Category: Criminology

‘Criminal markets are now sophisticated and competitive, riven by class divisions created on the back of the individual’s relative success and failures in markets. A successful new proto bourgeoisie drawn from all positions on the former social order dominates a defeated precariat’ (Hall & Winlow, 2015: 126)

Take director Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series, The Gentlemen (Netflix, 2024), which follows Eddie Horniman, a reluctant aristocrat who inherits his family estate only to discover it sits atop a vast underground cannabis empire. Here is a criminological reality in the 21^st century where liberalism has been outgrown and which demonstrates symbolic inefficacy for those competing in the current neoliberal economy. By entering the reality of organised crime, corruption, and violence, a new Symbolic Order of entrepreneurialism and wealth creation materialises that would otherwise not be possible, or within reach for most, within the global neoliberal capitalist system. Thus, recycling the traditional economic business model of supply and demand for controlled substances, the actors in The Gentlemen have diverted their libidinal drives to fill the void of the Lacanian Real for a slice of the high life; where the high rollers of wealth accumulation previously sat and to which access was limited despite the capitalist fantasy and falsehood of ‘rags to riches’  that everyone can compete and succeed within the ‘fair and equal’ neoliberal system.

What we can see in The Gentlemen is Hall’s (2007: 2012:2015) pseudo-pacification process in action. Let us revisit where this fundamental element of ultra realist theory derives. Hall posits that in medieval England the economy and the family unit were conjoined, where property was owned by the family unit and shared between them from generation to generation to support their existence (Polanyi, 2002; Sombart, 1915). The family units produced on a subsistence level for self-consumption rather than profit as their Aristotelian ‘telos’ or fulfilment. Labour was a family activity and not an economic commodity at this point, and the family units existed under moral guidance of the Church, which acted as the big Other, maintaining morality, stabilising prices, and keeping the peace. However, the co-existence of the market trader, who bought commodities only to sell them unchanged for profit, operated outside this subsistence model but was tolerated as they appeared to abide by the morality and ethics of the Church, which kept trade functional. The emphasis was very much in favour of the peasant labourer and the artisan at this stage rather than the profiteering of the market trader. The change in this system began in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, or earlier according to Dyer (2000). Dyer suggests that the nobility was more concerned with leisure pursuits such as hunting, prayer and entertainment than managing the land and estates that they owned; this was the realm of the peasantry and labourers, which opened the opportunity for the more entrepreneurial peasants and artisans in motivating aspiration and access to wealth creation whilst paying rents to the landowning nobility. Sound familiar?

Let’s get psychoanalytic. Hall argues that at the core of subjectivity lies nothing but ‘a powerful and structuring absence that inspires deep anxiety; one which is assuaged by the active solicitation of a coherent symbolic order from which meaning can be established and the individual can orientate and navigate themselves within the world’  (Raymen, 2023: 141). As the Enlightenment overrode the Church’s morality, rooted in unconditional selflessness and sacrificial love, it ushered in a new era defined by the pursuit of profit, where the family unit was eroded and displaced by individualism and market competition. Subjective Lacanian ‘lack’  was reoriented to be fulfilled by economic gain and status seeking, and as a by-product, those less aspirational and entrepreneurial were left behind  – ‘Ha ha, losers.’

In The Gentlemen, we observe the different socioeconomic units, whether they be family by birth or by entrepreneurial activity, all competing in the lucrative market of cannabis production and distribution using a division of labour and complete vertical integration (see Messina, 2022) to operate an illicit capitalist business model. Let us start at the top with the protagonist Eddie Horniman. Born the second son to the Duke of Halstead, a model of aristocracy in the colonial British Empire mould with a good education and a commission in the Army, Eddie unexpectedly finds himself heir to his father’s estate over his brother, who has been overlooked in the will. Inheriting a crumbling country estate which is costly to maintain, Eddie is announced as overseer of the family assets in an epoch of decolonisation where the past aristocracy has no real purpose or place in the current globalised neoliberal world. Still focused on leisure pursuits and entertainment, the Halstead family, especially Eddie’s Brother Freddy, cling to the defensive unit of family and land in a contemporary landscape of neoliberal market economics. With no notable income to maintain this wealthy status, a truth is revealed to aristocratic Eddie by the stylish, sardonic, sophisticated, and steely (Tudum by Netflix, 2025) commoner Susie Glass; the land he has inherited sits on top of a cannabis mass production site in return for rent; a last gasp deal his late father made to maintain the family income and status. Eddie’s brother, Freddy, still overindulgent in recreational excess, places the family under further strain by running up a drug debt amongst gambling and other failed risky ventures.

Enter Gospel John, a Merseyside working class fish trader and zealot, to whom Freddy is indebted, known for his violence and a healthy dose of Christian fervour. Gospel John sends his brother Tommy to collect the debt from Freddy. He is shot by Freddy in the process. Now introduced to what the mass production of cannabis on his inherited property entails, Eddie is moved well beyond the safety and comfort of the aristocratic and privileged Symbolic Order he thought he had inherited into the reality of the highly lucrative, competitive, and violent sphere of serious and organised crime. Eddie’s former institutionalisation by the Army and government is now well past its sell by date and part of the vestige of power that once was (Netflix, 2025). The former Symbolic Order now being ‘deaptative’ (Johnston, 2008), Eddie has now become an actor in a new adaptive market economy with a higher scale of violence, yet operating within and on the same model as the neoliberal economic system, which Eddie finds addictive. At the same time, American Crystal Meth entrepreneur Stanley Johnstone is filling an absence, read as ‘lack’, of history and identity by re-inventing himself as a liberal English gentleman of wealth and property, eager to progress in the still rigid codified British class system, whilst the last remains of the Halstead aristocracy is desperately abandoning theirs to adapt and survive in this new reality. All this takes place and is maintained in a space of ‘orderly disorder’ (Horsely, Kotzé, and Hall, 2015) which is being run by convicted gang boss Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) from a privileged existence in prison, read as ‘holiday’, whilst his daughter Susie Glass runs the business on the ground for him.

Hall’s (2012) interest in pseudo-pacification comes from the explanation of the decline of violence from the Middle Ages to the present day as market economies emerged and developed and where rates of violence and homicide are seen to have decreased. Economic trade cannot function in a totally altruistic or totally violent space. There must be a reduction of violence for economic exchange to function, not a total pacification but a balance between civility and controlled aggression; something which is evident throughout all the character interactions within ‘The Gentlemen.’ As Hall, in Raymen (2023:143) argues, ‘a perpetual cultivation of dynamic tension between the poles of pacification and stimulation which provides the ideal pseudo-pacified subjectivities for the flourishing of a market society.’ Hall suggests that as economies grew, subjectivity did not lose its aggression. Instead, aggression was preserved and put to an appropriate and scaled down use as a driving energy in nascent market economies.

 As we see in The Gentlemen, violence is a normalised (see Žižek, 2009) part of the organised crime economic modus operandi, an accompaniment to drug production and distribution used to ensure the security and continuous flow of products and maintain market share, just as it is in military form in the legitimate globalised neoliberal market economy. The drive to succeed in this open space of organised criminal enterprise, which can more easily be accessed by anybody, has increased the level of interpersonal violence necessary to compete and survive. Thus, the sliding scale of pacification has been moved further away from civility and upped the level of accepted violence on which Eddie’s new-found market economy operates. Yet, as we see in the various cohesive units within the show, elements of medieval pacification, morality and aesthetics – through the morality and values of the church in Gospel John, and the desire for the iconography and architecture of the nobility in Stanley Johnstone – are holding on.

Yet for Eddie Halsted, the collapse of his aristocratic status sees him move into the arena of the organised criminal elite to be thrown into a violent economic reality. Interjected with various other criminal entrepreneurs, traders, labourers and artisans within the organised criminal fraternity, we see a wide spectrum of historical socioeconomic roles from the early centuries of capitalism now intersecting in a new global neoliberal illicit economy. Cannabis has been weaving its way into normality over the decades and is now quite commonplace everywhere, legalised or decriminalised in many parts of the world, yet still a controlled substance as defined under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 in the UK. One only has to walk through our post-industrial cities and towns to find the unmistakable scent of weed present.  So much so, that the production of cannabis in The Gentlemen is truthfully portrayed as a new and expanding industry where the means of production, packaging, and distribution are controlled in-house and underpinned by the artisan skills and labour of ‘weed horticulturalist’ Jimmy Chang as chief grower. Hmmm, sounds medieval but with guns to me.

Effectively, in The Gentlemen (and women such as Susie Glass, Lady Sabrina, and the extremely dangerous and violent Mercy), all actors have become the ‘losers’ of the neoliberal capitalist system. They have therefore entrepreneurially adapted their own game, markets, and Symbolic Order. From the masculinity of the working-class actors to the entitlement of the privileged nobility, by exercising  ‘special liberty’ to lever themselves above the herd and achieve their instrumental and expressive aims (Kotzé, 2024), often violently but with ‘criminal fraternal civility’, all operate in pursuit of that which has been made absent in the restrictive  construct of the lawful neoliberal economy. By diverting their Freudian libidinal drives to fill the Lacanian void with the jouissance of illicit free market competition and its rewards, their aggressive drives have become accustomed to operating on a lesser pacified scale suited to the competition rules of the illicit market in which they operate – a free market that functions in parallel to the legitimised economy, but one which has higher returns and requires intensified competition and aggression to function optimally. Let us face it, the organised crime world does not operate with the same civility as the current economic system, but then the current economic system does not offer the same equally accessible opportunities, and when cannabis becomes legal, criminal entrepreneurs already have the means of production, the market connections and the infrastructure in place to continue their operations and maintain their competitive advantage.

Reference List

Dyer, C. (2000) Everyday Life in Medieval England. London: Hambledon and London.

Hall, S. (2007) ‘The emergence and breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process’. In Watson, K (Ed.) Assaulting the Past. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Hall, S. (2012) Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage Publications Ltd.

Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2015) Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism. Abingdon: Routledge.

Hall, S. and Winlow, S. (2018) ‘Ultra-realism’. In DeKeseredy, W., and Dragiewicz, M. (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Critical Criminology. (2^nd ed). Abingdon: Routledge.

Horsley, M., Kotzé, J. and Hall, S. (2015) ‘The maintenance of orderly disorder: Law, markets and the pseudo-pacification process’. Journal on European History of Law. 6. Pp. 18-29.

Johnston, A., (2008) Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Kotzé, J. (2024) ‘On special liberty and the motivation to harm’. The British Journal of Criminology. 65(2). Pp. 314-27.

Messina, M. (2022) ‘Exploring vertical integration in the supply chain’. Forbes. [online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2022/12/29/exploring-vertical-integration-in-the-supply-chain/.

Tudum by Netflix (2025) The Gentlemen cast is full of Nobility and Scoundrels. Available at: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/the-gentlemen-series-cast.

Polanyi, K. (2002) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. London: Beacon Press.

Raymen, T. (2023) The Enigma of Social Harm: The Problem of Liberalism. Abingdon: Routledge.

Sombart, W  (1915) The Quintessence of Capitalism. New York: E.P Dutton & Co.

The Gentlemen. (2024)Directed by Guy Ritchie. Available from: Netflix.

Žižek, S. (2009) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books Ltd.