Before Criminology
Criminologists were not the first to theorize crime, its causes, and the best policies for prevention. Centuries – indeed millennia – before nineteenth-century Europeans first used the scientific method to theorize crime, it was addressed in systematic ways – not scientifically, but rationally – by earlier writers in the Western tradition, especially philosophers. It is well-known that late-nineteenth-century criminologists such as Lombroso, Garafolo, and Ferri (the first to use the moniker “criminologists”) were responding with science to social problems articulated (with reason rather than science) by earlier writers such as Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham. It is less well-known that these criminologists were responding to questions about crime and justice that had been posed in the classical age by philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca; in the middle ages by Boethius, Augustine, and Aquinas; and in the early-modern age by thinkers including Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Hobbes, Diderot, Helvetius, Montesquieu, Hume, and Kant. Can we tell the story of criminology in such a way that the moderns are understood not to have invented something new, but to have done something old in a new way? Can we define criminology so that the modern form of the field (which emphasizes academic, scientific, empirical, and quantitative analysis) can be understood as just that: the modern form of a field which has other forms both temporally (classical vs. modern) and methodologically (scientific vs. humanistic)?