This article revisits the concept of relative deprivation and asks whether it is still useful for criminology. The article traces the way relative deprivation has been used in the past to understand crime and how it has connections to other, more recent, additions to debates on social justice. I argue that relative deprivation has disappeared even in the place that it had become the key explanation for crime—left realism. In so doing, I explore the resurrection of left realism in criminology—what I refer to as “post-millennial left realism”—first, by those who were associated with it originally, and then with Hall and Winlow’s (2015, 2017) shift in emphasis to what they term “ultra-realism.” I maintain that relative deprivation is still a powerful concept for bridging several related areas that should still be central to the concerns of criminology—in part, because it is still a major concern in popular social science and social psychology. Why has it disappeared in criminology? I present an argument that suggests that the absence of certain research methods, such as ethnographic and qualitative or small-scale survey methods, has impoverished our understanding of the lived reality of people experiencing the social transformations of a networked, precarious society. The massive polarization and disruption in politics and social discourse, as well as the worldwide economic, public health, and social transformations (ranging from the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter protests to the COVID-19 global pandemic) have demonstrated the continued relevance and analytical power that relative deprivation, in its elaborated form, brings to questions of crime and justice.

本文重新审视了相对剥夺的概念，并询问它是否仍然对犯罪学有用。这篇文章追溯了过去人们使用相对剥夺来理解犯罪的方式，以及它与其他最近关于社会正义辩论的补充内容之间的联系。我认为，即使在它成为犯罪的关键解释——左派现实主义的地方，相对剥夺已经消失了。在这样做的过程中，我探索了犯罪学中左派现实主义的复活——我称之为“后千禧年左派现实主义”——首先是那些最初与之相关的人，然后是 Hall 和 Winlow (2015, 2017) 转变强调他们所谓的“超现实主义”。” 我坚持认为，相对剥夺仍然是一个强大的概念，可以连接几个相关领域，这些领域仍然应该是犯罪学关注的核心——部分原因是它仍然是大众社会科学和社会心理学的主要关注点。为什么它在犯罪学中消失了？我提出的一个论点表明，由于缺乏某些研究方法，例如民族志和定性或小规模调查方法，我们对经历网络化、不稳定社会的社会转型的人们的生活现实的理解变得贫乏。政治和社会话语以及全球经济、公共卫生、