Neoliberal capitalism and middle-class punitiveness: Bringing Erich Fromm's 'materialistic psychoanalysis' to penology

Why is it that imprisonment has undergone an explosive growth in the USA and Britain over the last three decades against the background of falling crime rates in both countries? And why has this development met with a significant and escalating degree of support among the public? To the extent that governing elites on either side of the Atlantic have been eliciting public support for their authority by inducing concerns about issues of crime and punishment, what explains the selection of crime as a means to this effect, and in what precise ways do crime and punishment fulfil their hidden political function? Moreover, how do Americans and Britons legitimate their consent to objectively irrational policies and the elites responsible for their formulation? In seeking to advance the study of these questions, the present article rediscovers the method and key findings of Erich Fromm's 'materialistic psychoanalysis', bringing them to bear upon insights produced by political economies of contemporary punishment and related scholarship. Particular attention is paid to the hitherto understudied themes of the political production of middle-class support for punitive penal policies under conditions of neoliberal capitalism, and the crucial role played in this process by the privileged position accorded to violent street crime in the public domain

Moral Panics and the Transgressive Other

The concept of moral panic arose out of a particular conjuncture of political, social and theoretical circumstances; specifically the events of 1968, the social transformations of the late 1960s and the synthesis and energizing of New Deviancy and subcultural theory in British criminology centering on the NDC (National Deviancy Conference) and the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies). This work evoked Mills’s Sociological Imagination: the placing of individual problems as public issues, the relation of the individual to his or her particular time and social structure, and the effect of social dynamics on the psychological and psychodynamics on the social. The sociological imagination is not a constant but is greatly enhanced at times of change: it is this imagination which engenders transformative politics. Such an analysis clearly demands placing both human actors and reactors, in this instance, ‘deviants’ and moral panickers, in structure and historical time and to examine both the immediate and deep roots of their behaviour. There is a tendency in these neo-liberal times to view moral panics as simple mistakes in rationality generated perhaps by the mass media or rumour. In this process any link between the individual and the social structure, between historical period and social conflict, is lost. In particular the peculiar ‘rational irrationality’ of moral panics is obfuscated, the link between social structure and individual belief diminished, and attempts to utilize moral panics to stymie social change and transformative politics obscured