Great Wave

by Fischer, David Hackett;

  Then the pattern of change reversed yet again. In the 1990s crime rates were falling rapidly in the United States. Some learned observers believed that this decline marked the beginning of a new secular trend. Others thought that the crime wave of the twentieth century had yet to run its course.

  This evidence comes mostly from Britain and the United States. Did similar patterns prevail in other nations? The broad answer is yes. Many local variations appeared in levels of crime, but temporal trends were similar in many nations.

  Crime Waves and Price Revolutions

  When the history of personal violence is compared with price movements through the past eight centuries, a striking paradox appears. The secular trends have moved in opposite directions. Crime rates have come down since the twelfth century; prices have gone up. But even as these long trends were opposed in their secular tendency, they were similar in timing and closely interlocked in rhythm and structure of change.

  The complexity of this association clearly appears in a comparison of prices and murder in England. Homicide rates showed a strong downward tendency during periods of price-equilibrium (1350–1490, 1650–1730, and 1830–1900). Those declines continued into the early years of each price revolution (1490–1550, 1730–1760, 1900–1940). The downward trends reversed in later stages of price revolutions. Homicide rates began to increase, then surged to very high levels in years of crisis (1310–48, 1610–50, 1780–1820, and 1965–95).

  The conjunction between these trends was most striking in critical periods, when price revolution approached its climax. Four times since the twelfth century, a similar sequence of events occurred. Prices began to surge and returns to capital kept pace with inflation, but wages lagged behind and inequalities of wealth increased. When all of these things happened, crime rates also increased sharply. Most major price surges were followed by crime surges, so closely that the two movements often appeared as statistical shadows. This pattern of association has been replicated in many different studies by scholars who were unaware of trends in other periods and places.

  Questions of Cause: Four Theories of Crime

  This complex association of price movements and crime waves holds important clues for the cause of crime, for the consequences of price revolutions, and for the structure of historical change in general.

  Four theories of crime tend to dominate the debate. Two of these ideas are favored by conservative writers. One holds that crime is an act of rational choice, and rises from a prospect of gain. The remedy is to raise the cost of committing crime and to reduce its benefits by tougher penalties.

  Another conservative theory begins differently but ends in a similar conclusion. It holds that crime rises mainly from crime-prone subgroups that are not susceptible to reform. The remedy is repression: capital punishment and long-term imprisonment.

  Progressive observers tend to think of crime in two different ways. One theory that is favored by the left holds that crime is caused by oppression and exploitation. Marxist versions of this idea (still popular in the universities) argue that crime is a response to capitalist exploitation in particular. The remedy is social reform. Liberal versions center on the individual rehabilitation of the criminal.

  Another theory much favored on the left is that crime waves are in large part the figments of overheated conservative imaginations, and are themselves instruments of social control. One scholar writes, “It is tempting to suggest that the historian should study at least some types of crime in the past in terms of ‘enforcement waves’ rather than ‘crime waves.’” Another scholar suggests that we should think in terms of “control waves.” See J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983) 210; and Jason Ditton, Controlology: Beyond a New Criminology (n.p., 1979).

  All of these theories have elements of truth, but none of them encompasses the subject. It is certainly the case that “enforcement waves” exist, but they cannot explain away the existence of crime waves. The evidence of homicides, for example, derives not only from the police and courts, but also from public health records. Each of these empirical sources is problematic in its own way, but all of them clearly show similar wave-patterns that could not possibly be artifacts of measurement. Crime is something real in the world; so also are crime-waves and the long secular decline of criminal violence.

  The progressive idea that crime is a reflex of capitalist exploitation works no better. The history of crime does not correlate with the history of capitalism. In general, as capitalist institutions developed during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, crime rates declined. Further, some of the most violent crime waves in the late twentieth century occurred in socialist societies.

  Conservative theories of crime work no better than those of progressives. Much work has shown that tougher penalties and restraints do deter crime in some degree, but are never the dominant causal agents that conservatives claim them to be. The stubborn rise of the murder rate in twentieth century America, even as many states returned to capital punishment, tells us that other factors were more powerful.

  The conservative idea that criminal violence rises from crime-prone subgroups also is true in one sense but false in another. It is certainly the case that rates of personal violence vary broadly from one culture to another. This is clearly the case in the United States. Differences in homicide rates are greater between American regions than between European nations. But these differences are more evident in levels than trends. When rates of personal violence increased in late twentieth-century America, they did so in every part of the country. One striking property of the crime waves in the late stages of each price revolution is that they tend to appear in every region, city and class. Always the poor and underprivileged were more likely to be the perpetrators of crime, and also its victims. But crime waves touched all groups, and regions and nations. The question is why, and what might be done about it.

  The search for another explanation might begin with close study of the empirical evidence, which holds many causal clues. Let us begin by observing that crime waves correlate with surging prices. It is important to observe that many kinds of crime increase in these periods of economic stress. When the cost of living soars, theft increases sharply. Some people steal to survive. Others steal to get ahead in hard times when other avenues are blocked. The material linkages are very strong.

  At the same time, when prices surge, homicides also increase. Increasingly in the modern world, the victims tend to be friends, neighbors, lovers and family members. In many of these acts of personal violence, prospects of material gain are not the primary cause. These are irrational acts. They are driven by passion, anger, jealousy, and fear. In them we may see another classic mechanism, long familiar to social science, of frustration and aggression. Deterrents are powerless to prevent this sort of personal violence, which explodes in periods of high stress without any rational calculus of material gain.

  The remedy for these two tendencies cannot be either a conservative policy of repression and deterrence alone, or a liberal program of social reform. The control of crime requires a more complex and subtle policy that combines elements of deterrence for crimes of ambition, repression for hardened criminals, and another strategy for crimes of frustration and pain. This other strategy might include broadly conceived but narrowly targeted programs to provide short-term employment training in periods of stress and similar programs that are meant to keep hope alive. This can only be done by a combination of public and private effort, in which governments, educational institutions, and private corporations work together, unconstrained by ideologies of both the left and right.

  One of the major conclusions to emerge from a study of price movements and crime waves is that surges are a large part of the phenomenon. A surge-pattern offers an opportunity for targeting a policy in temporal terms. To do so, planners must learn to think more rigorously and more historically about the problems before us.

  APPENDIX O

  E
conomics and History

  The reason of a thing is not to be enquired after, till you are sure the thing itself be so. We commonly are at what’s the reason of it? before we are sure of the thing.

  —John Selden, Table Talk, 1689

  A primary purpose of this project is descriptive. One of its organizing assumptions is that a task of empirical description may be undertaken without an apparatus of theory. This idea breaks in a fundamental way with an epistemic orthodoxy that has dominated the disciplines of American social science since the late 1940s. So universal has this orthodoxy become in the United States that scholars who work within it are unaware that any other mode of thinking is even possible.

  In American universities, a social scientist is free to adopt almost any style of dress, demeanor, life-style, sexual preference, or political ideology, no matter how bizarre or preposterous the choice may be. But graduate students are required to embrace the conventional epistemology of their disciplines, on pain of expulsion from the guild. If they dare to think about the world in any other way, their work is judged “unsound,” and they are sent upon their way.

  The orthodox epistemology of American social science may be summarized in a sentence. It holds that every explicit description rests upon implicit theoretical assumptions that create the criteria for selecting the things to be described. It teaches that nothing can be understood, or even perceived, without reference to a theory. This epistemology argues not merely that theory-centered thinking is a valid form of social science. It insists that theory is the only form.

  Within this body of belief, the central idea of “theory” varies broadly from one social science to another. In economics, a theory is commonly understood as an “if . . . then . . . ” proposition; that is, a statement in the form of’ ‘if x, then y.” In sociology, a theory is commonly a paradigm model. In history, it sometimes becomes a sequence of narrative statements. However it is conceived, theory-framing and theory-testing became the consuming obsession of American social science during the mid-twentieth century.

  The emergence of this epistemic orthodoxy in the United States may be dated to the decade 1945–55, when it appeared simultaneously in manifestos by economists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and historians. In economics, a leading example was an important essay called “Measurement without Theory,” published by Tjalling Koopmans in 1947. Koopmans argued that empirical measurement of any phenomenon was “impossible” without fixed “theoretical preconceptions.” Further, he asserted (inconsistently) that measurement without theory was trivial and useless, because “conclusions relevant to the guidance of economic policies cannot be drawn.” Koopmans was not content merely to defend the importance of theoretical knowledge in economics. He wished to deny the value of economic knowledge in any other form and to condemn any colleague who sought to attain it in a different way. See Tjalling C. Koopmans, “Measurement without Theory,” Review of Economics and Statistics 29 (1947) 161–72.

  Similar arguments were simultaneously made in the other social sciences. An example in sociology was Serge Timasheff’s manifesto called Sociological Theory (1955), which argued that “without theory directing their interpretation and arrangement, facts are almost meaningless.” Timasheff’s sociological colleagues argued among themselves about how theorizing might best be done. Talcott Parsons favored the construction of grand theory. Robert Merton argued for “theories of the middle range.” But here again, in sociology as well as in economics, the new orthodoxy insisted that theory was not merely one form of meaningful thought. It was thought to be the only form. All others were dismissed by Timasheff as “almost meaningless.”

  The practical effect of this new orthodoxy was profound. It radically changed the work that social scientists actually did. During the 1930s, for example, an earlier generation of economists had labored at large projects of empirical description such as Koopmans’s review-essay specifically condemned. An example was the work of the International Committee on Prices, which compiled comprehensive and very valuable time series on price movements through the past millennium. After 1950, this work came to an end. Mechanical data-gathering continued in government agencies, but creative projects of empirical description by leading scholars passed out of fashion.

  In American sociology, something similar happened. During the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, sociologists had produced many powerful works of empirical description. Chief among them were community studies such as the Lynds’ two Middletown volumes (1929–37), Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City series, and Sidney Goldstein’s Norristown study. As the new epistemic orthodoxy took hold, these projects were gradually abandoned, and sociological monographs became narrow tests of specific “theoretical” propositions. Larger works tended to be ruminations on theory in general. For a generation, theory-bound inquiry became the central and even the exclusive business of American social scientists.

  The effect of this revolution was both positive and negative. Monographs became more coherent in their conceptual apparatus, and more rigorous as well. But a price was paid for these advances. Inquiry became narrowly blinkered by theoretical assumptions, which often proved to be circular in their structure and increasingly ignorant of the world that they purported to explain. As a consequence, social science became increasingly remote from social reality. The theory-centered epistemology of social science began by stimulating thought; it ended by stultifying it.

  During the 1970s and 1980s, a growing chorus of self-criticism began to be heard from younger social scientists. In economics, for example, Lester Thurow in 1983 complained that his discipline had become a closed world. “In economics today,” he wrote, “theory has become an ideology rather than a set of working hypotheses used to understand the behavior of the economy found in the real world . . . in my mind, mainstream American economics reflect more an academic need for an internal theoretical consistency and rigor than it reflects observable measurable realities in the world.”

  Similar arguments were also made by sociologists such as Alvin Gouldner. For the most part, however, these critics did not argue against theory in general. They inveighed against theories of which they disapproved. Even among the iconoclasts, the epistemic orthodoxy remained intact. Nevertheless, their critiques were symptoms of a malaise that was deeply felt during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

  Ironically, at the same time that this epistemic orthodoxy established itself in social science, its assumptions were being challenged by epistemologists and cognitive scientists in a body of scholarship that is potentially revolutionary for social inquiry. One example of this work is the epistemology of Fred Dretske, who draws a helpful distinction between two epistemic operations that he calls “seeing” and “knowing.” Dretske argues that there is a “visual ability” which is “an endowment relatively free from the influence of education, past experience, linguistic sophistication, and conceptual dexterity.” He offers the example of a “bewildered savage, transplanted suddenly from his native environment to a Manhattan subway station, [who] can witness the arrival of the 3:45 express as clearly as the bored commuter. Ignorance of X does not impair one’s vision of X; if it did, total ignorance would be largely irreparable.” See Fred I. Dretske, Seeing and Knowing (Chicago, 1969), 8.

  Dretske argues that “seeing” in this special sense can take place not only between an observer and a physical object, but also between an observer and an historical event. “Not only can books, cats, trees, automobiles, buildings, shadows and people be seen in the way that I have just depicted,” he writes, “but also such items as battles, departures, signals, ceremonies, games, accidents, stabbings, performances, escapes and gestures. . . . Events as well as objects (and things such as shadows) can be seen in this way. . . . Events are movements and occurrences; they involve a moment or change” (14–15).

  This simple act of brute perception is fundamental to our experience of the world. We use it every day. In purely practical terms, we can scarcely exist without it. But in the
formal inquiries of social science and social history, its operations have been suppressed by a relativist epistemology which insists that there is no seeing without knowing, no description without explanation, no observation without prior belief, and no measurement without theory.

  Seeing is, indeed, very different from knowing. Its product is information rather than meaning. Information, Dretske teaches us, is “an objective commodity, something whose generation, transmission and reception do not require or in any way presuppose interpretative process,” and it can be attained by a process that is “logically independent of whatever beliefs we may possess” (17). He is wrong on the first point, but right on the second.

  The present work is organized on the assumption that there are at least two very different forms of cognition: seeing-observing and knowing-believing. American social scientists in the twentieth century have been taught to do the second and to despise the first. They are trained to know and believe but not to see and observe. They are told to seek meaning rather than information. Most of all they are taught that the perception of social phenomena is necessarily theory-bound and that any other sort of cognition is insignificant or even impossible.

  Much important work is done within this theoretical frame, but it does not exhaust the epistemic possibilities. There are other ways to study the world. American historian John Day, who has been formally trained in the very different epistemology of the French Annales School, offers a valuable suggestion in that respect. In a recent “essai d’autohistoire,” Day distinguishes between two types of historical epistemology: that of what he calls the American “cliometric school” and that of the French Annalists. American cliometricians, he observes, begin with a theory—a hypothetico-deductive “if . . . then . . . ”model. French Annalists begin with a problematique—a set of questions that are more open-ended and carefully set within a specific cultural and historical context. “Ce marriage de convenance entre pratique et theorie en histoire [de l’école des cliometricians Americains],” John Day writes, “contraste a mon sens avec la bonne entente entre pratique et problematique qui characterise les grands historiens de l’Ecole des Annales.” See John Day, “Terres, marchés et monnaies en Italie et en Sardaigne du XIIe au XVIIIe siècle,” Histoire, Economie et Société 2 (1983) 187–203.