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5 Soc. & Legal Stud. 5 (1996)

handle is hein.journals/solestu5 and id is 1 raw text is: 









     WAR MARKETS: CORPORATE

     AND ORGANIZED CRIMINALS

                       IN EUROPE

                       VINCENZO RUGGIERO
                          Middlesex University





HE ARMS TRADE holds some emblematic features, which are situated

      on the border between legality and illegality.' The study of this activity,
      therefore, is very relevant for those students of crime who, despite
relentless efforts, find it difficult to define what crime is. It is also an implicit
commemoration of the sociology of deviance, which according to Sumner (1994)
died about 20 years ago, when the publication of a number of texts killed off the
discipline.
  The study of the manufacture and trade in arms may shed light on the
dynamics which permit the movement of the threshold of legality, and on the
relationship between this type of activity and ethics. In this respect, the work of
Le Goff (1977) should be borne in mind. He argues that entrepreneurs and
merchants bear an 'original sin' related to their activity, a sin which, according to
the specific devices offered by different contexts, is either 'purged' or displaced.
In Le Goff's view, the history of entrepreneurs themselves coincides with the
history of this displacement. The arms trade shows how 'business ethics' is
somehow an oxymnoron, because the definition of what is ethically acceptable or
unacceptable, legal or illegal, depends on circumstances which transcend the
ethical and legal arenas. The centrality of arms for the economies of the
developed countries, in financial and occupational terms, is one factor which
appears to allow for the discretional stretching of values, a characteristic which
Knight (1935) attributes to all entrepreneurs who redeem the intrinsic immo-
rality of their trade through the 'economic risk' they incur.


SOCIAL & LEGAL S=TUIES (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi),
Vol. 5 (1996), 5-20

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