THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY
The true significance of criminal anthropology is a matter with which
few outside Italy have any real acquaintance, and least of all do those
understand it who have most forcibly attacked Lombroso’s methods of work
on account of their alleged defects.
What is, then, the real significance of this doctrine? It is not merely
that it is the starting-point of the reform movement in criminal
procedure, in penal methods, and in the theory of jurisprudence; this,
indeed, accounts for its practical significance. But its importance
reaches far beyond the traditional contest between the prosecuting
counsel and the experts, as to whether, in the case of an individual
accused person, responsibility is diminished or absent. In legal
circles, Lombroso does not play the undesirable rôle of the alienist who
appeals to the prosecutor or to the judge with the assertion: “This man
belongs to me, not to you, for he is a patient, an invalid.” But
Lombroso, in the name of criminal anthropology, appeals to all those
responsible for the enforcement of the criminal law in the following
terms: “You are upon a false road. Neither the accused, nor the accuser,
nor, finally, society at large, will be in the least helped or satisfied
by your methods, by which you study the _crime_ dialectically and
inquisitorially, and endeavour to apportion the punishment to the degree
of blame. Criminal anthropology is not satisfied with demanding, with
Mittelstaedt and Kraepelin, that we should do away with imprisonment,
and abandon any attempt to measure out punishment. Criminal anthropology
declares that the interest of society lies, not with the individual
crime alone, but with the criminal. Every criminal is, in fact, even
before the necessary social reaction has set in against him, or it may
be on his behalf, the object of positive scientific study—_i.e._, of
anthropological study. To ascertain whether his nature has been moulded
by endogenous or by exogenous factors, to determine whether we have to
do with a criminal nature (a born criminal), with an accidental or an
occasional criminal, with an insane or a degenerate criminal, is the
affair solely of positive science, of anthropology, with methods
peculiarly its own.” Thus, when we rightly comprehend the life-work of
Lombroso, we see that it is completely erroneous to assert that the
object of study of criminal anthropology is merely the born criminal,
and that its content is solely the description and elucidation of his
characteristics.
Everything belonging to inherited human nature, to the social structure,
to the economic system and economic history, to justice, to geological,
climatical, and meteorological conditions as determining factors of
human conduct, all determinative cosmic processes—in short, the
reciprocal action between the individual and his environment in the
widest possible sense, and the precise determination of the socially
important characters of the individual—all these are, for Lombroso, the
subject-matter of anthropology; and if a conflict arises between the
individual (thus influenced) and the traditional rights or interests of
society, they are the subject-matter of criminal anthropology. Criminal
anthropology would, and must, exist, even if the idea of responsibility,
and the psychological and legal decisions and traditions based upon that
idea, were non-existent.
A broad-minded general review of the necessity and the causal
connection, in consequence of which inheritance from nearer and more
remote ancestors determines the nature of the individual from his
entrance into the world, and of the inescapable influences which the
world-all as a unity and as a totality, and also through the individual
forces of organized matter and highly organized human society, exercises
on the individual, so that the latter is compelled to act in whatever
manner the operation of these forces determine, whilst all the time he
is under the illusory belief that he desires so to act, and is liable to
be blamed for his actions—this view of the ἓν καὶ πᾶν, of the totality
of the cosmic process, interpermeated throughout by the spirit of life,
and in whose eternal unity and endless manifoldedness the differences
between normal and abnormal, healthy and unhealthy, would seem utterly
without importance—this is the _positive_ view of the world, which from
the very beginning guided Lombroso in his researches. I do not propose
to consider at any length the question whether this view involves
certain dogmatic assumptions. I myself do not think so. In any case, it
is to this view of the world we owe the overwhelming accumulation of
facts which, between the years 1845 and 1860, was effected in the
different fields of natural science. We may also draw attention to the
manner in which the growth of positivism was accompanied by a
development of the industrial arts and by the consequent transformation
of economic life. In a brief Appendix to this work an account is given
of the facts discovered during this period—one characterized by a
temporary realism in politics and by the development of a realistic and
naturalistic art and poetry, and remarkable also for discoveries in
chemistry and physics, with consequent important practical applications.
Thus, for example, the new idea regarding man’s place in Nature
(involving also a new idea of man’s relationship to his social
environment) led to a new artistic method of representing humanity.
In this period, the time of Lombroso’s youth—that of the maturity of
Moleschott, Darwin, R. Mayer, Bunsen, Lyell, Pflüger, and Helmholtz—it
was possible to gain some respect for facts, the enormous accumulation
of which had overwhelmed those who were playing at “natural philosophy”
during the two preceding generations. _Positive_ facts, in an abundance
known to no previous and to no subsequent period in history, were the
foundation of positivism, which then became a principle of investigation
and of explanation. Upon this foundation, and with the aid of this
principle, criminal anthropology was erected. From far-reaching
conceptual analyses, and even from distinct definitions, Lombroso was
preserved, because he accepted as a fact only that which had definitely
been observed, whether as object or as process. His respect for facts
was boundless. It is ridiculous to reproach him with not having
personally observed every single fact of which he makes use. Read his
books, and see the enormous mass of statistical material requisite for
his researches. Wide general conclusions can be reached by no other road
than that of statistics (see above, p. 10).
It must be freely admitted that Lombroso, in his continuous hunger for
material, in his insatiable, unresting desire for new, important, rich,
and rare facts—a greed of the intellect from which nothing was more
remote than mere sensationalism—did not confine his attention to matters
directly observed by himself, nor was he always satisfied with
statistically registered details, but frequently utilized facts of a
singular nature—inadequately warranted facts, which, on the face of the
matter, should have been more strenuously verified. Among these are
certain anecdotes from the lives of celebrated men. To the same category
belongs his credulous acceptance as facts of the processes observed by
him in his “spiritualistic” experiences. This is a matter to which
further reference will be made in a later chapter.
Lombroso’s positivism had one consequence of great importance to
criminal anthropology. “Anthropology,” in his view, embraced all the
facts which, proximately or remotely, determine the being and life of
man. But he had a preference for observing and utilizing
_states_—_i.e._, persistent facts—in place of observing and utilizing
_processes_. Thus it happened that Lombroso’s all-embracing
anthropology, which was far more comprehensive than anthropology as
understood by Virchow, Broca, and Mantegazza, availed itself more
frequently and more thoroughly of anthropometrical and descriptive data
than of the results of experiment, which must first be planned and then
registered, whereas congenital or acquired physical characters are
always ready for observation, and may easily be submitted to serial
study and to statistical treatment. He had little inclination for the
clinical observation of transient, morbid processes, although he did not
disregard this field. In spite of his conviction that mental disorders
are diseases of the brain, he did not regard the brain as something
which man carries about in his skull as he carries his watch in his
pocket; he studied the sick brain of an acute maniac in its organic
connection with the entire life-process, in its dependence upon the
social conditions of life, in its subordination to hereditary
influences—and this inheritance he was accustomed to trace back to the
first beginnings of organic life, regarding man as the final product of
a cosmic causal chain. Thus, to him the permanent documents, the
“stigmata,” in which these resultant effects of remote causality find a
universal and permanent expression, necessarily seemed to him to be of
greater importance than the transient phenomena of clinical observation.
The “types,” the categories of criminals, of geniuses, pseudo-geniuses,
and cretins, must, he considered, be more worthy of observation than the
impulses to speech and movement of the maniac or the katatonic. So,
also, he was fascinated by epilepsy, by the trance-state of
“spiritualistic” mediums, exhibiting in a high degree phenomena always
alike, always recurring in the same manner, whereas the internal
processes in the psyche which eluded objective research attracted his
observation less, although he was one of the first who appreciated at
its true value Fechner’s idea of psycho-physics.
Moreover, the phenomena of experimental physiology and pathology, which
would otherwise have been most interesting to him, were rendered
inaccessible to him in consequence of the elaborate technicalities of
the pathological and clinical laboratories. To this category belong
racial variability, the hereditary influence of social factors upon
social predisposition, the influence of the constitution of the soil, of
climate, and of the seasons, upon the most diverse manifestations of
human activity, and the significance of cosmic factors. The inevitable
result of this was that German biology, and, above all, German
psychiatry, which endeavoured to unriddle everything, either at the
bedside of the living patient in the hospital or in the brain of the
deceased patient in the laboratory, did not understand, and could not
understand, what Lombroso was really driving at with his anthropology.
Now let me attempt to summarize the matter in a few words. Lombroso’s
mind was permeated with the idea of the unity of a universe under the
dominion of strict law, of an invariable uniformity of principle
throughout the world, within which the human being is subjected to laws
identical with those to which crystals, plants, and lower animals are
subordinated; and the understanding of these laws could, he was
convinced, be obtained only by the establishment of positive facts. In
so far as these facts relate to human beings, they comprise in their
totality the science of anthropology.
Certain human actions by which the safety of society is endangered are
no less determined than is the secretion of the urine or the heart’s
beat. It is a stupid blunder to allow the social reaction in response to
such actions to depend upon the blameworthiness of the offender. The
social reaction has one purpose, and one only—the safety of society.
Anthropology, utilizing all the methods at its disposal, will throw
light on the determining causes of anti-social actions, and thus by
anthropology we shall be guided in our choice of means for the
preservation of social security.
That this view forbids us even to moot the idea of “responsibility” is
perfectly obvious.[42] Thus it gives us no basis whatever for
establishing or denying responsibility in the individual instance, or of
determining its extent if it exists. Lombroso provides a scale of
measurement neither for punishment nor for responsibility.