Colin Sumner

Colin Sumner, a criminologist, is the subject of this study, which revisits his thinking on Marxism, ideology, censure, deviance, crime, underdevelopment, social control and the media. Each strand of his work is placed within the wider social setting in which he wrote. David Moxon contends that Sumner deserves to be reinstated in criminology as a pioneer whose scholarship combines deep theoretical rigor with real insight. Rather than selecting highlights, the author works through the full body of Sumner's output and traces how his grasp of ideological censure grew more developed over time. Sumner's later writing also shows a rising unease with late modern capitalism and with the judgmental climate of the twenty-first century. The book argues that his analysis anticipated these developments to a striking degree and that his ideas can still help readers make sense of a turbulent present.