This book is about 'Kantianism' in both a narrow and a broad sense. In the former, it is about the tracing of the development of the retributive philosophy of punishment into and beyond its classical phase in the work of a number of philosophers, one of the most prominent of whom is Kant. In the latter, it is an exploration of the many instantiations of the 'Kantian' ideas of individual guilt, responsibility and justice within the substantive criminal law . On their face, such discussions may owe more or less explicitly to Kant, but, in their basic intellectual structure, they share a recognisably common commitment to certain ideas emerging from the liberal Enlightenment and embodied within a theory of criminal justice and punishment which is in this broader sense 'Kantian'. The work has its roots in the emergence in the 1970s and early 1980s in the United States and Britain of the 'justice model' of penal reform, a development that was as interesting in terms of the sociology of philosophical knowledge as it was in its own right. Only a few years earlier, I had been taught in undergraduate criminology (which appeared at the time to be the only discipline to have anything interesting to say about crime and punishment) that 'classical criminology' (that is, Beccaria and the other Enlightenment reformers, who had been colonised as a 'school' within criminology) had died a major death in the 19th century, from which there was no hope of resuscitation.

Inhalt
I. Law, Ideology and Punishment.- 1. Introduction: Critique and Retrieval of the Liberal Ideal of Criminal Justice.- 2. Between Appearance and Reality: the Contradictions of Legal Ideology.- 3. Juridical Ideology and the Philosophy of Punishment.- II. The Birth of Juridical Individualism: Hobbes and the Philosophy of Punishment.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Contradiction in the Hobbesian Philosophy of Punishment.- 3. Hobbes's Juridical Individualism.- 4. Hobbes and the Historical Development of the Philosophy of Punishment.- 5. Conclusion.- III. Purifying Juridical Individualism: Kant's Retributivism.- 1. Introduction.- 2. The Metaphysical Basis of Punishment.- 3. 'A Theory Built on Tension'.- 4. Conclusion: Kant's Juridical Individualism.- IV. Rationalising Juridical Individualism and the Rise of 'the Irrational': Hegel.- 1. Introduction.- 2. The Hegelian Justification of Punishment.- 3.'From the Point of View of Abstract Right'.- 4. Reason, Reality and the Irruption of 'the Irrational'.- 5. Conclusion.- V. Abstract Right and the Socialisation of Wrong: Retributivism's English Decline and Fall.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Revising the Classical Tradition:T.H.Green.- 3. Revising the Classical Tradition: Bradley and Bosanquet.- 4. Conclusion.- VI. Juridical Individualism and State Power: Utilitarianism in the Twentieth Century.- 1. Introduction.- 2.The Triumph of Utilitarianism.- 3. Utilitarianism and Individual Right.- 4. Conclusion.- VII. Juridical Individualism, Individual Freedom And Criminal Justice.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Defending Freewill.- 3. Freewill, Determinism and Criminal Justice.- 4. Conclusion.- VIII. Juridical individualism, State Power And Legal Reasoning.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Legal Reasoning and Criminal Responsibility.- 3. Speaking theLanguage of Law.- 4. Conclusion.- IX. The Limits of Legal Ideology.- 1. The Philosophical Historical Development of the Liberal Ideal of Criminal Punishment.- 2. The Return to Kant.- 3. The Ideal and the Actual.