Cesare Lombroso
Overview
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
criminologist
Criminology
Criminology is the scientific study of the nature, extent, causes, and control of criminal behavior in both the individual and in society...
and founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology
Italian school of criminology
The Italian school of criminology was founded at the end of the 19th century by Cesare Lombroso and two of his Italian disciples, Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo .- Lombroso's conception of the "atavistic born criminal" :...
. Lombroso rejected the established Classical School
Classical school
The Classical School in criminology is usually a reference to the 18th-century work during the Enlightenment by the utilitarian and social contract philosophers Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria. Their interests lay in the system of criminal justice and penology and, indirectly through the...
, which held that crime
Crime
Crime is the breach of rules or laws for which some governing authority can ultimately prescribe a conviction...
was a characteristic trait of human nature
Human nature
Human nature refers to the distinguishing characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that humans tend to have naturally....
. Instead, using concepts drawn from physiognomy
Physiognomy
Physiognomy is the assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, especially the face...
, early eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
, psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...
and Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...
, Lombroso's theory of anthropological criminology
Anthropological criminology
Anthropological criminology is a field of offender profiling, based on perceived links between the nature of a crime and the personality or physical appearance of the offender...
essentially stated that criminality was inherited
Heredity
Heredity is the passing of traits to offspring . This is the process by which an offspring cell or organism acquires or becomes predisposed to the characteristics of its parent cell or organism. Through heredity, variations exhibited by individuals can accumulate and cause some species to evolve...
, and that someone "born criminal" could be identified by physical defects
Congenital disorder
A congenital disorder, or congenital disease, is a condition existing at birth and often before birth, or that develops during the first month of life , regardless of causation...
, which confirmed a criminal as savage, or atavistic
Atavism
Atavism is the tendency to revert to ancestral type. In biology, an atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations before. Atavisms can occur in several ways...
.
Lombroso was born in Verona
Verona
Verona ; German Bern, Dietrichsbern or Welschbern) is a city in the Veneto, northern Italy, with approx. 265,000 inhabitants and one of the seven chef-lieus of the region. It is the second largest city municipality in the region and the third of North-Eastern Italy. The metropolitan area of Verona...
on 6 November 1835 to a wealthy Jewish family.
Quotations
Unfortunately, goodness and honor are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses.
Die Welt (1909); also in A Treasury of Jewish Quotations (1985) by Joseph L. Baron
Genius is one of the many forms of insanity.
As quoted in Born under Saturn: the character and conduct of artists : a documented history from antiquity to the French Revolution (1963) by Margot Wittkower
Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics.
p. x
The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities.
Pt. II, ch. 2
The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand.
Pt. III, ch. 3
"Lawsuit mania"...a continual craving to go to law against others, while considering themselves the injured party.
Pt. III, ch. 3