Niceforo, Alfredo

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Niceforo, Alfredo

Alfredo Niceforo (1876-1960), Italian criminologist, statistician, and sociologist, was born in Castiglione di Sicilia. He held academic posts, first as a professor of criminology and later as a professor of statistics, at the University of Lausanne, the Universite Nouvelle in Brussels, and the universities of Naples, Turin, Messina, and Rome.

Empirical research and statistical work . Niceforo began his career as a criminologist of the Italian school, closely following Lombroso and Enrico Ferri. However, he broadened the theory of criminology, asserting that for a comprehensive understanding of crime and its dynamics it is not enough to study the criminal; an understanding of the normal man and his social environment is also necessary. As a positivist, Niceforo sought to study the individual in all his biological and psychological complexity, rather than simply examining a particular phenomenon—for example, crime—as it impinges on the individual. His early interests in criminology prepared the way for his work as one of the first Italian social scientists to conduct extensive empirical social research (see La “mala vita” a Roma, 1898a, describing his collaborative work with Scipio Sighele), as well as for his later interest in the related fields of biology, anthropology, demography, social psychology, and sociology. Indeed, his theory of criminology might be called an anthroposociological one, and in 1905 he published his first major work in social anthropology, Les classes pauvres.

In method, not only did Niceforo adhere to the positivism of the Italian criminologists but he also believed that statistics are necessary to any analysis of social phenomena. Prominent among those from whom he derived his conception of statistics were Quetelet and Messedaglia (see 1919, Introduction). Niceforo held statistics to be an essential tool for the discovery of lawful regularities among social phenomena: statistics can help to reveal regularities by quantifying, measuring, and classifying; such regularities form the necessary basis for the development of the social sciences.

His approach to social phenomena through statistics was presented first in La misura della vita (1919) and later in an enlarged version of that work, II metodo statistico (1923). In his search for regularities, Niceforo applied statistics even to such fields as linguistics, art, and literature. He also sought to find indices of progress and civilization (1921) by first breaking down collective life into such components as material, intellectual, and moral life, as well as political and social organization, and then presenting what he called a symptomatologie sociale for each of them. His discussion of the relationship between “social symptoms” and the concepts they are presumed to measure showed an early awareness that this relationship is only one of probability.

Concept of egos . Niceforo developed the idea that there is a stratification of egos in human psychology, distinguishing a deep ego from a superficial one. (This notion first appeared in 1902, in his La transformation del delito, and was elaborated in his 1939 article “La structure du ‘moi’ d’après l’école italienne de criminologie.”) The deep, unconscious ego reflects primitive, atavistic instincts (here Lombroso’s influence is apparent) and is the habitat of antisocial, egoistic, and infantile tendencies. The superior ego, on the other hand, reflects what man has learned from society in terms of values, norms, rules, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes. Partly anticipating some of the developments of psychoanalysis, Niceforo analyzed the conditions under which and the ways in which the deep ego—the egoistical antisociality which is in every man and which he called latent delinquency—eludes the curbing action of the superior ego and manifests itself. He discussed the masks under which it comes to the surface and is able to make itself accepted by the individual and by society, and he indicated both the mechanism of self-justification, which permits the individual’s conduct to be dominated by the deep ego, and the mechanism of self-consolation, by which the individual covers his disappointment when an attempt of the deep ego to come to the surface, however masked or transformed, fails or is stifled. (See also L’ “io” profondo e le sue maschere, 1949.)

Residues . Niceforo’s sociology, which was somewhat similar to that of Comte and Spencer, was based on the belief that underneath the apparent variability of social fact there exist what he called residues. His use of this term is independent of and differs in content from Pareto’s [seePareto, article onContributions to Sociology]. As early as 1911 Niceforo used the term to designate the constant elements of social structure and activity, primary among which is the existence of diversity among men. Each man is different from every other, and these differences—physical, psychological, etc.— are amenable to precise measurement. Later (1953) he referred to these residues as general, universal categories which are not easy to discover but which allow the scientist to examine social life in depth. To discover the residues is to discover the fundamental laws which govern the structure and processes of human society.

Toward the end of his career (see 1957) Niceforo listed all the residues he had found in the course of his studies. The list contains two residues that transcend diversity: the hierarchy of individuals, groups, and societies; and the “principle of agglutination” of the group, exemplified in the totem and in the organization of the free commune, the religious system, and the national ideology.

It was Niceforo’s continuous attempt to approach all phenomena of social life with the instrument of statistical method that led him to try to understand social phenomena not only in their interrelations but also in their relations to biological and geographical phenomena. As in his early work on crime, he maintained that any social fact must be considered the result of a combination of physical, biological, and social forces. This aspect of his work made him a forerunner of those who consider sociology an interdisciplinary science.

Francesco P. Cerase

[For the historical context of Niceforo’s work, seeCriminology; Penology; Sociology, article onThe Early History of Social Research; and the biographies ofBeccaria; Lombroso; Quetelet.]