Donald Black

The Geometry of Terrorism

Terrorism in its purest form is self-help by organized civilians who covertly inflict mass violence on other civilians. Pure sociology explains terrorism with its social geometry—its multidimensional location and direction in social space. Here I build on the work of Senechal de la Roche (1996) and propose the following geometrical model: Pure terrorism arises intercollectively and upwardly across long distances in multidimensional space. Yet because social distance historically corresponded to physical distance, terrorism often lacked the physical geometry necessary for its occurrence: physical closeness to civilians socially distant enough to attract terrorism. New technology has made physical distance increasingly irrelevant, however, and terrorism has proliferated. But technology also shrinks the social universe and sows the seeds of terrorisms destruction.

Dreams of pure sociology

Unlike older sciences such as physics and biology, sociology has never had a revolution. Modern sociology is still classical—largely psychological, teleological, and individualistic—and even less scientific than classical sociology. But pure sociology is different: It predicts and explains the behavior of social life with its location and direction in social space—its geometry. Here I illustrate pure sociology with formulations about the behavior of ideas, including a theory of scienticity that predicts and explains the degree to which an idea is likely to be scientific (testable, general, simple, valid, and original). For example: Scienticity is a curvilinear function of social distance from the subject. This formulation explains numerous facts about the history and practice of science, such as why some sciences evolved earlier and faster than others and why so much sociology is so unscientific. Because scientific theory is the most scientific science, the theory of scienticity also implies a theory of theory and a methodology for the development of theory.

Social Control as a Dependent Variable

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the general theory of social control. It presents social control as a natural phenomenon that varies with its location and direction in social space. It is possible, in principle, to develop a body of sociological theory that will predict and explain how normative life differs from one setting to another or, in other words, to understand social control as a dependent variable. First advanced at the turn of the century by Edward Alsworth Ross (1901), the concept of social control has long been associated with the normative aspect of social life. In one usage, which dominated the earlier literature, social control refers broadly to virtually all of the human practices and arrangements that contribute to social order and, in particular, that influence people to conform. In a second and more recent usage, social control refers more narrowly to how people define and respond to deviant behavior. It, thus, includes punishment of every kind—such as the destruction or seizure of property, banishment, humiliation, beating, and execution—as well as the demand for compensation by a victim of misconduct, sorcery, gossip, scolding, or a facial expression of disapproval such as a scowl or stare.

The Elementary Forms of Conflict Management

Conflict management is the handling of grievances, including litigation, mediation, arbitration, negotiation, beating, torture, assassination, feuding, warfare, strikes, boycotts, riots, banishment, resignation, running away, ridicule, scolding, gossip, witchcraft, witch-hunting, hostage-taking, fasting, confession, psychotherapy, and suicide.1 Although diverse, its many varieties reduce to a smaller number, each arising under distinctive conditions.

The social organization of law

Law seems to be everywhere, ordering the most minute details of daily life while at the same time making life and death judgments. Law can be and is many things at once--majestic and ordinary, monstrous and merciful, concerned with morality and yet often righteously indifferent to moral argument. It is thus central and important in social life and, at the same time, elusive and mysterious. What law is and can be, as well as the nature of laws presence in society, is, however, more than a matter of moral maxims, philosophical aspirations, or adroitness in manipulating legal texts. Laws power and mystery is reflected in, and made possible by, its institutional arrangements and social organization.

CRIME AS SOCIAL CONTROL

The criminality of crime is defined by law, and therefore falls within the jurisdiction of a completely different theory. This chapter discusses the struggle between law and self-help, the deterrence of crime, the processing of self-help by legal officials, and the problem of predicting and explaining self-help. The approach taken in the chapter departs radically from traditional criminology. Indeed, the approach taken is not criminological at all, because it ignores the characteristics of crime as such. Instead, it draws attention to a dimension of many crimes usually viewed as a totally different—even opposite— kind of human behavior, namely, social control. Crime often expresses a grievance. This implies that many crimes belong to the same family as gossip, ridicule, vengeance, punishment, and law. It also implies that to a significant degree one can predict and explain crime with a sociological theory of social control, specifically a theory of self-help. Beyond this, it might be worthwhile to contemplate what else crime has in common with noncriminal conduct.

On the almost inconceivable misunderstandings concerning the subject of value-free social science†

A value judgment says what is good or bad, and value-free social science simply means social science free of value judgments. Yet many sociologists regard value-free social science as undesirable or impossible and readily make value judgments in the name of sociology. Often they display confusion about such matters as the meaning of value-free social science, value judgments internal and external to social science, value judgments as a subject of social science, the relevance of objectivity for value-free social science, and the difference between the human significance of social science and value-free social science. But why so many sociologists are so value-involved - and generally so unscientific - is sociologically understandable: The closest and most distant subjects attract the least scientific ideas. And during the past century sociologists have become increasingly close to their human subject. The debate about value-free social science is also part of an epistemological counterrevolution of humanists (including many sociologists) against the more scientific social scientists who invaded and threatened to expropriate the human subject during the past century.

Compensation and the Social Structure of Misfortune

This essay identifies social conditions associated with the compensatory style of conflict management, addresses variable aspects of compensation itself, and examines the modern trend toward a greater degree of compensatory liability of organizations for the misfortunes of individuals. Several propositions are discussed: Compensation is a direct function of groups and a curvilinear function of relational distance, and is greater in upward and group-directed cases than in downward and individual-directed cases. In addition, liability varies directly with social distance and is greater in group-directed than in individual-directed cases. The modern trend toward greater organizational liability appears to be a devolution toward a pattern of collective dependency characteristic of earlier societies before the decline of kinship.

On self-help in modern society

In a modern society, conflict between people is frequently defined as crime and is handled by officials of the state such as police, prosecutors, and judges. It is taken for granted that ordinary citizens must turn to law for help [1]. This mode of social control has several distinctive consequences: it dramatizes the deviant character of an offense, for example [2], and it may escalate hostility between the parties involved [3]. Its patterns of detection and other procedures also affect the nature and distribution of crime itself, making some kinds of conduct in some places more vulnerable to observation and intervention, leaving other kinds in other places relatively immune. Finally, for the offender, law tends to be more stigmatizing and disabling than other social control and so may even render future conformity less likely [4]. If, however, people were to engage in more self-help rather than relying so heavily upon law, that is, if they were to exercise more social control on their own, a different kind of public order would prevail [5]. In the nature of the case, many incidents would effectively be decriminalized, since they would no longer be formally defined and handled as criminal, and beyond this, many patterns of conduct themselves would surely change in response to new risks and opportunities. In this paper, we specify several conditions under which self help flourishes and suggest a number of techniques by which it might be stimulated. Self-help is by no means a new phenomenon. Rather, it is a social practice which has been commonplace in many settings, and which is present to some degree nearly everywhere. It is a quantitative variable, which may be greater in one place and weaker in another. Historically, for instance, the degree of self-help has been highest in primitive societies, in bands and tribes, and has declined progressively with social evolution and the growth of law [6], Within modern societies as well, some groups of people engage significantly in self-help even to the point of organized vigilantism while others are more dependent upon legal control [7]. The same individuals may have recourse to self-help upon some occasions and turn to law upon others [8J. It might also be noted that, like law, self-help has both preventive and remedial aspects, and these vary quantitatively and to some degree independently across social locations. The problem is to isolate the conditions which permit us to predict and explain variation of this kind. Developments in the theory of law and in the theory of altruism, or helping behavior, provide useful perspectives on this topic. The theory of law is relevant since self-help, like other non-legal social control, generally varies inversely with law [9], and what predicts the one may therefore predict the other in a pattern of opposition. The theory of altruism is relevant as well, since the exercise of informal social control by one person on behalf of another, including his or her Donald Black is Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Virginia. M.P. Baumgartner is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Interrogation and the Criminal Process

The relative absence of formal provision for the resolution of conflict among organizations in the American legal system results in each one controlling others in the system through constraints on the processing of people and information as inputs to their own organization. This paper focuses on the specific case where the courts attempt to control the behavior of the police through the exclusionary rule, particularly as set forth in the Miranda decision. Data on interrogations of suspects in field patrol settings show that arresting officers always had evidence apart from the inter rogation itself as a basis for arrest. It would appear that the introduction of Miranda-type warnings into field settings would have relatively little effect on the liability of suspects to crimi nal charges, particularly in felony cases, assuming current police behavior with respect to arrest.