{"product_id":"rethinking-the-penal-state-lozc-wacquant-9781509573042","title":"Rethinking the Penal State","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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 signal concepts of bureaucratic field and symbolic power, he resolves the opposition between rationalist theories of penality running from Jeremy Bentham to Karl Marx and emotionalist theories descending from Immanuel Kant to Émile Durkheim to capture the constitutive \u003ci\u003eduality of punishment\u003c\/i\u003e at once material and symbolic, an instrument of class control and a means of communicating values, endlessly oscillating between rehabilitation and retribution.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy rolling out the police, court, prison and their bureaucratic tentacles, the penal state curates crime, contains moral disorders, manages urban marginality and draws the boundary of citizenship. Its day-to-day deployment also signals sovereignty and serves to manufacture political legitimacy in the eyes of the general population. But the penal Leviathan is a \u003ci\u003ebifurcated state\u003c\/i\u003e which captures nearly exclusively dispossessed and dishonored categories by targeting their neighborhoods: it is everywhere a class-splitting and a race-making institution based on the stubborn differentiation of 'paper penalty' and 'street penality' The structural osmosis between districts of urban dereliction and the carceral institution on both sides of the Atlantic is such that we cannot understand the penal state without understanding the dual city and vice versa.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo flesh out penal power as strategic action, Wacquant takes us deep inside a criminal court in California where we discover that the prosecutor who negotiates guilty pleas is the human spear of the state. In his daily tussles with defense attorneys and the sentencing judge, he calibrates and drives the concrete infliction of physical and psychic force upon bodies deemed out of order.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGetting 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, rather than abandoned to the periodic panic-peddling of electoral politics. Instead of chasing the chimera of abolition, we should muster the intellectual resources needed to reclaim the vexed duality of 'law and order' for a progressive politics. This requires articulating a \u003ci\u003eradical penal minimalism\u003c\/i\u003e suited to reconciling punishment and democratic citizenship.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eElegantly formulated and crisply argued, this book will be of interest to social scientists, criminologists and jurists as well as to scholars across the disciplines looking for novel ways to envisage the state, the law, punishment and inequality.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Loïc Wacquant\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1509573046\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781509573042\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Polity Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/27\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 528\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback","brand":"Loïc Wacquant","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":48621630750975,"sku":"9781509573042","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/rethinking-the-penal-state-lozc-wacquant-9781509573042","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}