This knowledge is the most important contribution which Lombroso’s life-work has given to sociology.
But it does not stand alone.
The greatest of all his services to sociology is that he threw light upon the reciprocal action between the organic and the social phenomena of human evolution in respect of a number of important details; but in doing this he avoided the onesidedness with which Marxism deduces the fate of the social organism from the economic basis of society, and avoided also the error of the dreamers who hope to explain the laws of social existence by regarding society as an organism similar to the mammalian organism, possessing distinct organs, each with its own peculiar functions.
Lombroso was very powerfully influenced by Darwinism and by the evolutionary idea in general, more especially in the form elucidated by Herbert Spencer in his “First Principles.” As anthropologist, indeed, as regards the question of the origin of man and man’s place in nature, he was a forerunner of Darwin[[35]]; but in respect of the manner in which he presents the reciprocal action between the organic and the social, he is quite free from the analogies and homologies which led such men as Schaeffle and Spencer so widely astray. It was quite inevitable that Lombroso’s sociological thought should be powerfully stimulated by the view of his opponents that law is a product of the intellectual, not of the organic life of mankind, and that therefore it was not nature that produced criminals, but social and national processes. Thus it became necessary for him to prove—as in my opinion he succeeded in doing—that nature makes the criminal, but that society provides the conditions in which the criminal commits crimes. Nature creates the criminal—and here Lombroso occupies the same ground as Spinoza and Schopenhauer—inasmuch as it is through nature’s work that he comes to be born with predetermined tendencies of character—tendencies which are not altered after birth, but merely provided with opportunities for their manifestation. Lombroso identifies this predisposition of character with the so-called “moral insanity,” and there is no objection to this, provided we exclude the idea of an acquired illness. Above all, he regards this predisposition as an arrest at an earlier stage of development, as an atavism. Lombroso always presupposes the acceptance of the “fundamental biogenetic law,”[[36]] and for this reason is led to expect the occurrence of atavisms as the result of an arrest of development. Hence, what others speak of as degeneration is to him a pathological process leading to arrest of development.
The course of his own mental development impelled Lombroso to take a further step, and to apply his customary methods to the study of the revolutionary, of the genius, of women, and of “mattoids.” If we now take a comprehensive view of all this, we find that Lombroso’s principal contribution to sociology involves the recognition of the following facts:
Organic nature, through the course of development, and under the influence of inhibitive or favourable factors, creates in the masses of individuals to which she gives birth differences and differentiations—differences of sex, of intellectual and æsthetic capacity, of character, etc. Thus she gives opportunity for the origination of certain social phenomena; for society offers a field abounding in opportunities for the activity of the most extensive differences of natural endowment. But society provides also selective factors, and thereby alters the constitution and composition of the materials furnished by nature in the most manifold variety. Thus, more or less rapidly, the race undergoes modification. This reciprocal action is the province in which nature and society meet, and in which social polity has to receive guidance from anthropology and biology.
I consider that Lombroso has proved by a rigid induction that nature has endowed man at birth with social sentiments, or—which amounts to the same thing—with an organic predisposition, out of which, in the course of individual development, social sentiments arise; and that inheritance and fœtal development determine whether the individual is in a position to guard and to further his own interests in the communal life without prejudice to the interests of the community.
In this connection he has most carefully investigated two special instances: first, that category of individuals who have needs and impulses incapable of satisfaction without severe injury to the interests of the community or to the social standards—criminals and prostitutes; and secondly, those who consider that the permanent or future interests of the community cannot be secured without infraction of the traditional forms of social life, or, perhaps, without disregard of formal legal prohibitions, without “breaking the old tables,” without “revaluation of old values”—geniuses and “political criminals.”
He has, however, also demonstrated the fact that in relation to the rigidity—the formalism—with which the traditions of the social order have hitherto always been preserved, and will continue to be preserved in the future, society itself is not as a rule in a position to distinguish between the criminal and the useful revolutionary. This is made manifest by the study of the researches undertaken by Lombroso for his description of the political criminal (1890) and of anarchism (1849). His examination of the part played in social life by the political or social genius leads him to formulate a theory regarding the acceleration of social evolution. Genius brings to pass the revolution for which the way has been prepared by evolution; the criminal merely produces revolts.
Thus, in my opinion, we owe to Lombroso the recognition of a fact of enormous importance—namely, that many disturbances and also many advances in social life (crime, genius, and revolution) are brought about, not by economic or other social influences, but by the natural variability of the species, homo sapiens. (Be it noted that Lombroso contrasts with homo sapiens, homo delinquens; while he classes the latter with homo neanderthalensis.) To the sociologist it is a matter of indifference whether certain classes of varieties are termed degenerative or not. About this point it is for the biologists to come to an agreement, but in doing so they must not ignore Lombroso’s anthropological and morphological researches.