Explaining drug policy: Towards an historical sociology of policy change

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• 作者：Toby Seddon  ; ;   ; ^{toby.seddon@manchester.ac.uk}
• 关键词：Policy ; History ; Sociology ; Politics
• 刊名：The International Journal of Drug Policy
• 出版年：2011
• 出版时间：November 2011
• 年：2011
• 卷：22
• 期：6
• 页码：415-419
• 全文大小：224 K

文摘

The goal of seeking to understand the development over time of drug policies is a specific version of the more general intellectual project of finding ways of explaining social change. The latter has been a preoccupation of some of the greatest thinkers within the social sciences of the last 200 years, from Foucault all the way back to the three nineteenth-century pioneers, Marx, Durkheim and Weber. I describe this body of work as ¡®historical sociology? In this paper, I outline how a particular approach to historical sociology can be fruitfully drawn upon to understand the development of drug policy, using by way of illustration the example of the analysis of a recent transformation in British drug policy: the rise of the criminal justice agenda. I conclude by arguing that by looking at developments in drug policy in this way, some new insights are opened up.