Cesare Lombroso (1835 - 1909)
Related: anthropology - crime - degenerate - eugenics - Italy - science
Contemporaries: Eadweard Muybridge - Édouard Manet - Johannes Brahms - Henry Spencer Ashbee - Édouard Manet - Félicien Rops - James Abbott McNeill Whistler - William Morris - Mark Twain - Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - Swinburne - Jean-Pierre Brisset - Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam - Paul Cézanne - Walter Pater
Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (2004) - Cesare Lombroso, Guglielmo Ferrero [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Biography
Cesare Lombroso (Verona, November 6, 1835 - Turin, October 19, 1909) was a historical figure in modern criminology, and the founder of the Italian Positivist School of criminology. Lombroso rejected the established Classical School of criminology, which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature. Instead, using concepts drawn from Physiognomy, early Eugenics, Psychiatry and Social Darwinism, Lombroso's theory was that criminality was inherited, and that the born criminal could be identified by physical defects, which confirmed a criminal as savage, or atavistic. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Lombroso [Nov 2005]
Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) was an Italian anthropologist and criminologist. Lombroso was one of the pioneers of the study of human criminal delinquency, but his work was hampered by the received ideas of social Darwinism that were current in his day.
In 1876 Lombroso published L'Uomo delinquente, (Criminal Man), which he later expanded into a multi-volume work. Lombroso measured the shape and size of criminals' heads, and concluded that they displayed atavistic traits that were throwbacks to primitive man. In effect, what Lombroso had created was a new pseudoscience of forensic phrenology. Lombroso concluded that the criminals were born with inherited anti-social traits. His work on this was later pulled into the context of eugenics and other "scientific racism," which had many consequences in the first half of the twentieth century.
Lombroso also advocated humane treatment for criminals. He argued for making rehabilitiation as the chief goal of penology, and against the routine employment of capital punishment. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Lombroso [Sept 2004]
Homosexuality [...]
Some of the first European writings on homosexuality as such were by nineteenth-century forensic and criminal anthropologists such as Cesare Lombroso and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. These authors were invested in demonstrating connections between human behavior and human physiology. In essence, they were responsible for imagining homosexuality as a condition that inhered in individual human bodies, a form of delinquency that marked certain persons as constitutionally delinquent. --http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/anthropology.html [Sept 2004]Related to the evolutionary approach was the argument that homosexuality was a sign of degeneracy. Many believers in the positive school of criminology saw homosexuality as evolutionary degeneracy. They maintained that homosexuals were genetic throwbacks and, as such, behaved in animal-like ways. Cesar Lombroso, the late nineteenth century Italian criminologist, argued that homosexuals were at a lower stage of human development than heterosexuals. Since positivists did not believe in free will, they did not hold homosexuals responsible for their condition. They did believe, however, that homosexuals should be restricted to asylums because they posed a danger to society (Bayer, 1981:20). --http://www.vernonjohns.org/nonracists/dvhomo.html [Sept 2004]
Magnus Hirschfeld [...]
Cesare Lombroso: A man he met when he attended an 1894 medical congress in Rome. Lombroso who wrote Criminal Man in 1889 had a vast collection of data on the physical and psychological traits of criminals and prostitutes. The collection impressed Hirschfeld. Five years later, Hirschfeld would be making a similar collection of data on homosexuals.--http://www.nathanielwandering.net/Science.htm [Sept 2004]Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (2004) - Cesare Lombroso, Guglielmo Ferrero
Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (2004) - Cesare Lombroso, Guglielmo Ferrero [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
About the Author
Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), an internationally famous physician and criminologist, wrote extensively about jurisprudence, psychiatry, human sexuality, and the causes of crime. As a young law student, Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942) assisted Lombroso with research.
Nicole Hahn Rafter is Senior Research Fellow at Northeastern University. Among her many books are Partial Justice: Women, Prisons, and Social Control and Creating Born Criminals. Mary Gibson is Professor of History at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860-1915 and Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology.
Book Description
Cesare Lombroso is widely considered the founder of the field of criminology. His theory of the "born" criminal dominated discussions of criminology in Europe and the Americas from the 1880s into the early twentieth century. His book, La donna delinquente, originally published in Italian in 1893, was the first and most influential book ever written on women and crime. This comprehensive new translation gives readers a full view of his landmark work.
Lombroso’s research took him to police stations, prisons, and madhouses where he studied the tattoos, cranial capacities, and sexual behavior of criminals and prostitutes to establish a female criminal type. Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman anticipated today’s theories of genetic criminal behavior. Lombroso used Darwinian evolutionary science to argue that criminal women are far more cunning and dangerous than criminal men. Designed to make his original text accessible to students and scholars alike, this volume includes extensive notes, appendices, a glossary, and more than thirty of Lombroso’s own illustrations. Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson’s introduction, locating his theory in social context, offers a significant new interpretation of Lombroso’s place in criminology.
Synopsis
A new translation of Cesar Lombroso's La Donna Delinquente, with a new scholarly introduction Cesare Lombroso is widely considered the founder of the field of criminology. His theory of the "born" criminal dominated discussions of criminology in Europe and the Americas from the 1880s into the early twentieth century. His book, La donna delinquente, originally published in Italian in 1893, was the first and most influential book ever written on women and crime. This comprehensive new translation gives readers a full view of his landmark work. Lombroso's research took him to police stations, prisons, and madhouses where he studied the tattoos, cranial capacities, and sexual behavior of criminals and prostitutes to establish a female criminal type. Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman anticipated today's theories of genetic criminal behaviour. Lombroso used Darwinian evolutionary science to argue that criminal women are far more cunning and dangerous than criminal men. Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson's introduction, locating his theory in social context, offers a significant new interpretation of Lombroso's place in criminology.
your Amazon recommendations