Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780198229919)

This is an interdisciplinary study of the debate on crime and madness in France between 1880 and 1914. Harris argues that the traditional bases of the French penal system were undermined at the time by psychiatric theories of human behavior and new sociological interpretations of crime, which challenged legal concepts of free will and moral responsibility. The book also examines the evolution of a new kind of knowledge, and shows how the politique criminelle envisaged by specialists was the result of the interaction among the bureaucratic culture of the magistrates, the clinical and scientific world of the psychiatrists, and the background of the defendants.

Author: Ruth Harris
ISBN-10: 0198229917
ISBN-13: 9780198229919
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Language: English
Published: 09/28/1989
Pages: 376
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.41lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 1.00d