ABSTRACT
The development of positivism within criminology and its continuing impact on the discipline are explored in this chapter. While largely centring on individual positivism, the ‘social positivism’ of Quetelet and Guerry is also considered. Attention is given to positivism’s role in the ‘othering’ of groups or individuals perceived as different. Stressing the importance of documenting criminology’s past, it relates assumptions about individual predisposition to criminality that preoccupied Lombroso and his colleagues to the eugenicist movement and the horrors of the Holocaust. As with many of the chapters, case studies are included, such as the extraordinary meeting that occurred between Tolstoy and Lombroso in 1897. Chapter 3 concludes by bringing the debate over positivism up to date by considering current developments in biosocial criminology and the critique of this strand of theory.
