Benjamin Rush and the Gothic Origins of American Criminology

Abstract

This article examines Benjamin Rush’s contributions to the history of American criminology. Although criminology had not cohered into a discipline in the eighteenth century, Americans widely discussed crime and its causes through popular fiction, execution sermons, death narratives, and other forms of crime literature. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), a founding father of the nation and the penitentiary, drew on a mix of empirical psychology and biology in order to address the cultural fear of criminal irrationality and madness. The article argues that Rush’s proposal for the penitentiary is part of a larger proto-criminological project and connects the gothic culture of his time with the existing science of criminal man. Through his public advocacy and his work as a lecturer, Rush helped to found the early instantiation of a positivist style of American criminology, rooted in fears of the monstrous and uncanny criminal.