Reading the Criminal in the Austrian School of Criminology: Unveiling the Deviant Character Through Measurement and Intuitive Introspection

Abstract

Biological criminology tried to find the reasons for deviant behaviour in the criminal’s body and mind. In the early twentieth century, the Austrian School of Criminology developed various means of exploration of the criminal character: a sort of autodidactic psychology relying on the experiences of everyday life, focusing on the interpretation of facial expression and gestural phenomena; the immediate participation in the criminal’s personality by intuitive introspection; and the exact registration of expression by the use of polygraphs. Bachhiesl explores how methodologically contrarian methods aimed at the same target: reading the true nature of the deviant, externalizing it by measurement. Thus, facts were not found but produced. The overreaching confidence in scientific exactness made research penetrable for arbitrariness, making criminology a precarious instrument of science-founded politics.