Classicism and positivism are two trends, schools of thought, which contradict each other in the way they view crime in society. The classical school was the predominant school of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe. It is founded on the principle that man is a ‘calculating animal’ and that it interacts with others on the basis of a sort of social contract. This applies to criminal behavior as well. The man had the capacity to distinguish and decide on his own regarding its behavior. It is the calculations he makes that make him act in defiance of the laws or according to them. Thus, this school assumes that man has the free will to decide himself his course of action. They rejected the idea that people were determined by a superior force in what they do. Man is not considered to be determined in his course of actions. Thus he is fully responsible and accountable for everything he, or she does.
This belief of man as a calculating animal assumed that everyone was able to conduct complex rational calculations in his, or her, mind and then decide what was his, or her, best interest in a specific course of action.
“The question for policymakers therefore how to use the institutions of the state to influence citizens to choose not to offend. This theory emerged at the time of the Enlightenment and it contended that it should focus on rationality.” (Vold et al, 1998)
There is also another school that took rationality seriously. The Positivist school of thought was inspired by the positivist ideas that universal laws are governing the course of action of everything in the universe. The duty of science was to discover these laws. Once we discover them, we can make a precise description of what shall happen and, most importantly, why it happened.
According to this school this, was true even for deviant, criminal, behavior. There were laws that governed the conduct and actions of people. If we discover these laws then we can predict why they acted in such way and what to expect from them in the future. These could be biological laws, psychological laws, or social laws that govern people’s conduct. So, this school does not view people as beings who choose by their free will their course of actions. People are determined by these laws to behave in a certain manner. In its most extreme form, this school believed that people could be classified as criminals by checking certain biological features of their bodies. The same could be said for psychological factors. Thus, people were determined to be criminals not by their genes (the biological features) or their psyche (the psychological factors). They may seem to choose freely what to do but they cannot behave differently from these determined characteristics they have. Thus, if we classify people according to these universal principles, laws, then we can distinguish the potential criminals within society.
Compared, the two of these schools are quite opposed in the way they view the role of the human being in society. The classical school assesses the role of the criminal law after someone has done something and insists on the fact that people should be sanctioned at the same token as the crime they committed. Instead, the positivist school believes that we do not have to wait for people to commit something and try to understand why. If we get to know people’s biologic and psychological principles, than we can assess who is a deviant in society and who not. They are induced to perform their deviant actions by these principles, and not by free choice.
References
Vold, G. Bernard, T. and Snipes, J. (1998) Theoretical Criminology. Oxford University Press.