person
Cesare Lombroso
Lombroso
also: Ломброзо
Italian criminologist (1835-1909) whose theory that criminality was an inherited, anatomically determined trait rather than a product of free moral choice was widely discussed -- and, as here, sometimes glibly invoked -- in the late nineteenth century.
Reading notes
- A Problem §11 the newest school of Lombroso does not admit a free will
Ivan Markovich invokes the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso's theory of the 'born criminal' -- that criminal behavior was an inherited, anatomically determined trait rather than a matter of free moral choice -- as a fashionable, faintly absurd scientific alibi for Sasha's forgery; the colonel's exasperated retort in the next section punctures the appeal to authority rather than substance.