Moral Statistics
Definition
The nineteenth-century term for the systematic study of social phenomena, including crime, suicide, and marriage, using official numerical records rather than individual case narratives.
Related terms
- Cartographic School
- An early nineteenth-century movement, led by Guerry and Quetelet, that plotted crime statistics onto geographic maps to study how offending varied by...
- Economic Determinism
- The theoretical position, developed most fully by Bonger, that the economic structure of a society, particularly its mode of production, is the...
- Thermic Law of Crime
- Quetelet's finding that violent, personal crime peaks in warmer months and southern regions while property crime peaks in colder months and northern...
- Absolute Poverty
- Deprivation measured against a fixed subsistence threshold, such as inadequate food or shelter, distinct from relative poverty and less central to Bonger's...
- Adolphe Quetelet
- Belgian astronomer and mathematician who generalised statistical regularity to social behaviour and formulated the thermic law of crime.
- Andre-Michel Guerry
- French lawyer who used the compte general de l'administration de la justice criminelle to build the first choropleth crime maps of France,...
- Criminality and Economic Conditions
- The English title of Bonger's 1905 Dutch work Criminaliteit en Socialisme, the founding text of his economic theory of crime.
- Relative Poverty
- Deprivation measured against the standard of living and expectations of one's own society, which Bonger treated as a stronger driver of crime...
- Willem Bonger
- Dutch criminologist who published Criminality and Economic Conditions, arguing capitalism cultivates the egoism behind crime.
Explained in these topics
- The Cartographic School and Economic Theories of Crime
- Cartographic School and Economic Theories of CrimeThe nineteenth-century term for statistics of moral conduct, such as crime, suicide and literacy, treated as social facts with underlying regularities.