There is no suggestion of completeness of the ‘square’ as if it were some form of structural functionalist formalism or set of a priori concepts specifying the dynamic of all forms of crime and crime control. The interactions between the participants will vary for particular types of crime in particular types of community. The square is rather a starting point for critical analysisof crime. Left Realism developed a methodology somewhat akin to that expounded by Karl Marx as ‘the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete’. Marx gives as an example the process of starting from an abstract category such as ‘population’: