Book Reviews
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00231 |
| Date | 01 September 2002 |
| Published date | 01 September 2002 |
Book Reviews
PUNISHMENT, RESPONSIBILITY, AND JUSTICE. A RELATIONAL
CRITIQUE by ALAN NORRIE
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 252 pp., £40.00)
On reading Alan Norrie’s new book, the following passage sprang
irresistibly to mind, for reasons which will become plain as this review
unfolds.
In his recent Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism: Five Interventions in the
(Mis)use of a Notion,
1
the Slovenian polymath Slavoj Z
ˇiz
ˇek explores, in his
customary provocative manner, the difficult task of confronting ‘the radical
ambiguity of Stalinist ideology which, even at its most ‘‘totalitarian’’, still
exudes an emancipatory potential.’ He continues:
From my youth, I remember the memorable scene from a Soviet film about the
civil war in 1919, in which the Bolsheviks organise the public trial of a mother
with a diseased young son, who is unmasked as a spy for the counter-
revolutionary White forces. At the very beginning of the trial, an old
Bolshevik strokes his long white moustache and says ‘The sentence must be
severe but just!’ The revolutionary court (the collective of the Bolshevik
fighters) establishes that the cause of her enemy activity was her difficult
social circumstances; the sentence is therefore that she should be fully
integrated into the Socialist collective, taught to write and read and to acquire
a proper education, while her son is to be given proper medical care. While the
surprised mother bursts out crying, unable to understand the court’s
benevolence, the old Bolshevik again strokes his moustache and nods his
approval: ‘Yes, this is a severe but just sentence!’.
This anecdote, despite its ideological baggage, expresses vividly the central
concerns of Alan Norrie’s latest work.
The message of this review is: do not be put off by what is unfamiliar in
this book. Norrie is one of the most prolific critical authors on criminal
justice, and deservedly well-known. However, this study, Norrie’s most
recent work, may also be for many readers the most difficult, the most
abstruse. To be sure, there is much here, especially his detailed critical
readings of Antony Duff and John Gardner
2
Michael Moore
3
(in chapter 5,
521
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
1S.Z
ˇ
iz
ˇek Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism: Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a
Notion (2001) 131.
2 A. Duff, ‘Principle and Contradiction in the Criminal Law: Motives and Criminal
Liability’ and J. Gardner, ‘On the General Part of the Criminal Law’ in Philosophy
and the Criminal Law, ed. A. Duff (1998).
3 M. Moore, Placing Blame (1997).
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