Oakeshott and the New Crime Prevention
| Author | Paul Knepper |
| DOI | 10.1375/acri.36.3.338 |
| Published date | 01 December 2003 |
| Date | 01 December 2003 |
Paul Knepper
East Carolina University, United States
Many countries now have some kind of national crime prevention
structure.This new crime prevention, unlike traditional criminology,
extends the responsibility for preventing crime outside of criminal justice
to households, neighbourhoods, and families. Drawing on the work of
British political philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, the article discusses
recent prevention trends in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United
Kingdom and the United States. Specifically, the discussion applies four of
Oakeshott’s central themes — his attitude toward social science, his
concept of a person, his theory of human association, and his description
of the rule of law to four emerging rationales — evidence-based policy,
situational crime prevention, social crime prevention and marketing
prosocial values.
Many countries now have some kind of national crime prevention structure. The
new crime prevention, unlike traditional criminology, acknowledges the limits of
government in responding to crime. The new crime prevention has been defined as
those interventions intended to forestall crime without recourse to the criminal
justice system.1 This “responsibilisation strategy,” as Garland (1996, p. 451) puts it,
represents a new mode of managing crime, with its own logic, means of enquiry and
policy initiatives. It directs a program toward potential victims and the conduct of
everyday life thought to facilitate criminal activity. The strategy extends the
responsibility for crime to a knot of activities outside criminal justice and beyond
government: households, businesses, neighbourhoods and families (Garland, 1996;
Garland & Sparks, 2000; Pratt, 2001; Shapland, 2000).
To untie this strategy, this article draws on the work of Michael Oakeshott.
Oakeshott is an accidental criminologist, which is to say that he never contributed
directly to criminology. A member of the history faculty at Gonville and Caius,
Cambridge, Oakeshott became the chair of political science at the London School
of Economics in 1951. He is best known for his history of political thought,
although his work has contributed to several disciplines, including history, political
science, philosophy, literature and education (Coats, 2000; Devigne, 1994; Grant,
1990; Farr, 1998; Franco, 1990; Gerencser, 2000; Nardin, 2001). Oakeshott wrote
This article was originally presented at the Inaugural Conference of the Michael Oakeshott
Association, London School of Economics, London, UK, 3–5 September 2001.
Address for correspondence: Paul Knepper, Professor of Criminology, College of Human
Ecology, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina 27858-4353, United States.
Email: knepperp@mail.ecu.edu
338
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VOLUME 36 NUMBER 3 2003 PP. 338–353
OAKESHOTT AND THE NEW CRIME PREVENTION
more about horse-racing than he did about crime. Quite possibly, he wrote nothing
because he felt he had nothing to say.2 Yet Oakeshott has a great deal to offer crimi-
nology. Criminal conduct raises questions of law, government, human association,
and moral conduct — the very questions Oakeshott devoted himself to throughout
his life. And, in an age whose leading intellectuals have turned to the prison as a
metaphor for social existence, he achieves a unique place by sustaining a funda-
mentally affirmative outlook (O’Sullivan 2001). Oakeshott advances considerable
skepticism but never loses his intrigue for the possibilities afforded by what he
called “the poetic character of all human activity”.
This essay applies four of Oakeshott’s central themes — his attitude toward
social science, his concept of a person, his theory of human association, and his
description of the rule of law to recent trends in crime prevention in Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US).
Each section provides an introduction to Oakeshott’s thought, drawing on his own
work as well as those of his interpreters, and then directs his ideas toward a partic-
ular aspect of the new crime prevention, including evidence-based policy, situa-
tional crime prevention, social crime prevention and media-based schemes.
Dealing with crime prevention in this way does risk oversimplifying crime preven-
tion strategies and their national contexts; there are complexities that are not
dealt with here, although they are important. The present discussion focuses on
some of the rationales for the new crime prevention, and particularly, those ratio-
nales supplied by academics.
Attitude Toward Social Science
Oakeshott contributed more than any other British philosopher to advocating an
historical understanding against the “ignorant prejudices” of naturalism, positivism,
and realism (Boucher, 1993, p. 697).3 Oakeshott’s general approach to knowledge
(“nothing so grand” as an “epistemology” he says) can be glimpsed with his attitude
toward social science.
Oakeshott’s first book, Experience and its Modes (1933), described three modali-
ties of ideas: science, history and practice. Oakeshott regards experience, or reality,
as a unity; each modality represents a modification of the whole of experience.
Auspitz (1976, p. 263) explains the modalities this way. Ask a scientist to explain
human conduct and the answer will come in the form of mathematical notation.
Ask an historian, and the answer will come as a series of solutions to dilemmas of
life in the natural world. As for the practically-minded, the question is to be
answered with a question: how can scientific and historical knowledge be directed
to current concerns? Science and history operate within the practical imagination,
as myth, inspiration or example.
The desire for coherence leads to the attempt to explain the whole of human
experience within the terms specified by a single mode. Oakeshott remains skepti-
cal of this project. No modality can account for the totality of the world, not even
philosophy. The philosopher seeks to grasp the whole of experience, to reach
outside the boundaries of presupposition and jargon. But even the philosopher’s
enterprise relies on organising categories. The philosopher’s calling, Oakeshott
concludes, is to remain critical, to cast doubt on the claims of the other modes to
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339
PAUL KNEPPER
having achieved full coherence (Auspitz, 1976, p. 264). “Philosophy is born an
outcast, useless to men of business and troublesome to men of pleasure”
(Oakeshott, 1966, p. 355).
Oakeshott then, is particularly skeptical of the absolute claims of science. In the
opening pages of On Human Conduct (1975), he rejects naturalistic explanations of
social happenings.4
When a geneticist tells us that ‘all social behaviour and historical events are the
inescapable consequences of the genetic[s] … of the persons concerned,’ the expla-
nation appears as a ‘brilliant illumination’ of social change. But in advocating such
an explanation, this brilliance is … somewhat dimmed when it becomes clear that
he can have nothing more revealing to say about his science of genetics than it also
is all done by genes, and that this theorem is itself his genes speaking (Oakeshott,
1975, p. 15).
Oakeshott shares F.A. Hayek’s view of scientism as a form of prejudice that assumes
universal application for a habit of thought developed for making predictions about
the natural world. “Scientism” regards scientific inquiry as the only, or at least the
most reliable, route to knowledge about the world (Hayek, 1979). Except that for
Oakeshott, scientism represents merely one aspect of “rationalism,” the attempt to
reduce political organisation to an overriding aim or formula, the whole of social
life of which is said to follow. Oakeshott rejects all claims to remake society, the
scientific socialism of Comte as well as the natural rights of Locke.5
In Rationalism and Politics (1962), Oakeshott makes a distinction between
“technical knowledge” and “traditional knowledge.” Every mode of inquiry, includ-
ing science, includes both kinds of knowledge. Technical knowledge can be
expressed in terms of rules, principles, and maxims. It can be reduced to a how-to
book: instructions in a driver’s manual, recipes in a cookbook, procedures for scien-
tific experiments. Traditional knowledge, on the other hand, cannot be reduced to
a book; it exists only in practice. It refers to “connoisseurial” knowledge, in
Auspitz’s (1976) terminology, that cannot be divorced from experience: the
pianist’s artistry, the orator’s style, the scientist’s judgment. Technical knowledge,
because it appears to offer a comprehensive explanation, presents itself as a superior
form. Yet traditional knowledge remains indispensable.
Technical knowledge cannot be successfully divorced from traditional knowl-
edge. “Nowhere,” he writes, “can technical knowledge be separated from practical
knowledge, and nowhere can they be considered identical with one another or able
to take the place of one another” (Oakeshott, 1962, p. 14). Cooking, to use his
example, involves both instructions and practical knowledge. A good cook is not
somebody who dreams up a pie and then attempts to make one. A cook makes a
good pie by knowing about the balance of flour, eggs, and sugar; the mixture of
these ingredients, the effect of heat, and so on.
Oakeshott’s sense of the limits of social science provides good counsel to policy
makers looking for an objective basis for crime prevention policies. Government
centres with...
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