Crimes of the powerful and beyond: An essay review

Conclusion

I have argued that the problems withCrimes of the Powerful are instances of the inherent limitation of a “criminology of the powerful” and thus are not specific to a particular text, but refer centrally to a particular enterprise. These problems result from the contradictions entailed in the conjunction of criminology and political economy and the formal use of concepts derived from the latter as an explanation of, or gloss on, problems generated by the former. The formal introduction of the concepts of political economy does not, of itself, entail a break with the criminological agenda and, as a result, the analysis produced is inadequate to its object — the powerful. It is the position of this article that if one is to theorize upon either corporate crime or anti-trust law then political economy must assume priority — or else one simply establishes, as does Pearce, the “criminality” of big business. It is not the case that crime and law are irrelevant areas for political economy and, more especially Marxism, but rather that a proper understanding of the theoretical requirements necessary for an adequate analysis of corporate crime and anti-trust law must, of necessity, be founded in political economy, not criminology. Hitherto these requirements have not been met by criminology. This can be witnessed by the way in which criminology has addressed political economy, ie. in a purely arbitrary fashion in which concepts are simply adopted as if they were given — concepts which are effectively riddled with contradictions. Until these theoretical requirements are met, or built upon, then criminology is doomed to receive into itself a simple multiplication of texts likeCrimes of the Powerful together with all the consequent inadequacies associated with such texts. In such a context the “powerful” remains an ever elusive object