I have admired Hans Boutellier's work on crime and morality for a number of years and was keen to ask him to contribute to the New Horizons in Criminology book series. Much of his work is published in Dutch and, whilst some has been translated into English, I believe it deserves a far wider audience. In 2014 I was invited to speak at the International Conference on Law Enforcement and Public Health, hosted by VU University in Amsterdam. By chance, at a conference dinner I was sat next to Hans and was able to discuss the idea of a new book. I am delighted that our informal discussion that night has now resulted in what I believe will be seen an important little book.

A Criminology of Moral Order is the sixth title in the New Horizons in Criminology book series. The series is home for concise authoritative texts that are international in scope and reflect cutting-edge thought and theoretical developments in criminology. The books are written by leading authors in their fields and I was very pleased when Hans agreed to contribute. This book is the culmination of work that previously resulted in four books – three of which have been translated into English - Crime and Morality (2000), The Safety Utopia (2005) and The Improvising Society (2013); and one that, at the time of writing, is still only available in Dutch - The Secular Experiment (2015). For the current text, Boutellier developed the ideas put forward in these earlier publications resulting in a unique and insightful contribution to criminological understanding of both morality and order.

Moral judgments are central to processes that result in actions or omissions being declared as harmful to others, or being labelled as crimes. And crimes and harms (and the labelling of harms and crimes) can have deleterious effects on the moral order of society – however defined. Yet, according to Boutellier, criminologists have often neglected issues of morality. In this book Boutellier skilfully explains how moral order is conceived within complex networked societies. He makes the point that in a secularized and networked society a common moral ground is difficult to find.