Scientistic utopia and reactionary nostalgia. Criminal procedure and the early positivist school

The first Lombroso’s criminalist disciples (in the eighties of the Nineteenth Century) imagined that experimental criminology would trasform trials from an objective check about a fact into a clinical and anthropological examination of the offender. On one side they believed that the season of procedural values of Enlightenment (orality, publicity, presumption of innocence, jury) had exhausted its historical cycle. On the other side they were determined to rebalance the relation between «social defence» and individual liberty, even at the price of returning to institutes and instruments of old regime (inquisitorial system, irreversibility of the guilty plea, preponderance of investigations over the trial phase). At first, the ‘new school’ was suspected of too much leniency due to a deterministic conception of crime, but soon it revealed a conservative or even reactionary purpose of its continuous appeals to common feeling. The essay presents in parallel the positivist procedural proposals and the polemical, often harsh retorts of liberal penalists, which saw in the rhetoric of the common good and in the call to arms against the enemy a threat to the constitutional order.