In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new philosophical movement emerged that would soon transform the relationship between the known and the unknown, between nature and culture, between humans and the natural environment, and between individuals themselves: English positivism . About a century after the birth of the French Enlightenment movements, which reaffirmed the role of human reason over faith and mysticism, a rational approach to the world around us, and the need to create valid tools and foundations for investigating reality itself, a method emerged: the scientific method.
Scientism without limits
One of the hallmarks of positivism was precisely its use of a nascent method, which, however, was likely imperfect, or at least insufficient to satisfy the demands of the scientist of the time. The crude and "ruthless" use of quantitative techniques and the abusive application of scientific laws pertaining to the natural and physical sciences resulted in the mystification of the scientific method and often in a new form of faith: scientism.
Some of the key elements that led to a progressive shift away from positivist currents in the social sciences were the transformation of individual and social realities into mere numbers and a strong predisposition toward determinism caused by excessive faith in the usefulness of mathematics , biology, and statistics in sociology and psychology. In the wake of positivist currents and the intermingling of sciences that were not clearly defined by their respective fields of expertise, forensic sciences and a primitive criminology emerged in Italy.
A presumed genetic anomaly
Cesare Lombroso , considered the founder of these new sciences , studied medicine and researched pathological anatomy and pathophysiology. After completing his studies, he volunteered as a military doctor in the occupied territories of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies , following its annexation to the Kingdom of Italy. The already ferocious repression of the insurgent regions of the South found justification and accommodation in Lombroso's studies. By collecting, preparing, and analyzing severed heads from the resistance population, he identified a presumed anomaly in a cranial fossa in the skull of one of the resistance leaders, Giuseppe Vilella . This was considered sufficient evidence to conclude that this anomaly was the cause of habitual and, above all, genetic violent behavior. The forced determinism of the case analyzed was accompanied by a ruthless generalization of this element to the entire southern population, "guilty", according to the author, of having mixed with the Arab and African populations, inheriting a phantom propensity for murder and barbarism.
Physiognomy and the South
In his publications on crime rates, the first four cities to appear were in the South; the data were not specifically organized, and all acts of civil resistance during an institutionalized conflict were included. The fifth city to appear is Venice, most likely due to the strong resistance that also took place in Veneto. In that case, ancestral guilt was attributed to intermingling with Slavic populations. All of this was more than sufficient to create what Erich Fromm, a century later, would call a "process of dehumanization," that is, the objectification and concrete actions resulting from assumptions about the inferiority and guilt of another people or ethnic group.
The basis for the racial laws
What happened within a few days was terrifying in scale: from the deportations to Europe's first concentration camps to the mass shootings deemed necessary by Lombroso and his followers in " The Criminal Man " and "The Anarchists," to the gender violence accommodated, if not promoted, in " The Criminal Woman ," from the destruction of camps to the burning of towns and villages. His theories would form the foundation upon which the fascist racial laws and Nazi "remedies" would be promoted and approved. The unification of Italy was probably the main cause of the beginning of the Great Italian Migrations toward Northern Europe and the Americas. The echo of Lombroso's theories reached the United States even before the migrants. In the ports of New York and Boston, thousands of Italians arriving as workers and future slaves were welcomed in two separate lines, the "white" Italians on one side and the "black" Italians on the other.
An inhuman museum
The skulls and bodies subjected to autopsies by macabre science were never returned to their families until 2012, when a court ruling in Lamezia Terme ordered the Cesare Lombroso Museum to return Vilella's skull, 148 years after his death, the first martyr of criminal anthropology and Italian psychiatry. Since 2010, the "No-Lombroso" technical-scientific committee – http://www.nolombroso.org – has promoted a petition calling for Cesare Lombroso's criminological theories to be officially removed from textbooks and for street names and museum commemorations in the name of "Cesare Lombroso" to be eliminated as soon as possible.
René Verneau
