* Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney. Thanks to the members of the Amsterdam Sociogenesis group for their critical commentary, especially Cas Wouters and Geert de Vries. 1 The distinction is not entirely rigid: the Crown also initiates actions in the general interest in civil law, many civil sanctions bear strong resemblances to criminal penalties (Mann 1992), and civil law is still ultimately backed by the sanctions of criminal law. Crime, government and civilization: Rethinking Elias in Criminology ROBERT VAN KRIEKEN * The placement of criminal law under the control of the public authority of the sovereign or the state has always been part of an attempt to civilize its operation, both restraining the workings of law on those inflicting particular kinds of harms, and rendering those workings, supposedly, more effective. However, the reconfiguration of the authority of the state in relation to criminal law since the 1970s has led most criminologists to reject the whole notion of a long-term civilizing process encompassing criminal law, turning instead to analyses of the inner logic of the various new responses to crime characterizing advanced liberal societies over the past three decades. This article outlines the major features of contemporary crime control and punishment identified within this approach: the transition from disciplinary modes of exercising power to ‘governing through freedom’, the emphasis on ‘designing out crime’ or actuarial justice, and the changed place of emotions in ‘affective governance’, including a turn to popular punitiveness. It then identifies some central empirical and conceptual problems shared by these accounts of contemporary crime control, and outlines the contribution that Elias’s work on long-term processes of civilization and decivilization can make not just to understanding the historical development of punishment, but also current developments across the whole field of criminal justice, focusing on the examples of restorative justice and popular punitiveness. Can we think without shame and remorse that more than half of those wretches who have been tied up at Newgate in our time might have been enjoying liberty and using that liberty well - that such a hell on earth as Norfolk Island need never have existed - if we had expended in training honest men but a small part of what we have expended in hunting and torturing rogues? I say, therefore, that the education of the people is...the best means of attaining that which all allow to be a chief end of Government... (Lord Macaulay, quoted by Henry Parkes 1876: 219) Central to the character of the social institutions and practices constituting human social life are the ways in which the various types of harm humans inflict upon each other are dealt with, ranging from those more likely to be dealt with informally, such as insults, bad manners, and sexual infidelity, to those more likely to responded to in institutionalised ways, such as assault, fraud, theft, sexual abuse and murder, whether as individuals or as collectivities such as states. A key feature of the approach adopted in Western legal systems is their bifurcation into two types of formally regulated conflicts and harms, associated with corresponding doctrines, procedures and courts for dealing with them: civil wrongs generally pursued by the individual or organisation harmed, but under the supervision of the Crown via the mechanisms of the legal system, and criminal wrongs pursued by the Crown. 1 This bifurcation, resulting in the state’s assumption of responsibility for the imposition of the sanctions of the criminal justice system, its infliction of punishment and direct constraint of individual liberties and rights, in the name of society as a whole, is also central to the self- understanding of modern sovereignty, as Griffiths CJ stated in 1915: