Abstract

The essay reconstructs the production of anthropologist, criminologist and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) in the field of historiography. An exponent of materialist positivism, Lombroso devoted several essays from his youth to his maturity to the laws of historical becoming: from the role of madness in history to natural and climatic influences on civilization, to a peculiar interpretation of political change. In this search for the fundamental laws that direct the historical process, Lombroso appears, along with authors such as the Frenchman Hippolyte Taine and the Englishman Henry Thomas Buckle, to be the interpreter of the attempt to «scientificize» history, importing into it the method and knowledge of the medical- natural sciences.