ABSTRACT
Left realism emerged in the mid-1980s in the United Kingdom and in the United States. The roots of left realism are found in the writings of Jock Young (1975, 1979), Tony Platt (1978), and Ian Taylor (1981), but this school of thought was not expressed formally until the publication of John Lea and Jock Young’s What Is to Be Done about Law and Order? (Lea & Young, 1984). Shortly after this seminal work came Elliott Currie’s (1985) Confronting Crime: An American Challenge, which, arguably, marked the official birth of North American left realism and is still, today, one of the most widely read and cited progressive texts of its kind. Left realism captured the attention of a small number of Canadians in the late 1980s and early 1990s thanks in large part to an international conference on this variant of critical criminology organized by John Lowman and Brian MacLean.2 However, to the best of our knowledge, Walter DeKeseredy remains the only Canadian progressive scholar who continues to publicly identify himself as a left realist and to routinely publish materials on this perspective. It should also be noted in passing that several Australian critical criminologists, such as Brown and Hogg (1992a,b), engaged with left realism in the early 1990s, but it did not attract many followers “down under,” or around the rest of the world for that matter. Of course, an unknown number of readers will disagree with our brief historical account. As Michalowski (1996) states in his story of critical criminology as an intellectual movement, “This is all to the good. I increasingly suspect that we can best arrive at useful truth by telling and hearing multiple versions of the same story” (p. 9).
