At the Macro-Micro Intersection: Perspectives in Criminal Research

Author: Xie Yong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: The following words are written at the beginning of this paper collection. The division and arrangement of the papers follow a horizontal structure, i.e., the logical structure of the papers in this collection is arranged by the author. Since I firmly believe in the following methodological principles, namely that an understanding of any existing static "structure" cannot be separated from an understanding of its generative process; therefore, I feel obligated to explain the intellectual development history of this collection to the readers, as a kind of annotation for the collection. Like most of my peers, my primary and secondary school life was marked by the Cultural Revolution from the very beginning. Due to the experiences of my family during the Cultural Revolution, I was inseparably linked with relocation and transfers from the very beginning of my schooling. During the height of the Cultural Revolution, under the pressure of the circumstances, my father secretly burned six bags of "forbidden books" that might bring even greater trouble. The connection between this incident and me became apparent a few years later. From that time on, one of the difficulties in my daily life was to search everywhere to find where I could obtain these surviving "spiritual refuse" to satisfy my hunger. After graduating from high school, I first underwent three years of re-education in the mountains, and then enrolled in the Department of Philosophy at Xiangtan University in early 1978. The reason I chose the Department of Philosophy was, on the surface, the result of exploring Einstein's mysterious philosophical world under the oil lamps in the youth dormitories, but in reality, it was because I could not fix my interests in a specific discipline at that time. I wanted to understand all the new knowledge I had never heard of before, and I stubbornly believed that I could grasp the spiritual essence of all kinds of knowledge. American educator Bruner said: "Any subject can be taught effectively to any child at any stage of development in a way that is sound in intellectual terms." This sounded so reasonable to me. Therefore, I chased the shadows of different instructors around the university campus: dialectics of nature, biology, physics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, psychology and finally chose social psychology and sociology. In 1985, three years after I started teaching at the university, I was admitted to the Department of Sociology at Nankai University to study social psychology under Professor Kong Lingzhi. In 1988, I obtained a master's degree in law, and the same year returned to my alma mater, Xiangtan University, to teach courses such as criminal psychology and criminology. During my studies, although my field of study changed repeatedly, there was actually one theme that remained my focus: the issue of how the existential relationship between the subject of cognition and its external world constrained the cognitive process. In my early philosophical studies, I came to the realization that modern and contemporary philosophy, due to its excessive fascination with the great achievements of natural science, had increasingly narrow perspectives, and was solely preoccupied with the relationship between human cognition and the world, while failing to pay enough attention to the more fundamental question of human existence in the world. Inspired by this, at the annual meeting of the Hunan Provincial Society of Dialectics of Nature in 1983, I submitted a paper titled "The Position of the Subject of Cognition in Nature." The paper argued that the relationship between human cognition and the world could only be truly understood within the existential relationship between human existence and the world. It is necessary to first understand what we are and where we are, and then we can truly understand what we see. Based on this view, I later co-authored a declaration against epistemologicalism titled "The Essence, Origin, and Impact of the 'Fundamental Problem of Philosophy.'" Subsequently, my interest in learning and research shifted to sociology. However, in the field of sociology, the same kind of issue that reattracted me again was the same in nature. It has long been recognized that people's understanding of society is more obviously constrained by the existential relationship of the subject of cognition than their understanding of nature. For example, the value neutrality problem in social research has long been an issue that has easily sparked intense debate. However, the existential relationship between people and society does not merely mean "social status," "class position," or "value orientation." The subject of social cognition, in addition to existing as a bearer of social relations, accepting certain social status and values, also exists as a relatively independent individual, a flesh-and-blood natural person. The movement of his limbs must obey the law of universal gravitation, his sensory activities are limited by specific physiological functions, and his mental operations must follow certain templates of higher nervous activity mechanisms; moreover, the existential characteristics that the subject of social cognition possesses are logically and historically prior to the existential characteristics mentioned above, such as social status, and therefore they are more worthy of attention in terms of their constraints on the subject's cognitive ability, relationship, and process. At this point, people naturally think of the two opposing methodological tendencies that have long existed in social research: holism and individualism. Holists regard the overall characteristics of society as the starting point for research and believe that only under this premise can individual behavior be deeply explained. Conversely, individualists regard individuals and their behavior as the starting point for research, advocating that the scientific explanation of social phenomena must be based on the explanation of individual behavior. However, in my view, these two different methodological claims actually commit the same error, namely, ignoring the differences between social phenomena and individual behavior at the existential level, blindly pursuing a unified causal explanation of them, and attempting to connect these two types of objects at different levels logically with a single deductive system. This gives the impression that the differences between social phenomena and individual behavior are entirely due to the differences in the observational perspectives of the subject of social cognition, rather than the characteristics of the objects themselves. To view the differences between social phenomena and individual behavior with this epistemological perspective clearly overlooks the historical and concrete constraints of the existential relationship between people and society on the process of social cognition. As a real subject of cognition, a person is, in terms of its existential form, an individual with specific spatiotemporal characteristics, and therefore its perceptual and cognitive abilities must also have corresponding specific characteristics. For example, the natural language system that people use daily to think and communicate is mainly established on the prototype of life experience at the individual level, and if it is used without restraint to describe and explain facts at the level of the social whole, it often tends to create some seemingly plausible concepts in our research, such as imagining that a society has "goals," a nation has "motivations," and they can all make "behavioral choices" based on their "goals" or "motivations." This approach of directly using individual-level experience to explain the social whole level is only effective in cases where the scale of the specific social system itself is not large and its internal relationships are relatively simple and consistent; for most modern social systems, the confusion brought by this reductionist approach is far greater than the questions it can answer. Therefore, the author strongly advocates that, at least for the present and for a very long time to come, our understanding of social objects should strictly distinguish between the macro and micro levels of objects, and we should not arbitrarily make cross-level explanations of research objects of different levels. It is very clear that this proposition has a strong tint of Durkheim's influence, and similar discussions can be easily found in Durkheim's "Methodological Studies of Sociology." However, unlike Durkheim, the author tends to place the foundation of the argument on the constraints of the existential characteristics of the subject of cognition on the cognitive process, rather than on the intuitive differences between social phenomena and individual behavior. To examine the practical effectiveness of the above proposition, starting from 1989, in conjunction with the new criminalology teaching tasks I accepted, the author conducted a systematic review and analysis of the ideological development of criminalology in Europe and America over more than a hundred years. When the author observed the various theories that emerged in the complex criminalology research in Europe and America with the paradigms of methodological holism and individualism, the author gained a deeper understanding of the dilemmas faced by contemporary criminalology research, and thus the book "Introduction to Criminalology Research" was born. In the book, the author made the following judgment: The theoretical research of criminalology in Europe and America, as a whole, is dominated by an individualistic tendency over a holistic one, and the theoretical goal that individualistic criminalologists deliberately pursue is to provide a unified explanation of criminal phenomena at the macro level and criminal behavior at the micro level. In other words, they attempt to answer two completely different questions with the same theoretical model: "What are the causes of crime phenomena or crime rates in a society?" and "What are the causes of criminal behavior of a person?" To facilitate the achievement of this theoretical goal, they usually take the interaction between individuals and their immediate social environment as the starting point of theoretical analysis, gradually approaching both the social and individual ends. However, in this way, the researchers actually place themselves in a situation that is disconnected from both the top and the bottom—they cannot synthesize the existing research materials at the macro object level from above, and they also cannot encompass the facts already discovered at the micro level from below. As a result, the numerous theoretical hypotheses derived from this line of thinking are either mutually contradictory or close to tautological repetition. To get out of this dilemma, in the book, the author proposed to adopt another strategy for developing theories, namely, first to develop theories that are truly suitable for the characteristics of objects at the macro and micro levels separately, and then to seek communication between the macro and micro levels. However, the communication mentioned here does not refer to describing and explaining the crime phenomena of society and the crime behavior of individuals within the same logical system, but refers to the creative use of theories and knowledge at both the macro and micro levels by the problem-solver in the actual process of solving specific criminal problems. In other words, this communication is not logical identity in theoretical form, but comprehensive innovation in practical form. The above reflections on the methodology of criminal research, in addition to being recorded in "Introduction to Criminalology Research," are also reflected in a group of articles in this collection. The group of articles titled "The Glory and Dilemma of Methodological Individualism" shows the author's reflection on methodological individualism and how this reflection moved from the general level of methodology to the level of criminal research methodology. However, in terms of the author's actual thought process at that time, before forming the above methodological awareness, the author's main interest was still focused on the micro level of crime. Therefore, the third group of articles in this collection, "The Micro Perspective of Criminal Research: Criminal Psychology," should be placed first in the collection if arranged in the order of writing. In the early 1980s, the author proposed the concept of "dual personality consciousness," which, in retrospect, can be seen as an instinctive response to the rapid changes in social psychology and consciousness at the beginning of the reform and opening up. There was originally a plan to conduct a relatively comprehensive and in-depth analysis of this social psychological phenomenon, but later the author felt that he was not prepared enough and abandoned it. However, the author still believes that the phenomenon of dual personality consciousness is a major phenomenon in the field of social consciousness since modern times, and it has had a profound impact on the evolution of social culture and the growth of individual personality since modern times. In fact, it is also an important cultural condition for the formation and maintenance of criminal tendencies of specific groups and individuals. In addition, at the level of criminal psychology research, the author also believes that criminal tendencies can generally be understood as special differences in individual psychology and behavior. The production of this difference is neither innate nor sudden, and its initial formation mechanism should be sought in the early differences of individual life and their interaction with the early environment. Following this line of thought, the author has also made some preliminary explorations on the family environment factors that affect the socialization of young children. On the one hand, due to the adjustment of the curriculum in the Law Department of Xiangtan University, criminalology replaced criminal psychology as a restricted elective course for undergraduates; on the other hand, because of the major transformation of social change in China in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the market economy replaced the planned economy, and the civil society replaced the administrative society, which quickly shifted the author's interest in criminal research from the micro level to the macro level. In this process of transformation, the author formed the above methodological awareness. After completing the writing of the book "Introduction to Criminalology Research," the author began to consciously break free from the ideological constraints of methodological individualism and no longer attempted to seek explanations for crime phenomena in a specific society from the atomic level of social structure, i.e., individual characteristics and individual interaction characteristics; instead, the author turned to the macro characteristics of social structure itself and its evolution, and attempted to observe and understand the crime phenomena and changes in contemporary Chinese society from such a perspective. The second group of articles in this collection, "The Macro Perspective of Criminal Research: Criminalology," is the crystallization of these thoughts. The main part of this group of articles is the author's reflections on the phenomenon of corporate crime. The reason the author paid special attention to the phenomenon of corporate crime at that time was, on the one hand, because this crime phenomenon was just emerging and had attracted widespread attention, and on the other hand, because the corporation was more directly and closely linked to the macro social structure of a specific society than the natural person, and thus it was more convenient to observe and analyze from the macro perspective of criminal research. As the author's observations and reflections on this aspect deepened, along with the gradual formation of civil society in our society, the author found that the crime phenomena in our society were undergoing a profound change, with traditional crimes dominated by natural persons being replaced by crimes dominated by various organizational forms, and the latter were becoming the main challengers to the legitimate social order. Following this line of thought, the author's observational perspective later expanded to organized crime phenomena. The above is the origin of this collection of papers. Adding these words before the dozen or so old texts is to take this opportunity to share my thoughts with colleagues who have similar academic interests. Although it is already the internet age, the realm of "meeting friends through writing" remains sacred in my heart. Xie Yong August 10, 2004, Changsha