A question which appears to me to deserve consideration is whether Lombroso was an individualist or a socialist. It is well known that he exercised a very great influence upon many of the notable advocates of Italian socialism, both through his personality and by means of his writings; but I have shown more than once in what has gone before that he did nothing to support the doctrine of the class war, and Loria was the only thinker standing anywhere near the Marxian position who can be said, so far as I can ascertain, to have exercised a considerable influence upon Lombroso’s thought. Lombroso was never a party man.[[39]]
Lombroso was a passionate advocate of the rights of the expropriated classes, always a fearless opponent ever ready for battle, of all exceptional laws, and a firm believer in democracy; but he was as far removed from the one-sided advocacy of any kind of class interest as he was from every apriorist interpretation of social life.
I may, therefore, answer the question by saying that as an intellectual, and in his criticism of the present social order, Lombroso shows himself to be an individualist; but, notwithstanding this, his feelings lead him to favour the socialist view, so that we find in his writings a sympathetic understanding of the humanist movement no less than of the process of emancipation in modern social evolution.
We cannot discuss Lombroso as a sociologist without considering also his ideas and efforts in the field of social reform.
We have seen that he rejects the class war and revolutionary methods as instruments of social reform, but he is even less sympathetic towards parliamentary government,[[40]] and he expects valuable results from those reforms only that are demanded and brought into effect by the public opinion of the time, and regarding whose necessity the majority of the population is firmly convinced.
Inasmuch as Lombroso was led to the study of socio-political questions chiefly by way of his interest in the world of crime, it will readily be understood that he was concerned with the construction of the legal order of society, and especially with criminal law, rather than with the construction of the economic order of society. For this reason we find in his writings few original ideas regarding industrial problems and the emancipation of the working classes. During many years spent in Pavia and Pesaro he failed to come into contact in any way with capitalism and the greater industry. First in the industrial city of Turin did these phenomena force themselves upon his attention; but in his earlier life, while still quite a young man, he was much occupied with the agrarian question; and he was one of the most ardent opponents of the traditional tariff policy of Italy—a country in which the food of the people is very heavily burdened by excessive protectionist corn duties, enormous land taxation, and very high octroi (town dues), without any correlative advantage to the small tenant farmers, peasant proprietors, and agricultural labourers.
The progress made by Lombroso in the field of social reform, in consequence of his coming into contact with modern industrialism in the city of Turin, is most clearly displayed by a comparison of the measures which he recommended in the year 1890 for the prevention of political crime, with the contents of the 200 pages which, in the year 1897, in the third volume of his work on “The Criminal Man,”[[41]] he devoted to the prophylaxis and therapy of criminality in general. Two original ideas are to be found in both these works—viz., definite proposals for the decentralization of Italian national administration; and proposals also for the constitution of a kind of popular tribunal, as a counterpoise to the excessive powers of parliamentary cliques. In addition, we find in Lombroso’s writings, at quite an early date—and apparently as an original idea—a suggestion for the establishment of public labour (employment) bureaus.
I am not aware what Lombroso’s position was as regards the most recent conception among the methods of social reform—namely, the notion of “racial hygiene”; nor do I know what he thought of the demand associated with this notion for the deliberate breeding of supermen as the goal of the social politics of the future.
Unquestionably he was one of the boldest revaluers of traditional values; and he was always a convinced advocate of the view that the inadequate powers of natural selection ought to be supplemented by the deliberate selection (exclusion from reproduction) of anti-social individuals. With this end in view he was ever the fearless champion of the death-penalty, which he designated “estrema selezione.” Above all, he put before himself as the goal of his life-work the elevation of criminal law and the application of improved methods for the treatment of criminals; freed from all metaphysical complexion, these should, he considered, be numbered among the ultimate aims of social reform. Penal measures, in his view, are the sole safeguard of social evolution! As usual, in the case of medical men greatly interested in social reform, it is difficult to determine in Lombroso’s case where his demands for social reform end, and where the measures he claims as requirements of public hygiene begin; speaking generally, whenever he touches on hygienic questions—as, for instance, in the matter of pellagra—he takes a comprehensive view, embracing also the preservation and improvement of the race. The campaign against the most destructive endemic disease of Italy—pellagra—was the first notable contribution to social reform made by Lombroso in the years of his early manhood.
But to become a fanatical advocate of racial breeding, in the sense of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain, was rendered impossible to him by his recognition of the multiplicity of the population of Italy. No anthropologist was more intimately acquainted with the numerous and fundamentally different types inhabiting this country than was the discoverer of the mixed Africo-Hellene race of Calabria—the man who united in his own personality all the highest endowments of the Jewish spirit, and who from his study of the history of the Romance peoples of the Mediterranean region had learned to recognize the importance of the Semitic elements which have been intermingled in this region from the earliest dawn of history.