Postmodernism and Rethinking the Concept of Crime

Abstract

Defining the concept of crime is the starting point in the criminal thought. Basically, any view taken on the concept of crime formulates the other fundamental criminological concepts (such as the criminal and etiology) as well as basic concepts of criminal policy system (such as justice, criminalization and prevention). In the light of the foregoing, we attempt to discuss the concept of the crime in the framework of two distinct paradigms of modernism and postmodernism. That said, we argue that while the modernist reading conceives the crime with the presumption of the objective nature or inherent meaning, the postmodernist reading, on the contrary, replaces this presumption with the subjective nature or acquired meaning. In order to develop this thesis, the ideas of postmodernism will first be introduced. Subsequently, a critique of the modernist view of the crime will be offered. Eventually, a new definition of the crime from the perspective of the constitutive criminology will be provided. Despite the above-said importance, this analysis of the meaning of the crime has never been touched upon in the Persian literature of criminology.

Keywords

• crime
• postmodernism
• subjectivity
• de-construction
• constitutive criminologyy