Book-a-month Club – Choosing my Goethe

When I came across the term ‘delicate empiricism,’ several years ago, I felt I had found a concept that helped describe my approach to social science research in prisons—something I was writing a chapter about. I fell in love with this intriguing genius: prolific author, attentive scientist, and ‘lover of what is alive.’ Encounters in Pari fueled the flames. As a result of my new love, I emerged from Topping and Company’s independent bookshop in Bath in October 2024 more fully alive than when I had entered, with these two great biographies under my arm. I wasn’t aware that I was looking (except, perhaps, for Faust, Part 1), or that they existed, but something drew me to the right shelf. The bookshop itself, I discovered later, sees itself as a ‘world-opening,’ face-to-face, carefully curated book sanctuary. I spent a delightful time with my bookshop companion in Beckford Bottle Shop wine bar that evening feeling exuberant, expectant, and somehow sure of my ground. Once home, I found my opportunity and read them avidly. 

In this informal get together for book lovers, I reflect on the meaning of my encounters with Goethe and his two recent biographers. Drawing on my own work, as well as these two books, I explore two main Goethe-inspired ideas: the role of the human observer, and the concept of the life force.

Alison Liebling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Cambridge and the Director of the Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre. She has carried out research on life in prison for over 30 years. Her projects have included suicide and self-harm in prisons, close supervision centres for difficult prisoners, incentives and earned privileges, staff-prisoner relationships, the location and building of trust in high security prisons, the work of prison officers, and conceptualizing and measuring the moral quality of prison life, including comparisons between public and private sector prisons. She has evaluated shared reading programmes in Psychologically-Informed Planned Environments for prisoners with personality disorders, and is currently exploring the differences between survivable and unsurvivable prisons. Her books include Prisons and their Moral Performance: A Study of Values, Quality and Prison Life (2004), The Effects of Imprisonment (2005, with Shadd Maruna), Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: An International Exploration (2013, with Justice Tankebe); and The Prison Officer (2001, 2^nd edition 2010). She has just completed a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, carrying out the project, ‘Moral rules, social science and forms of order in prison’. She is finishing a book arising from that project, tentatively called Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity and Justice. She argues that what keeps people alive in prison is feeling part of a moral universe. She was made a member of the British Academy in 2018. She is involved in an advisory capacity in projects on penal reform and evaluating prison quality in countries including Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Germany and Switzerland.