5 - Lombroso's criminal science
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
Summary
ATAVISM AND ANARCHY
You have shown us lubricious and ferocious orangutans with human faces; certainly, being such they can act no other way; if they rape, steal, and kill, it is invariably on account of their nature and their past. The more reason for us to destroy them as soon as one is sure that they are and will remain orangutans. On this account I have no objection to the death penalty if society finds profit in it.
This passage was contained in a letter addressed by Taine to the Italian criminal anthropologist, Cesare Lombroso in 1887 and subsequently published in the preface to the 1895 French edition of Criminal Man.
Taine's support was no doubt welcome; two years earlier at the International Congress of Criminal Anthropology, Lombroso had come under sustained criticism from the French delegates, because of his fatalistic view of the delinquent. The adoption of the Italian approach to crime, argued Lacassagne, one of the leaders of the French group, would mean for jurists and legislators ‘to do nothing but cross their arms, or construct prisons in which to gather these misshapen creatures’.
Part II investigates the terms of Lombroso's fatalism. It compares the ‘positivist’ school of criminal science with ‘classical’ theories of punishment and draws out certain differences between Italian and French positivist language.
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- Faces of DegenerationA European Disorder, c.1848–1918, pp. 109 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
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