No Shame: The View from the Left Bank

Wacquant’s essay is less a review of three ethnographies about the inner city than a throwback to the sectarian days when leftists who failed to toe the Party line were deemed objective enemies of the working class. In this instance, we are told that research by Duneier (1999), Anderson (1999), and Newman is exhibit A for the charge “that U.S. sociology is now tied and party to... the neoliberal state and its ‘carceral-assistential complex ’ for the punitive management of the poor ” (p. 1471). The three of us do not hew to Wacquant’s politics, so we are indicted, along with the rest of American sociology, for a lockdown in the ghetto and the repression of the poor. Wacquant’s “review ” is built upon a relentless distortion of the research and writing in these three books. Repeatedly, Wacquant tells AJS readers that an argument presented in them rests upon implausible assumptions when it does nothing of the kind. The position he puts in the writer’s mouth is consistently the opposite of what appears on the page. Having created a series of straw men, Wacquant then razes them, often by par-roting the arguments made by the authors as if they were his own. He buttresses his critique of these books using data provided in them, cred-iting the evidence itself, while ignoring the fact that Anderson, Duneier, and Newman collected and carefully presented that evidence on purpose. He claims that our observations undermine the core analyses in these books, when they simply highlight the absurdity of the caricatures he has created. In the end, there is almost no link between these three books and what Wacquant makes of them. Long before its publication in AJS, Wacquant has been busy distrib-uting his attack around the globe and across the profession. Inevitably many people who have received copies from Wacquant will not see this rebuttal, but we hope many others do. It is important for interested readers to form their own judgment, not only of the books discussed here, but