Two Views On Criminal Behavior

• In Event: Harmony and Discord: Conceptualizing and Categorizing Mental Health

English Abstract

The emergence of Vienna as a leading center of medical criminalistics increased research on the physiological differences between criminals and normal people. In the second half of the nineteenth century, criminologists sought to explain human immorality and criminal behavior. In this regard, two viewpoints emerged among criminal anthropologists. One was the view propagated by the French anthropologists, Gabrial Tarde and Alexandre Lacassagne, who claimed that it was impossible to localize an isolated moral center or organ. This was the view of a majority of criminologists including German psychiatrists such as Julius Koch and Hans Kurella. However, a minority of neurologists defended the view that morality was a special sense organ located in the cortex of the brain. This was the viewpoint of one of the key founders of the Viennese criminal anthropology, the Jewish professor from Eisenstadt, Moritz Benedikt (1835-1920). Benedikt was the Professor of neurology at the University of Vienna and his name is both controversial and significant in the history of criminology in Austria-Hungary.

Author

• Ambika Natarajan, UM-DAE Centre For Excellence in Basic Sciences