Scipio Sighele
Scipio Sighele (24 June 1868 – 21 October 1913) was an Italian psychologist, sociologist and criminologist.
Contents
Biography
Scipio Sighele was born in Brescia into a large family of Italian jurists. His father, a magistrate, was a public prosecutor in Palermo in the years following the unification of Italy. After high school, he studied law with the criminal lawyer Enrico Ferri, along with future members of the Lombrosian movement: Guglielmo Ferrero and Adolfo Zerboglio. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the phenomenon of complicity and taught criminal law at the University of Pisa.
But it was with two articles on the criminal mob, published in 1891 in Cesare Lombroso's journal, the Archivio di Psichiatria, that he became known. These two articles together formed the core of his major work La Folla delinquente, published shortly afterwards and soon to be a worldwide bestseller. The book was soon translated into French under the title La Foule criminelle. The work deals with the phenomena of association and contagion and demonstrates the mechanisms at play within a crowd.
Sighele, if he endeavors to demonstrate the criminal nature of the collective associations (the criminal crowd is composed of criminal men), puts however in light the psychic phenomena at work by deviating from the strict lombrosian anthropological orthodoxy.
Gustave Le Bon plagiarized his work (Gabriel Tarde called him "a plagiarist as well as a photographer" in his correspondence). Sighele defended a left-wing collective psychology that is quite distant from the reading of the crowd by Le Bon.
Sighele, now famous, widened his research in the field of collective psychology by focusing on the couple and the criminal sect. Zola, Durkheim and Nordau in France will use his discoveries in the various fields of letters, sociology or politics. Sighele published in France The Psychology of Sects (1895) and new editions of his major work The Criminal Crowd, in which he increasingly abandoned his negative reading of the crowd. In 1901, he published a book with the prophetic title The Intelligence of the Crowd. At the time of the Dreyfus affair he was an ardent supporter of the innocence of the French officer in Italy.
At the turn of the century, he became an active activist in his native Trentino, then under Austrian rule. Sighele gradually abandoned sociological work to devote himself to journalism and political studies. A militant of the nationalist, irredentist party, he operated in Trentino (his home region), suffering from Austrian authority two trials in 1900 and 1908, until in June 1912 he was expelled and had to leave his villa in Nago on Lake Garda. He therefore taught courses in collective psychology and criminal sociology outside Italy, at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Free University of Brussels. He died in Florence in 1913. His last works were on the national question and irredentism, of which he became a theorist.
Works
- La folla delinquente (1891)
- La coppia criminale (1892)
- La teorica positiva della complicità (1893)
- Mondo criminale italiano (1893–1895)
- Cronache criminali italiane (1896)
- La delinquenza settaria (1897)
- La donna nova (1898)
- La mala vita a Roma (1899)
- L'intelligenza della folla (1903)
- Le scienze sociali (1903)
- Per l'università italiana a Trieste (1904)
- Per Francesco Bonmartini (1906)
- Letteratura tragica (1906)
- Cesare Lombroso (1910)
- Eva moderna (1910)
- Pagine nazionaliste (1910)
- Nell'arte e nella scienza (1911)
- Il nazionalismo e i partiti politici (1911)
- La crisi dell'infanzia (1911)
- Ultime pagine nazionaliste (1912)
- La donna e l'amore (1913)
- Letteratura e sociologia (1914)
References
- Battaglia, Felice (1936). "Sighele, Scipio." In: Enciclopedia Italiana. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
- Bigaran, Maria Pia (2018). "Sighele, Scipio." In: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 92. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
- Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne R. (2003). "The Secret Power of Suggestion: Scipio Sighele and the Postliberal Subject," Diacritics, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 60–79.
- Zimmern, Helen (1898). "Criminal Anthropology in Italy," The Green Bag, Vol. X, No. 8, pp. 342–49.
- Zimmern, Helen (1898). "Criminal Anthropology in Italy, II" The Green Bag, Vol. X, No. 9, pp. 382–87.
External links
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- 1868 births
- 1913 deaths
- Crowd psychologists
- Italian criminologists
- Italian irredentism
- Italian psychologists
- Italian sociologists
- Sapienza University of Rome faculty
- Scientists from Brescia
- Université libre de Bruxelles faculty
- University of Pisa faculty
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