Ian Taylor. Sociologist
| Date | 01 August 2001 |
| Author | Kit Carson |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486580103400201 |
| Published date | 01 August 2001 |
| Subject Matter | Obituary |
-i0
BIT
U A R Y
Ian
Taylor.
Sociologist 11.3.1944 -19.0.2001.
Noreader of this journal needs me
to
rehearse
the
minutiae of
Ian
Taylor's
academic
achievements.
Such
acatalogue would anyway fail to
capture
the
true
significance of his
contribution
to
the
history of ideas
surrounding
in particular, though
not
exclusively, the analysis of crime in
the
post 60's era.
For Ian
and
his writings did much more
than
add substantially
to
the
accretion
of research and scholarship in this field during
the
last
third
of
the
twentieth
century. Initially, of course, he was a crucial member of
that
small band of icono-
clastic sociologists who "liberated" British
criminology
from its
unreflexive,
positivist and atheorctical fetters by engaging with
the
then
burgeoning sociology
of deviance emanating in large measure from the
United
States. But more
than
that, with others he then went on
to
forge a much more robust indigenous crimi-
nology
which
reconnected
the
study of crime
with
the
overarching
concerns
of mainstream social theory and political
thought.
No
one
will
ever
be able,
in particular, plausibly
to
challenge
the
significance of
the
New
and
Critical
Criminologies in transforming the terrain over which the explanation of and
the
social and political response to crime would henceforth be contested.
To be sure, these earlier works were criticised for promising more
than
they
could
in
the
cnd
deliver. But
this
was to miss
the
point.
For
they
mapped
out a longer term and necessarily unfinished project, perhaps best characterised
as
the
development
of
amature and sophisticated political economy of crime.
It
is this "reintegrative" project
that
to this day, at least in my mind, lies at
the
heart
of serious criminological enterprise.
And
it was to
this
that
Ian
Taylor,
along with a growing pantheon of U.K., European and
North
Amcrican scholars,
devoted much of the last twenty five years of his lifc. In Law and
Order:
Arguments
for Socialism he reclaimed law
and
order as an issue for
the
Left,
and
sought
to redeem many of
the
desecrated concerns of social welfarism as issues to be
rescued from
the
rampant rhetoric of the Right. In what was to be his last and quite
possibly his most significant reintegrative
contribution
-Crime in Context -
he sees himselffinally and perhaps prophetically standing at
the
beginning of a ncw
century hoping for "a better and more sophisticated explanation of
the
special
relationship between
the
explosive development of market society and
the
problem
of
social
order
itself"
The
award
of
the
American
Socicty
of
Criminology's
Hindclang prize in 2000 for this work was both timely and wcll deserved.
Ian visited Australia on several occasions,
the
academically most memorable
perhaps being his trip to participate in a series of broadcast seminars on social
justice themes in the late 1980's. In collaboration with a wide range of
other
inter-
national
and
interstate participants he played a central organising and contributory
role in what was even then still a fairly radical undertaking, namely an
attempt
to bridge
the
gap between scholarly discourse
on
social justice
and
its public
political debate.
The
success of
the
venture and of Ian's role in it
can
be judged
by
the
number of subsequent requests for repeat broadcasts and transcripts. It was
THE
AUSTRAUAN
AND NEW ZEAlAND
JOURNAL
OF CRIMINOLOGY
VOWME J4
NUMBER
2200I
PP.
I"
-"
3III
To continue reading
Request your trial