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Theoretical Criminology
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The murderous Dutch fiddler

Criminology, history and the problem of phrenology

Nicole Rafter

Northeastern University, USA

To form a clear view of the origins of criminology and present-day practices in criminal justice, criminologists need to recognize phrenology as one of their progenitors. Although phrenology is dismissed as a ‘pseudo-science’ and mocked as ‘bumpology’, it in fact constituted an important early science of the mind, and the theories that phrenologists generated in the fields today called criminology, criminal jurisprudence and penology influenced those fields long after the phrenological map of the brain had been forgotten. Coming to terms with phrenology requires rejecting simple distinctions between ‘science’ and ‘pseudo-science’. It leads to a better understanding of the scientific project of criminology and, more broadly, to a better understanding of the nature of social-scientific knowledge

Key Words: biological theories of crime • history of criminology • history of science • phrenology • prison history • pseudo-science

Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 9, No. 1, 65-96 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1362480605048943
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N. H. Rafter
H. J. Eysenck in Fagin's kitchen: the return to biological theory in 20th-century criminology
History of the Human Sciences, November 1, 2006; 19(4): 37 - 56.
[Abstract] [PDF]