Introduction

Abstract

This book is a contribution towards metatheoretical development as part of the post-postmodern return to sociological theory and method associated with Archer (1995), Layder (1997, 2007), Mouzelis (1995, 2007), Owen (2009a, 2009b, 2012a, 2012b) and Sibeon (2004, 2007), in tandem with a cautious attempt to build bridges between criminological theory and selected insights from evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics. In the pages that follow, I suggest a way in which criminological theory might move beyond its four main theoretical obstacles. These obstacles are the nihilistic relativism of the postmodern and poststructuralist cultural turn; the oversocialised gaze and harshly environmentalist conceptions of the person; genetic fatalism or the equation of genetic predisposition with inevitability (Owen, 2009a, 2012a) and bio-phobia (Freese et al., 2003) that appear to dominate mainstream criminology; and the sociological weaknesses of many so-called biosocial explanations of crime and criminal behaviour (see, for instance, Walsh and Beaver, 2009; Walsh and Ellis, 2003), which, although dealing adequately with biological variables, appear to neglect or make insufficient use of meta-concepts such as agency-structure, micro-macro and time-space in their accounts of the person.