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Critical Criminologies and the Reconstruction of Utopia

Ronnie Lippens make a plea for renewed utopian thinking in critical criminology. Critical criminology must avoid nihilism and postmodernist impossibilism, along with its fragmenting dynamics. Instead, it must make substantial efforts to fight the contemporary (postmodern) condition, where possibilities and opportunities for human emancipatory action are splintered, and where postmodernist rhetoric serves as a legitimating logic for the ways of postmodern global capital. To this end, the traditional divide separating “realist” and “idealist” critical criminologies must end; they must reemerge as companions in a utopian, “antisystemic” project.

criminology; utopias and utopianism; postmodernism

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 22, No. 1 (1995): 32-50