Criminality and economic conditionsBonger, Willem Adriaan
General
Criminality and economic conditions
Bonger, Willem Adriaan
Crime -- Economic aspects
May I here be permitted to make a quotation from an interesting page of
Professor Manouvrier upon this question: “That the effect of
environment is generally understood in too limited a way, we see proved
every day in the appreciation expressed, of the causes that have
determined certain differences of productive power or moral conduct. It
is a question, perhaps, of two brothers. It is said that they have been
brought up exactly in the same manner, that they have received exactly
the same education, and that the question of environment is thus
settled. Immediately the doctors begin to call in atavism, to feel the
bumps of the head, to study facial asymmetry, etc. Anatomy must be
appealed to, since the influence of environment has been eliminated. It
can be put down to bad luck if some bump, some depression, some
asymmetry is not found that will serve, whether or no, to account for a
solution of the question. There remains always, further, the resource
of invoking invisible, hypothetical vices of the internal constitution.
The phrenologists were in a relatively difficult situation; they had to
find a fixed anatomical character, a bump for a function specified in
advance, or they were obliged to imagine a conflict of bump with bump.
The present method is less exacting; it is enough to find no matter
what deviation from morphological perfection, without its being
necessary to show the connection between this deviation and the
physiological inferiority to be explained. But what am I saying? The
question is often of an inferiority of a sociological order, and
trouble is not even taken to make sure, to begin with, that this
corresponds to a psychological inferiority. Yet however indispensable
this may be as a preliminary, it is not enough; it must be ascertained
that this inferiority implies a functional trouble before calling in
pathological anatomy at all hazards.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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