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Title: Lombroso’s Anarchy Problem Author: Jeff Shantz Date: 2014 Language: en Topics: criminology, crime, theory, Haymarket, Paris Commune, sociology, social sciences Source: Simply Criminology
Cesare Lombroso, one of the influential founding figures in
criminological social science, dedicated a great deal of his research,
study, and writing to the analysis of anarchists, as, in his view,
prototypical agitators. Indeed, the centrality of concern over anarchism
in his work is often overlooked or forgotten. The anarchists provide one
of the primary resources for Lombroso’s multisectional “Illustrative
Studies in Criminal Anthropology.” Indeed, Lombroso suggests that the
study of the physiognomy of the political criminal provides perhaps the
most practical application of Criminal Anthropology (capitalization in
the original). Lombroso’s interests in anarchists as a significant
criminal type emerge very early on in his work. He develops a lengthy
discussion of the anarchist criminal figure in 1891 in his article
“Illustrative Studies in Criminal Anthropology. III. The Physiognomy of
the Anarchists” published in the journal The Monist.
Such study of anarchists, as the prototypical political criminal,
according to Lombroso, furnishes nothing less than the juridical basis
of political crime, something which had seemed to elude earlier
researchers and their research. Indeed, Lombroso suggests that before
his research it was common for analysts and laypeople alike to conclude
that there was no political crime. Certainly, that was the conclusion of
jurists, Lombroso argues. Note that Lombroso does not address, or seem
even to conceive of political crime as an activity of elite
institutions, such as the government or criminal justice systems.
In a 1900 article, “A Paradoxical Anarchist,” published in Popular
Science Monthly, Lombroso notes that up to that point much of his
research on anarchists had been done only through indirect or secondhand
studies. Those indirect studies involved analysis of data furnished by
journals, legal proceedings, and handwriting analyses (!) of small
numbers of anarchist subjects. He notes, for example, his attempts to
study supposed anarchists Caserio and Luccheni through indirect means.
Lombroso actually bemoans the fact that he has only rarely had the
opportunity to examine a “real live” anarchist directly and “make those
measurements and craniological determinations” without which study is
reduced to an approximation and remains merely hypothetical (1900,
n.p.). Yet none of this stopped him from making a range of rather
extreme claims against anarchists based on no direct contact with any of
his “subjects” and with only limited, often entirely inaccurate,
information about the movements and groups they were said to be a part
of.
At the same time, and despite this lack of meaningful information,
anarchists posed a central and significant concern for Lombroso and,
indeed, serve as significant targets for his research. One might
suggest, in fact, that much of Lombroso’s criminological analysis is
developed through a fascination with anarchism. Without the figure of
the anarchist Lombroso’s work would surely have lacked spectacular
effect and political influence, as well as social impact. And he got
anarchism completely wrong.
In “Anarchy and its Heroes” Lombroso puts his political biases fully on
display and up front (without ever acknowledging that they are simply
his own personal perspectives). In his view, even necessary and just
forms of social change that address the harms faced by some groups in
society are criminal, even if simply because it offends the
sensibilities of a majority (read dominant or hegemonic) group. In the
first paragraph he suggests:
In politics, every violent effort against the established order, against
the old, is punishable for it wounds the majority’s opinions and
sentiments. Even if it constitutes a necessity for an oppressed
minority, judicially it is an anti-social fact and consequently a crime,
often a useless crime, for it awakens a misonéistique reaction. (1897,
2)
Here, despite his critiques of classical criminology, for being an
idealistic utiltarian philosophy rather than science, he shows something
of a utilitarian assessment of acceptable or legitimate social action.
The minority can legitimately be harmed if such harm if palatable to the
majority (the greatest good for the greatest number)—however that
majority might be determined and canvassed. More than this, though,
Lombroso reveals his own underlying belief that one can be, indeed is, a
criminal or madman simply because one does not agree with the majority.
Furthermore, Lombroso’s social ontology emphasizes minimal change and
even them only at the slowest of paces. He envisions society as tending
toward stasis. In his view, expressed in “Anarchy and its Heroes,” in
societies, even advanced economic ones, “the law of inertia dominates”
(1897, 2). This is, for Lombroso, a characteristic that marks the
majority of people in society, as well as the overall tendency of
society itself.
Hereditary anomaly, for Lombroso, provokes moral anomalies. It makes
criminals and anarchists innovators, advocates for progress (1891, 341).
They supposedly suffer from a suppression of “misoneism,” the horror of
novelty. It is this horror of novelty, says Lombroso, that is nearly a
“general rule of humanity” (1891, 341).
For Lombroso, social misoneism is in opposition to ideas of revolt. In
revolts or insurrections, which he distinguishes from revolutionary
change, Lombroso argues, “there only appear madmen and criminals who are
led by their morbid state to feel and to think differently from everyone
else” (1897, 2). Misoneism supposedly restrains normal people from
engaging in such activities.
In this suppression of misoneism, anarchists share another, key, trait
with lunatics and the insane. Lombroso suggests: “Whoever has observed
in asylums the conduct of lunatics, will understand that one of their
characteristics is originality, just as in men of genius; only the
originality of the insane and of moral lunatics, or of born criminals,
is very often absurd or unavailable” (1891, 342).
This, though, far from being a scientific conclusion, is a political
assertion. It is a reflection of Lombroso’s own personal preference.
That society can be, and is, open to change and can, and does, embrace
the new is reflected by the dramatic, and rapid, technology-enhanced,
change in the current period of techno-capitalist globalization and the
internet. Innovation and originality are key catchwords of the current
period of capitalist globalization and have been at least since the rise
of public relations industries in the 1940s. Of course, Lombroso himself
was writing during a period of some of the most rapid change in human
social history, the Industrial Revolution. We might note that Lombroso
did not apply his theory of misoneism to the industrial and corporate
heads who were themselves pushing dramatic change nor did he apply the
theory to politicians creating and/or passing legislation to facilitate
rapid (and often destructive) social and/or environmental changes.
Lombroso makes a false distinction between proper revolutions which he
suggests, rather arbitrarily, are slow and prepared expressions of
ongoing evolution, and revolts which, in his view, are “the precipitous,
artificial incubation at exaggerated temperatures of embryos that due to
this fact are doomed to a certain death” (1897, 2). Lombroso echoes
conservative sociologists of crowds and riots in suggesting that public
uprisings are not expressions of dissent or rational organizing but
rather the result of instigation by “outside agitators”—“rendered more
rapid by some neurotic genius or some historical accident” (1897, 2).
Otherwise revolutions are, in Lombroso’s opinion, slow and gradual.
Furthermore, for Lombroso, revolts respond only to causes that, in his
view, are of little importance, being only local or personal in
character.
Lombroso has an entirely arbitrary delineation of participants in
revolutions and participants in revolts. In his schema only criminals
and madmen are present in the latter.
According to Lombroso, and this is a particular bias of police and
politicians who oppose social movements, criminals participate in
revolts “much more than do honest people” (1897, 2).
Lombroso adds a certain ethnocentrism, reflecting his overarching
bio-evolutionary racist perspective, in going further to suggest that
revolts are also “frequent among the least advanced peoples, like in
Saint-Dominique” (1897, 2).
Never mind Lombroso’s gross assumption that people who do not personally
or actively take part in insurrections do not support or sympathize with
people who do take the responsibility and risk of participation. This
assumption flies in the face of most historical and sociological studies
that suggest there are many who do not participate in such public
mobilizations (as insurrections or uprisings or even street protests)
who do nonetheless support them and/or their participants and/or the
ideals underpinning them. Indeed, social movement theorists have long
identified and analyzed what is called the “free rider syndrome.” This
refers to the situation in which many people who support mass
mobilizations allow others to take the risks associated with popular
efforts and movements to achieve social change, particularly in contexts
of criminalization and repression that attach potentially heavy costs to
participation. Notably, perspectives such as those proffered by Lombroso
actually play into and reinforce an environment of state repression and
criminalization by pathologizing activism and suggesting that it is
criminal activity, rather than a legitimate expression of dissent.
The anarchist advocacy of, and support for, revolts and
insurrections—uprisings against economic exploitation and social
injustice—has serious implications for Lombroso. In his view: “It
follows from this that it is easy to understand that the anarchist
movement is composed for the most part (except for a very few
exceptions, like Reclus and Kropotkin) of criminals and madmen, and
sometimes of both together” (1897, 2).
For Lombroso, misery makes the anarchists failures and rebels. So
opposition to misery becomes a malady. Unfortunately poverty leaves most
anarchists without material for useful novelties. So they turn to bombs
according to Lombroso. For Lombroso, if anarchists had understood that
humanity is misoneic, ruled by caution and hesitant to progress, they
would never have become anarchists in the first place.
The members of the Paris Commune, common folks who revolted against
exploitation, are referred to by Lombroso as having an “innate cruelty.”
They had a “true moral insensibility” (1891, 341). This is marked only
by their refusal to accept conditions of oppression, inferiority, and
subordination as well as poverty and deprivation.
Perversely (we will not say hysterically or insanely), Lombroso suggests
that one of the consistent characteristics of criminal anarchism is
altruism and selflessness, or sentiments of what Kropotkin calls mutual
aid. Indeed, for Lombroso this trait is a certain marker of depravity.
The unfortunate subject of much of Lombroso’s scorn in “Anarchy and Its
Heroes,” Vaillant, is said to be “an exaggeratedly passionate altruist”
(1897, 4). Not only do anarchists like to care for others, share, and
practice mutual aid (a clear marker of depravity in a society driven by
private property and competition), they are passionate (rather than
perfunctory, perhaps) in doing so. Lombroso also relates the stories of
August Spies, Haymarket martyr, of whom all who knew him said he was a
saint. In Lombroso’s telling:
He only earned 19 francs a week, but he still gave two to a friend who
had fallen ill. He even helped a man who had outrageously offended him.
His companions said that if the revolution were ever to triumph it would
be necessary to put him in prison in order to prevent him from harming
the revolution through sentimentality. (1897, 4)
So how does Lombroso manage to construct altruism and selfless
commitments to mutual aid as deviance? Lombroso develops his analysis
further. He writes:
In order to explain this…we must recall what occurs among hysterics like
Vaillant.
Hysteria, which is the sister of epilepsy, and which is in a like
fashion connected with the partial loss of affectivity, any [sic] times
demonstrated along with an exaggerated egoism, certain bursts of
excessive altruism, which is an outgrowth of moral madness and is
dependent upon it — and reveals to us the morbid phenomenon within the
warmest charity. (1897, 4)
Here is a rather classic case of a psychological framework being applied
to address social conditions. Lombroso actually provides a pseudo
scientific cover for the competitive and acquisitory, privatizing,
forces that are hegemonic within capitalist social systems and which are
promoted by political and economic elites who benefit from such
arrangements. Lombroso identifies forces that are counter to the
privatizing and competitive forces of capitalism as being deviant or
insane. Not only are they “mad” however. They are a particular type of
madness—moral madness. Altruism and mutual aid are threats to the moral
structures of capitalism—of competitive acquisition, the bourgeois work
ethic, acceptance of private ownership of collective resources, class
inequality, and so on. Here Lombroso prefigures Stan Cohen’s discussions
of moral panic in suggesting that mutual aid and altruism (and anarchist
practitioners) are posed not only as material or physical threats to
society but as threats to moral order as well.
To be straightforward, Lombroso actually comes off as rather mean
spirited in his social vision. In condemning various acts of mutual aid
and altruism, and attempting to condemn such behaviors on psychological
as well as moral and criminal grounds he shows not only an analysis
distorted by the priorities of capitalist market relations but hints at
a certain viciousness in his own approach.
He is even downright sneering in his condemnation of this so-called
illness. At length he writes:
In speaking of hysterics Legrand du Saulle wrote that there are those of
them who while remaining in the world loudly espouse all the good works
of their parish, asking charity for the poor, working for orphans ,
visiting the sick, giving alms, watching over the dead, ardently
soliciting the beneficence of others. Hysterics create charitable works
with as much ardor as the knights of industry launch a financial affair
with hyperbolic dividends. Devotion has become a need for these sick
individuals, an occasion for necessary expenditure and, without any
doubt, they pathologically play the role of virtue and everyone is taken
in by this. (1897, 5)
The unfavorable comparison of altruistic “hysterics” to knights of
industry, who are upstanding symbols of industrious virtue, is telling.
In his condemnation of social sympathy, mutual aid, and altruism,
Lombroso gives himself away as something of, well, an atavist.
This is perhaps not so surprising for an upholder of the status quo and
dominant institutions and relations in a capitalist society. Indeed,
under capitalism, where private property and profit rule, gift giving,
mutual aid, and altruism can seem like, can be rendered deviant
behaviors. It is not uncommon either to ridicule those who promote
and/or pursue alternative institutions and ways of relating.
Clearly Lombroso was able to use his “analysis” of anarchists and
Communards to gain access to resources of the Paris police. He was also
able to present himself as an “expert” analyst, despite the clearly
political nature of his work. Lombroso was able to use his profiling of
anarchists to build cultural, or “scientific,” capital for himself and
to establish his position as a reliable scientist and policy advisor. He
was, even more, of course, able to parlay his political posturing
against anarchists into a prominent, viable, and highly rewarding career
as a criminologist.
Lombroso, Cesare. 1900. “A Paradoxical Anarchist.” Popular Science
Monthly 56, January.
1897. “Anarchy and Its Heroes.”
1891. “Illustrative Studies in Criminal Anthropology. III. The
Physiognomy of the Anarchists.” The Monist 1(3): 336–343.