We Have Never Been Liberal - Bourgeois Identity and the Criminal(ized) Other

Part of a special issue on emerging imaginaries of regulation, control, and repression. The writer discusses the processes of middle-class identity formation and maintenance that underpin much of the literature on the “punitive turn” in liberal middle-class sensibilities. He argues that the processe...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kearon, Tony (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Published: 2005
In: Social justice
Year: 2005, Volume: 32, Issue: 1, Pages: 5-19
Online Access: Volltext (Publisher)
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Keywords:
Enlightenment
Criminals
Crime
Corrections (Criminal justice administration)
Social Sciences
Criminology
Liberalism
Social marginality
Group Identity
Description
Summary:Part of a special issue on emerging imaginaries of regulation, control, and repression. The writer discusses the processes of middle-class identity formation and maintenance that underpin much of the literature on the “punitive turn” in liberal middle-class sensibilities. He argues that the processes of criminalization of a stereotypically deviant other do not simply result from the fundamental ontological crisis in middle-class identity in late modernity. He suggests that in many important respects, the evolution and maintenance of defensible liberal sensibilities have been grounded throughout modernity in the ongoing existence of a symbolically crafted and imagined inferior other that is palpably different, deviant, and endemically rebellious.
ISSN:2327-641X