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.
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