Abstract

Some two decades ago Robert Nye began investigating the emergence of criminology as a discipline. At first he wanted to write a book about it, but he eventually thought better of the idea. “It was soon evident to me, as it has been to everyone else who has looked through the older criminological literature,” he explained, “that crime was seldom treated as an isolated phenomenon, even by those who were most eager to establish scientific criminology as an isolated discipline” . Undaunted by Nye's words of warning, Richard Wetzell has produced a sweeping history of German criminology, one that approaches “the history of crime and criminal justice from the perspective of intellectual history and the history of science, rather than social, legal‐institutional, or political history” . Wetzell, that is, attempts largely to isolate the discourse of German criminology from its social, institutional, and political contexts. Readers of Isis may consider this an odd conception of this discipline. Moreover, those seeking insight into the questions and debates that preoccupy most historians of science these days will search in vain, because Inventing the Criminal generally treats “science” itself as a given, as self‐evident, as explanans rather than explanandum.That said, Inventing the Criminal represents an undeniable contribution to the history of criminology. Wetzell has marshaled an impressive array of primary source material in order to tell his story, which stretches from the 1880s through the Nazi regime. His approach, which combines close readings of journal articles and books with doses of archival material, tends to center on prominent individuals. Anyone looking for a careful analysis of criminological discourse, of individual thinkers and their writings, will find it here.Wetzell has picked through an astounding array of seemingly disparate source material and shaped it into the coherent history of a “recognized scientific field” . That history begins during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with the German reception of Cesare Lombroso's theory of the “born criminal.” During this “early” period , Wetzell shows how German research on crime was dominated by psychiatrists, who favored a criminal‐biological approach. Wetzell, who finds a trend of increasing methodological sophistication in criminal‐biological research between 1918 and 1945, argues that German jurists and psychiatrists, confronted with an increasingly sophisticated and complex scientific field, were forced to check some of their more extreme impulses. He is at pains to show that “normal” criminological science persisted even under the Nazi regime and that crude racist explanations of crime “did not predominate in mainstream criminal biology and criminology” . The claim that the sophistication of criminological research actually prompted serious objections to sterilization in Nazi Germany may be Wetzell's single most interesting point.Of course it is precisely here, at the most compelling moments of the book, at the moments where politics and science fuse, that the limitations of Wetzell's stated approach become most evident. Historians of criminology simply cannot, and should not try to, separate out the “scientific” from the “social, legal‐institutional, or political.” It is a mission impossible