Magnus Hörnqvist, The Pleasure of Punishment
| Author | Victor Lund Shammas |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211044434 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
While the book advances understanding of how law reform was centred around a
liberal framework, it can be argued that the book raises issues of periodisation,
whilst ignoring other developments which may be inconsistent with and fall outside
of the neat and tidy characteristics of this period. In this way, Rock’s narrative
runs the risk of pendular logic which has so oftenbeenusedtodescribeshiftsinpen-
ality and which are criticised for “badly distorting the nature and process of penal
change”(Goodman et al., 2017). However, by going beyond macro-level theories of
punishment to explain the political agency and internal workings of Parliament, he
shows how and why policy change occurs. In so doing, Rock demonstrates how var-
iegated this period actually was. Without reducing this oscillation to merely a
change in Government, Rock pieces together wider social values, criminological
knowledge and political strategies in influencing political agendas of the Labour
Government.
Overall, this book provides the basis for an empirically informed political analysis
of policy developments in that specific locale. It provides an account of political
history, as a resource for further analysis in relation to decision-making processes, polit-
ical discourse, struggle and contestation as a way of making sense of change at the level
of policy.
ORCID iD
Phillipa Thomas https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0520-338X
Reference
Goodman P, Page J and Phelps M (2017) Breaking the Pendulum, The Long Struggle Over
Criminal Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Phillipa Thomas
Lecturer in Criminology, University of Bath
Magnus Hörnqvist, The Pleasure of Punishment, Oxford and New York:
Routledge, 2021: 173 pp., ISBN 978-0-367-18532-9
In The Pleasure of Punishment, the criminologist Magnus Hörnqvist sets out a provoca-
tive thesis: To understand modern punishment, we must think about its pleasure-seeking
and pleasure-satisfying dimensions. The “excitement of early-modern execution crowds”
is the “paradigmatic example of the pleasure of punishment,”Hörnqvist writes (p. 4)—
think of the execution of Damiens at the beginning of Foucault’sDiscipline and Punish—
but this kind of untroubled enjoyment is no longer permissible or possible. We are no
longer dealing with the straightforward satisfaction of relatively simple desires. Rather,
now the pleasure of punishment is mediated through a whole series of complex
570 Punishment & Society 25(2)
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