Willem bonger biography

History

The Institute is named after the University's Sociology and Criminology Professor Willem Adriaan Bonger (1876-1940). Bonger's contributions to the development of the social sciences before World War II is significant. In 1905 he finishes his thesis "Criminality and Economic Conditions" (Criminalité et conditions économiques) in which he links criminality and economic circumstances. In 1913 he issues another important work, "Belief and crime" (Geloof en misdaad), in which he challenges the perspective that the diminishing power of the church correlates a rise in criminality. Bonger criticized the biologically oriented theories of criminality that were dominant in his day and propagated a sociological point of view. In his work he also used statistical analyses. In 1921 he holds the first Dutch University chair in Sociology and Criminology.

Today, multidisciplinarity and societal relevance remain paramount values within the Bonger Institute.

Willem Bonger

Dutch criminologist and sociologist

Willem Adriaan Bonger (September 6, 1876 – May 15, 1940) was a Dutch criminologist and sociologist. He is considered an early Marxist criminologist which through his work, criminology stood out as an autonomous science, making its interrelationship with sociology more evident according to a scientific approach.

Biography

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Bonger was born in to a middle-class and intellectual family. His father Hendrik worked in an insurance company in Amsterdam and was the first to enable him, the youngest of ten children, to study at university. Both of his parents were Remonstrant Protestants.^[1] Willem's older brother Andries was an art dealer and friends with the brothers Theo and Vincent van Gogh, and his sister Johanna was the wife of Theo van Gogh.

Bonger attended the Barlaeus Gymnasium in Amsterdam and took up lag studies at the University of Amsterdam in 1895, where he heard, among other things, criminal lag fro

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Social and individual explanation

What most clearly marked out SDC from later right-wing law and order crime control discourse was its highlighting of aetiology as a central question. The commission of acts that were labelled as criminal was caused by a complex mix of social and individual processes. The overall level of crime at different times and places was a function of political economy and culture, as explained by ‘root causes’ theories such as Robert Merton’s (1938) influential anomie theory, for example. But individual offenders had a degree of autonomy, and hence responsibility, that to most criminologists justified the imposition of punishment, although the primary purpose of this was to rehabilitate. Whilst penal policy was important in relation to the conduct of identified offenders and the achievement of justice in specific cases, the overall control of crime was primarily a function of social, economic, and cultural processes.

This perspective can be illustrated by m