CHAPTER IV

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.