Across the West, it will be either the centrists or the mainstream rig...

The 2008 global financial crisis was an event of huge significance. We continue to live in its aftermath. It should have heralded the end of an epoch. The dogma, corruption, disinformation, errors and misunderstandings that structured neoliberalism’s financialised market system were revealed in grim detail. However, the best the mainstream left cou...

The roots of the left are to be found in the early industrial age. Demands for equality, political representation, rights at work and better care for the poor can be traced further back in recorded history, but it was during this epoch that the left grew in confidence and popularity, taking on many of the characteristics and policies that became sy...

The rise of post-crash populism has been far more significant to the political right than the left. The vast majority of left populist movements that arose after the 2008 financial crisis have now petered out. Sanders failed, Corbyn failed, while Podemos in Spain and SYRIZA in Greece seem spent forces. Many of Europe’s old, centre-left parties cont...

The return of populism after the 2008 global financial crisis was, given the left’s abandonment of interventionist economic policy and alienation of its traditional voters, inevitable. However, as we have been at pains to stress, the dominant narratives that accompanied the return of populism were remarkably onesided and tended to ignore the long h...

During the period of austerity that followed the financial crash, new antagonisms rooted in shifting material reality began to emerge, while older antagonisms rooted in class and culture evolved and became gradually more acute. The ongoing fragmentation of society during these years became normalised. Some on the left continued to persevere with ac...

Why has the Labour Party in Britain been unable to take advantage of the historic opportunity presented by the global financial crisis to press its case for radical socio-economic reform? Why, despite more than a decade of Tory austerity and genuine signs of social crisis, does it find itself behind in the polls to a Conservative Party openly commi...

In this article, we respond to DeKeseredy and Schwartz’s (2013) article, “Confronting Progressive Retreatism and Minimalism: The Role of a New Left Realist Approach.” In that 2013 piece, the authors contend that many critical scholars are “retreating” from the crucial challenges of our time, and that many more are “minimizing” their critique and tr...

Research has shown that neoliberal economic policies may increase violence. In this study we extend this logic to create a “neoliberalism-homicide hypothesis.” We test this hypothesis using two global measures of neoliberalism (the Economic Freedom of the World Index and the Index of Economic Freedom) and 2014 homicide rates for 142 nations. Regres...

This chapter argues that there has never been a ‘civilising process’ across the course of modernity but an economically functional conversion of harms from physical brutality to socio-symbolic aggression. The subject’s acceptance of core harms can be best explained in a framework of transcendental materialism, with a focus on the process of deaptat...

This article presents original qualitative data gathered during prolonged ethnographic fieldwork with violent men in deindustrialised communities in the north of England. The data are used as an empirical platform for a theoretical exploration of the symbolism and subjectivising influences of traumatic life experiences in these men’s biographies. T...

Critical criminology must move beyond twentieth-century empiricist and idealist paradigms because the concepts and research programmes influenced by these paradigms are falling into obsolescence. Roger Matthews’ recent work firmly advocates this position and helps to set the ball rolling. Here we argue that Matthews’ attempt to use critical realist...

When the real world out there enters one of its periodic convulsions, and the faddish ways of seeing it which have dominated a particular era become exhausted and begin to lose their credibility, the real world appears more real than it has done in the preceding years. It looms large in our consciousness and demands that we return to it. In such pe...

The shock Brexit result highlighted a worrying trend: underemployed white men and women who have seen their standard of living fall, their communities disintegrate and their sense of value, function and inclusion diminish, desperately want a mainstream political party to defend their interests. However, no such party exists. These men and women can...

The years 2008 to 2013 saw a new generation of political protestors take to the streets. Riots disrupted many Western cities and new protest movements emerged, keen to address a bleak context of economic collapse and austerity politics. In this groundbreaking new study, Winlow, Hall, Briggs and Treadwell push past the unworldly optimism of the libe...

This article challenges various theories that depict the capitalist epoch as a process of civilization to posit a new theoretical framework built around the concept of pseudo-pacification. Principal indicators of civilizing momentum, such as the decline in homicide and brutal punishment, are relocated in a new perspective that juxtaposes them with...

This article contextualises the pattern and nature of youth offending in contemporary China and explores the philosophical bases, policy and practices of Chinese youth justice. It concludes that in many important ways youth offending in China echoes that of the Western industrialised countries, despite China's unique environments. Chinese youth jus...

Over the past 30 years the industrialized West has witnessed a move towards space, heterogeneity and subjectivity in the criminological study of violence and homicide. Although large-scale quantitative studies of the temporal and spatial distribution of homicide continue to provide a broad empirical context, aetiological explanations tend to be bas...

Most of the riots that have occurred in England throughout modernity have been associated with symbolic protests and fuelled by an underlying sense of injustice about specific, objective grievances related to the position of the agrarian or industrial working classes in the socio-economic and political structure. In the period that stretched from t...

This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between today‗s criminal identities and consumer culture. Using unique data taken from criminals locked in areas of permanent recession, the book aims to uncover feelings and attitudes towards a variety of criminal activities, investigating the incorporation of hearts and minds...

This article is an initial analysis and theorization of original ethnographic data gathered from young men who participated in the English riots of August 2011. The data consistently suggest that consumer culture supplied these young men with a compelling motivation to join the rioting after the initial localized response to the original incident h...

‘…classic Winlow and Hall – bleak, brilliant and unmatched in the art of rethinking crucial social issues. Enlightening, and rather scary.’ - Professor Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths, University of London ‘This superb book inhabits a unique theoretical space and demonstrates Winlow and Hall at their brilliant best as theorists of contemporary social e...

This article is an initial analysis and theorization of original ethnographic data gathered from young men who participated in the English riots of August 2011. The data consistently suggest that consumer culture supplied these young men with a compelling motivation to join the rioting after the initial localized response to the original incident h...

In this article we attempt to develop an analysis of the English urban riots of 2011. Rather than build on the assumption of organic resistance and protopolitics, we argue that the disturbances were a brief eruption of social unrest that lacked the clear, unifying political symbolism necessary to turn objectless dissatisfaction into articulate poli...

This article argues that a transcendental materialist conception of subjectivity can move us beyond the orthodox idealist theories that dominate progressive thought in advanced consumer-capitalism. This position can shed new light on current forms of subjectivity that seem to prefer life in consumer culture’s surrogate social world rather than acti...

Criminology is ideally placed to examine the late-capitalist subjectivities now appearing before us in stark relief as the current economic crises deepen. However, to do so it must come of age as a producer discipline, exporting and exchanging its empirical findings and theoretical formulations with its former parent disciplines on equal terms. Onl...

We want to make one very simple claim that we hope might contribute to the developing discourse on the disciplinary and institutional governance of academic criminology: the Ethics Committee is one of a growing number of little others that attempt to compensate for the loss of the traditional symbolic order. While our focus is on the Ethics Committ...

Steve Hall uses cutting-edge philosophy and social theory to analyse patterns of crime and harm and illuminate contemporary criminological issues. He provides a fresh, relevant critique of the philosophical and political underpinnings of criminological theory and the theoretical canon's development during the twentieth century, and applies new Cont...

This article explores the ways in which memory and humiliation can shape the social engagement of persistently violent men. Drawing upon field data from two of our previous ethnographic studies conducted in the North East of England, we hope to make a few basic points about the importance of emotion and memory as constitutive and dynamic components...

This article examines comparative homicide rates in the United States and Western Europe in an era of increasingly globalized neo-liberal economics. The main finding of this preliminary analysis is that historical and spatial correlations between distinct forms of political economy and homicide rates are consistent enough to suggest that social dem...

Consumption and consumerism are now accepted as key contexts for the construction of youth identities in de-industrialized Britain. This article uses empirical evidence from interviews with young people to suggest that claims of `new community' are overstated, traditional forms of friendship are receding, and increasingly atomized and instrumental...

In this brief polemic we argue that a renewed critical approach to the destructive power of capitalism is essential for criminological theory. The current focus on the allegedly plural and transgressive sub-cultural foreground of criminality has drawn our attention away from the restrictive and constitutive politico-cultural power that the mutating...

A stubbornly high level of interpersonal violence in town and city centres across Britain every weekend is gradually being recognized as a key aspect of the general problem of crime. In this article we want to explore some of the important criminological outcomes of night-time leisure in a culture dominated by hedonism and the logical needs of the...

The disintegration of traditional forms of community and social order is one of criminol-ogy's core issues for the twenty-first century. As these forms are replaced by individual-ism, fragmentation and differentiation in a fluid, unstable culture governed by advanced capitalism's economic command to consume and discard with increasing rapidity, eve...

This paper focuses upon the emergence of the night-time economy both materially and culturally as a powerful manifestation of post-industrial society. This emergence features two key processes: firstly a shift in economic development from the industrial to the post-industrial; secondly a significant orientation of urban governance involving a move...

A substantial body of empirical work suggests that young, economically marginalized males are the most likely perpetrators and victims of serious physical violence. Interpreting these findings in a historicized way that has been neglected by the criminological discourses of the moment suggests that physical violence has become an increasingly unsuc...

This paper focuses upon the emergence of the night-time economy both materially and culturally as a powerful manifestation of post-industrial society. This emergence features two key processes: firstly a shift in economic development from the industrial to the post-industrial; secondly a significant orientation of urban governance involving a move...

This paper, based on ethnographic research, is concerned with the accountability of licensed premise door staff – better known as ‘bouncers’. The situational dynamics of the bouncer's enacted environment ensures that theirs is a role consistently exposed to the interactions of violence. As such, allegations of assault, both upon and by door staff,...

This paper will claim that capital's historical process produces durable forms of violent criminality because intense phases of this process constitute specific cultures at the emotional level as `visceral being'. As the productivist era recedes, the globalizing neo-capitalist market-place, based on circulation, consumption and social administratio...