It was a great pleasure to work on this book. It gave me the opportunity to combine earlier work and new ideas into the design of a criminology of moral order. It is the culmination of work that had previously resulted in four books. I have used parts of earlier translations of The safety utopia (2005b) and The improvising society (2011/2013). I have leant heavily on my last research project on the secular conditions of Western societies, which was only published in Dutch: The secular experiment (2015). Selected pieces from earlier publications are combined, rewritten and edited, and have resulted in this new publication.

As the reader will have noticed, this criminology of moral order is related to crime and security, but it is rather a theory on the contemporary organization of human relations. Morality is at the heart of every interaction, and crime is a disturbance of how a society wants to understand, define and regulate these interactions. That goes for every society in every era – also for our diversified, network society without any obvious general philosophies of life. The challenge of our time is to formulate and reformulate our sentiments, ideas and beliefs, day in and day out, to keep each other on the right track.

We don't do that, of course, without any notion of norms and values. We have our habits and traditions – albeit that these are faded out a little or even unknown, for example by new inhabitants of the West. Indeed, we relate to our traditions, instead of being a product of them. Of course, we have the law as the result of an era of deliberation and struggle. Criminal law can even be understood as a canon of morality. It shifted to the middle of the moral space, and became a centre of gravity in organizing our ‘postmodern’ social relations. But it falls short, because it is too little too late in relation to the big moral space it has to regulate.

What is more, criminal law has to adapt to cyberspace with its very own conditions and parameters of regulation and social ordering. In the book, I have only sometimes referred to the virtual world that has become so important for our relations today.