SOC227 Lecture Notes - Friedrich Engels, Social Conflict Theory, Ralf Dahrendorf
16 Jun 2013
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Document Summary
1960s: (1) identifying real crimes (2) evaluating how criminal law used as a mechanism of social control (3) examining inequities in society (4) describe the criminogenic influence of social and economic power. Goal: explain crime within economic and social contexts. Crime: outcome of class struggle in which conflict works to promote crime by creating a social atmosphere in which the law is a mechanism for controlling the have-nots while maintaining the position of the powerful. True crimes - racism, sexism, imperialism; substandard housing, unsafe working conditions. Marxist thought - basis for all social conflict theory. Karl marx - era of unrestrained capitalist expansion economic conditions of capitalism - turned workers into a dehumanized mass. Most important relationship: between owners of productions (capitalist bourgeoisie) and workers (proletariat) There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases in wealth without diminishing in misery, and increases in crime even more rapidly than in numbers .
