Cesare Lombroso, a modern man of science

by Hans Kurella

How did it happen that Lombroso, the anthropologist and psychiatrist, was led to a criticism of the science of law? He had discovered intuitively, and believed he could establish inductively, the fact that there exist “born criminals” or “criminal natures.” His whole course of mental development—viz., the fact that he was strongly influenced by the evolutionary theories of Vico and Marzolo, by the English utilitarians, by the French positivists, and, to some extent also, by the German materialists of the middle of the nineteenth century—had induced the conviction that the first object of punishment should be the protection of society, and the second the improvement of the criminal. It was for these purposes, he considered, that law had come into existence.

This work, whose aim it is to describe Lombroso, the man and the investigator, is not the place in which to describe his influence upon the Italian school of positive penology, or to describe the subsequent development of that school and its further influence upon the legislation and penal methods of the civilized nations. Science grows slowly; the study of the causes of crime demands time and patience, brings disillusionment, and leads to ever-fresh restatements of the old problems. The zeal of the reformer finds it difficult to tolerate the gradual transformation of the old machinery. He wishes at one stroke to rejuvenate old institutions, to sweep away the old rules. But science, which has to provide a basis for his efforts, is in its nature patient. The reformer’s zeal, which has to construct the new edifice, is not patient. Lombroso was to learn this from personal experience. It was not possible for him to remain at the standpoint of 1876. And, as reformer, he himself experienced many changes, especially as a result of his investigations into the categories of the criminal by passion, the habitual criminal, the occasional criminal, the criminaloid, the criminal lunatic, and the epileptic criminal.

He and his school, in their efforts at reform, worked along two main lines: first, the reform of practical penal methods; and, secondly, the systematization of the general theory of punishment.

The efforts of this school in relation to the system of punishment and the reform of penal methods are too well known for it to be needful to give here even the brief summary for which alone we should have space. But it is important to point out that the Italians, under Lombroso’s guidance, resolutely attacked the penal dogmas of the day, which it was necessary to overthrow before a reform of penal methods in the sense of social defence could possibly be effected. I shall merely make especial reference to the powerful influence for good exerted by the positive school in the direction of the amelioration and humanization of the horrible function of punishment, which represses so many crimes, but at the cost of so much suffering and of such numerous errors.

Lombroso gradually came to believe that no useful purpose is effected by the provision of a great national apparatus intended to improve that which is unimprovable—i.e., the criminal nature; and that society could not be effectively safeguarded against its permanently dangerous members—i.e., the criminal natures—by means of protective measures of a transient duration.

Being thoroughly convinced of the existence of criminal natures, and being, as a utilitarian, hostile to all metaphysics, it was inevitable, when he came to consider the fundamental aim of the institutions of law and the State, that he should be led to reject all methods of treating criminal natures which did not involve their complete removal or lifelong exclusion from the life of free society. Thus, a large proportion of his subsequent life was spent in endless controversies directly against the traditional legal systems and institutions which did not harmonize with the position he had taken up. He did not seek these controversies, but he could not and would not attempt to avoid them. Throughout them, however, he remained the anthropologist, the collector and investigator in the wide field of the natural history of mankind, one more interested in studying the origin of the socially significant varieties of mankind, of which civilized man is one, than in the description of the differential characters of the races of mankind now living in various parts of the world—although investigations in this latter field were by no means repugnant to him.

Lombroso’s great synthetic studies of the natural history of the criminal came to an end in the year 1902, with the publication of the German edition of his book upon the Causes and Prevention of Crime. Some months later appeared a work by Aschaffenburg on Crime and its Prevention. Even after 1902 Lombroso continued to write upon this subject, more especially in his periodical devoted to criminal anthropology; and down to the last year of his life he followed closely the progress of international research in this field. But it seems to me that the book of 1902, published at the close of thirty years’ work, marks the end of his inner development, whilst the Congress for Criminal Anthropology held in the year 1906, in which he was able to hold a review of his disciples, co-workers, friends and rivals, gave a fitting outward conclusion to his career, when he had already passed his seventieth year.

During the last years, and, above all, during the last months of Lombroso’s life, a tendency to pessimism became clearly manifest; and this tendency was, owing to his peculiar organization, closely connected with a strong bent towards mystic contemplation. But this, in my opinion, has no bearing whatever upon his crimino-anthropological researches. His doctrine of the “born criminal” was in no way based upon a pessimistic foundation. In the field of social reform, including criminology, he was definitely optimistic. The weak, the sick, and the degenerate, were regarded by him at once with the objectivity and the philanthropy of the born physician. It was only in his moral valuation of the genius, and of the great condottieri and conquistadores of modern industrial life, that he lacked mildness; indeed, in this latter respect he rather inclined to severity.

During the period 1879 to 1894 were held the first three International Congresses of Criminal Anthropology; and the same period was signalized by numerous other performances of Lombroso, which served for the propagation, the development, and the application of his ideas. Thus it happened that he was forced to leave the quiet of the laboratory and the study; the greatest publicity was gained for the “new school”; and the investigator who, until the age of one-and-forty, had lived at Pavia, remote from the world, became involved in unending controversy. By the best elements of Italian political radicalism Lombroso was now regarded as leader; and a little later also, during the years 1880 and 1890, through the support of the slowly developing Marxist School of Socialism,[^[44]] Lombroso found himself leader in a movement at first dominated entirely by “intellectuals.” It soon appeared that the retired and modest investigator was none the less a formidable opponent, whose voice could make itself heard in all the great questions of public life, and far beyond the bounds of Italy. I need mention here only the two great epidemics of anarchism and anti-Semitism, whose flood-tide fell in this period between 1880 and 1892.

Lombroso was a man of harmonious type, a radical through and through, one who could not understand that anyone who had once grasped a truth should be induced to conceal it from social class-considerations. What those may have to suffer who are ill-adapted for the utterance of half-truths, and who are averse from compromise, Lombroso had learned when he came to publish his researches into the cause of pellagra, the characteristic endemic disease of Northern Italy.