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Governing through Crime "Old School" Style in Iran

By Jonathan Simor

When I was in graduate school reading the then recent historical research of the late Edward P. Thompson and his colleagues on crime and society in Britain during the 18th century I was thrilled (intellectually speaking) to see how the majesty of the English common law had served to bolster a shaky revolutionary gentry class in its hour of need. Having overturned long settled rural arrangements and modes of social control going back to the Conqueror, this gentry class found in the criminal law subtle tools of terror and moralization that proved enough to settle down a restive and far more risky (for common people) society, but only by investing in law itself as a source of independent legitimacy. This picture of law as a tool of class power, and a slowly tightening restraint on power was so vivid that it took me a long time to recognize the political logic of crime in late modern America, where in my view a very different kind of restructuring of power and risk has taken place in the shadow of fear of violent crime...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on February 02, 2010 (boomark / email).