Works of critical historiography have long alerted us to the fact that the search for the origins of various academic disciplines, scientific discourses, and strands of thought can be problematic. More often than not, these sorts of historiographic endeavours have failed to historically locate the birth or beginning of their object of study without causing controversy or inviting fierce criticism. Seldomly do the interpretations or reinterpretations of the past produced via these risky academic undertakings result in enthusiastic and unanimous reception by academic audiences and circles. What often happens, instead, is that authors' ideological stances, intellectual biases, and personalised readings of the past are exposed by the authors own efforts to objectively establish what actually happened in the past. Janne Kivivouri's Crime and Civilization: The Birth of Criminology in the Early-nineteenth Century makes an important contribution to the academic study of criminology's past without, however, fully overcoming this historiographic challenge. Kivivouri's overarching argument is that criminology was born in France in the 1820s and 1830s as a scientific, data-driven, quantitative, politically neutral, and state-sanctioned enterprise focused on conventional, street crime - and particularly on the question of how education and civilisation impacted people's morality and criminality. The data revolution enabled by the publication of the French Compte in 1827 ('the first truly modern crime statistical yearbook') gave life, the author argues, to the 'first criminology'. Criminology, defined by Kivivouri as 'systematic analysis of data corpora designed to enable research' (about crime-related phenomena), then, is an early-nineteenth century phenomenon, as the subtitle of the book makes abundantly clear While Kivivouri is not the first to argue that criminologists have been wrong in tracing the origins of modern criminology back to Enlightenment thinkers like Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, he makes a significant effort in trying to establish why this is so: What separates the first (truly criminological criminology of the early-nineteenth century from the typical ways of thinking about crime from the eighteenth century is 'the systematic use of quantitative data to test hypotheses' […]
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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671632
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