Big Trouble or Little Evils: the ideological struggle over the concept of harm

Hall, Steve and Winlow, Simon (2018) Big Trouble or Little Evils: the ideological struggle over the concept of harm. In: Zemiology: Reconnecting Crime and Social Harm. Critical Criminological Perspectives . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 107-126. ISBN 9783319763118, 9783319763125

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Abstract

This chapter argues that there has never been a ‘civilising process’ across the course of modernity but an economically functional conversion of harms from physical brutality to socio-symbolic aggression. The subject’s acceptance of core harms can be best explained in a framework of transcendental materialism, with a focus on the process of deaptation, which proliferates harms in the tension between shifting realities and ossified ideologies. The criminalisation of harms is maintained in a state of imbalance by negative ideology, which legitimises the existing spectrum of harms by constantly warning us of the far greater harms we would risk should we instigate a process of transformation. This dominant ideology operates at the core of the criminalisation process, compelling us to regard specific harms as the ‘price of freedom’.

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