Criminological Legacy of Professor Janez Pecar (1924-2021)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide a general outline and short theoretical analysis of Professor Janez Pecar's monumental criminological legacy, first and foremost the scientific articles he published in this review in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and then his three monographs dealing with formal, informal, and institutionalized (non-state) control. Pecar's theory of business deviance in former Yugoslav socialism is highlighted in more detail in connection with some key structural characteristics of that political and economic system. These are nowadays more or less forgotten, unknown, or even distorted, although they have to be taken into account carefully so as to understand fully Pecar's insightful analysis of the structural causes of economic crime in the context of the social ownership of the means of production and workers' self-governing. What follows is the reflection on his theoretical dealing with the corruption and other crimes of the powerful in the restored capitalist system established by the democratic independent Slovene national state. In the concluding section, Pecar's central scientific preoccupations - namely state and social (self-governed) control - are situated in the actual neoliberal globalized capitalism in a way that shows their chronic unsuitability. Roughly speaking, state control is problematic because it is bourgeois, whereas social control is problematic because it is non-existent (or reduced to very restricted and structurally unimportant spheres of social and personal life).