Ian Taylor Remembered

IAN TAYLOR WAS A KEY FIGURE IN THE POLITICALLY COMMITTED SOCIOLOGY THAT emerged in the 1960s. Radicalized, like so many intellectuals of his generation by the political flux of the time, he worked prolifically in the fields of criminology, politics, urban studies, sport, and popular culture. He was a polymath: he wrote on a wide array of subjects: soccer hooliganism, gun control, the Hillisborough disaster, glam rock, and money laundering among them; his most recent work included an article and consultancy on the Italian village planned in Manchester and his last piece, written from his hospital bed for the Times Literary Supplement, was on Canadian populism and the common sense revolution. It is perhaps as a criminologist that he was best known. He was a founding member of the National Deviancy Symposium, that irreverent, anarchistic bunch of sociologists who got together in the late 1960s, rehearsing many of the themes and controversies later to be associated with postmodernism and revolutionizing criminology out of recognition. In 1973, he co-authored The New Criminology, which remains in print today, and in 1981, while a lecturer at Sheffield University, he published Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism, which forcefully argued the need for parties of the Left to take seriously the problems of crime, prefiguring much of the present shift in policy and debate. In the 1980s, while working in Canada, he began to develop a criminology that firmly rooted the problem of crime within the wider political economy -- a position that became the hallmark of his later work. But his interests were not solely theoretical. In recent years, following the Dunblane massacre, he became active both politicall y and as a researcher in the campaign to control gun ownership. Numerous packages containing bullets, used syringes, and decaying meat arrived at his address at Salford University. Ian was unperturbed and suggested to the police that it was obviously from a distraught member of the gun lobby. They, for their part, with characteristic aplomb asked whether he had thought of the possibility that the packages might emanate from a disgruntled colleagues or perhaps his wife! The police eventually came round to his point of view, intercepting and searching all his mail and finally arresting the irate gun enthusiast. Ian Taylor's latest book, and to my mind the best, is Crime in Context, published in 1999. In this he traces not only how market societies generate crime, but also how crime itself can be seen as operating as a marketplace. The book received widespread critical acclaim and was awarded the prestigious Michael J. Hindelang award of the American Society of Criminology. Ian Taylor was born in 1944 in Sheffield and educated at the Universities of Durham and Cambridge, returning to Durham to complete his Ph. …

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