The 'scholarly myths' of the new law and order doxa

Abstract

The moral panic that has been raging through Europe in recent years about 'street violence' and 'delinquent youth,' which allegedly threaten the integrity of advanced societies and call in turn for severe penal responses, has mutated, since the French presidential elections of 2002, into a veritable law-and-order pornography, in which everyday incidents of 'insecurity' are turned into a lurid media spectacle and a permanent theatre of morality. The staging of 'security' (sécurité, Sicherheit, seguridad), henceforth construed in its strictly criminal sense--after crime had itself been reduced to street delinquency alone, that is to say, in the final analysis, to the turpitudes of the lower classes--has the primary function of enabling leaders in office (or competing for it) to reaffirm on the cheap the capacity of the state to act at the very moment when, embracing the dogmas of neoliberalism, they unanimously preach its impotence in economic and social matters. The canonization of the 'right to security' is the correlate of, and a fig leaf for, the dereliction of the right to work, a right inscribed in the French Constitution but flouted daily, on the one side by the persistence of mass unemployment in the midst of national prosperity and, on the other by the growth of precarious wage labour that denies any security of life to the growing numbers of those who are condemned to it.