Victor Lund Shammas

Every instantiation of decommodifying welfare capitalism relies on a global hinterland, an exterior space for which commodification still remains the rule and whose function is to service the national interior of a social democratic polity. Taking Norway as its case study, this article deploys the notion of a protective "cupola," following Žižek and Wacquant's concept of the "centaur state," as productive ways of thinking about how late-modern social democracy relies upon dualization and structural bifurcation. While extracting resources, low-cost labor, cheap goods, and financial profits from the global hinterland, the welfare-capitalist state privileges its national citizenry. Despite significant neoliberal transformation, it continues to protect the populace from the vagaries of the market, but at the expense of the world beyond its bounds. Social democracy, then, hinges on the preservation of difference, failing to offer a truly globe-encompassing, universal response to the commodifying effects of market capitalism. Welfare capitalism tends to mean welfare for insiders, (liberal) capitalism for the rest.

Following a series of transformative political and legal battles, California's overcrowded prison system has moved in the direction of moderate decarceration. A softer stance on punishment means that thousands of previously ineligible inmates serving indeterminate sentences are now being considered for release on parole. Drawing on ethnographic observations of twenty parole hearings in one California men's prison, this study outlines how rehabilitation has come to be enmeshed in a logic of punitivity, as parole commissioners subject inmates to an individualizing gaze that misrecognizes the socially embedded nature of their performance. Parole commissioners are tasked with assessing dangerousness, deploying a multifaceted conception of risk that combines formalized actuarial instruments and evaluative judgments to form the inchoate and contradictory notion of “insight.” Inmates are expected to demonstrate this if they are to be released, but what is insight? Parole boards assume that it is a valid indicator of future behavior and probable recidivism, and parole commissioners posit that successful inmates will be capable of demonstrating authentic remorse and insight, unimpeded by the constraints of an austere and dangerous carceral environment. However, the discretionary criteria established by the penal system are limited by the deleterious living conditions established by this same penal system.

Outer space is becoming a space for capitalism. We are entering a new era of the commercialization of space, geared towards generating profits from satellite launches, space tourism, asteroid mining, and related ventures. This era, driven by private corporations such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origins, has been labeled by industry insiders as ‘NewSpace'—in contrast to ‘Old Space', a Cold War-era mode of space relations when (allegedly) slow-moving, sluggish states dominated outer space. NewSpace marks the arrival of capitalism in space. While challenging the libertarian rhetoric of its proponents—space enterprises remain enmeshed in the state, relying on funding, physical infrastructure, technology transfers, regulatory frameworks, and symbolic support—NewSpace nevertheless heralds a novel form of human activity in space. Despite its humanistic, universalizing pretensions, however, NewSpace does not benefit humankind as such but rather a specific set of wealthy entrepreneurs, many of them originating in Silicon Valley, who strategically deploy humanist tropes to engender enthusiasm for their activities. We describe this complex as ‘capitalistkind'. Moreover, the arrival of capitalism in space is fueled by the expansionary logic of capital accumulation. Outer space serves as a spatial fix, allowing capital to transcend its inherent terrestrial limitations. In this way, the ultimate spatial fix is perhaps (outer) space itself.

Where is the pain in exceptional prisons? A new generation of prisons produces unusual ‘pains of imprisonment’ which scholars of punishment are only beginning to catalog. This article brings the reader inside the social milieu of Norway’s ‘Prison Island’, a large, minimum security (‘open’) prison. Here inmates live in self-organized cottages and enjoy relatively unrestricted freedom of movement. But even under exceptional conditions of Scandinavian incarceration, new vectors and modes of punishment arise that produce ‘pains of freedom’, a notion drawing on Crewe’s historicizing examination of Sykes’ concept. Serving as an addition to conventional sociological conceptualizations of prison pains, the ‘pains of freedom’ can be classified into five sub-categories: (1) confusion; (2) anxiety and boundlessness; (3) ambiguity; (4) relative deprivation; and (5) individual responsibility. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with 15 inmates, it is shown that freedom is occasionally experienced as ambiguous, bittersweet or tainted. These new pains may be indicative of what is in stock for clients of future penal regimes in other societies.

In recent decades, many scholars have invoked the concept of penal populism to explain the adoption of “tough on crime” measures and a wider politics of “law and order” across the post-industrialized world. But scholars who invoke the concept often betray an implicit commitment to its twin ideology—penal elitism—the belief that penal policymaking should not be subjected to public debate and that matters pertaining to crime control and punishment should be left to experts or specialists. The doctrine contains four key properties: isolationism; scientism; a narrow notion of “the political”; and a thin conception of “populism.” Isolationism involves creating buffers around arenas of social life—including criminal justice systems—to remove them from what is held to be undue democratic influence. Scientism is the overvaluation of scientific reason and the dismissal of a public believed to be emotional, irrational, or exceedingly simplistic. Politics conceived narrowly limits “the political” to that which takes place within the formal political system, ignoring the wider notion of politics as the exercise of symbolic power in everyday life, which extends far beyond the political system as such. The thin conception of “populism” ignores the fact that populism is an ideology promising to protect the public from harms of neoliberal capitalism that nevertheless fails to offer a plausible alternative to market rule. In this article, I argue that in place of either penal populism or penal elitism, academics should engage in democratically grounded practices to reverse harsh justice by including the public in a reformulated politics of punishment.

Surplus populations are back on the political agenda. With the rise of automation technologies and the advent of the hyperflexible " gig economy, " millions of individuals across the postindustrialized world will likely become supernumerary or consigned to low-quality jobs in the service sector. Neoliberalism signaled the abdication of the state's responsibility for ensuring full employment and providing high-quality employment. Criminology has largely forgotten the central role played by employment and high-quality work in preventing the spread of social pathologies. Against the logic of neoliberalism, what is needed is a state capable of counteracting the formation of surplus populations, or an anti-surplus state. A second New Deal would enact infrastructure investments and re-embed superfluous populations into meaningful employment relations. Following Bourdieu's criticism of a scientistic " flight into purity, " criminologists should adopt the lessons learned by Sweden's interwar social democrats and advocate policies capable of preventing the augmentation of social superfluity.

(Forthcoming, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.)

Faced with mounting surplus populations, states are increasingly adopting expressive, exclusionary, and fortifying measures. Such measures can be described as acts of staging sovereignty. Across the postindustrialized world, performances of sovereignty, aimed at bolstering the apparent power and glory of the state, both fuel and are themselves fueled by the resurgence of ethnonational and ethnoracial denigration and a strong public appetite for punitive responses to insecurity, crime, and criminal offenders. With the burgeoning ranks of supernumerary individuals bereft of a positive economic function under postindustrialized capitalism, the act of staging sovereignty is only likely to grow increasingly integral to the practice of late-modern statecraft.

In his late lectures, Foucault developed the ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, a courage to speak the truth in the face of danger. While not entirely uncritical of the notion, Foucault seemed to find something of an ideal in the political and aesthetic ideal of franc-parler, of speaking freely and courageously. Simultaneously, post-1968 political thought valorized the ideal of parrhesia, or "speaking truth to power": parrhesia seemed inherently progressive, the sole preserve of the left. But a cursory inspection of the annals of Nazism and fascism shows that these movements also aligned themselves with parrhesiastical modes of expression. The fragmented, disparate strands of today's neo-fascist revival, too, are closely imbricated with the notion of speaking valiantly in the face of supposed orthodoxies: in many ways, the preeminent parrhesiasts today are found on the neo-fascist side. This points to an essential weakness in the concept of parrhesia, particularly in terms of its value and valence as a strategy for the political left. Perhaps it matters less how we speak-being caught up in language games-than what policies and programs we enact. Žižek's plea for a renewed dogmatic orthodoxy and Chesterton's criticism of heresy offer ways out of the parrhesiastical trap.

Bourdieu’s anthropology of the state can be interpreted as a form of political theology, premised on a panentheistic conception of the state, which is transcendental to social reality while simultaneously being lodged in all social matter. The state is a Leviathan that imposes a horizon of meaning beyond which social agents rarely, if ever, move. The anthropologist must transcend the doxic structures of the state by engaging in a labor of anamnesis, enacting a bringing-to-consciousness of the invisible and occluded operations of the state in its deployment of symbolic power, which serves to naturalize a series of dominant (yet arbitrary) categories, concepts, and representations. Bourdieu’s ontological vision can be summarized in the concise formula, ‘state = society = God.’ A guiding methodical imperative for sociologists of the state-as-divinity is extracted from Bourdieu’s lectures on the state: the Deus Absconditus Principle, which mandates detecting and uncovering the veiled divinity of the state in all aspects of social reality. It is the task of the anthropologist to channel, interpret, and challenge the panentheistic state.

Drawing on a close reading of Pierre Bourdieu's works, I offer five lessons for a science of crime and punishment: (1) Always historicize. (2) Dissect symbolic categories. (3) Produce embodied accounts. (4) Avoid state thought. (5) Embrace commitment. I offer illustrative examples and demonstrate the practical implications of Bourdieu's ideas, and I apply the lessons to a critique of orthodox criminology.

Critics of neoliberalism have emphasized the role played by the Mont Pèlerin Society in the meteoric rise of market ideology in the postwar era. Some accounts have contended that the Society was instrumental in securing consent for the Reagan-Thatcher market revolution of the 1980s. However, dissenting voices within the Society itself claimed it had outplayed its usefulness by the early 1970s. As President of the Society from 1970 to 1972, Milton Friedman, a leading Chicago School economist and founding member of the Society, had become dissatisfied with the its excessively inclusive character.  Friedman tried to dissolve the Society in 1971, an attempt that ultimately failed. However, Friedman remained for the remainder of his life convinced that the Society had become little more than a convivial gathering of “tourists” and “fellow travelers” that no longer functioned as an agonistic arena characterized by “exciting intellectual experiences.” From the Society’s inception and over the coming decades, the problem of maintaining its elitist credentials remained a source of strife. The Society’s internal debates on inclusivity provide insight into the paradoxical nature of a neoliberal organization understood as an anti-collectivist collectivity, which mirrors the tenuous relationship between neoliberalism and democracy.

Capitalism in northern societies is entering an age of advanced precarity. On the one hand, postindustrial societies are confronted by growing surplus populations for whom there exist few positive functions the market. These new " dangerous classes " are increasingly subject to surveillance, discipline, and exclusion as the policing and penal instruments of the state are called upon to detect and contain risk. On the other hand, capitalism's " insiders " are increasingly consigned to a precarious life of hyperflexible labor and generalized insecurity. Confronted with a growing mass of " social detritus, " augmented by advances in automation and catalyzed by accelerating flows of capital, states in the Global North will increasingly be forced to mobilize the disciplinary instruments of policing and punishment to contain the swelling ranks of problem populations. Societies in the North are entering an era that is increasingly likely to be characterized by the rise and consolidation of precarious life and labor. What confronts capitalism in the Euro-American world more than ever are the swelling ranks of the supernumerary sections of humanity, those millions of people who serve no purpose in the market: " illiterate " immigrants across Europe, deskilled " ex-cons " in the United States, a " lost generation " of unemployed youths, and expendable ex-proletarians wrought by the " robot economy. " New pariahs, individuals bereft of economic function and (consequently) social worth, Marx' ([1867] 1976) " relative surplus population " engendered by the workings of the " laboring population " itself under the dictates of capital, a " population which is superfluous to capital's average requirements for its own valorization " ([1867] 1976: 782), are no longer permitted to fulfill even the dubious role of an industrial reserve army. These millions are a void, a negatively charged void, threatening the social order by the mere fact of their existence. Post-Keynesian capitalism has produced social pathologies which it can quell only through the strong arm of the state. 1 The precarity of life and labor will only grow more momentous. More than five million jobs will be squeezed out by technological advances between 2015 and 2020, 1 It could certainly be claimed that even as things are turning from bad to worse within societies in the Global North, conditions have been and continue to be far worse in developing countries. This article focuses on the Global North, not out of analytical arbitrariness or complacent Eurocentricity, but because certain intersecting political tendencies, conjoining technological advances, the logic of neoliberal restructuration, and political reactions to social pathologies, have made their appearance on the stage of world history here first. Certainly, one must avoid the temptation of self-pity in anatomizing those " postindustrialized " societies that remain relatively wealthy, stable, and secure when compared with certain developing nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, the opposite error, that of willful self-negation, should not be permitted to prevent scholars from anatomizing the increasingly potent logic of superfluity and concomitant forms of discipline directed at superfluous populations that are taking root in so-called advanced societies.

To be punished today is in many ways to be forced into freedom, at least under those forms of punishment that have moved farthest into their late-modern forms: open prisons and electronic monitoring. The convicted offender is forced to become an author of their own life-course. Like so many neoliberal subjects, they, too, must become entrepreneurs of the self, tailoring their actions to a penal regime that emphasizes remorse for one’s crime, insight into one’s criminal ‘thought patterns,’ and the necessity of developing ‘prosocial’ attitudes and skillsets. Interestingly, these tropes surface in nearly all postindustrialized penal regimes, regardless of their position along the penal continuum: thus, prison systems in both California and Norway emphasize the individual’s need to gain insight into their individual-level behavioral and cognitive patterns said to be the proximate causes of their descent into a life of crime (Shammas 2014, 2018). The reason for this seems clear: almost all postindustrialized societies partake of a neoliberal logic of sovereignty that only seems to devolve authority from the state to the individual, while ensuring that statecraft is placed in the service of the promotion of markets. In all this, the punished body is to avoid grumbling, to take a certain delight in their self-correction, which is a self-imposition in name only, and they are to enjoy the terms of their own punishment, just as ‘neoliberal employment,’ in Frédéric Lordon’s phrase, ‘aims at enchantment and rejoicing: it sets out to enrich the relation with joyful affects’ (Lordon 2014, 48). In this sense, neoliberal penality, too, is something entirely new, for the punished body in former times was rarely expected to be gladdened by their penalized condition. Ultimately, then, neoliberalism is little more than rule by the state, aimed at the promotion of markets, and borne by the figure of the joyous, affirmative individual.

What is behind this (moderate) turn to a politics of law and order? Part of the explanation can be found in a broader set of policies best described as neoliberal (Harvey 2005; Wacquant 2009; 2012). While influential political scientists have long described the Scandinavian societies as social-democratic (e.g. Esping-Andersen 1990), social scientists are beginning to recognize that countries like Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are doing away with significant elements of postwar social democracy (Shammas 2015; 2017). As the Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn (2017: 275) writes, the “egalitarian, solidaristic ‘People's Home’, which has attracted widespread progressive admiration internationally, is being eroded and dismantled.” Sweden now displays “extraordinary…inequality of wealth,” Therborn (2017: 278) writes. In Norway, national industries, such as the country’s flagship oil and natural gas company Equinor (formerly Statoil)—the source of so much of Norway’s wealth—have been fully or partly privatized.

The Arab body has long been a focal point of literary, political, technological, and military interventions. The state of otherness attributed to the embodied nature of Arab identity has made it a key locus of social domination as well as, more positively, a springboard for fresh takes on social domination far beyond the particular social suffering of a single social category. By engaging in a close reading of Kerouac's On the Road in tandem with an autoexperiential account of sociopolitical developments targeting Arab corporeality in the post-9/11 era, this article demonstrates the contradictions and potentialities of social suffering. To be a bearer of an Arab body is to be the on the receiving end of a whole host of societal suspicions, social anxieties, modes of surveillance, military incursions, and, more generally, deployments of negative symbolic power. But this state of domination turned corporeal also makes for a potential site of freedom, a vector for new solidarities with other groups and categories turned alien and other.

This chapter charts the structural transformation of the Norwegian welfare state and attendant shifts in the modality of punishment over the course of the twentieth century and beyond. Between 1900 and 2014, the Norwegian welfare state embodied three distinctive forms: first, a residualist, minimally decommodifying regime of Bismarckian welfare politics; second, a comprehensive, universalist regime of social democracy that was broadly redistributive and decommodifying along Fordist-Keynesian lines; third, a hybridized semi-neoliberal regime that maintained important elements of social democracy while implementing marketized logics of state governance, relying increasingly on private providers to deliver core state services and witnessing accelerating socioeconomic disparities. Three modalities of penality arose out of and in conjunction with these stages of transformation of the welfare state in this period (see also Hauge 2002): first, penality as paternalism, mobilizing prisons to act as warehouses for the poor and disreputable, particularly the unemployed, vagrants, thieves, and alcoholics; second, penality as treatment, entailing the medicalization of social pathologies and the resurgence of prison labor schemes, paving the way for a reintegrative system of treatment and work that was fundamentally aimed at bringing wayward social agents back into the fold of the citizenry through gainful employment; third, penality as dualization, in which the prison system diverged along lines of citizenship, giving rise to a rehabilitation-oriented track increasingly reserved for national insiders and slowly mounting a residual, punitive wing to be mobilized vis-à-vis foreign outsiders and non-Norwegian citizens. In this third and last period, incarceration rates slowly crept upwards to levels not seen since social democracy's apex at mid-century.

Contemporary sociologists of punishment have criticized the rising incidence of incarceration and punitiveness across the Western world in recent decades. The concepts of populist punitiveness and penal populism have played a central role in their critiques of the burgeoning penal state. These concepts are frequently sustained by a doctrine of penal elitism, which delegates a limited right to politicians and ‘the people’ to shape institutions of punishment, favoring in their place the dominance of bureaucratic and professional elites. I argue that the technocratic inclinations of penal elitism are misguided on empirical, theoretical, and normative grounds. A commitment to democratic politics should make us wary of sidelining the public and their elected representatives in the politics of punishment. A brief discussion of Norway’s legal proceedings against Nazi collaborators in the mid-1940s and the introduction sentencing guidelines commissions in Minnesota in the 1980s shows—pace penal elitism—that professional elites may variously raise the banner of rehabilitationism or retributivism. While penal elitism may yield a few victorious battles against punitiveness, it will not win the war.

Norway has long been considered to be a bastion of social democracy due to its strong, protective, decommodifying welfare state. However, with the recent rise of neoliberalism and right-wing populist politics across the West, this Northern European society has gradually shifted from Keynesian Fordism to a moderate form of neoliberalism. This political-economic pivot has also resulted in a transformation of what Foucault termed biopolitics: a politics concerned with life itself. In early 2019, leading politicians in Norway’s centre-right coalition government placed the problem of the declining fertility rate on the national agenda and framed the problem of biological reproduction in ways particular to their political-ideological perspectives. The Conservative Party discussed reproduction in terms of producerism, or the problem of supplying the welfare state with labouring, tax-paying citizens. The Progress Party emphasised ethnonational exclusion, engaging in racial denigration with the aim to ensure the reproduction of ‘ethnic Norwegians’. The Christian Democrats highlighted a conservative Christian ‘right to life’ topos amidst growing secularisation and pluralism. All three parties signalled a turn from traditional social-democratic ideologies. Neoliberalism has proven to be malleable, able to fuse with a wide range of biopolitical programmes including moral exhortations, ethnonational exclusion and religious discourse to approach the problem of reproduction. However, this post-social-democratic approach generally is unwilling to provide material security through large-scale social expenditures and universal welfare institutions, preferring instead to address the ‘hearts and minds’ of the populace. Consequently, the fundamental cause of sub-replacement fertility—the gradual proliferation of ontological insecurity—remains unaddressed.

Since Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks on Israel, Israel has responded by unleashing tremendous amounts of violence on the Gaza Strip. This violence, Israel claims, has been targeted at Hamas infrastructure, aimed at preventing a repeat of the October 7 attacks. But Israel’s warfare has come at a terrible, and untenable, human cost, with UN Secretary General António Guterres repeatedly calling for a ceasefire and determining that Israel was responsible for “clear violations of international humanitarian law” in Gaza. After nearly a month of war, some 9,000 people have been reported killed in Gaza by Israeli attacks, largely involving a combination of airstrikes and mortar attacks, including white phosphorus artillery shells, according to Amnesty International, “which may be considered indiscriminate attacks and therefore unlawful.”

A sociodicy is a structured attempt to justify the social order in spite of its manifold injustices. Its conceptual lineage can be traced back to the notion of theodicy, or the justification of God despite the existence of evil and suffering, a term that was appropriated and "sociologized" by Max Weber; it was the French mid-20 century sociologist Raymond Aron who expressly coined the term sociodicy, even though it was his student and collaborator Pierre Bourdieu who became its most famous and frequent exponent. On Bourdieu's usage, sociodicies are narratives that try to shield dominant social strata from criticism over inequalities, hierarchy, domination, and social suffering (that is, pain and distress originating from the social order rather than individual pathology).

Axel Honneth’s (2017) The Idea of Socialism is a timely reflection on a puzzling state of affairs: Perhaps at no time in the past several decades have so many sensed that there is something terribly wrong with global capitalism—from mounting inequalities to runaway climate change—and yet rarely has the resolve to think through workable alternatives to the global capitalist order been weaker. But the “sudden decline in utopian energy” (p. 2), or withering away of the millenarian impulse, is perhaps not so difficult to explain. As Honneth recognizes, it is incredibly hard to re-engineer vastly complex, mutually interdependent systems of political governance, economic production, and sociocultural reproduction—perhaps so difficult that the very idea of fashioning ideological blueprints for the refabricating of the world has itself grown outmoded.

What can the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu contribute to a critique of law? Throughout the last decades of his career, Bourdieu repeatedly returned to a quasi-theological reading of sociology. During his lectures at the Collège de France in the mid-1980s, Bourdieu would often quote Durkheim’s famous observation that “society is God” – by which Durkheim simply meant, following Ludwig Feuerbach, that people tend to erect the godhead in their own image. Bourdieu, however, gave this phrase his own metaphysical, almost mystical, twist. In the closing pages of his last book, Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu reiterated Durkheim’s line, this time adding that the State — this omnipresent, all-potent political entity — is the “realization of God on earth.” In other words, Bourdieu established a series of equivalences: society is God, the state is God’s realization on earth; in short: society = God = state.

Social democracy is not faltering because of the arrival of immigrants from the postcolonial sphere. Instead, the welfare state is being dismantled by the very political establishment that has taken a tougher stance on criminal offenders and asylum seekers, including center-left social democratic parties like the Norwegian Labor Party. The real cause of social dislocation is not immigration but marketization. If social democracy was the leading cause of penal exceptionalism, its disappearance must, logically, cause exceptionalism to falter and fade away also. It seems improbable that Nordic penal exceptionalism can withstand the slow erosion of social democracy.

Guy Standing's book suggests that the social ills emanating from capitalism should be ascribed not to capitalism working according to plan, but to something, somewhere along the way, having gone wrong with capitalism, in the movement from truly free markets to their disfigured progeny. It is never clear whether Standing wants to rid capitalism of its perversions, and thereby restore markets to their purified form, or whether this ethical-moral framing is a rhetorical strategy—a form of immanent critique—aimed at exposing the hypocrisies of those proselytizing the free market creed. At times, Standing sounds like a cross between Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman. It is this schizoid movement from left to right and back again—a dialectical intertwining—that gives rise to what one might call Standing’s centrist libertarianism. He borrows from both right and left, ultimately serving up a strange ideological brew, advocating for the idea that markets should be made free, restoring the welfare state of postwar social democracy, freeing all manner of “commons” (from nature to intellectual property), enclosed within a universal basic income scheme. Common to all these proposals is the idea that capitalism can still be redeemed.

Against Müller’s inchoate and overly wide conception of populism—by his own admission, Müller’s is a theory that lumps together Evo Morales and Hitler (p. 94)—there is only one characteristic that, analytically and strategically, should be used to define populism: pretend or faux anti-neoliberalism. Minimally populistic regimes pretend to counteract the hegemony of markets and protect the people against market forces, while in reality setting about dismantling the welfare state and promoting corporate interests. “While the reality in Hungary has been savage cuts to the welfare state, Orbán’s self-presentation as a strong leader ready to nationalize companies and use the state to protect ordinary folk from multinationals has been highly effective,” Müller writes perceptively (p. 59). Recall also that Nigel Farage’s Leave campaign scored major points on the infamous claim that Brussels was draining Britain’s coffers to the tune of 240 million pounds per week – funds which were to be reallocated to save the long-ailing National Health Service. Of course, no such funds were forthcoming, and the figure was largely a fabrication (see e.g. Clegg 2017). But the promise to restore the dignity of one of the five central pillars in William Beveridge’s vision of the “people’s peace,” was extremely effective. Similarly, Trump has promised to protect “the little man” against corporate greed – again, a hollow promise made by a politician unlikely to disturb the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism.

This book examines two policies—conditional cash transfers (CCTs) and participatory budgeting (PT)—with the aid of the "extended case method." Peck and Theodore have conducted interviews with policymakers, experts, and activists in fifteen countries to provide a portrait of how these political solutions have fared under neoliberalism.

Carceral Geography is the study of how spatiality intersects with punishment. Moran’s study offers a comprehensive overview of recent work and defends the view that studying the spatial dimensions of penality is crucial. It raises a number of pertinent questions: How do spatially targeted policing strategies lead to ethnoracial and socioeconomic disparities in prisoner populations? Why is prison construction sometimes the subject of Nimbyism and at other times welcomed as a valuable source of revenue and job creation in faltering communities? Are prisons really impermeable “total” institutions or can their boundaries be porous? How does the decentralized “archipelago” of penal institutions, differentiated along degrees of internal control (“categories” in England and Wales, “levels” in California, and “open” vs. “closed” prisons in Scandinavia), contribute to the production of docile bodies? Can architecture and interior design play a role in the construction of “humane” prisons – or should such a notion be rejected as oxymoronic?

Perceptive capitalists have long understood that they need reformist anti-capitalism to ensure their survival, while irrational capitalists have insisted on fighting social democracy against their own best interests in the long-run. “To avoid self-destruction capitalism needs a set of countervailing forces,”  Garland writes (p. 137). “And welfare states are the embodiment of these forces established in a functional, institutional form.”

Gresham M. Sykes’ (1958) The Society of Captives had a formative influence on the microsociology of prison life. In this classic of structural functionalism, Sykes develops an internalist account of prison culture in a New Jersey maximum-security prison. Inmates cluster together to counter the deleterious effects of the pains of imprisonment. Prison guards and administrators are only imperfectly able to control the prisoner population because of the defects of total power, and checks on custodial authority are the result of inmate resistance and the scrutiny of external society. Inmates fall into argot roles, prison-specific patterns of  behavior that run counter to conventional norms. The book has been interpreted by many as supportive of the deprivation model of prison culture. Despite the shortcomings of its structural functionalism, the work remains influential on contemporary prison studies.

Imprisonment is widely seen as a humane improvement over corporal punishment. But social observers like Gresham M. Sykes pointed out that imprisonment entailed its own distinct set of deprivations, including the loss of liberty, goods and services, heterosexual relationships, autonomy, and security. According to the deprivation model, prison culture and inmate behavior are shaped by constraints encountered in the prison environment. Contrary to the deterrence hypothesis, which contends that greater pains of imprisonment yield lower offending rates, research suggests that harsher punishments may have criminogenic effects. Recent empirical work has emphasized secondary pains of imprisonment that extend beyond the individual offender to negatively impact families and communities outside the prison.

In the United States, the jail population totaled around 700,000 persons per day by the early 2010s, and an annual total of nearly 12 million detainees were confined across more than 3,000 facilities. In The Jail, John Irwin scrutinizes the American system of pretrial detention and short-term internment. Arguing that jails are imbued with greater “pains of imprisonment” than traditional penitentiaries because of a distinct lack of emphasis on rehabilitative procedures, Irwin contends that these liminal holding facilities produce four stages of mortification as citizens pass through their gates. The jail causes psychic disintegration and disorientation of lower-class citizens drawn from deteriorating urban quarters, and the jail degrades and prepares marginalized populations for a continued existence at the bottom tiers of the social order. Far from protecting the public from predatory and dangerous offenders, Irwin argues, jails are instead filled with non-serious offenders whose prime crime is that they are offensive to public sensibilities.

Robert Wald Sussman has written a powerful and erudite history of racism. An anthropologist by training, Sussman adeptly portrays the “persistence of an unscientific idea” over the past five hundred years in Western Europe and the United States. The book is structured around what Sussman considers two dominant strains of racist thought: pre-Adamite polygenism (which holds that “superior” Western civilization derives from a different set of ancestors than other “inferior” races) and degenerate monogenism (which contends that all races derive from a common ancestor, but some races have since degenerated under adverse conditions). With this theoretical couplet in hand, Sussman unpacks the history of racism by revealing how a multitude of scholars and agitators developed the ideology of race from the Spanish Inquisition to the Enlightenment, Social Darwinism, eugenics, Nazi genocidal policies through to modern-day IQ racism.

Prison populations frequently contain sizable groups that are ethnoracially, religiously or nationally diverse. Some criminal justice observers have viewed these groups as a source of risk. Recent research suggests that inmates frequently downplay the importance of diversity, establishing social orders that allow them to ‘get along.’ I report on a study of an open prison in Norway where inmates deny the importance of ethnoracial difference. Relatively harmonious prisoner relations are made more probable by the state of external social relations and internal institutional features. Liberality and permissiveness diminish conflict levels, allowing inmates to find common ground.

The Nordic societies have concocted a series of alternative penal measures to correct and control criminal offenders. Chief among these is the open prison. In Norway prison administrators regularly channel around one-third of the incarcerated population into minimum-security, open prisons. Here inmates enjoy greater autonomy and freedom of movement, more meaningful work, and increased opportunities for immersion in ordinary society. While open prisons are significantly less expensive to operate than higher-security facilities, largely thanks to the fact that they require fewer security personnel to control the prison population, it remains a contentious issue whether such prisons are better at rehabilitating offenders and delivering reduced recidivism rates.

What seems certain, however, is that such prisons are uniquely suited to disciplining and controlling prison populations, crucially, by giving inmates something to lose and then threatening to take it away. Maximum security prisons, on the other hand, are unable to produce fine-grained gradations of incentives and disincentives to regulate inmate behavior for the
simple reason that inmates there have practically nothing to lose. This is perhaps the fundamental disciplinary innovation of the open prison: it corrects, in some sense, because many inmates learn to desire to be corrected.

Innledning Sverige er på mange måter et traumatisert land, et land traumatisert av det mange svensker selv betrakter som en usedvanlig godhjertet, men stadig mer feilslått handling: I 2015 tok landet imot 160 000 asylsøknader og ga opphold til flere titalls tusen mennesker fra Midtøsten og omkringliggende land. Samme år ankom som kjent 1,3 millioner flyktninger Europa, brorparten fra krigsrammede samfunn som Syria, Afghanistan og Irak, de to sistnevnte en direkte virkning av USA/NATO-ledede invasjoner, og førstnevnte-den syriske borgerkrigen-et indirekte produkt av det maktvakuumet og voldsoverskuddet amerikanske styrker har etterlatt seg i området. Det er en av Irak-krigens tragiske ironier at de vestlige landene som uttalte seg sterkest mot krigen-Tyskland og Sverige-likevel endte opp med å baere den største flyktningebyrden som oppstod i kjølvannet av den. (Hvis denne verden var rettferdig, ville denne byrden falt på USA og Storbritannia alene, ikke Sverige og Tyskland-og i hvert fall ikke fattige små land som Libanon og Jordan.) Det traumatiserte Sverige er et land revet mellom sosial nød og superrikdom, taeret av nyliberalisme, industridød, privatisering, høyrepopulisme, terrorangrep, skytinger og granatangrep, der Sverigedemokratene nå synes å vaere landets største parti. Disse nye sosialdemokratene er høyreorienterte etnonasjonalister som ikke har stort flere løsninger enn en hardere politikk mot minoriteter av alle slag. Det er midt i dette kriserammede Sverige-som samtidig er en krise for venstresiden-at Aftonbladet-kulturredaktøren og forfatteren Åsa Linderborg og journalisten og dikteren Göran Greider prøver å besvare dette stadig aktuelle spørsmålet: Hva må gjøres? Kuren de foreskriver det traumatiserte, for ikke å si sykelige Sverige, er venstrepopulisme.

Brexit viste at fremtiden er radikalt åpen, at alt kan skje. I disse tider er ikke dette nødvendigvis en lystig tanke. Samtidig er fremtidens uavklarthet nettopp det som gjør at «Brexit ikke trenger å bety Brexit i det hele tatt», som Clegg skriver. Demokratier bør få lov til å skifte mening. Med så mye uforutsigbart i horisonten, bør vi kanskje ta vare på det bestående, nettopp for å kunne bevege oss fremover i terrenget. Vi bør lære oss, som keiser Augustus sa, å skynde oss langsomt.

I boka Fictitious Capital (2017) hevder den radikale franske økonomen Cédric Durand at den neste finanskrisen inntreffer snart, fordi finansnaeringen har vokst seg for stor, innfløkt og avhengig av fiktiv kapital. Mens ordentlig kapital brukes til å produsere konkrete varer og tjenester, mener Durand, består fiktiv kapital på sin side i forflyttingen av papirverdier rundt på verdens børser og finansmarkeder, uten rotfeste i et reelt økonomisk grunnlag.

Norges nasjonalsymboler voktes omhyggelig. I fjor fikk NTNU påpakning for å ha latt flere av sine tekniske ansatte kjøre biler med riksvåpenet klistret på siden – bilene bar både universitetets logo og riksvåpenet, en kombinasjon som ifølge Kunnskapsdepartementet strider mot Utenriksdepartementets retningslinjer for bruk av Riksvåpenet. For noen år siden ble en nynazistisk klesbutikk i Tyskland hindret i å bruke det norske flagget i en kleskolleksjon rettet mot høyreekstreme. «Vi har ingen toleranse for slikt», sa forbundskansler Angela Merkel den gang. Butikken ble domfelt for å ha misbrukt det norske flagget. Flagget og riksvåpenet er statssymboler. Følgelig kan de ikke brukes i en hvilken som helst anledning eller av hvem som helst. Bruken forsøkes begrenset og regulert av staten. Andre regler gjelder visst for flyselskapet Norwegian. Den tilsynelatende folkelige milliardaeren Bjørn Kjos – markatraver og nordmann først, dernest kapitalist – ser ut til å ha fått en uformell dispensasjon til å ødsle bort noen av nasjonens viktigste markører: flaggets farger, berømte nordmenn, og selve nasjonens navn i adjektivform. Flyselskapet Norwegian er i ferd med å bli blant Norges mest synlige produkter. Selskapet har allerede rukket å bygge opp en stor flyflåte, og i januar 2017 var selskapet større enn SAS målt i passasjerantall. Og større skal selskapet bli. I 2012 la Norwegian inn den største flyordren i europeisk historie, med blant annet naermere 100 Airbus A320neo-fly og 100 Boeing 737 MAX-fly på vei. Selskapet har gått fra å ha hatt 3,3 millioner passasjerer i 2005 til 25,8 millioner passasjerer i 2015. Norwegian har i løpet av et tiår økt tilbudet fra 50 flyruter til 447 ruter. Nasjonalsymbolikk på børs Selve forestillingen om nasjonen Norge står sentralt i markedsføringen. Flaggets farger: Rødt, hvitt og blått, malt rundt flyets neseparti, med en overvekt av rødt og hvitt, og en antydning av blå striper. Navnet: Norwegian, selve adjektivet som beskriver nasjonen og folket. Menneskene: Flere av flyene er oppkalt etter kjente nordmenn, såkalte Tail Fin Heroes. Dette er en tvangsmessig appropriasjon av norsk nasjonalidentitet. Ingen av oss er blitt spurt om vi er villige til å selge ut nasjonens symboler på Oslo Børs. Vi nyter kanskje godt av billige flyreiser, noe som unektelig har bidratt til å åpne verden ytterligere, men prisen vi betaler er at nasjonen Norges symboler blir utplyndret og forestillingen om Norge blir forvrengt. Teorien er såre enkel. Norwegian bruker norskhet som en salgsfremmende del av markedsføringen av produktet sitt. Norge forbindes med positive ting som godhet, et rent miljø, og et velfungerende velferdssamfunn.

Kun fatalister kan oppnå lykke, mens de optimistiske og håpefulle blant oss stadig blir skuffet, hevder den tyske filosofen Frank Ruda i boken Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism. Fatalistene vet at verden allerede er ugjenkallelig ødelagt, at historien er en «slakterbenk», som Hegel skriver i sine forelesninger over filosofihistorien. Men endetiden er ikke noe som skal komme en gang i fremtiden. Apokalypsen har allerede funnet sted. Straks mennesket oppdaget ild begynte den lange marsjen mot atombomben og klimakatastrofen – en opplysningens dialektikk. Paradoksalt nok er omfavnelsen av den totale håpløsheten, eller den absolutte fatalismen, selve forutsetningen for å unngå at ting beveger seg fra «vondt til verre» (s. 36), påstår Ruda. «Å anta at alt allerede er tapt og at apokalypsen allerede har inntruffet blir selve betingelsen for fremveksten av en genuint fri handling» (s. 127). Dette høres jo unektelig temmelig dystert ut. Likevel hevder Ruda at hans fatalisme er en form for komisk fatalisme: Vi bør akseptere avgrunnen med et smil. Vi bør møte apokalypsens etterdønninger med latter, i den visshet at ingenting nytter og at mennesket er dømt til å leve et liv tappet for essensiell mening. En slik latter har en forløsende effekt: Livet er tragisk, men nettopp derfor blir det komisk, og derfor bør vi tillate oss noen lettsindigheter. Fordi alt er både håpløst og meningsløst, kan vi frigjøre krefter i oss selv til å handle på en friere måte. For ligger det ikke en viss komikk i det å vite og akseptere at verden er et meningsløst sted, et meningsvakuum? Avgrunnsfølelsen er en produktiv negativitet: Vi må omfavne det håpløse for å få utrettet ting, enten vi ønsker å starte en revolusjon, skrive filosofibøker eller forelske oss. For å utdype dette siste punktet: Ruda understreker at det så å si er umulig å forelske seg hvis man på forhånd er innstilt på en slik forelskelse. Ingen forelsker seg (eller blir gjenstand for en forelskelse) hvis de aktivt går inn for å bli forelsket eller elsket: Forelskelsen er alltid et fall – tomber amoureux/amoureuse på fransk, eller to fall in love på engelsk, et poeng Rudas laeremester Slavoj Žižek liker å understreke. Å forelske seg er ikke et fritt foretatt valg. I kjaerligheten virker det meste forutbestemt, og i en virkelig forelskelse kjenner man seg viljeløs og overstyrt. Nettopp i forelskelsens fall laerer man at frihet er et begrep som ikke evner å fange opp de aller viktigste aspektene ved vår menneskelige eksistens – en laerdom som også kan anvendes på revolusjonaere situasjoner. I politiske revolusjoner virker også historien som den beveger seg på skinner: Revolusjonen er ikke villet. Den er en begivenhet.

Robert Wald Sussman har skrevet både kraftfullt og kunnskapsrikt om rasismens historie. Sussman, som selv er antropolog, gir en mesterlig skildring av «den uvitenskapelige ideens utholdenhet» gjennom de siste fem århundrer i Vest-Europa og USA. Boken er strukturert rundt det Sussman regner som de to dominerende grenene i rasistisk tenkning: pre-adamittisk polygenisme (som påstår at «overlegne» vestlige sivilisasjoner stammer fra en annen gruppe forfedre enn andre «underlegne raser») og degenerert monogenisme (som hevder at alle «raser» har samme opphav, men at noen senere har degenerert som følge av ugunstige omstendigheter). Med denne teoretiske duetten som grunnlag lar Sussman rasismens historie komme til syne ved å avsløre hvordan en mengde akademikere og aktivister har utviklet rasismens ideologi fra den spanske inkvisisjonen til opplysningstiden og videre gjennom sosialdarwinismen, eugenikken, nazismens folkemordspolitikk og moderne tids IQ-rasisme.

This course introduces doctoral students to some of the key contributors to the French tradition, starting with Émile Durkheim, a progenitor of modern sociology, and his nephew Marcel Mauss, the “father of French ethnology,” extending through the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lèvi-Strauss, hermeneutic historicism and power analyses of Michel Foucault, critical- realist sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, and transcendental empiricism of Gilles Deleuze. The aim is to unfurl the specific academic trajectories of these thinkers within a wider space of intellectual forces—the French academic scene extending from the late 1890s up to the new millennium—to enable PhD students to critically evaluate, appropriate, and apply their concepts and ideas in the context of their own doctoral research.

The purpose of this five-part class is to give you a good grounding in the powerful theoretical framework of the renowned French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). One of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century, Bourdieu began as an ethnographer of Algeria in the 1950s, eventually writing dozens of books and essays on everything from educational inequality, legitimate culture, social domination, neoliberalism, television, museums, photography, the artist Manet, and theories of the state. If you want to understand how societies work, you will be hard pressed to find a single thinker who could serve as a greater guide than Bourdieu. Obviously, we cannot cover all his books in such a short space of time. (The interested student may, of course, proceed farther on their own.) Instead, we will be reading a smattering of Bourdieu’s key texts, essays, and interventions to get a good sense of the breadth of his work.