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Text Box: is crucial. In my view, critics in the criminological arena have neither focused sufficient attention on their critical roots, nor grasped the problematic place of those roots within contemporary epistemological horizons (Hofman, 1996). The former oversight has permitted a grave silence to pervade the discourse’s departure points. The latter does little to help critics decode the precariousness of their critical footings under conditions where modern forms of critical practice are in retreat (e.g., Bauman, 1992; Lyotard, 1984). Analysts will not likely understand the retreating place of modern critical thinking in similar, or even commensurate, ways. It might be taken to be the product of: wider alterations to modern epistemological configurations (Pavlich, 1995; B. Smart, 1992; Bauman, 1992); concessions made by the old ‘left’ in altered political environments (B. Smart, 1993); or, even an emerging truth regime’s extreme intolerance of critical thinking (Pavlich, 1996; Lyotard, 1984). Regardless, in the technical, crime-solving ethos that dominates criminology today, criticism directed at foundational assumptions is increasingly disqualified. Fundamental questions like ‘should prisons be abolished?’, or ‘in whose interests is it to claim that crime ‘really’ does exist?’, no longer loom as prominent moments in criminological debate. Their flight to the margins of such discourse coincides precisely with the rising dominance of ‘relevant’ quests for ‘real’ solutions, or ‘cost effective’ responses, to ‘crime’. Through such developments critical thinking has been abandoned to the debased realms of unusable esoteric, idealistic equivocation, and so on (Roberts, 1996; Lippens, 1995). In turn, this has limited critical criminology’s capacity to deflect challenges directed at its very being (van Swaaningen and Taylor, 1994; C. Smart, 1992; De Haan, 1987). If critical discourse is again facing a ‘crisis’, it is neither so because of its failure to come up with a sufficiently credible (‘radical’) definition of ‘crime’, ‘criminology’, or even ‘aetiology’. Rather, it has to do with a failure to confront the ailing plight of critical practices under contemporary (postmodern? late modern?) epistemological conditions. As long as this plight remains unexamined, the legitimacy of fundamental critical thought in criminal justice discourses remains in jeopardy. If critical thinking articulated to discourses on ‘crime’ and ‘deviance’ [or even a concept of ‘censure’ – Sumner, 1990; Roberts, 1996)] is to make inroads into the virtual hegemony of technically-focused discourses, then its protagonists must re-evaluate the auspices and aspirations of their critical genres, taking account of the altered knowledge-creating environments before them.

Text Box: George Pavlich University of Auckland In its day, the new criminology soared to prominence on promises of social emancipation and justice. Echoing elements of 1970s radical social thought, this perspective declared its intention to revolutionize administrative criminology, the sociology of deviance and the social institutions licensed by such discourses (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973; 1975). The new criminologists identified themselves with the plight of the oppressed, and formulated a theory designed to revolutionize unequal capitalist structures (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1974: 448). As such, the discourse’s founding mandate included an attempt to establish a critical approach that would redefine the bedrock of ‘correctional’ criminology (e.g., legal definitions of ‘crime’, consensual definitions of ‘deviance’, individual-centered aetiologies, etc.). Implicit in this approach was a bid to reconsider the very auspices upon which critical thinking directed at ‘crime’ or ‘deviance’ might be predicated. However, amidst a momentous call to ‘praxis’, reflexive analyses into the bases of criticism sui generis seemed to distract from more urgent revolutionary pursuits. In the process, the auspices of critique escaped serious analytical consideration, and remained hidden in the shadows of dominant debates seeking to define ‘radical’ (‘Marxist,’ ‘socialist’ or ‘critical’) criminology. In short, these debates focused on delineating particular definitions of ‘criminology’ at the expense of attempts to clarify the bases of ‘critical traditions’. Criticism became the forgotten, but assumed, concept against which the threads of critical debate were silhouetted. This analytical amnesia permitted, even nurtured, a circling of discursive wagons around different camps which claim to bear the critical mantle around one or other ‘radical’ definition of ‘crime’ (and/or criminology). However, such defensive postures defy the openness, the quest for alteration, that is so central to critical thinking. They may even obscure the potential value of openly fragmented debate that does not depend upon disciplinary unity (Ericson and Carriere, 1994). In any case, by tying critical criminology constitutively to notions of ‘crime’, or even ‘criminology’, protagonists have not adequately studied what is arguably the distinguishing feature of the discourse; namely criticism. In other words, it is not so much the quest for a ‘radical’ definition or cause of ‘crime’ that distinguishes critical criminological projects; rather, it is an allegiance to forms of critical inquiry that

Critical Criminologist