minology in the 19th and the early 20th century was Classical Criminology, influenced by utilitarianism they proposed penal reform in Europe, usual punishment for crime was death. Jeremy Bentham (Robbins, Bentham and Mack, 1963) argued that humans had pleasure/pain motivators when it came to committing a crime, if the pleasure outweighs the pain, a person will most likely commit the crime. The focus was on individuals making choices to commit crime. To prevent people from committing crime, punitive action was deemed essential for deterrence.

Positivist criminology, instead sought to find hidden factors and group factors that went beyond individual agency, in early 20th century defeated classical criminology, crime was no longer punished as punitively and now biological and or social factors were blamed for the actions of the individuals and groups. Increasingly positivism made use of statistical techniques, imitating the techniques of natural sciences like physics, chemistry and biology.

Through the influence of the Chicago School of Criminology (Jeffery and Vold, 1958) we see that that use of ethnography is crucial to understand society or groups of people who share certain characteristics. Crime and crime control are being seen now as the means assigned by culture. CC has developed in reaction to certain strands of positivist and classical criminology that focused on quantification and “hard” empiricism and crime control. Max Weber’s theories also greatly contribute to our understanding of Antifa. His main focus on society was the understanding of rationalisation, modernity and disenchantment. (Kauffmann, 2009) Weber has identified enchantment and disenchantment in the era of modernity and post modernity. Weber can be linked to CC if crime is viewed as a way to seek thrills (Berger, 2016), and an attempt to rediscover “magic” in a world of cold rationality and “disenchantment”. Technological advances and increasing knowledge have both been a blessing and a curse on modern society.