The Petty Bourgeois' Romanticizing of the Outlaw

I have often seen writers refer to a fascination with crime and criminals as being distinctly "petty bourgeois," but I do not remember any of them clearly explaining why they think that is so in an explicit way. What I have gleaned from them is the view that, being petty bourgeois such people are not on top, and frustrated--their lot, if far from the worst society has to offer, still that of the "bound but unprotected" and they naturally not liking it much. At the same time being petty bourgeois they are essentially individualistic and conformist, so that they do not imagine, let alone desire, any other world than this one. They just want to change their condition in the one that exists. And the rule-breaking criminal, who is at the very least refusing to be bound, and if they get big enough, in some degree protected too in a society where corruption is not unknown (else what need for an Eliot Ness or a Batman?), has a fascination for them as someone doing what they would like to be doing, or would like to have done in the past (such that they would be enjoying the benefits of those actions now).

Certainly thinking of Robert Merton's "theory of anomic behavior," which I understand to have been the result of his examination of crime, this seems to track. As Merton wrote society sets goals for its members and sanctions particular means for realizing those goals--like individual economic advancement through education and getting a job (or, less often these days, be-an-entrepreneur-in-a-legal-line-of-activity). The conformist accepts goal and means--getting ahead, and getting the job supposed to lead to that. The rebel and the "retreatist" in their different ways and for different reasons refuse goal and means--disbelieving in getting ahead, and refusing to pretend the way taking the job requires them to do. The "ritualist" Merton describes as rejecting the goal but accepting the means--in the sense that they do not really believe in all that getting ahead stuff, but get a job anyway and go through the motions (because, frankly, it's very, very tough to live without a source of income). However, there is one other category--what Merton called "innovators"--who accept the goal but rely on a less than approved means, i.e. accepts "individual economic advancement" as a life's purpose but pursues the object through illegal business activity. They are not rebels, they accept the success-striving recommended to them, they just resort to disapproved means to go about it--while not advertising those means, or necessarily meaning to persist in them beyond their attainment of their goal.

I do not recall Merton saying anything about this, but I think that what those who picture crime as an object of fascination to those sincerely eager to get ahead, but disappointed in the sanctioned options and their results--perhaps especially in times of declining prospects for the "middle class." Few act on such nonsense--but all the same, the attraction on this foolishness on some level has its part in making criminals very popular protagonists in contemporary pop culture.