ABSTRACT
In the history of criminology there is hardly any chapter more fascinating and thought-provoking than the twentieth-century developments following the death of Lombroso. As already indicated, the influence of his ideas was very different in different countries. 1 Strongest in Italy and South America, weaker in France and Spain, almost completely absent in Russia. In Germany and Austria, after a great deal of original opposition there was a revival, whereas a different historical process took place somewhat later in the United States. 1 In England the two opposing trends are best represented by Havelock Ellis as leader of the pro-Lombrosian party, Charles Goring as his opponent, with Henry Maudsley standing in the middle. Ellis, while not pretending to produce any original material on the subject, made a conscientious and painstaking attempt ‘to present to the English reader a critical summary of the results of the science now commonly called criminal anthropology’. In this he was highly successful. By no means uncritical, he opposed Lombroso's use of the concept of atavism; he stressed that there was no uniform ‘school’ of criminal anthropology and no real type of born criminal, preferring the phrase ‘moral insensibility’ of the instinctive and habitual criminal. 2 Much of his material is anecdotal and naïve, but he possessed a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the contemporary literature and presented it well. He protests against the accusatorial Anglo-American system of criminal procedure, which heralds ‘the barbaric notion of the duel’, and asks that on questions of insanity at least two experts should be heard, appointed by the judge. He adopts Ferri's concept of ‘social reaction’ in the place of punishment and calls for social reforms instead of mere repression, for education ‘in the true sense’ and for sterilization of the unfit. Like Ellis, Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), the great psychiatrist, was also strongly influenced by the idea of moral insanity as developed earlier in the nineteenth century by James C. Prichard and others. 3 Without completely subscribing to Lombroso's theories he believed in the existence of individuals who, because of congenital or acquired characteristics, are entirely lacking in the capacity for moral feeling and for comprehending moral ideas. This condition, however, was not, as Lombroso thought, a morbid entity, a distinct disease, but could arise from a variety of causes. Crime and madness were both ‘antisocial products of degeneracy’, but crime, he wrote later, was not necessarily a symptom of degeneracy. Similarly to Lombroso, however, he linked epilepsy with physical stigmata of degeneration and with crime. 4
