When Cesare Beccaria called for an end to institutional barbarianism, invoking humanity in the treatment of offenders, he implicitly warned governments that, without the reform of penal systems, dangerous forms of “sedition” would soon arise. A few years after this warning, the French Revolution and its “excesses” proved how prophetic Beccaria’s call was. Meanwhile, Jeremy Bentham revealed more impatience and less understanding for popular rebellions, which were always described uncomprisingly by him as “crimes against the state.”

In brief, the two major thinkers that any criminology text would mention in its opening pages believed that political violence should be included among the issues that the new discipline was slowly identifying. It is, therefore, surprising that contemporary criminology devotes scarce attention to such a topic, leaving it to the analytical efforts of political scientists and, at times, students of social movements. And yet, terrorism, which is a specific form of political violence, has been studied by positivists, functionalists, labeling theorists, conflict theorists, and so on: namely, by most theoreticians belonging to the different schools of thought of which criminology and the sociology of deviance are composed.

A BRIEF OVERVIEW

Let us start with the founding father of “La Scuola Positiva,” Cesare Lombroso (1876: 258–59), who describes political offenders as individuals in need of suffering for something grand, a need produced by “an excess of passionate concentration in one single idea.” As if hypnotized, political offenders are seen as “monomaniacs” who display the typical “sublime imprudence of nihilists and Christian martyrs,” and turn rebellious because they are oversensitive. According to Lombroso, some of these offenders suffer from hysteria, which frequently manifests itself through excessive altruism coupled with excessive egotism; theirs is a form of “moral insanity.” This formulation, antiquated though it may sound, returns in contemporary descriptions of leaders of developing countries and armed organizations, who are also connoted with variants of moral insanity.