The Positive School of Criminology: Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901Ferri, Enrico
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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
This same anthropological factor also includes that which each one of us
has: the race character. Nowadays the influence of race on the destinies
of peoples and persons is much discussed in sociology, and there are
one-sided schools that pretend to solve the problems of history and
society by means of that racial influence alone, to which they attribute
an absolute importance. But while there are some who maintain that the
history of peoples is nothing but the exclusive product of racial
character, there are others who insist that the social conditions of
peoples and individuals are alone determining. The one is as much a
one-sided and incomplete theory as the other. The study of collective
society or of the single individual has resulted in the understanding
that the life of society and of the individual is always the product of
the inextricable net of the anthropological, telluric and social
elements. Hence the influence of the race cannot be ignored in the study
of nations and personalities, although it is not the exclusive factor
which would suffice to explain the criminality of a nation or an
individual. Study, for instance, manslaughter in Italy, and, although
you will find it difficult to isolate one of the factors of criminality
from the network of the other circumstances and conditions that produce
it, yet there are such eloquent instances of the influence of racial
character, that it would be like denying the existence of daylight if
one tried to ignore the influence of the ethnical factor on
criminality.
In Italy there are two currents of criminality, two tendencies which are
almost diametrically opposed to one another. The crimes due to hot blood
and muscle grow in intensity from northern to southern Italy, while the
crimes against property increase from south to north. In northern Italy,
where movable property is more developed, the crime of theft assumes a
greater intensity, while crimes due to conditions of the blood are
decreasing on account of the lesser poverty and the resulting lesser
degeneration of the people. In the south, on the other hand, crimes
against property are less frequent and crimes of blood more frequent.
Still there also are in southern Italy certain cases where criminality
of the blood is less frequent, and you cannot explain this in any other
way than by the influence of racial character. If you take a
geographical map of manslaughter in Italy, you will see that from the
minimum, from Lombardy, Piedmont, and Venice, the intensity increases
until it reaches its maximum in the insular and peninsular extreme of
the south. But even there you will find certain cases in which
manslaughter shows a lesser intensity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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