Lombrozo Chezare

Cesare Lombroso was a famous Italian psychiatrist, army surgeon, and professor of forensic medicine. He was a follower of the theory of degeneration advanced by the French psychiatrist B. O. Morel. He was the founder of the anthropological school in criminology and criminal law, based on the idea of the born criminal. His most important works include The Criminal Man, Criminal Types, The Female Offender and the Prostitute, and Genius and Madness: A Parallel Between Great Men and the Insane.

Cesare Lombroso (Heb. Hizkiyah Mordekhai) was born into a wealthy Jewish family; his father was Aronne Lombroso and his mother was Zephira Levi. He married Nina de Benedetti, from an Alexandrian Jewish merchant family. He studied literature, linguistics, and archaeology at the universities of Padua, Vienna, and Paris. Changing his plans, he switched to medicine and later, in 1859, became an army surgeon. From 1862 he was a professor at the University of Pavia. In 1871 he headed a psychiatric hospital in Pesaro. In 1878 he became professor of forensic medicine and hygiene in Turin, and from 1896 he was professor of psychiatry and, from 1906, of criminal anthropology.

Lombroso’s chief contribution to criminology was that he shifted the focus of study from the crime as an act to the person — the criminal. He distinguished four types of criminals: murderer, thief, rapist, and swindler; this typology has survived to the present day. Based on his own conclusions about biological traits and external morphological features (shape of the skull, structure of the auricle, etc.), he argued that violators of legal norms (Homo delinquent) are people of abnormal physical and therefore mental organization.

For such people, crime is inevitably the result of their innate characteristics and atavism. In particular, political crimes are also rooted in the biological nature of the criminal. Lombroso maintained that the nature of a normal person is marked by hatred of the new (misanism), whereas love of the new (philoneism) is characteristic of “born criminals under the influence of affect, so-called affective degenerates.” Proceeding from the