Deviance and Control: The Secular Heresy

In the early 1970s many sociologists, particularly radical theorists of crime and deviance, had rejected the belief that sociological knowledge was objective or value-free. Their work, often with good reason, had come to dominate much of the literature of criminology, deviance and social work. In this book, originally published in 1976, Professor Morris provided an immensely readable and controversial reply. At the time it was felt it was likely to please neither the materialist nor the positivist, and that those whose master was not Marx but Freud would find little comfort in it. Though he writes as a social scientist, the book is not weighed down by statistics, nor an endless, jargon-laden exegesis of criminological and deviance theory. What it does do is to set the question of deviance and its control in a wider perspective by examining our beliefs about social order at the time and the manner in which such order was imposed. In doing so, the author draws widely upon history, sociology and philosophy, providing essential reading for students of sociology, crime and deviance, social work and the law.