Overview

In this book based on his 2024 Adorno Lectures, Loïc Wacquant combines social theory, comparative history and structural ethnography to probe criminal punishment as a core function of the state. Extending Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he captures the constitutive duality of punishment, at once material and symbolic, an instrument of class control and a means of communicating values, endlessly oscillating between rehabilitation and retribution. Ranging from the birth of the workhouse prison in sixteenth-century Europe to the deployment of punishment in the colonies to the workaday world of prosecutors in a California criminal court, Wacquant reveals how the penal state curates crime, manages urban marginality, signals sovereignty, and manufactures legitimacy in the eyes of the population by restoring control over bodies out of order. But the penal Leviathan is a bifurcated state which captures nearly exclusively dispossessed and dishonored categories by targeting their neighborhoods: it is everywhere a class-splitting and a race-forging institution based on the stubborn differentiation of ""paper penality"" and ""street penality."" Getting inside the machinery of criminal justice shows that punishment must be placed at the epicenter of the political sociology of statecraft, group-making and place-making in the metropolis as well as brought to the forefront of civic debate to articulate a radical penal minimalism suited to reconciling punishment and democratic ideals.

Full Product Details

Author:   Loïc Wacquant (University of California at Berkeley)
Publisher:   Polity Press
Imprint:   Polity Press
ISBN:  

9781509573035

ISBN 10:   1509573038
Pages:   528
Publication Date:   21 May 2026
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Awaiting stock  

Table of Contents

A Genealogical Sketch Overture: On Punishment, the State and Citizenship The criminal as anti-citizen The many faces and functions of penality A historicist-analytical approach 1. Penality as Core State Capacity and Negative Sociodicy Punishment and social structure revisited Punishment and the state: the puzzle of mutual ignorance Durkheim, Rusche and Foucault on penality: passion, labor, disciplines Reformation versus retribution: meshing philosophies of punishment Weber, Mann and Scott on the state: force, penetration, legibility The three states of Pierre Bourdieu Bourdieu 1, penality in the bureaucratic field Bourdieu 2, Right hand and Left hand Bourdieu 3, symbolic capital and negative sociodicy Three structural properties of the penal state 2. Marginality, Ethnicity, Territory The stunning return of the prison Penalization as neoliberal statecraft Lessons from social history: marginality floods the city Province of the precariat: class and ethnicity behind bars Managing marginality by targeting territory Structural osmosis 'Paper penality' versus 'street penality' Historical excursus: colonial penality and the urban badlands The penal triad in the tropics Bringing unruly bodies to heel, or indigénat at work Special punishment in neighborhoods of relegation 3. Penal Power Incarnate: A Day in the Life of a Prosecutor A structural ethnography of prosecutorial practice Situating the pretrial prosecutor 'The Professor' comes to court Anatomy of the local judicial field A day in the life 'Down in the trenches' The splintering of punishment across class fractions A cautionary note on race and prosecution Judicial tagging and relational contracting The human spear of the state Coda: The Parable of Marx's Hangman and the Aporias of Abolitionism Urban marginality, penal policy and social rights Abolitionism as penal millenarism The ten tenets of radical penal minimalism Penal transformation and the 'ethic of responsibility'

Reviews

""Rethinking the Penal State is a breath of fresh air and sure to become a major reference point in the study of punishment. It demonstrates that punishment is central not only to statecraft, but to producing citizenship. It is must-read for students, scholars, and policymakers interested in why and how democratic societies remain on the cusp of justice rather than realizing it."" Vanessa Barker, author of Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order ""Wacquant paints on canvas that is as wide as the global history of penal forms and as precise and detailed as the best ethnographies. Easily one of the most important contributions to the theory of punishment and society in the twenty-first century."" Jonathan Simon, author of Mass Incarceration on Trial

Author Information

Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Research Associate at the Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique, Paris.

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