Russian Journal of Economics and Law (Sep 2016)
THE WORD CRIMINOLOGY: A PHILOLOGY AND A DEFINITION
Abstract
Objective: to formulate a new definition of the word “criminology”.Methods: dialectic, systemic, analysis, synthesis, comparison.Results: the paper presents the history and etymology of the word “criminology”. Basing on the analysis, the author’s definition of criminology is formulated as the systematic study of crime, criminals, criminal law, criminal justice and criminalization.Scientific novelty: the author proves that criminology is usually but not necessarily academic and scientific, which means that criminology can be public and/or humanistic. This concept is proved by presenting some early English instances of the word “ criminology” which predate the attempt to theorize a field of criminology in Italy and France in the 1880s, and offers some new readings of those Italian and French texts. The philological analyses then come into conversation with some twentieth-century attempts to define the field and some twenty-first-century innovations in an effort to generate a definition of criminology that is responsive to the diversity of criminology in both its original formation and its ongoing transformations. Practical significance: one advantages of the new interpretation of criminology is its inclusiveness: it introduces all non-orthodox research into scientific sphere, which allows new possibilities for the development of new directions, views on the problem of crime, theories and methods of crime prevention and reaction.
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