Caesar or Cesare? American and Italian images of Lombroso

The centenary of Lombroso’s death provoked several occasions for comparing, at an international level, the huge influence of Lombroso. This essay looks at some opposite waves of Lombrosianism in different periods and at the same time, in the USA and in Italy. The reception of an author does not necessarily mirror his or her own work, but it may reveal the concerns and the needs of the community which interprets him. In the late 1970s the perception of Lombroso was mainly negative. He appeared as a champion of totalitarianism and discrimination, especially against women and Jews. George Mosse ‘s judgement in 1979- “Lombroso’s definition of criminality became a part of Hitler’s final solution of the Jewish problem”- is well known and has become [a] common place. During his lifetime, however, Lombroso had enjoyed a good reputation in the US (better than in Italy and France, i.e.) as “a man of science”. Not only specialists, but large audiences were “hungry to read what he had to say on almost any subjects”. My first question is: how could such a fascination with the Italian criminologist arise? The first Americanisation of Lombroso produced a very different image of him from the biological racism’s criminologist and inspired very different views on criminals and crime control. However the Lombrosian ideas that circulated in the 1930s and 40s even among the European displaced scholars in the US never came back to Italy. On the contrary, Mosse’s accusations arrived immediately in the 1970s, after decades of silence on Lombroso. Such a silence started with fascism. He was neglected as a socialist and a Jew , his books were forbidden, his relatives were persecuted. Not only. The Italian anti-Jewish law in the 1930s had proposed a new conception, based on the race, which refused both the classical school of law (from Beccaria to Carrara) and the positivistic school of Lombroso. Even his biological determinism didn’t fit in the juridical definition of the Jew that Italian fascist jurists proposed; they wanted a political and philosophical definition and criticised the biological version that the German jurists preferred. Paradoxically Mosse’s verdict broke the silence on Lombroso in Italy but strengthened the condemnation that Italian fascism had made of him. Only recently, his ideas have started to be more studied than judged. We can now see how importanta was the occasional delinquent, next to the criminal mind and the inborn criminal concept. And how this idea was developed in the American debate on rehabilitation vs. deterrence and on juvenile delinquency.