ABSTRACT
Child murder and white-collar crime, one might think, sit at the opposite ends of the criminal spectrum. But there is a tendency to attribute financial wrongdoing too to the vagaries of individual personality, to the predilections of a minority of ‘rotten apples in the barrel’. Those studying the history of white-collar crime have their own version of social crime: they present fraud not as a strategy of poverty but as a strategy of respectability. The chapter explains whether there is any basis for the belief that some individuals are predisposed to criminality. This focus does prove extremely useful, but perhaps not in the way that one might wish. The attribution of motive is of course one of the most daunting tasks that the historian of crime–or of anything else–ever has to tackle. Hindsight can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be highly misleading.
