Crime, reason, and history

by Alan W. Norrie

Crime, Reason and History provides an exciting and challenging new approach to the study of the criminal law. It offers a critical introduction to the law's general principles emphasising, in contrast to orthodox criminal law texts, the tensions and contradictions that lie at their heart. Norrie argues that the apparently abstract and ahistorical components of the criminal law were developed from the rationalist and individualist ideologies of the Enlightenment. The concepts of individual justice and citizenship which inform the criminal law coexist in tension with the nature of crime and its control as a social and political concern. Norrie begins by outlining the themes of rationality and justice which govern the organisation of the orthodox criminal law text. He then places these in the context of the reform of the criminal law begun in the early nineteenth century. Noting the primary conflicts within the ideologies of reform, he takes the reader through the established debates and