Wacquant and civic sociology: ‘Formative intentions’ and formative experiences
| Published date | 01 November 2010 |
| Date | 01 November 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895810382366 |
| Author | Richard Sparks,Ian Loader |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
Wacquant and civic sociology:
10(4) 405–415
© The Author(s) 2010
‘Formative intentions’ and
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formative experiences1
DOI: 10.1177/1748895810382366
crj.sagepub.com
Ian Loader
University of Oxford, UK
Richard Sparks
University of Edinburgh, UK
Our contribution to the now rather expansive activity of welcoming, critiquing, and
otherwise discussing Loïc Wacquant’s new books is devoted to exploring the conception
of sociology’s ‘civic’ roles that he says animates and underpins them. For this reason, we
will focus here in particular on the afterword to Prisons of Poverty (which itself is called
‘A civic sociology of neo-liberal penality’) (Wacquant, 2009b). Given that this is the
argument with which we primarily wish to engage, we will shortly devote a moment or
two to summarising the position.
Like many people, we think there is reason to be grateful that a sociologist of
Wacquant’s stature has chosen to devote a substantial portion of his career to analysing
the new penal politics. We believe that this has contributed significantly to our under-
standing of the issues and to the seriousness with which wider social scientific and public
discourse now have to treat ‘criminological’ questions. As far as space permits here, we
will go on to say a few words about what this means for sociological and criminological
work as agents of democratic deliberation and reflection. This happens to be the very
problem that has occupied our attention recently (Loader and Sparks, 2010), just as it
does, in one way or another, most people who think seriously about these issues at all.
We will then go on to argue in favour of a certain conception of the civic roles of
social science. This emphasises the connections between what we call an ‘academic
formative intention’, on the one hand, and a commitment to the enhancement of demo-
cratic deliberation on matters of common concern, on the other. Our argument, in brief,
is that the public value of sociology or criminology, in this case as applied to questions
of punishment and social control, is most coherently and convincingly described as that
of contributing to a better politics of crime and its regulation – or what we call ‘demo-
cratic under-labouring’ (we say a little more about this curious term below; for a fuller
exposition, see Loader and Sparks, 2010: Ch. 5). We think this is in many respects very
Corresponding author:
Richard Sparks
Email: r.sparks@ed.ac.uk
406
Criminology & Criminal Justice 10(4)
close to, perhaps even entirely compatible with, Wacquant’s view of the matter, notwith-
standing some differences in vocabulary and style. However, it is also designedly inclu-
sive and is by no means restricted to, and certainly does not automatically prefer, one
way of engagement over all others. We suggest that Wacquant has discovered – in a way
that is partly given by prior aspects of his intellectual orientation and theoretical convic-
tions (his ‘approach’, or more technically his ‘formative intention’), and partly worked
out in response to some striking aspects of the acclaim, and no doubt opprobrium, that
greeted the publication of his work in various parts of the world (what we call here his
‘formative experiences’) – one important way of doing something that looks very like
what we mean by democratic under-labouring. We are aware that this sounds curious:
Loïc Wacquant as under-labourer, surely some mistake?
We borrow the term ‘formative intention’ from the work of Collins and Evans (2007:
116–7) in the sociology of natural science. Collins and Evans use this term to analyse what
is distinctive about particular sorts of knowledge production and claims to expertise – what
counts, for example, as properly conducted and reported science within the conventions
of what Merton termed ‘organised scepticism’ that structure a scientific community?
How does this differ from the intentions and expectations of art, or law, or ordinary dis-
cussion? We find this diction helpful in developing our own conception of the mission
and tasks of the democratic under-labourer. In our view, the special contribution that the
under-labourer as a social scientist can make to democracy presupposes a commitment
to the values of clarity, coherence, non-contradiction, evidence, and so on, that define her
activities as academic ones. She holds, that is to say, that when sociology, criminology,
and other disciplines intervene in public life, they need to do so in ways that remain
embedded in academic formative intentions and processes, and retain an overriding
interest in the production of knowledge. Yet this is not, as we hope to make clearer below,
in any sense an argument that scholarship stands above debate, or flourishes an expertise
that can trump other positions and bring an end to discussion, still less that it should
absent itself from public controversy (see also Edwards and Sheptycki, 2009).
How, then, does all this bear upon Wacquant’s objectives in writing these books? No
doubt there will be readers for whom Wacquant’s very eloquence, the vigour of his judge-
ments and opinions, and the intensity of his objections to what he sees as the destructive
march of neoliberalism through the institutions and ways of life of many countries, casts
suspicion on his scientific credibility from the outset. Yet, at the same time, the vehemence
of his disapproval of what he sees as the evangelising and propagandist activities of many
of the neoliberal think-tankers, policy consultants, commentators, and others implicated in
this process, seems to us to result not just from disagreement, but from a sense that these
people are seeing the world through ideological blinkers, playing fast and loose with evi-
dence and so on. That is to say, he does not see them simply as mistaken, but also as
somewhat fraudulent; as being so convinced of the correctness of the cause that they have
become indifferent to the quality of the evidence that supports it. The problems of their
politics, and the inadequacy of their social science, are for him bound up together. Thus,
although Wacquant may be seen from a certain point of view as an inveterate side-taker,
he does not see himself as inhabiting an epistemologically flat universe. He thinks, in
other words, that he has a better argument, not just a morally superior vantage point.
Yet at the same time, whilst no alert reader of Wacquant can generally be left in much
doubt as to what he is against, and despite his well-known taste for pugilism in all its
Loader and Sparks
407
forms, we see his outline of civic sociology as an accommodating, moderate, and quite
capacious one. Perhaps this seems surprising. We are certainly not suggesting that
Wacquant has ceased to express himself in a trenchant and on occasion combative man-
ner. Certainly he intends us to be in no doubt as to where he stands on the big issues that
his books address. For him, the effects of the neoliberal ascendancy on the penal realm
have been disastrous, perhaps especially in their exported forms. The apologists and
ideologues involved in this movement (its ‘missionaries’, as he calls them) have in his
depiction characteristically been over-zealous, always highly instrumental, and often
downright unscrupulous. At the same time, he has some fairly unflattering things to say
even about those whom one might suppose to be closer to him, politically and intellectu-
ally. Certain other notable recent contributions in the sociology of punishment receive a
somewhat peremptory – and not always fair – dismissal. The entire debate on ‘public
sociology’ is cuffed aside in one rather disdainful footnote – even if the casual observer
might have some difficulty in grasping what is really at stake in the distinction between
‘public’ and ‘civic’ sociology (we return to each of these engagements in due course).
Yet, curiously, the appealing (to many readers) ebullience of Wacquant’s writing in
Prisons of Poverty (2009b) and elsewhere could easily lead one to suppose that civic
sociology here means something bigger and less intellectually modest than turns out to
be the case on closer...
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