Rebels and Causes

...and of his various talks with delinquents, social workers and penal authorities...

...Thus, few research ventures look beyond easily visible correlations between "bad" families, socio-economic status and ethnic origin...

...To be sure, this interpretation will not be news to those familiar with American research, which reports a similar blocking of opportunity among working-class youths disposed to delinquency, but Fyvel puts it well, and above all locates the problem in a far broader historical and social context than comparable American sociological writings...

...In both respects, American writers on delinquency are victims of their social scientific training, which laboriously teaches incapacity to speculate in print and carefully eradicates empathy and involvement by the investigator...

...But if his book possesses virtues rare in American writings on the subject, it also possesses attendant vices, which make it less than completely satisfactory...

...Such young men are seduced by the mass media (advertising is assigned an especially meretricious role) into a hedonistic, irresponsible youth culture patterned superficially on an American model, though its roots lie in British society...

...And most serious, though he cites Daniel Bell's well-known critique of crime statistics, he nonetheless uses British statistics without any recognition that absolute increases in juvenile convictions may prove nothing more than a growth in the youthful population or a police crackdown...

...He also makes the "bourgeois" America of the 19th century far too much like that "bourgeois" Europe to which his theory most aptly applies...

...It is at once the intensely personal account of a perceptive English writer's responses to delinquency and individual delinquents, and an effort to show that delinquency can "be understood only in the context of the sweeping social and cultural changes which are transforming our Western society, as well as Soviet Russia...

...contributor, "Daedelus," "American Scholar" American studies of juvenile delinquency have two characteristic faults...

...To his study of delinquents-admittedly a subject new to him-he brings an open but not empty mind, shaped by long experience as a political writer and informed by "one certainty that we are living in a time of revolutionary social change of which we should take note...

...between the effects of cultural transition and the effects of affluence...

...The bulk of the book is primarily journalistic, a report-interspersed with general reflections-of his travels in Great Britain and on the Continent...

...Fyvel believes that the study of a social symptom like delinquency can help clarify the nature of these changes...

...Indeed, to an American, it would seem that the very sameness and dreariness of much British working-class life must itself be a factor in the adolescent's hankering for bright plumage and colorful coffee houses...

...Most suffer from circumscribed vision, stemming from that American interpretation of empiricism which makes illicit any sally beyond immediately given facts...

...and it usually remains for "wild-eyed" social critics like Paul Goodman to suggest delinquency is a commentary on the whole nature of American (or any other) society...

...He is at his best in analyzing and criticizing this change-its effect on the family, on the "social super-ego," on women -and in his subtle delineation of how increasing wealth, opportunity and comfort has created in Great Britain a milieu in which exaggerated Edwardian finery, muggings and even race riots paradoxically flourish among the young...

...He repeatedly reports, at second hand, lurid cases of juvenile misbehavior, immediately thereafter warning the reader not to generalize from such isolated and extreme examples...

...Throughout, Fyvel prefers anecdote to careful statistical analysis...

...Though he rarely stays long enough with any one of his subjects to allow a character to emerge fully, he nonetheless gives a full account of how he went about his study and what he thinks should be done about delinquency...

...One of the virtues of this report is that it provides us with much of the "'raw data" upon which Fyvel bases his own conclusions, and thus provokes us, too, to respond and reflect...

...The other failing of most American writing on delinquency is that it is insufficiently "journalistic," seldom communicating that delinquents are individual human beings, mainly adolescent boys with hopes, fears, idiosyncrasies and dreams like the rest of us...

...Here sharper distinctions are needed (and available in American writings)-distinctions between delinquency in different classes...

...Fyvel's point that all these delinquencies reflect the same "revolutionary social change" would be stronger had he shown greater awareness of the differences between them...

...Readers of Encounter will be familiar with what Fyvel believes this change to be: the progressive destruction of the older bourgeois order in Europe and America, and its increasing replacement by mass culture, mass consumption and mass advertising-in a word, by the "affluent society...

...Throughout this book, Fyvel is aware that he is dealing with individuals...

...Perhaps it will be all the more useful to American readers because both its chief subject matter, British youth, and its special strengths are likely to be unfamiliar to most Americans...

...of his trips to Borstal Homes, settlement houses and coffee houses...

...Similarly, while Fyvel possesses the "journalistic" virtues of immediacy and vividness, he too often lapses into sensationalism (though always with a manifestly bad conscience...

...When he does use statistics, one is seldom sure quite what they mean...

...The peculiar merits of Troublemakers lie precisely in its easy combination of concrete detail with farreaching theory, and in the way Fyvel can show society writ small in the individual's woes...

...T. R. Fyvel's Troublemakers: Rebellious Youth in an Affluent Society, primarily a study of "youthful offenders" in Great Britain, has neither of these failings...

...Despite these limitations, Troublemakers remains a provocative and useful book...

...In his eagerness to demonstrate the effects of social changes, he lumps together the quiet schizoid murderer, the "half-strong" youth of Germany, the "hooligan" of Moscow, the Teddy Boy of London, and the warring gang member of Harlem...

...They are unsatisfactory for two reasons: The author unhesitatingly subscribes to a C. Wright Mills-cum-Vance-Packard view of the "new social power elite, buttressed by the high barriers of exclusive clubs, colleges, and residential areas" and of "the new class stratification imposed upon the American people...

...The virtue of speculation is awareness of relationship, but its vice is over-simplification...

...In the background there is always that same industrial England, monotonous and grey, which recent English films have made familiar to American audiences...

...Fyvel too often fails to distinguish...

...Another example of Fyvel's tendency to blur differences is his two chapters on America...

...between neurosis, psychopathy and working-class culture as sources of deviance, etc...

...Specifically, Fyvel argues that most delinquents are recruited from among the "also-rans," youths now early employed and well remunerated but denied access to full participation in the emerging British meritocracy...

...One wishes that his eye for the vivid and the dramatic were paired with an equally good eye for figures...

...Or he quotes an exaggerated statement on New York gangs from Newsweek, only to add apologetically, "This passage may sound somewhat dramatic...

...Individuals disappear between research methods and tests of statistical significance-though it is presumably about individuals that we worry when we are concerned about delinquency, and surely only individuals can elicit that mixture of fear, envy and compassion which the young deviant arouses...