Folk devils and moral panics: 'Left idealism' reconsidered

This article is intended as an attack on Jock Young's use of the term 'left idealism' - that distillation of every 1960s hysteria and radicalchic inanity - to describe and to castigate the moral, political and intellectual assumptions of the emergent 'paradigm' of radical criminology in Britain of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Young's synopsis, I shall argue, is not only premised on an inadequate approach to the history of ideas; it is also highly selective in its interpretation of the early history of radical criminology in Britain.