Content area
Full text
Beirne traces the intellectual history of criminology, taking us through Beccaria's Dei Delitti e Delle Pene (1764), Adolphe Quetelet's analysis of the "Social Mechanics of Crime," Guerry's Statistique Morale (1833), Tarde and the Neoclassical Criminology, and Goring's The English Convict (1913), while focusing on the development of positivist thinking and methodology. Beccaria and Tarde are examples of thinkers not usually thought of in those terms, whereas the others are classic examples of positivists.
What Beirne does, chapter by chapter, is to qualify or even contradict some virtually axiomatic "truths" about these authors. For example, the picture of Cesare Beccaria that emerges here is quite different from the one provided by textbooks, which regard him as the founder of classical criminology, opposed to the positivist school. Beccaria is said to have viewed individuals as rational, volitional actors; therefore laws should only be sufficiently hard to deter from crime, and they should be conducive to predictability, proportional to the crime, etc. Some latter-day commentators have also claimed that Beccaria was not interested in Homo criminalis but only in Homo penalis. Beirne shows, however, that Beccaria did write about "criminal man" and furthermore about laws that determine his behaviour. Beccaria was clearly influenced not only by the humanism of the Enlightenment but also by the current Scottish "science-of-man" perspective: he understood criminals and criminal behaviour causally in material and social terms, rather than in merely individualistic ones. Beirne attributes Beccaria's unclear language, to his need for self-protection, which has not been...