Lombrosianischer Mythos

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Der Lombrosianische Mythos ist ein Begriff, der von den Soziologen Alfred R. Lindesmith und Yale Levin durch ihren Aufsatz The Lombrosian Myth in Criminology im Jahre 1937 geprägt wurde. Der Artikel hinterfragt die Bedeutung des italienischen Arztes und Begründers der Kriminalanthropologie Cesare Lombroso als Gründungsvater der Kriminologie.

Die beiden Autoren schreiben (Lindesmith/Levin 1937, S. 653):

The prevailing conception in this country of Lombroso as the founder of scientific criminology may best be described as a myth. Many earlier studies of crime closely parallel contemporary sociological studies. An extensive literature upon juvenile delinquency, professional crime, crime causation, and other aspects of criminology was already in existence when Lombroso began his work. The use of autobiograpgical documents, the employment of official statistics, the ecological approach, and the study the criminal "in the open," were understood and applied long before the time of the Italian school. From a sociological viewpoint, the advent of Lombroso represents a retrogression or an interlude in the progress of criminpology rather than a step in advance. The eclipse of the earlier work may perhaps best be explained as a result of shifting prestige values associated wit the importation of social Darwinism into the social sciences, with the growing popularity, in the later part of the nineteenth century, of psychiatric and other individualistic or biological theories, and with the isolation of American criminology from earlier European developments.

Literatur

• Lindesmith, Alfred R. und Yale Levin (1937) The Lombrosian Myth in Criminology, American Journal of Sociology 42: 653 - 671.