Lombroso, Cesare (1835-1909) was a sociologist, the founder of the school of criminal anthropology in Italy. He was born in Verona on November 6, 1835 in a family of wealthy landowners. He received medical education at the universities of Pavia, Padua and Vienna. He independently mastered such disciplines as ethnolinguistics, social hygiene and psychiatry. A decisive role in the intellectual formation of Lombroso was played by the philosophy of positivism, which affirmed the priority of scientific
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Lombroso, Cesare (1835-1909) was a sociologist, the founder of the school of criminal anthropology in Italy. He was born in Verona on November 6, 1835 in a family of wealthy landowners. He received medical education at the universities of Pavia, Padua and Vienna. He independently mastered such disciplines as ethnolinguistics, social hygiene and psychiatry. A decisive role in the intellectual formation of Lombroso was played by the philosophy of positivism, which affirmed the priority of scientific knowledge obtained by experimental means. His first anthropometric research began in the early 1860s, when he was a military doctor and took part in a campaign to combat banditry in southern Italy. The extensive statistical material collected by Lombroso was an important contribution to the development of social hygiene, criminal anthropology, and in the short term, the sociology of crime. As a result of the generalization of the empirical data obtained, Lombroso concluded that the backward socio-economic conditions of life in southern Italy caused the reproduction there of anatomically and mentally anomalous type of people, an anthropological species that found its expression in the criminal personality - "a criminal man." This anomaly was revealed by anthropometric and psychiatric examination, which opened up opportunities for predictive assessments of the dynamics of crime. These conceptual approaches of Lombroso posed the problem of the responsibility of the society that reproduced crime, thus challenging the position of official criminology, which placed responsibility solely on the person who broke the law.
The most valuable part of Lombroso’s scientific heritage consists of studies on the sociology of political crime – Political Crime and Revolution (Il delitto politico e le rivoluzioni, 1890), Anarchists. Gli anarchici Studio di psicologia e sociologia criminale (1895), Genio e follia (1897). The phenomenon of political crime, widespread in Italy at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries in the form of anarchist terrorism, Lombroso explored from the point of view of the individual consciousness of a political criminal - a person sacrificially devoted to the utopian ideal of social justice. The nature of this social behavior, driven by the ideas of political vandalism, Lombroso convincingly explained the crisis of parliamentary democracy in Italy, the corruption of politicians, the devaluation of the ideals of social justice.
The criminological ideas of Lombroso have gained wide popularity in Russia. They are represented by numerous both lifetime and posthumous Russian editions of his scientific works. In 1897, Lombroso, who participated in the congress of Russian doctors, received an enthusiastic reception in Russia. In his memoirs devoted to the Russian episode of his biography, Lombroso reflected a sharply negative vision of the social order of Russia typical of his contemporary Italian left, which he severely condemned for police arbitrariness (“the suppression of thought, conscience and character of the individual”) and authoritarian methods of exercising power.
In Soviet Russia, the term Lombrosianism was widely used to refer to the anthropological school of criminal law, one of the trends in bourgeois theory of law (according to the criteria of the class approach). Lombroso’s doctrine of the natural-born criminal was particularly criticized. In the opinion of Soviet jurists, it contradicted the principle of legality in the fight against crime, had an anti-people and reactionary orientation, since it condemned the revolutionary actions of the exploited masses. With this deliberately biased, ideological approach, Lombroso’s merits in the study of the root causes of extremist, protest forms of social struggle, which found expression in political terrorism, and more generally in political crime, were ignored.