As long as the agents preserving the (legal) order succeed in convincing that their differential effectiveness is due to the "inherent" properties of those subjected to it and, therefore, is independent of any social conditioning - often doing nothing more than confirming and reinforcing a certain relationship with the law and a certain class habitus that, constituted outside the system of law management and enforcement, is the underlying principle of most, if not all, penal attributes - they will continue to contribute in an unparalleled way to the maintenance of the structure of relations among social classes and, at the same time, to the legitimization of this structure, concealing the fact that the criminal classifications they produce essentially reproduce social hierarchies.
The criminal justice system, through the specific logic of its operation, fulfills ideological functions, as its mechanisms, which contribute to the reproduction of the established order and the maintenance of domination relations, remain hidden. Within this logic, the criminal justice system also provides the ruling class with a "theodicy of its privilege," not so much through the ideologies it produces and engraves, but mainly through the practical justification it provides to the established class, as it obscurely conceals and records -under the apparent guise of formal equality- the relationship between, on the one hand, management and enforcement and, on the other hand, the held legal capital.
Through an effort to identify and analyze the epistemological and scientific errors that stem from the "scientific glory" and are committed in the field of "sociology of deviance and crime," the author seeks to demonstrate how the sociology of deviance, linked with the sociology of culture and knowledge, far from being that type of applied science, is based on the foundations of a general anthropology of power and legitimacy.
[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]
