The Positive School of Criminology: Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901Ferri, Enrico
Science
The Positive School of Criminology: Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901
Ferri, Enrico
Criminal anthropology
Gradually the anthropocentric illusion has been compelled to give way
before the results of science, and today the theories of Darwin have
become established among our ideas. But another illusion still remains,
and science, working in the name of reality, will gradually eliminate
it, namely the illusion that the nineteenth century has established a
permanent order of society. While the geocentric and anthropocentric
illusions have been dispelled, the illusion of the immobility and
eternity of classes still persists. But it is well to remember that in
Holland in the sixteenth century, in England in the seventeenth, in
Europe since the revolution of 1789, we have seen that freedom of
thought in science, literature and art, for which the bourgeoisie
fought, triumphed over the tyranny of the mediaeval dogma. And this
condition, instead of being a glorious but transitory stage, is supposed
to be the end of the development of humanity, which is henceforth
condemned not to perfect itself any more by further changes. This is the
illusion which serves as a fundamental argument against the positive
school of criminology, since it is claimed that a penal justice
enthroned on the foundations of Beccaria and Carrara would be a
revolutionary heresy. It is also this illusion which serves as an
argument against those who draw the logical consequences in regard to
the socialistic future of humanity, for the science which takes its
departure front the work of Copernicus, Galilei and Darwin arrives
logically at socialism. Socialism is but the natural and physical
transformation of the economic and social institutions. Of course, so
long as the geocentric and anthropocentric illusions dominate, it is
natural that the lore of stability should impress itself upon science
and life. How could this living atom, which the human being is,
undertake to change that order of creation, which makes of the earth the
center of the universe and of man the center of life? Not until science
had introduced the conception of a natural formation and transformation,
of the solar system, as well as of the fauna and flora, did the human
mind grasp the idea that thought and action can transform the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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