GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING LOMBROSO’S LIFE-WORK AS A SOCIAL
REFORMER, HIS METHODS, AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
Lombroso’s life-work was by no means confined to the highly specialized
field of criminal anthropology. For more than thirty years he was
engaged in the description and elucidation, in a very large number of
monographs and handbooks, of various social ills—crime, prostitution,
alcoholism, pellagra, anarchism, revolts, anti-Semitism. It was as
pathologist and anthropologist that his attention was, in the first
instance, drawn to these matters; and it was his aim to show that these
phenomena—together with many others of which his study was merely
occasional—owe their origin to the typical characteristics of the
anti-social individual.
To this aim, and to his discoveries, under the guidance of this aim, in
the most diverse fields of human experience and knowledge, are due his
peculiar significance in the history of science.
He was an anthropologist, but he studied human beings, not in artificial
isolation, nor in respect merely of individual organs, such as the skull
or the brain—he studied man as he always manifests himself, as the
member of a community, man more or less perfectly adapted to his
environment, and, in so far as he is imperfectly adapted, in conflict
with the hostile forces of that environment. He studied especially the
ill-adapted varieties of mankind, and those which lack the faculty of
adaptation; and in this study he endeavoured to discover “types.”
As a thinker, his nature resembled that of Spinoza. Like Schopenhauer,
Buckle, Quetelet, and Vico, he was one of the most notable advocates of
the determinist conception of society and of history. Looking far beyond
the horizon of a merely economic view of human society, he sought and
found the laws of development of human society rather in the laws of
organic nature.
Undoubtedly many of his ideas and tendencies are in harmony with the
materialist conception of history, and for this reason we find many of
his most distinguished pupils and collaborators in the Marxian camp; but
it was impossible that a man endowed as he was with an intuitive
capacity for the understanding of the conception of the biological
determination of social phenomena should be content to deduce the
actions of individuals and the fate of a nation from the economic
structure of the society in which the individual and national life are
passed.
In his conception of human life, determinism is, indeed, so self-evident
a premise of research, that it is not even discussed, and is hardly so
much as mentioned; in this respect Lombroso stands on the same platform
with the supporters of the materialist conception of history.
But the extent to which, in its detailed application, his biological
determinism leads to different results from those which are the outcome
of the economic determinism of the Marxians will best be shown by a
specific illustration.
This illustration relates to the elucidation of the causes of a tumult
which occurred in Esthonia in the year 1905. The judge before whom the
persons arrested during the suppression of the revolt have been brought
wishes to discover who were the ringleaders; the psychologist wishes to
ascertain to what extent imitation, suggestion, or hypnotic automatism,
has impelled certain ordinarily law-abiding citizens to take part in the
disturbances; the editor of the local Marxian newspaper demonstrates the
causes of the revolt by an analysis of capitalism in general, and of the
economic and social characteristics of the government of the disturbed
section; the reactionary politician will consider that the fault lies in
irreligion, in the disturbing effect of revolutionary agitation, and in
the decline in the authority of a government in which constitutionalism
has replaced absolutism, and whose punitive measures have lost their
former repressive severity. But if Lombroso had been summoned to the
prisons of Liebau, Riga, Dorpat, and Reval, and had been invited to
ascertain the causes of the Letto-Esthonian jacquerie, he would have
examined the meteorological records at the time of the disturbances;
would have inquired carefully regarding the racial origin of the persons
arrested; would have looked for stigmata of degeneration in their
physiognomy and physical characteristics, especially those of the skull;
would have noted how many epileptics, hysterics, lunatics, and
alcoholics there were among them; would have distinguished the habitual
vagrants and those with previous convictions. Among the women arrested
during the jacquerie, he would have asked how many were menstruating at
the time; he would have made a list of the adolescents entirely
dominated by fanatical doctrines; a list of the agents provocateurs; a
list of those instigated by feelings of personal animosity against the
local landed gentry and their retainers. And when all this had been
done, it is very doubtful if among the accused there would then remain
any considerable residuum in whom an advocate of the materialist
conception of history would be able to prove the existence of a purely
economic determination to the offences with which they have been
charged. And even if Lombroso, as is not improbable, should have found
among those arrested or liable to arrest some disciples of Bebel or of
Schönlank, his analysis of their inherited tendencies, their
gynæcological state, their sensibility and reflexes, the shape of their
skulls and the extent of their visual fields, would ultimately bring to
light determinants of their actions quite other than their acquired
orthodox Marxism, which a jurist of the school of Plehve would have
denounced as the _vera causa_, or sufficient reason, for their
participation in the disturbance.
In no other way can we obtain so clear an idea of Lombroso as a
sociologist as from a study of his remarkable book on political
criminals and revolutions.[33] (See above, Chapter III., pp. 64–79.)
Moreover, the manner in which he was led to undertake the writing of
this work is in itself especially characteristic of his methods of
investigation.[34] In the year 1884 there was an exhibition at Turin of
the relics of those who fought for Italian freedom; in this exhibition
were to be seen likenesses of the originators and leaders of this
movement, the men who worked and fought beside Mazzini, Garibaldi, and
Cavour. It was the study of these physiognomies that led Lombroso to
draw his distinction between revolutionists and rioters, and led further
to his general analysis of political criminals. This course is extremely
characteristic of his method of research. Lombroso at all times and in
all places starts from the immediate study of individuals, and proceeds
thence to the formulation of general sociological theories. This method
of procedure differentiates him as an isolated phenomenon among modern
sociologists; but the method was that employed by Goethe and Lavater.
To enable us to characterize more closely Lombroso’s method in
sociology, let us quote from two of our greatest thinkers, Kant and
Goethe. Kant writes: “Thoughts without contents are empty, intuitions
without concepts are blind.” Goethe says (“Zur Morphologie,” p. 2): “To
the man of understanding, to take note of the particular, to observe
with precision, to distinguish each from other, is in a sense that which
arises out of an idea, and also that which leads up to an idea. Such a
one has found his own way home through the labyrinth, without troubling
himself about a clue which might have provided him with a more direct
path; to such a one a piece of metal which has not been passed through
the coining press, and whose value therefore is not apparent, seems a
troublesome possession. He, on the other hand, who stands on higher
ground is apt to despise the individual instance, and to comprise in a
lifedestroying generalization that which can possess life only in
isolation.”
In hardly any province of thought is the contrast thus characterized by
the great morphologist and observer so clearly marked as in the science
of society.
Lombroso has described for us individual human beings to the number of
many thousand, personally examined by himself in respect both of mental
qualities and of bodily characteristics. In addition, we owe to him a
number of personal descriptions of deceased celebrities—“pathographies,”
as they have recently been termed; these comprise the vast material
collected by him in his research into the nature of genius. His work on
“Cardanus” (Girolamo Cardano [Jerome Cardan], natural philosopher and
physician, 1501–1575), published in 1855, when he was still a student,
was the first modern pathography; it contains the germ of Lombroso’s
theory of genius.
The use he is able to make of such individuals for the elucidation of
sociological ideas is dependent upon his own peculiar gifts. He has an
extraordinarily keen insight into whatever is important and
characteristic in an individual; and his grasp of the significance of
the facts thus obtained is due to his remarkable talent for the
discovery of analogies. But if he had been endowed with this talent
alone, a talent possessed also by the German natural philosophers of the
beginning of the nineteenth century, he would not have gone beyond the
formulation of mere hypotheses; but owing to his wealth of coinable
metal (to use Goethe’s simile)—owing, that is to say, to his possession
of a limitless abundance of intuitions peculiar to himself—he was able
to pass beyond the simple formulation of brilliant hypotheses; his
intuitive endowments enabled him to say with Bacon: “Intellectum longius
a rebus non abstrahimus, quam ut rerum imagines et radii (ut in sensu
fit) coire possint.”
Thus, clear perceptions, the utilization of analogy as an organon of
research, a grasp of the important and characteristic elements of
concrete phenomena—these are the means employed by Lombroso in
sociological research. Superadded to these, there arose in him, as a
result of his mental development, a strong conviction of the importance
of enumeration and mensuration, inducing him to accumulate a colossal
mass of data relating to all the subjects investigated by him, to
collect statistical data of anthropometry, demography, economic, moral,
criminal, and social statistics. It was, moreover, a fact of great
importance to the extension of sociological knowledge, that his
collection of data was notably facilitated by brilliantly-grounded and
broadly-based official statistical inquiries instituted in Italy during
the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and also by the
results of comprehensive parliamentary investigations. In the absence of
the great “Inchiesta Agraria” (Agrarian Investigation), his researches
into the causes of pellagra, the widely-diffused and destructive disease
affecting the agricultural labourers and small farmers of Northern and
Central Italy, would hardly have been possible. Equally important for
the anthropometrical researches which, when army surgeon in Calabria in
the year 1862, he initiated upon the mixed population of that region
(then containing no Latin admixture, but composed of Greek, Albanian,
and Sicilio-African elements), was the publication of the recruiting
statistics, by means of which it is comparatively easy to ascertain the
racial composition of the Italian people; whilst to German anthropology
and sociology this indispensable material is almost as inaccessible as
are the Italian plans of mobilization.
Quantitatively considered, the greater part of Lombroso’s life-work has
been devoted to the study of social phenomena bearing upon the fact that
every society contains certain categories of pathological or abnormal
individuals, whose behaviour has a disturbing influence upon the regular
social life. But however interesting and important in relation to the
practical working of State and society may be the social
interconnections thus brought to light, it is certainly not possible
from the knowledge of these alone to deduce a system of sociology; for
example, we do not obtain an adequate knowledge of the remarkable social
phenomenon of prostitution simply by means of the biological study of
the anomalies of a large number of individual prostitutes, and by the
proof that these anomalies are analogous to those whose presence may be
demonstrated in criminal types. For, although this explains the
sociological fact of the existence of a supply of purchaseable sexual
pleasure, it does not explain the existence of the demand for the same
commodity. Lombroso was gradually induced, not only by the critical
powers with which he was so richly endowed (and which led him repeatedly
to the view that most of the phenomena he was investigating were
produced by purely social factors), but, in addition, by the general
tendency of his mind, to show, not merely that the existence of numerous
abnormalities and degenerative varieties of mankind disturbs the life of
society, but, further, that the political and economic development of
the civilized nations gives rise to the appearance of abnormalities
which themselves induce social reactions—and to demonstrate that these
cannot be got rid of by reformatory measures, will not disappear with
the removal of the cause, but lead to permanent biological individual
variations, and, through inheritance, produce anomalies for generations
to come, and in this way give rise to long-enduring social injury or
disturbance.
In the first place it is to him that we owe the knowledge that a given
social and economic order can give rise to transmissible biological
anomalies, and that those who suffer from these anomalies, ill-adapted
for any social and economic order, necessarily exercise a disturbing
influence in society. It was not merely as a positivist that he was led
to this view, but, above all, as an anthropologist.
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.
No detailed exposition is requisite to show how remote this method of
causal explanation of social phenomena is from the hypothesis that
refers the whole past course of social evolution to the class war, or
regards the class war as the sole factor of importance in the making of
the future. From the standpoint of Lombroso, a moral organization which
would transform its advocates from fighters for the interests of the
community to fighters for the exclusive interests of a class would be
condemned simply as moral insanity.[37] In his work on the anarchists he
expresses himself in this sense (p. 16), here, indeed, with reference to
the governments, which in their political activity are not concerned
exclusively with the interests of a particular class.
He has shown how nature produces socially important differentiations
altogether apart from the co-operation of socially causative factors.
The most important of these differentiations, that between the two
sexes, was described by him exhaustively in the first part of his work
on the female criminal and the prostitute; here, also, he discusses
fully the significance of the natural organization of woman for social
life in relation to motherhood.
His description of the natural organization of woman is only one part of
the important contributions of Lombroso to sociology.
With regard to the natural differentiation of human beings, his work is
summarized in the succeeding paragraphs (I do not think it necessary to
refer here to the numerous passages in his works in which he elaborates,
in greater or less detail, the views I am about to describe; for my
account is based, in addition, more especially upon the direct exchange
of ideas, by word of mouth and by correspondence, during an intimacy of
many years’ duration):
Human beings are differentiated—horizontally, as it were—into tribes and
nations in consequence of original variability, in consequence of
selective œcological factors (soil and climate), and in consequence of
wars, expulsions, and migrations.
This differentiation—greatly influenced by social factors, such as
colonization, miscegenation, etc.—becomes organic, and this organic
differentiation is of very great social importance.
In addition to this, there exists another kind of differentiation,
which, to express it graphically, is vertical in character—viz., the
formation of classes. This depends chiefly upon economic factors, which
are competent to induce organic changes in isolated individuals, but not
to lead to the formation of inheritable types—that is to say, of racial
characteristics. As yet, at any rate, there is no inheritable type of
_homo industrialis_, the proletarian.[38]
In addition to these two varieties of differentiation, there is yet a
third kind, dependent upon purely organic causation, giving rise
continually to new types with a great tendency to inheritance: talent
and genius, the criminal and the saint, the various intermediate stages
of sexual differentiation, which permits of so many nuances in the
intensity of masculinity and femininity in man and woman. These
differences arise altogether independently of social factors—Lombroso
has never suggested the deliberate breeding of supermen—but they give
rise to all-important disturbances and advances in social evolution.
Finally, in Lombroso’s view, the social evils dependent mainly on
economic factors—malnutrition, overwork, unemployment, overcrowding,
town life, vagabondage, accidents, celibacy, venereal diseases,
alcoholism, cachexia—give rise, through the process of reproduction, to
the great army of degenerates, who lack the faculty of adaptation, and
therefore give rise to further disturbances of social life, to
ever-renewed infractions of social order.
No other investigator has done as much as Lombroso for the description
and recognition, by means of exact measurement and numeration, of the
sociologically important, non-ethnic varieties of the human species,
_homo sapiens_. Inspired by the great idea of evolution, he earnestly
endeavoured to elucidate the most obscure secrets of organic life; but
it was precisely by means of his profound knowledge and understanding of
the organic realm that he was safeguarded from attempting to base his
sociological thought upon the superficial analogy between the loose
association of individuals in society and the intimate interconnection
of the cells of a living organism by means of which they are all fused
into a unitary being.
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.