ABSTRACT
The participation of two or more persons in the commission of crime is as old as crime itself. Even if we should not accept Freud's theory of the murder of the primal father by his sons as one of the earliest crimes known to mankind, standing at the beginning of human morality (see above, Chapter 17), such joining of forces for criminal purposes must be of very ancient origin. Cain, it is true, appears as a lonely slayer, but if we regard the killings done in the pursuit of blood vengeance as crimes, we find here an institution which, by imposing on the whole tribe the duty to execute an act of collective blood vengeance, was likely to foster co-operation between individual members of the tribe. In modern society the need for cooperation in crime has other roots. It is the growing complexity of modern life which makes such arrangements essential not only in ordinary business pursuits, but equally in criminal activities which differ from lawful ones mainly in the fact that the latter are permitted and the former proscribed. With only very slight exaggeration we can say that whatever is produced in our society—with the exception of highly individual works of art—is the product of the combined activities of a number of human beings. If in the field of crime this is true only to a somewhat lesser degree the reason for the difference lies in the natural reluctance of offenders to run the risks involved in collaboration; but even so the practical significance of associations in crime is very great and still growing. The subject under discussion in the present chapter has of course to be distinguished from the kindred one where crime is the outcome of the atmosphere prevailing in certain sections or sub-sections of our society without actual collaboration of several of its members. To this latter aspect attention has been drawn above in Chapter 21.
