REVIEWS 169

Punishment and Modern Society. By David Garland(Chicago, Ill.: Univer-

sityof ChicagoPress, 1990.312 pp. $29.95).
The criminologist David Garland is probably best known among historians for
his book Punishment and Welfare, which analyzes the evolution of the penal
system and its relationship to the emerging welfare state, especially in England
since the late nineteenth century. His new book is not a work of straightforward
history. Rather, his aim is to arrive at a sociology of punishment, a sociology
which would help us deal with that phenomenon today. He does write from a
developmental perspective though, making ample use of historical data.
Garland's premise is that most of the recent literature on punishment has
been written by professionals who, in one wayor the other, were involved in the
criminal justice system themselves. They were concerned primarily with that
system's internal functioning, or rather dysfunctioning, which prevented them
from adopting a view from outside. Faced with a crisis of disillusionment in
penological writing, Garland wants to stress the importance of such an outside
view, of seeing the criminal justice system, or "penality" as he calls it, as one
element in a wider social network: "we need to know what punishment is in
order to think what it can and should be" (10).
His method essentially consists of critically reviewing what other theorists
have said about penality, weeding out the weak elements and emphasizing the
strong ones. Thus, he discussesthe work of three classical sociologists, Durkheim,
Marx and Weber, and their followers, moving next to more recent studies by, or
inspired by,Foucault and Elias.The common element in these respective analyses
is that they do not deal with punishment for its own sake but in order to validate
a specifictheory about society as a whole and its development. Foucault probably
comes closest to reviewing punishment for its own sake, but he, too, has a wider
perspective of power, discipline and the constitutive role of certain discourses.
Although neither Weber nor Elias extensively dealt with penalitv, others have
been influenced by their writings. In the case of Weber this means that authors
took up themes such as rationalization or the routinization of charisma; in the
case of Elias the implications involved changing sensibilities and punishment's
cultural context. Marx and Durkheim, of course, had their own grand theories.
Garland pursues his method consistently and diligently. He often devotes a
separate chapter to the exposition of a specific approach and another to his
criticism of this approach. The result is a highly readable book from which a
lot is to be learned about theories of punishment and the character of penality.
Durkheim, for example, is rescued more or less from the obscurity of a textbook
existence. Garland shows how Durkheim's theory of penality, although illus-
trated mainly by examples from 'primitive' societies, still has its relevance for
the modern world. We do not have to swallow his view of organic solidarity
and his vision of society as a moral community in its entirety, but we can still
admit that punishment sometimes has solidarity-producing effects. Where other
theories of penality often concentrate on just two parties, the controllers and the
controlled, Durkheim stresses the role of a third party, the onlookers. While he
may have taken the term onlookers in a rather literal sense, we may view them
as members of the general public reading newspapers and watching t.v. Some
crimes such as murder or rape certainly produce collective feelings of moral out-

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170 journal of social history fall 1992
rage throughout the population. However, as Garland rightly states, community
feeling nowadays is concerned primarily with whether individual offenders get
the appropriate amount of what is considered their due. Thus, Durkheim's thesis
that punishments express collective sentiments is shown to be applicable, but
in a restricted way. In a similar vein, Garland shows the theories of Marx and
others to be partially relevant and, what is more important, he shows where they
apply and where they don't.
Garland wishes his own theory of penality to be as close to social reality as
possible, which is of course what every theorist should strive for. In particular,
he wants to incorporate all relevant features of punishment and to use them as
building blocks for his theory, at the riskof making it lesscoherent than the grand
theories he has reviewed. This is done in the book's two concluding chapters.
The first deals with the mutual relationships of punishment and culture, viewing
penality not only as a reflection of culture but also as an active creator of culture.
The final chapter argues that punishment is a complex "social institution." The
strength of Garland's analysis, his refusal to opt for any of the grand theories and
his careful scrutiny of empirical reality, is simultaneously his weakness: it does
not become entirely clear what his own theory is and in some cases the reader
wonders whether the detour of reviewing the work of several great sociologists
was really necessary to arrive at an obvious conclusion. On the other hand,
Garland's task wasfar from easy and the concluding chapters, too, contain many
interesting ideas. This is certainly a book that every historian or other social
scientist concerned with crime and justice should read.
Erasmus University, Rotterdam Pieter Spierenburg
Coffee, Contention, and Change in the MakingofModemBrazil. By Mauricio
A. Font (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990. xii plus 351 pp.).
This detailed study of Sao Paulo in the 1920s is an ambitious and innovative
attempt to assess the impact of coffee on Brazilian society. Rejecting Frank's
"development of underdevelopment thesis," Font, a sociologist, argues that fac-
tors at work within Sao Paulo's export economy unleashed a dynamic process
of social and economic diversification leading toward a "full-fledged capitalist
revolution."
Diversification, according to Font, resulted from a fundamental weakness in
Sao Paulo's plantation economy: fazendas (large coffee estates) were not fully
capitalist enterprises. Both capitalist and precapitalist features characterized the
relationship between planters and the European immigrants they employed.
Under the standard contract, immigrant workers received wages and were also
allowed to cultivate food crops for their own use as well for sale in nearby mar,
kets. Through such sales, a surprisingly large number of immigrants eventually
managed to set aside the savings needed to purchase land and to establish them,
selves as independent producers. Font estimates that, by the late 1920s, at least
one quarter of all the coffeeharvested in Sao Paulo came fromsmall farms owned
by immigrants. Smallholders also cultivated cereals and cotton.

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