Critique of legal order: crime control in capitalist society

231 Pages·1974·32.7 MB·English

by  Richard Quinney

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Critique of Legal Order: Crime Control in
Capitalist Society is a revolutionary exam-
ination of law and crime in America, a lucid
analysis that provides a fundamental new
way of perceiving our social and legal order.
With impressive insight and reasoning,
Richard Quinney looks at the structure of our
system from a Marxian viewpoint and reveals
a pervasive "control and manipulation of
human beings, accomplished by those who
rule and those who benefit from this rule."
Contemporary law and crime control in Amer-
ica, Quinney asserts, is designed by an elite
for the ruling class, and accomplishes noth-
ing more than the preservation of the dom-
inant class and the oppression of those who
are powerless.
To demonstrate this, Quinney examines
both the basic framework of the American
legal system and many of the specific events
relating to crime control in the last decade.
He dissects Senate committees, presidential
commissions and task forces, the Justice
Department, the FBI and CIA, and such cen-
tral agencies as the Law Enforcement Assis-
tance Administration. He analyzes recent
Senate actions, such as the Omnibus Crime
Control and Safe Streets Act, the District of
Columbia crime bill, and the Organized
Crime Control Act. He explores the creden-
tials and records of individuals who have
helped shape contemporary legal ideology
and probes the role of universities and the
media in promoting that ideology.
From all this, he derives a forceful and
provocative set of conclusions a—bout where
crime control may be .leading and sug-
gests an alternative: a socialist society where
the real needs of people may be truly and
fairly achieved. "With the development of a
critical life, we will demystify current reality
and work toward a socialist society."
"In building a socialist society," Quinney
concludes, "we may return to the idea of
custom, rather than law, for the patterning of
our daily lives. Life, instead of being con-
trolled by the rigid mechanisms of the state,
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CRITIQUE OF LEGAL ORDER
CRITIQUE
OF LEGAL ORDER
Crime Control in Capitalist Society
Richard Quinney
Brown and Company
£{g\ Little,
Boston
COPYRIGHT © 1974, 1973 BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY (iNC.)
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN
ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS INCLUDING
INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS WITHOUT PERMISSION
IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY
QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 73-14085
FIRST PRINTING
Published simultaneously in Canada
by Little, Brown & Company (Canada) Limited
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Portions of this book were previously published in Richard Quinney, "Crime
Control in Capitalist Society: A Critical Philosophy of Legal Order." Issues in
Criminology, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 1973).
The author is grateful for permission to reprint excerpts from the following
sources.
G. William Domhoff, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America
©
(New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 123-24. Copyright 1970 by
G. William Domhoff.
Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich, and Thomas E. Weisskopf, The Capitalist
System: A Radical Analysis of American Society, © 1972, pp. 463, 520. By
permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
Ben A. Franklin, "Federal Computers Amass Files on Suspect Citizens," The
New York Times, June 28, 1970. © 1970 by The New York Times Company.
Reprinted by permission.
Jeff Gerth, "The Americanization of 1984," SunDance, I (April-May 1972), pp.
59, 64-65, 66.
Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon Press,
1969) excerpts from pp. xii, xii-xiii, xiii, 6—7.
Excerpts from Chapt©ers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, of The State in Capitalist Society by
Ralph Miliband. 1969 by George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Ltd., London,
Basic Books Inc., Publishers, New York.
The New York Times, February 3, 1972. © 1972 by The New York Times Com-
pany. Reprinted by permission.
John Wildeman, The Crime Fighters: A Study of the Ideologies and Reactions
to Criminally Defined Behavior on the Part of the Members of an Interest
Group Operative in the Official Definition and Management of Deviance.
Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 1971, excerpts from pages 76-78.
Preface
— —
Once there was a way or so it seemed to get there from here.
All we had to do was follow our procedures; all would be well.
But then we began to understand. It was no longer possible to gain
a better collective life under the established order or to comprehend
the current reality according to conventional wisdom. Other sources
became necessary.
This book is an attempt to understand some of the important
events that have been going on in the United States in the last de-
cade. I am concerned with developments in theAmerican legal order,
with occurrences that get to the deeper meaning of the American
experience. To accomplish an adequate understanding I found it
necessary to develop a critical form of thought. Rejecting the com-
mon assumptions of legal scholarship and criminological theory, I
am suggesting a critical Marxian philosophy that allows us to de-
mystify the existing social order. At the same time my purpose is to
create a form of life that will move us out of the oppression of the
capitalist age.
With a critical philosophy we begin to recognize that the legal
order (that which supposedly makes for civilization) is actually a
construction of the capitalist ruling class and the state that serves it.
Law, contrary to the dominant ideology, promotes the survival of
the capitalist system. Moreover, as capitalism is further threatened
by its own contradictions, the legal order is increasingly used to
maintain domestic order. The legal system at home and the military
apparatus abroad are two sides of the same phenomenon; both per-
petuate American capitalism, the American Way of Life. With a
critical Marxian philosophy we are able to understand how the cap-
italist ruling class establishes its control over those it must oppress.
This is a philosophy that no longer serves the existingcapitalist state;
instead, it promotes our liberation through socialist revolution.
As I was completing this book, Watergate was just beginning to
surface. All those things that I had been writing about the American
state and the ruling class were given further support. But more to
the point, the kinds of things I had uncovered in the crime control
measures of the last decade were now obviously correct rather than
being merely the product of a writer's paranoid imagination. Yet
many persons in the United States will likely feel that "the system"
has been purged once the functionaries associated with Watergate
have been brought "to justice." Too easily it can be assumed that a
critical understanding of American legal order is only a description
of an abnormal period in American history. But it is my contention
that Watergate is only the surface of the deeper reality of American
social and political life, that law and the state in America exist for
the promotion of the capitalist system. Capitalism, in not being able
to solve its own contradictions, will increasingly rely on repressive,
autho—ritarian measures to secure its own survival. That—the legal sys-
tem including the various agencies of crime control will be an
integral part of this effort is the meaning of my analysis of legal
order in America. That our future for some time to come will be a
dialectic between resistance and revolution, on the one hand, and
counterrevolution by the state on the other, is the conclusion of a
critical analysis.
Where do we go from here? Our purpose in a critical imagination
is to act collectively to bring about a world liberated from the op-
pression of capitalism. We are engaged in socialist revolution. The
thoughts and actions appropriate to an emerging socialist society
can be developed only in the struggle of creating a socialist society.
Given a socialist vision, the actual nature of our future, including
the nature of the state, will be realized only in the course of the
creation. It is in the struggle today that we realize ourselves and our
future.
Vi
Contents
1
A Critical Philosophy of Legal Order 1
The Positivistic Mode 2
The Social Constructionist Mode 5
The Phenomenological Mode 8
Critical Philosophy 11
Developing a Critical Philosophy of Legal Order 15
2
Knowledge and Order 17
The Search for Order 18
Sociology of Law 22
Criminology 26
VII