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H I S T O RY O F T H E H UMA N SCIENCES Vol. 19 No. 4

2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) pp. 3756
[19:4; 3756; DOI: 10.1177/0952695106069667]

H. J. Eysenck in Fagins
kitchen: the return to biological
theory in 20th-century
criminology
NICOLE HAHN RAFTER

ABSTRACT
In 1964, the British psychologist Hans Jrgen Eysenck published
Crime and Personality, the book that set forth his theory of the criminal
as a psychopathic poor conditioner. Crime and Personality went
through three editions, and even those who vehemently rejected the
theory acknowledged it as the most highly articulated and influential
biological explanation of crime of its time. Yet today Eysencks name
is fading from criminological memory and none too soon, in the
opinion of critics who continue to anathematize him as a self-serving
showman, charlatan, and dangerous right-wing conservative. This
article addresses four questions. Who was Eysenck? What did he say
about the causes of crime? Why was he (and why does he continue to
be) such a controversial figure? And did he contribute any ideas of
lasting significance to criminology? The answers open a window onto
the late 20th-century revival of biocriminology, a return to biological
explanations that continues into the present and seems to be accelerat-
ing. They also reveal characteristics of criminology itself as a knowl-
edge enterprise that has changed over time.
Key words biological theories of crime, biosocial theories of crime,
H. J. Eysenck, history of criminology, history of psychology
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38 H I S T O RY O F T H E H UMAN SCIENCES 19(4)

Today, nearly a decade after his death, H. J. Eysenck (191697) remains a

controversial figure, one whose very name continues to precipitate acrimo-
nious debates over the value of his work and nature of his criminological
contributions. There is no question that Eysenck was one of the most promi-
nent British psychologists of the 20th century or that his 1964 book Crime
and Personality set forth one of the most widely discussed and frequently
tested theories of its day. Nor is there disagreement that Crime and Person-
ality, by arguing that criminal behavior has a biological basis, boldly chal-
lenged the sociological theories that had dominated criminology since the
early 20th century. But whether Eysenck deserved his fame as a psychologist,
and whether his criminological theory was anything other than a regression
to 19th-century biological determinism, remain contentious issues, especially
among scholars who identified with the radical new criminology (Taylor,
Walton and Young, 1973) of the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile younger
scholars, less familiar with the hot-button issues evoked by Eysencks name,
wonder who he was and what all the fuss was about.
This article aims at reassessing Eysencks criminological work and iden-
tifying its place in the development of Anglo-American criminology. It
addresses four questions. Who was Eysenck? What did he say about the
causes of crime? Why was he (and why does he continue to be) such a
controversial figure? And did any of his criminological ideas have lasting
impact? My intention is neither to rehabilitate Eysenck nor to justify his
critics but rather to locate him in criminological history. Some criminol-
ogists will continue to contend that he has no place in that history and to
argue that the sooner he is forgotten, the better. But those who dismiss
Eysencks work as an unfortunate revival of a fascistic past often have little
awareness of his place in the evolution of biocriminology (a term coined by
Rose, 2000). Indeed, they often know little about biocriminology in general
and thus are blind to Crime and Personalitys significance as a tipping point
as the publication that first reinserted a biological voice into the chorus
of sociological explanations, sounding a theme that became steadily louder
over the following decades. Whether we like it or not, Eysenck played an
important role in the development of biocriminology, albeit a role he
assumed as a sideline and performed offstage from mainstream criminology.
The significance of his place in criminological history is just now becoming
clear.

EYSENCKS HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Eysencks encounter with criminology occurred at a time when the discipline

was particularly mistrustful of psychologists, especially those who traced
human character and behavior to biological roots. What is now termed
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EYSENCK IN FAGINS KITCHEN 39

criminology originated in late 18th- and early 19th-century writings by mad-

doctors, psychiatrists who attributed uncontrollable criminal behavior to the
biological affliction of moral insanity (Rafter, 2004). Thereafter, specialists
in other sciences and would-be sciences, including biology, medicine,
phrenology, evolutionism, criminal anthropology, psychology, mental
hygiene, eugenics, and genetics, joined the search for the causes of crime
(Davie, 2005; Garland, 1994; Pick, 1989; Rafter, 2005). Criminology, still in
its formative stages and totally lacking in disciplinary structure, was able to
accommodate them all, even as they jockeyed among themselves for author-
ity to define the nature of criminality and to treat criminals. Their many
differences notwithstanding, the early specialists in the causes of crime all
assumed that criminals are biologically abnormal; that is, they generally
subscribed to what is now called the medical model or view that criminals
are in some sense sick.
In the early 20th century, however, sociology began to take over criminol-
ogy, rejecting the medical model and normalizing deviance. By 1950, Edwin
Sutherland (1947) and other sociocriminologists completely dominated the
field, and they hardened its boundaries so as to marginalize and even exclude
researchers like Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck who combined psychological
and sociological approaches to crime (for the story of this boundary-
hardening, see Laub and Sampson, 1991). The sociocriminologists hostility
to outsiders was reinforced by memories of the prominent roles played by
psychiatrists and other medical professionals in formulating and implement-
ing Germanys program of racial hygiene during the Third Reich. Never
again, the vow to do everything possible to prevent another holocaust,
became None of them, a disciplinary resolve to keep out theorists who
might explain crime in terms of personal pathology. Thus, for the sociologists
who dominated late 20th-century criminology both the older, Sutherland
generation and the new or Marxist deviance theorists it was almost a
political and moral duty to oppose the intrusion of a psychologist who
promulgated a biological theory of crime.
Eysenck was not only an outsider but an outsider who raised fundamental
questions about criminologys domain assumptions (Gouldner, 1970) the
ways it defines its disciplinary territory and what it takes for granted about
human nature, social processes, and research goals. How does (or should)
the study of crime causation relate to life sciences such as genetics? Is
criminology a purely social science, or should it attempt to merge with
biology, psychology, medicine, and other harder sciences? What is crimi-
nologys goal? To identify criminals and potential criminals? To understand
crime? To contribute to the understanding of social processes generally? To
evaluate and guide public policy? How do criminologists frame their ques-
tions, go about answering them, and shape basic public assumptions about
the nature of crime? By raising such fundamental issues about the very
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40 H I S T O RY O F T H E H UMAN SCIENCES 19(4)

identity of criminology and its practitioners, Crime and Personality (1964)

intensified the sense of threat experienced by those already in the field.
Eysencks was the first new biological theory of crime since the early 20th
century. A few mid-century theorists had tried to revive biological expla-
nations (Hooton, 1939; Sheldon, 1949) or at least to integrate them with
environmental accounts (Glueck and Glueck, 1950), but none until Eysenck
attempted to formulate a full-fledged, biologically based explanation of
crime. Since its original publication in 1964, Eysencks theory has had a
contentious and curious history, but aspects of it have survived to feed into
current research on biological factors in offending. Biocriminology continues
to be resisted or ignored by some sociocriminologists, and it does not yet
play a central role in explaining crime, but it is being developed in multiple
ways by researchers such as Sarnoff Mednick and Adrian Raine at the
University of Southern California and Terrie E. Moffitt and her associates at
the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London. Given the rapid growth
of genetics and the neurosciences, that development is likely to continue in
the 21st century the much ballyhooed century of biology.

EYSENCKS LIFE AND CRIMINOLOGICAL

WRITINGS

When Hans Jrgen Eysenck, who had been born in Berlin, attempted to
enroll in the physics program at the University of Berlin, he was told that he
could do so only if he also joined Hitlers S.S. I didnt have to make any kind
of decision, he later wrote in his autobiography (1990: 39); I knew that I
couldnt live in that uniform, with those people, and that emigration was the
only possibility. And so in 1934, at the age of 18, he moved to England, a
country he knew from earlier visits. Eysencks anti-Nazi stand presaged a
lifetime of defying popular opinion and adopting maverick positions.
Eysenck claimed to have happened on psychology by accident. At
University College London, where he again hoped to study physics, he was
informed that he had not taken the correct qualifying exams. Thus he
enrolled in another science, one he had never heard of: psychology (Eysenck,
1990: 47). He was associated with the University of London for most of his
long professional life: that was where he earned his undergraduate degree
and, in 1940, his doctorate, and where he taught till age forced his retirement
(but not the end of his productivity) in 1983. When he retired, he was the
best known and most influential psychologist in Great Britain.
Eysenck published at least 71 books (the count in 1990, when he wrote his
autobiography; another report [Boeree, 1998] sets the total at 75) and over
700 articles. Many of his books were bestsellers, iconoclastic popular works
with titles such as Sense and Nonsense in Psychology (1957) and Know Your
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EYSENCK IN FAGINS KITCHEN 41

Own I.Q. (1962). Indifferent to the disapproval of his scholarly colleagues,

he also published in remunerative if disreputable journals such as The
Readers Digest and Penthouse (Gibson, 1981). In 1997, the Social Science
Citation Index reported him to be the most cited living person in the field
of social sciences and, among all persons living and dead, the most cited after
Freud and Marx (Jensen, 1997).
Only one of Eysencks monographs focused on criminality, the 1964
Crime and Personality, but it proved to be influential, not only because it set
forth a bold, coherent, and well-elaborated theory, but also because he built
on it, taking the book through several editions (the second in 1970, the third
in 1977). Moreover, he reiterated his theory of crime in other books of his
own and in works edited by others. It was Crime and Personality, however,
that established his credentials in the field of criminology. Even in his late
70s, he was still being invited to review criminological works (Eysenck,
1994), and in 1997 the year of his death he contributed (Eysenck, 1997)
to a NATO conference on the biosocial bases of violence.
Despite his high profile and extraordinary productivity, Eysenck seems to
have won awards from only two organizations, the American Psychological
Association and the International Society for the Study of Individual Differ-
ences (Gray, 1997). This paucity of honors probably chafed Eysenck, a man
keenly interested in his ratings. Yet the lack of formal recognition was nearly
inevitable (also see Claridge, 1997), given Eysencks attraction to controversy
and his championing of questionable causes. He took money from big
tobacco companies to show that cancer is a result not so much of smoking
cigarettes as of being a cancer-prone personality (Eysenck, 1965, 1980, 1990).
He also did extensive research on astrology and extrasensory perception (see,
for example, Eysenck, 1957), arguing for a correlation of planetary positions
at birth with ones personality. His views on gender were so sexist that he
could not find an American publisher for his book on the topic (Eysenck,
1990: 2256). When his protg Arthur Jensen was attacked for his contro-
versial 1969 article in the Harvard Educational Review claiming racial
differences in intelligence, Eysenck rushed to his defense with Race, Intelli-
gence and Education (1971), a book that took similar positions; and he
accompanied Jensen on a tour of Australian universities where, predictably,
they were heckled by demonstrators.
In the activist 1970s, Eysencks hereditarian views could not help but lead
to protests. When he went to the University of Birmingham to lecture, a wall
was painted with the words: Uphold genuine academic freedom: Fascist
Eysenck has no right to speak. (Savoring the ironies of this sign, Eysenck
memorialized it with a photograph in his autobiography [1990].) He received
a famous punch in the nose during a talk at the London School of Economics
(also pictured in the autobiography); and at Oxford University, a talk was
interrupted by a repeatedly rung fire alarm (Nyborg, 1997).
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42 H I S T O RY O F T H E H UMAN SCIENCES 19(4)

CRIME AND PERSONALITY

Crime and Personality (originally 1964) makes two basic assumptions: that
the explanation of human behavior lies in personality and that the expla-
nation of personality lies in biology. Using terms like traits and drive,
Eysenck conceives of personality as stability of conduct; it is that which
enables us to predict behavior over time. He holds that behavioral variations
among individuals must flow from personality differences. Eysenck began
concentrating on the nature of personality differences at the very outset of
his career; after working out his theory and publishing it in his first book,
Dimensions of Personality (1947), he had the platform on which he built for
the rest of his life, including the foundation for his theory of criminality. The
tools he used were those he had learned at the University of London at Cyril
Burts knee: Spearmans method of factor analysis and the concept of indi-
vidual characteristics as continua, like intelligence.
In Crime and Personality as elsewhere, Eysenck concentrates on the two
main personality dimensions of his theory: neuroticism (N) or emotionality
(a group of interconnected traits running from stability to lability); and
extraversionintroversion (E) (running from withdrawn to outgoing). In this
book his interest lies primarily in the E dimension (1970: 49), the extremes
of which he describes as follows:
The typical extravert is sociable, likes parties, has many friends, needs
to have people to talk to, and does not like reading or studying by
himself. He craves excitement, takes chances, acts on the spur of the
moment, and is generally an impulsive individual. He is fond of prac-
tical jokes, always has a ready answer, and generally likes change; he is
carefree, easygoing, optimistic, and likes to laugh and be merry. He
prefers to keep moving and doing things, tends to be aggressive and
loses his temper quickly; his feelings are not kept under tight control
and he is not always a reliable person.
The typical introvert is a quiet, retiring sort of person, introspective,
fond of books rather than people: he is reserved and reticent except
with intimate friends. He tends to plan ahead, looks before he leaps,
and distrusts the impulse of the moment. He does not like excitement,
takes matters of everyday life with proper seriousness, and likes a well-
ordered mode of life. He keeps his feelings under close control, seldom
behaves in an aggressive manner, and does not lose his temper easily.
He is reliable, somewhat pessimistic, and places great value on ethical
standards. (1970: 50)
According to Eysenck, everyone can be described in terms of the intersec-
tion of the personality dimensions. He originally predicted that criminals and
other antisocial types would be high in both N (unusually emotional and
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EYSENCK IN FAGINS KITCHEN 43

unstable) and E (unusually outgoing and driven to seek diversion). But

toward the end of the second edition of Crime and Personality (1970) he
concedes that criminals may not be a homogeneous group. Not only are there
vast differences between the Arkansas teacher who violated the fundamen-
talist laws of his state by teaching evolution[,] . . . hunger-striking
suffragettes, Ghandi imprisoned by the British Raj, and Hitler; there is also
a large group of introverted criminals characterized by inadequate person-
ality, rather dull and helpless, who drift into crime. . . . They are often solitary
figures, without friends and family (1970: 197). In contrast to these intro-
verts and at the extreme of the E dimension we have the actively antisocial,
psychopathic criminal who almost glories in his criminal activities and seems
bereft of conscience and guilt feeling. . . . It is with this latter (and much more
dangerous) group that our theories are concerned (1970: 197; emphasis
added).
At this point Eysenck introduces a third dimension, the P or psychoticism
factor, ranging from normal at one end of the scale to psychotic at the other.
A questionnaire-based study comparing over 1,000 normal males with 179
male prisoners, 56 neurotics (male and female), and 310 psychotic patients
(male and female) found that both the prisoners and the male and female
psychotics scored low on the N scale but at the top of the P scale. This does
not mean of course that the prisoners were psychotic, in the clinical sense;
rather it means that like psychotics, prisoners do not care for others; are
troublesome and cruel; lack feeling and sensitivity; constantly seek new
sensations; disregard danger; and enjoy upsetting others. In sum, the
prisoners fit the picture of not the normal extravert but rather the
aggressive, ruthless, hostile, insensitive psychopath (Eysenck, 1970: 198).
With some fancy footwork, then, Eysenck has gone from his original concept
of criminals as extraverts to identifying them with arch-villainous
psychopaths.
To support his second basic assumption, that the explanation of individ-
ual differences lies in biology, Eysenck draws on three types of argument,
one based on genetics, the second on Pavlovian conditioning, and the third
on neurophysiology. He builds his genetic argument by conducting a meta-
analysis of twins data collected by Johannes Lange (Crime as Destiny, 1928)
and his followers. For adult crime, identical twins are concordant in 71 per
cent of the cases, compared to a rate of 34 per cent for fraternal twins. The
same sorts of findings emerge in twin studies of juvenile delinquents, children
with behavior disorders, homosexuals, and alcoholics. (T)hese data . . .
demonstrate, beyond any question, that heredity plays an important, and
possibly a vital part, in predisposing a given individual to crime (Eysenck,
1970: 689). (It was precisely this type of overstatement that made critics
distrustful.)
For his second and central argument for a biological basis to criminality,
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44 H I S T O RY O F T H E H UMAN SCIENCES 19(4)

Eysenck turns to Ivan Pavlovs work on conditioning, hypothesizing that

extraverts condition more slowly and weakly than introverts. He goes on to
argue that classical conditioning (a process involving involuntary behavior
and the autonomic as versus the central nervous system) accounts for
moral behavior. Such conditioning occurs mainly in childhood, when parents
and teachers punish children for negative behaviors and reinforce them for
acceptable activities. Summarizing various evidence, he concludes that
psychopaths, criminals, and other antisocial types are poor conditioners and
that (in a line that became famous) Conscience is . . . a conditioned reflex
(1970: 120). The degree to which one is conditionable a persons place, so
to speak, on the E scale is determined by hereditary influences (1970: 100;
also see 172).
For the third and final step in his argument for a biological basis to
criminality, Eysenck turns, very briefly, to recent neurophysiological
research on the reticular formation, an area at the top of the spinal cord, as
the locus of inhibition and excitation. Information travels up the spinal cord
and out into the brains cortex; it also travels back from the brain to the body.
The reticular formation can act to facilitate or inhibit the transmission of
information (Eysenck, 1970: 1035). Eysencks point about brain physiology
remains cloudy and undeveloped in the second edition of Crime and Person-
ality, but in the third edition (1977) he goes the whole reductionist hog (as
he later put it [1990: 20]) to explain extraverted and introverted behavior in
terms of cortical arousal: when the ascending reticular activating system or
ARAS is underactive, the person will experience low cortical arousal; to
compensate, he or she will be driven to extraverted behavior. On the other
hand, when ARAS activity is high, there will be more cortical arousal, and
as a result the person will exhibit introverted behavior. Thus did Eysenck
attempt to establish a neurophysiological basis for his E dimension and to
explain why extraverts would be sensation-seekers. Presumably (though he
does not make this absolutely clear), one inherits a predisposition to strong
or weak ARAS activity.
From his completely deterministic point of view (Eysenck, 1970: 183) on
human behavior, Eysenck moves directly to recommendations for treatment.
First, from the fact that we are dealing with people who have inherited a
central nervous system which conditions only rather poorly, it follows that
we must submit criminals to a much more rigorous and efficient system of
conditioning than the normal person (1970: 172). Ideally, the government
would test every child . . . with respect to his conditionability, pick out
those predestined to become criminals, and advise the parents on the best
methods of training. Second, using stimulant drugs to improve condition-
ability, we should rehabilitate criminals by reconditioning them (ibid.:
17380). (In the third edition of Crime and Personality, Eysenck disavowed
aversion therapy and condemned the movie Clockwork Orange [1971],
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EYSENCK IN FAGINS KITCHEN 45

which some considered a depiction of his treatment proposals [1977: 174].)

In some cases it is best to use positive rewards, such as a system of prison
token economies.
Eysenck published one final book on criminality, the coauthored Causes
and Cures of Criminality (Eysenck and Gudjonsson, 1989), in which he
adjusted his theory in three ways. First, he tacitly retracted his former strict
determinism by asserting that his was a probabilistic theory (1989: 7). Second,
he argued that criminals differ biologically from non-criminals not only inter-
nally, in their genes and nervous systems, but also externally, in body build
and what the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso (Lombroso,
2006[1876]) had called the stigmata of crime. Third, he adjusted the defi-
nitions of his P and E dimensions to achieve a better fit with experimental
results. More generally, although Eysenck continued to make dogmatic asser-
tions, he now tempered them by describing his theory as a budding paradigm
(1989: 140), one that did not yet have its kinks worked out.

EVALUATING EYSENCKS THEORY:

HIS CONTEMPORARIES REACTIONS

From the start, fellow psychologists questioned Eysencks tendency to treat

criminals, prisoners, psychopaths, and antisocial types as interchange-
able categories (e.g. Cochrane, 1974: 21). They also queried Eysencks
definitions of the personality dimensions, especially the factor of P (Childe,
1981; Vernon, 1964). In addition, several critics pointed out that Eysenck
frequently altered the definitions of the personality dimensions, with
Gordon Claridge (1986: 80), a colleague and former student, referring affec-
tionately to sleight of Hans.
Although Eysenck devoted enormous effort to validating his question-
naires, many psychologists had doubts about his data-collection procedures.
There were rumors that students fed him the results that he wanted to find
and that, in any case, he tended to accept data uncritically (Gibson [a former
student], 1981); Cochrane, 1974). With regard to his derivation of the person-
ality dimensions, Farrington, Biron and LeBlanc (1982: 159) argued that the
kinds of data generated by personality questionnaires violate the underlying
assumptions of factor analysis (e.g. continuous, unidimensional, normally
distributed interval scales). More generally, they wrote, factor analysis tends
to be subjective in both determination of its reference axes and the factors
interpretation. In one reanalysis of Eysencks data, with a different rotation,
the E factor . . . completely vanished.
Psychologists many efforts to test whether high scores on Eysencks E
dimension were indeed associated with criminal behavior produced, at best,
equivocal results (Burgess, 1972; Cochrane, 1974; Hare, 1970; Hoghughi and
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46 H I S T O RY O F T H E H UMAN SCIENCES 19(4)

Forrest, 1970; Passingham, 1972). After exhaustively reviewing such efforts

and testing Eysencks theory with their own data, Farrington, Biron and
LeBlanc (1982: 196) concluded dryly: it seems unlikely that the Eysenck
theory, the Eysenck scales, or the Eysenck items are of much use in the expla-
nation of delinquency. Vernon (1964) contended that Eysenck reified his E
factor, treating it as a causal trait with an independent existence rather than
what it was: a statistical artifact (see also Gibson, 1981: 138).
Psychologists evaluations of Eysencks claims for a biological basis to
criminality focused on his claims for conditionability and heritability.
Admirers, while acknowledging that the evidence was mixed, concluded that
overall the experimental results supported Eysencks theory that criminals
are poor conditioners (e.g. Ellis, 1987). But to other commentators, such as
Passingham (1972) and Trasler (1978), the evidence indicated, plain and
simple, that criminals as a group do not condition any less well than non-
criminals (see also Raine and Venables, 1981).
Whereas Eysencks psychologist-critics tended to focus on empirical
issues, sociologists leveled more fundamental charges against Eysencks
positivism and biological determinism. To sociologists associated with the
new criminology of the 1970s, the entire post-Second World War welfare
state seemed to be in crisis. They doubted not only the states ability to
measure and cope with crime, but also the wisdom of urban planning projects
that tore up established communities, educational policies that tracked
children on the basis of intelligence tests, and a mental health system that
consigned the mentally ill to warehousing institutions (Young, 1988; see also
Downes, 1988; Rock, 1988). Aiming to create a competing paradigm
(Young, 1988) derived from Marxism, the radical sociologists needed an
emblem for all that they opposed. Some found it in the figure of Eysenck, a
ready-made symbol of the positivist approach to social problems (see,
especially, Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973).
For radicals, the term positivism encompassed a multitude of sins, chiefly
those of medicalization, reductionism, and determinism. The medical (or
psychiatric, or psychological) approach interpreted criminality as an indi-
vidual failing or defect (for example, abnormally high scores on the PEN
personality dimensions). In a key document of the new sociology of
deviance, Stanley Cohen objected strenuously to clinical positivism and
demonistic psychology of the Eysenck type (1974: 18). In a related vein,
The New Criminology (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973: 20) complained of
the positivists world view of a society consisting, in the main, of normal
people, who represent the consensus. He places himself . . . squarely in the
middle of this consensus. Deviants he perceives as a small minority existing
at the margins of society. In contrast to Eysenck, the new criminologists
identified with deviants, and they hoped to knock out the underpinnings of
the metaphor of crime as disease.
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EYSENCK IN FAGINS KITCHEN 47

Reductionism might serve in the hard sciences, the radicals allowed, but
attempts to reduce social problems such as crime to biological terms (genetic
predispositions, inadequacies of the autonomic nervous system) outraged
them (Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973; Young, 1988). It seemed similarly
reductionist (not to mention undemocratic) to recommend tackling a socio-
political phenomenon such as crime through a coercive program of aversive
conditioning (Downes, 1978). Closely related was the problem of determin-
ism, or assuming that criminals, far from having control over their own
behavior, are pawns of their biology. Psychologists joined the new crimi-
nologists in rejecting Eysencks determinism, with Hoghughi and Forrest
(1970: 252), for instance, contending that Eysencks theory could not handle
discontinuities in criminal careers. Not every young offender becomes an
adult criminal and it would be extremely tortuous to account for this in terms
of constitutional changes. Likewise, Trasler (1978: 287) wrote: The
commonsense facts indicate that criminals . . . are not automata, driven to
commit infractions.
The critique of positivism raised fundamental epistemological questions.
What is the nature of criminological knowledge, and how is it best acquired?
What is it good for? What do we assume from the outset about the nature of
criminals and crime? What do our answers to these questions imply for our
methodological procedures, including the degree to which we borrow from
the life sciences? (Also see Hollin, 2002.) And how do we gauge success?
These epistemological issues lay at the heart of the new criminologists
quarrel with Eysenck.

EYSENCKS CRIMINOLOGICAL INFLUENCE

Through his writings and contacts, Eysenck personally influenced a number

of psychologists who focused on criminological issues, including Lee Ellis,1
Adrian Raine (1997), and David Farrington. One of the reasons why I
became a psychologist, writes Farrington,2 was because I read Eysencks
popular books on Sense and Nonsense in Psychology and Uses and Abuses of
Psychology at age 16 and was inspired by them. More generally, Eysencks
extensive early work on psychophysiological factors in human behavior laid
a basis for similar work in todays biocriminological research. Eysenck
designed studies to determine whether criminals really do score high on the
personality factors and actually do condition poorly. The Biological Basis
of Personality (Eysenck, 1967), a work dedicated to I. P. Pavlov and Sir
Francis Galton, describes his procedures for discriminating between
extraverts and introverts, including tests of pain tolerance, salivary condi-
tioning experiments, studies of heart rate and respiration, and experiments
with sensory stimulation and bombardment. Researchers today continue to
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48 H I S T O RY O F T H E H UMAN SCIENCES 19(4)

investigate whether criminals and non-criminals can be differentiated by skin

conductance tests and resting heart rates (Cauffman, Steinberg and Piquero,
2005; Moffitt et al., 2001; Raine, 1993; Rowe, 2002). The conclusions of such
studies, indicating that offenders tend to have lower rates of arousability,
suggest that people may turn to crime to compensate. The present-day
picture of the criminal as a sensation-seeker and impulsive risk-taker builds
on Eysencks portrait of the extraverted offender.
Until now, most research on psychophysiological differences between
criminals and non-criminals has taken an additive approach, combining its
results with other psychological and sociological findings on the correlates
of crime without attempting to examine possible interactions between the
individual and his or her social situation. However, this additive approach
has recently become pass. The trend now is toward biosocial research that
identifies actual interactions among biological and social variables, a develop-
ment encouraged by research into ways genes themselves interact with one
another and their environments research antithetical to old-fashioned
biological determinism. In an article on Genes, Environment and the
Development of Behavior, animal behaviorist Patrick Bateson of the
University of Cambridge rejects the old dichotomies of nature versus nurture
and innate versus learned behavior to propose a jukebox model of develop-
ment. Bateson begins with an example involving grasshoppers:
Some normally green grasshoppers growing up on African savannah
blackened by fire are also black and prefer black backgrounds. As a
result they are less easily detected by predators. However, their
offspring, developing among new grass, suppress the mechanisms
making black cuticle and are once again green. . . . [C]ases are known
where particular genes are only expressed in special environmental
conditions. . . .
The study of individual differences in behaviour has been revolu-
tionized in recent years by the discovery of similar cases throughout
the animal kingdom. More and more examples of striking differences
in reproductive behaviour are being found between members of the
same species which are of the same sex and age. Each individual is
capable of developing in more than one way a jukebox with the
potential for playing many tunes but, in the course of its life, playing
only one. The particular tune it does play is triggered by the conditions
in which it grows up. (Bateson, 1998: 161; textual references omitted)
Today this concept of a complex, dynamic interplay of organism and
environment is making its way into criminology via biosocial research.
Over time, Eysenck became more willing to acknowledge the influence of
social factors on criminal behavior (Gudjonsson, 1997). However, he did not
attempt to operationalize social factors in his own research, even in an
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EYSENCK IN FAGINS KITCHEN 49

additive fashion, and was in fact reductionist in most of his work. Nonethe-
less, psychologist Adrian Raine has recently rehabilitated Eysenck as the hero
of biosocial research on offending, the foresighted progenitor of the new way
of thinking. Eysenck was decades ahead of his time in suggesting a biosocial
approach to crime, Raine (1997: 137) writes, for it is only now that this
approach is beginning to be embraced by a wider scientific community.
What caused this turnabout?
While still a student, Raine had taken note of a concept all but buried in
Crime and Personality, that of an antisocialization process (Eysenck, 1970:
146). Eysenck had hypothesized that if an introverted child (i.e. a good
conditioner) grew up in Fagins kitchen, it would grow up to be a good
law-breaking thief or prostitute, whereas an extraverted child, by virtue of
not conditioning so well, would have a better chance to escape from this fate.
Raine confirmed this hypothesis in a study of 101 male schoolchildren and
published the results with his teacher, Peter Venables (Raine and Venables,
1981). This became a classic and much cited criminological report on inter-
actions between conditionability and social setting. It concluded that Man
is, as Eysenck has maintained, a biosocial organism (Raine and Venables,
1981: 282). Biosocial research in criminology was underway, with Eysenck
rehabilitated as one of its first practitioners (also see Raine, 1997).
The final step in Eysencks recognition as a prophet of biosocial research
took place at the NATO conference on Biosocial Bases of Violence (Raine,
Brennan, Farrington and Mednick, 1997). The introduction to the conference
proceedings outlines four biosocial theories of antisocial behavior, one of
them Eysencks. Eysencks theory is included, the editors explain, partly
because it includes presumptively heritable factors and ties these to condi-
tionability and child-rearing, and partly because of the passage the Fagins-
kitchen passage in which Eysenck posited an apparently paradoxical
biosocial interaction for antisocial outcomes, the antisocialization process
(Raine, Brennan, and Farrington, 1997: 12). Eysenck himself attended the
conference, although he was now quite elderly, delivering a lively paper
(1997) on Personality and the Biosocial Model of Anti-Social and Criminal
Behavior that began by insisting on situational influences on criminal
behavior. The conference proceedings, published after Eysencks death, were
dedicated to him, a pioneer in biosocial theories of crime.

CONCLUSION

Eysencks ideas precipitated vehement reactions in which distaste for the man
intertwined with distaste for what he said. The work was controversial
because he was not only prolific and influential but also slipshod, ill-
informed to the point of ignorance about the sociology of crime, and
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50 H I S T O RY O F T H E H UMAN SCIENCES 19(4)

insensitive to his theorys political implications. Self-promotional and self-

confident, Eysenck relished controversy and was usually too busy writing
his next book to listen to critics. He himself presented a mass of contradic-
tions. A refugee from Hitlers Germany, he promoted a biological theory of
crime and advocated giving the state authority to recondition deviants into
conformity. A biological determinist, he became an advocate of biosocial
indeterminism. Although some considered him closed-minded and politi-
cally backward, Eysenck not only shifted ground but became a standard-
bearer for the biocriminological future. And while many accused him of
selling himself to the highest bidder, he was willing to defy popular opinion
and defend unpopular positions. Some aspects of his work were undeniably
superficial, but others have held up scientifically and a few have proved
prescient. A figure so filled with tensions and contradictions naturally
polarized his audiences.
Eysencks contributions to the future lay in his identification of the
criminal as a stimulation-seeker and in his Fagins-kitchen vision of social
learning as a series of transactions between individual biology and environ-
ment. Todays biocriminologists use different terminologies, but they too
hypothesize that offenders are likely to be born with neurological deficits
that predispose them to hyperactivity and sensation-seeking. Although these
contemporaries do not speak with a single voice, and although their work
rests on a much wider research base, many of them build on Eysencks funda-
mental idea that offenders have lower autonomic nervous system arousal
rates than non-offenders, a condition that predisposes them to extraverted
behavior. This theory, whatever one may think of it, constitutes a line of
development in todays biocriminology whose genealogy goes back to
Eysencks research on the criminal as a poor conditioner.
Eysencks other key contribution to contemporary biocriminology, his
perception of differential interactions between conditionability and social
setting, has become central to contemporary thinking about the biosocial
origins of criminal behavior. How much credit Eysenck deserves for this
perception is debatable. However, instead of re-engaging in quarrels over
Eysencks virtues and vices, it is more profitable to step back to assess his
place in criminological history. From the vantage point of the present, in
which biocriminology has become a subject of textbooks (Fishbein, 2001;
Raine, 1993; Rowe, 2002; Walsh, 2002), university courses, and sessions at
scientific conferences, the 1964 publication of Crime and Personality
marked a turning point, the moment when biological theories began to
regain a toehold in the criminological arena. Eysenck made the first thor-
oughgoing effort of the 20th century to formulate a biologically based
theory of crime, setting in motion a return to biocriminology that continues
into the present and promises to play an increasingly large role in the
criminological future.
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EYSENCK IN FAGINS KITCHEN 51

In his essay on Boundary-work and the Demarcation of Science from

Non-science, Thomas Gieryn (1983) examines ways in which scientists go
about establishing lines between their type of work and that of non-scientists.
He does not, however, pay much attention to what happens when two
sciences claim the same domain, the situation when Eysenck and sociologists
faced off over the territory of criminology. What happened was that both
sciences engaged in boundary-work, attempting to define science so as to
legitimize their own occupation of criminologys intellectual space and dele-
gitimize the others. Eysenck ornamented Crime and Personality with charts,
graphs, and tables, and he mockingly dismissed Marxist criminology, while
the new criminologists attacked determinism, the medical model, and
reductionism. Eysenck used what might be called a rhetoric of positivism;
the 1970s sociologists fought back with a rhetoric of emancipation. The two
sides addressed, not one another, but the audiences that would decide the
outcome: other scholars, students, the general public. They had nothing to
say to one another because they began with different domain assumptions
(Gouldner, 1970) about the nature of crime and of human beings.
And yet today the hostilities between sociological and biological
approaches to crime have subsided. The resistance of the new criminol-
ogists to letting someone like Eysenck into their territory has eroded, and
criminology is regaining some of the porosity it had in the 19th century. It is
again becoming what David Downes in conversation once termed a
rendezvous subject, a field whose doors are open (if at times grudgingly) to
all manner of newcomers. Sociocriminologists and biocriminologists today
at least recognize one anothers existence and take it into account in their
work (e.g. Sampson and Laub, 2005; Moffitt et al., 2001).
Broader social and political changes have made Eysencks work seem less
controversial than it did in 1964. One is simply the passage of time. Eysencks
model of personality has been superseded (Farrington and Jolliffe, 2002),
reducing his significance and the magnitude of his threat. At the same time,
the Holocaust has receded in memory, weakening political motives for resist-
ing the medical model and pathologization of criminality. In addition, the
thrust of scholarship on both the Holocaust and the production of scientific
knowledge has been away from viewing Nazi race hygiene as the creation of
a small group of mad eugenicists and toward finding analogies between it and
developments elsewhere (e.g. Proctor, 1988). With the passage of time,
criminologists have become less likely than they were in the 1960s to use
anti-biologism as a way of differentiating Us from Them. Moreover, Marxist
criminology has segued into the less politically rigid areas of critical
criminology (Schwartz and Hatty, 2003) and cultural criminology (Ferrell
et al., 2005), a relaxation that has opened up the field. Criminologists now
recognize that the social significance of crime and its control is so pervasive,
so complex, and so contentious that no scientific discipline can ever dictate
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52 H I S T O RY O F T H E H UMAN SCIENCES 19(4)

the ways in which these matters will be understood or addressed (Garland

and Sparks, 2000: 3).
A second change that has made Eysencks work seem less alien over time
is the stunning growth of genetics, neurochemistry, evolutionary psychology,
brain-imaging technologies, and other non-sociological sciences that now
feed into biological explanations of crime (Raine, 1993). No biocriminologist
today is in the position of Eysenck in the 1960s, charging the socio-
criminological citadel with few allies behind him. Eysencks work, now legit-
imated by a host of scientific developments, is beginning to look as much like
a harbinger of the future as a throwback to 19th-century biological deter-
minism. While it is too early to predict the impact of the new, non-
sociological sciences on 21st-century criminology, that impact will probably
be transformative, radically changing the face of the discipline.
In one sense, criminology today has again become the type of field it was
in the 19th century: it again has a low threshold and admits a range of
contending scientists. The big questions about disciplinary identity and goals
raised by Eysencks challenge have not been answered, and psychologists still
find themselves marginalized by sociologically oriented colleagues. But the
fields boundaries have become more permeable, a development brought on
in part by Eysenck. The dust-up between him and the new criminologists
seems to have taught both sides that science, as Gieryn puts it (1983: 792),
is no single thing.

NOTES

I would like to thank the many people who shared their memories of Eysenck and
sent copies of materials that I might otherwise have missed. Thanks are also due to
James Good and an anonymous reviewer for History of the Human Sciences, Robert
Hahn, Wolfson College, and Oxford Universitys Centre for Sociolegal Studies.

1 Lee Ellis, personal communication, 10 June 2005.

2 David Farrington, personal communication, 29 July 2005.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

NICOLE HAHN RAFTER has written extensively on the history of criminology

including a book on eugenic criminology, Creating Born Criminals. Her
recent work includes new editions of Cesare Lombrosos Criminal Woman
and Criminal Man. She is a senior research Fellow at Northeastern
Universitys College of Criminal Justice and an affiliated faculty member in
Northeasterns Law, Policy and Society Program.

Address: Nicole Hahn Rafter, Northeastern University, College of Criminal

Justice, 204 Churchill Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115,
USA. [email: nicolerafter@yahoo.com]