Abstract
The first and perhaps most fundamental problem of criminology, when practiced as a science, is the challenge of defining crime, of identifying a stable, empirical “essence” of crime that can guide data collection. In this article, an early stage in the history of this problem—represented by the competing views of Raffaele Garofalo, Émile Durkheim, and Willem Bonger—is examined to illustrate its complexity and its seemingly unavoidable ideological dimension. All three of these scholars embraced inductive scientific research and, to a degree, attempted to construct an empirically grounded definition of crime. Nonetheless, they “discovered” three very different essences of crime. These essences represent contradictory reality claims concerning human/social evolution, imply significantly different images of criminals, and serve as important historical reference points for several ideological currents that continue to flow through the field of criminology.
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