ABSTRACT
Science is based on comparisons, and criminology is no exception to that rule. For example, the crime rate of a country cannot be considered as high or low without comparing it to the crime rates of other countries. It is probably for that reason that since crime statistics were available for a few countries, the
rst criminologists started comparing them. e pioneers in that eld were French-speaking authors like Adolphe Quételet [(1831) 1987] and Alphonse de Candolle [(1830) 1987a, (1832) 1987b], followed by Gabriel Tarde [1886] with his book Comparative Criminality (La criminalité comparée). Later, such members of the Italian Positive School as Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri also included international comparisons in some of their works. In that context, it is interesting to point out that from the very beginning, some of these authors were fully aware of the limitations of such comparisons. us, de Candolle [(1830) 1987a] was probably not only the rst author to acknowledge the problem of the dark gure of crime [Beirne, 1993:105] but also the rst one to point out that international comparisons were almost impossible [de Candolle, (1832) 1987b] and to criticize the methodology applied by Quételet [(1831) 1987] for such comparisons.
