Race and Crime

Abstract

FROM 1922 until his death in 1940, Willem Bonger was professor of sociology and criminology in the University of Amsterdam. To psychologists and criminologists he is best known from his "Introduction to Criminology", the outcome of his life's work. In that volume, as in his earlier contributions, he showed himself a keen and critical champion of the view that crime must be regarded as a social or psychological rather than as a medical or biological problem. This was in effect a revolt against the views of the 'anthropological school' of criminology, which, under the leadership of Lombroso and his Italian followers, still dominated the psychology of crime when Bonger first began to write. His last book, on "Race and Crime", deals with what he terms the 'neo-Lombrosian theory'. Mrs. Hordyk received the manuscript only a few days before Holland was invaded, and has produced a most competent and welcome translation.

Race and Crime

By Willem Adriaan Bonger. Translated from the Dutch by Margaret Mathews Hordyk. Pp. xi + 130. (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1943.) 10s. net.