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Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism, by Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1996. 288 pp. $79.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8039-7584-8. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8039-7585-6.
Henry and Milovanovic's book has a lot of pretensions, comparable only to the famous The New Criminology (1975) by the British authors Taylor, Walton, and Young. In both books the idea of a criminological revolution is propagated. The difference is that Taylor et al. were not aiming to replace the epistemological foundation of the discipline as are Henry and Milovanovic.
The book is hard to understand for a "modern" (pre-postmodern) reader who believes that the world can be characterized in terms of order, perfection, essentialism, causality, and individual autonomy.
Constitutive Criminology intends to give birth to a postmodern criminology. The authors are eager to avoid the negativity of the deconstructive postmodern attitude. Their effort is to find a new variety of criminology that overcomes both the restrictions of modern criminology and the fruitlessness of skeptical postmodern criminology. In this attempt they describe the traditional or "modern" criminology with considerable...