ABSTRACT
Until interest in classical criminology revived recently, scientific criminology was assumed to have begun with a series of late 19th century writings inspired by an Italian Doctor, Lombroso. Today, he is widely credited with having drawn up the scientific manifesto reorientating criminology away from its connection with crime and the rational administration of a judicial mechanism, towards studying the criminal and the conditions which created the criminal. Lombroso was not alone – there has been, and still is, a vast network of scholars and research projects dedicated to reducing the problem of crime to the problem of the criminal. Although an individualist orientation has been a major tendency in positivism, its desire to escape legal categories is epistemological: how does one create a science which avoids taking as its object of analysis something that another discipline, ie the criminal law, has been responsible for defining? Moreover, the ideology of the criminal law appeared to institutionalise a purely abstract or formal self, rather than deal with real people exhibiting real characteristics. Criminological positivism wanted to define the limits of its intellectual horizons for itself, and thus argued at its inception that the solution to understanding the problem of crime was to study the criminal and the factors which constitute him... but who or what or where is the criminal? A widely accepted solution has been the methodology our opening proverb outlines.
