SIXTH COLUMN

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Friday, June 17, 2005

The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

This is an interesting list.

posted by Eleanor © @ 6/17/2005 11:23:00 AM  

1 Comments:

  • At Sat Jun 18, 01:32:00 AM PDT, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Good list. Under the positivist banner, I would add a seminal book by Cesare Lombroso: "L'Uomo Deliquente." Although the 1200 page work was only known in English through research quotes, and exposition, Lombroso defined the new school of Criminology. Let me quilt some statements from Hermann Mannheim's edited, "Pioneers in Criminology."

    "During his student days Lombroso found himself increasingly in disagreement with the free-will philosophy then current in Italian academic circles, and correspondingly his thinking was shaped in large measure by the French positivists, the German materialists, and the English evolutionists..." "Lombroso is generally credited with shifting the criminologist's attention from the crime to the criminal. Since his time the major issue has been "how and why do people commit crimes?.." "The scientific (read: positivist approach) substituted determinism for volition...Punishment was designed to fit the criminal, not the crime..." "The confusion caused by the positivists over the meaning of crime is today reflected in arguments concerning political criminals. The view...that crime consists of a violation of the moral sentiments of the community, and the view that crime must be defined in other than legal terms, have resulted in an intolerable situation in which criminologists cannot define a crime or argue that a criminal act has been committed. The questions can be answered with either a yes or a no according to one's political and social ideology. If we follow this line of reasoning, criminology is reduced to a political ideology rather than a scientific academic discipline, with social protest replacing scientific knowledge..." You can trace much of the moral-relativism that you read on the editorial pages of the liberal press, to the influence of Lombroso's application of Comteism to the study of the criminal.

    I would also add Arnold Toynbee's "Study of History" because of his slavish Arabophilism, and moral equivocation of Western and Muslim imperialism.

    Why add the "Greening of America"? That book floated on a short wave of shallow faddism, and long ago faded to intellectual oblivion.

     

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