The Inborn Criminal: Criminal Anthropology in the Russian Empire

A number of theories of criminality that emerged in the late nineteenth century postulated a biological predisposition to criminal acts. Accordingly, the articles in this section take up the notion of the imperial criminal as an "inborn criminal." In addition to Cesare Lombroso's ambiguous thery of the existence of people with inborn criminal tendencies, the authors also have in mind all of the conceptions which, resting on the theory of degeneration, proceed from genetic factors in explaining the reasons behind criminality. In treating this "medicalization" of the criminal personality, these papers develop the polemics which recently took a sharp turn around the existence and function of biomedical discourses in late imperial Russia.