Demonology and the Neo-Classical School

In medieval and early modern Europe, wrongdoing was rarely understood as a choice made by a rational actor weighing costs and benefits. It was understood as a symptom. A person who committed a violent or otherwise inexplicable act was frequently assumed to be possessed by an evil spirit, or to be suffering divine retribution for a sin committed by themselves or their family.

This is the demonological explanation of crime: causation is supernatural, not natural, and the appropriate response to an offender is spiritual, not correctional. Unusual behaviour, a sudden fit, or an act that seemed to have no ordinary motive was routinely read as evidence that an outside force had taken hold of the person, which meant the community looked for a spiritual remedy rather than a social or psychological one.

Mental illness in particular was frequently absorbed into this framework, so a condition a modern clinician would treat as a medical matter was instead read as a sign of spiritual affliction requiring exorcism or penance rather than care.

Demonology was not a fringe folk belief confined to villages. It was embedded in the institutions that governed daily life. The church held enormous authority over what counted as deviance, and ecclesiastical courts frequently handled matters that a modern system would classify as criminal. Confession, penance, and exorcism sat alongside corporal and capital punishment as legitimate responses to an offender, because the underlying theory of causation made spiritual remedy and physical punishment two branches of the same tree.

The practical consequence of this worldview was severe and often arbitrary. Since the cause of crime lay outside the natural world, there was no framework for asking whether an accused person's age, mental state, or intent should matter.

A child, a person with a serious mental illness, and a calculating adult offender could in principle face the same demonological suspicion and the same procedure for establishing guilt, because the diagnostic question was never about the offender's psychology. It was about whether a supernatural force was at work.

This is the backdrop against which classical and later neo-classical criminology should be read. Both movements were, at root, arguments that crime belongs to the natural, human world and can be explained and responded to using reason.

The distance travelled between a courtroom governed by demonology and one governed by neo-classical sentencing principles is the distance from a supernatural to a rational theory of the offender. Understanding demonology first is not an antiquarian exercise. It sets the baseline against which every later school, classical, neo-classical, and eventually positivist, measured its own claim to be scientific.

If demonology supplied the theory of crime, trial by ordeal supplied its matching procedure. Ordeals asked the accused to undergo a physical trial, carrying a bar of heated iron a fixed distance, plunging an arm into boiling water, or being bound and lowered into a pond, on the premise that God would intervene to protect the innocent and expose the guilty. A wound that healed cleanly, or a body that sank rather than floated, was read as a divine verdict rather than a physiological outcome.

Trial by battle operated on the same premise in a different form. Two parties, or their appointed champions, fought, and the outcome was taken as God's judgement on who was in the right. Both procedures dispensed with the evidentiary reasoning that a modern criminal trial depends on: witness testimony, physical evidence, and a structured inference from facts to guilt.

Under a demonological theory of the world, that reasoning was unnecessary, because guilt was a fact only a deity could reliably access. A confession extracted before or during the ordeal often mattered more in practice than the ordeal's outcome itself, which shows that even within a demonological system the ritual sat alongside older, more mundane methods of establishing guilt.

The clergy administered these ordeals for centuries, which gave the procedure religious legitimacy. That legitimacy began to erode from within the church itself well before secular rationalism took hold. Theologians increasingly questioned whether it was proper to demand that God perform a miracle on command to settle a legal dispute, and whether a procedure so easily influenced by the administering priest's sympathies could really be called impartial.

A priest who knew the accused, or who had reason to favour one party over another, could shape the ordeal's staging and interpretation in ways that had nothing to do with divine judgement, and critics inside the church were among the first to point this out.

The turning point came at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, when the church formally prohibited clergy from participating in trials by ordeal. Removing priestly involvement did not abolish the underlying demonological belief overnight, but it removed the ordeal's institutional support in much of Western Europe. In England, the ban prompted a rapid shift toward jury trial as the mechanism for establishing guilt, a shift usually dated to the years immediately following 1215.

The procedural machinery of criminal justice was starting to separate from its supernatural theory of causation, even while many of the underlying beliefs persisted for generations. Trial by battle survived somewhat longer as a legal option in parts of Western Europe even after ordeal by fire and water fell away, a reminder that a worldview and the procedures built on it do not always retreat at the same pace.

Demonology did not disappear in a single moment. It receded gradually, under pressure from several directions at once. The withdrawal of clerical sanction from ordeal procedure was one force. A second and larger force was the Enlightenment's insistence that human affairs, including crime, could be explained through reason and observation rather than through appeals to the supernatural.

Philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries argued that the natural world, including human behaviour, operated according to knowable laws, and that legal institutions should be built on that premise rather than on theology.

This is the intellectual soil in which the classical school of criminology grew. Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham replaced the demonological offender with a rational actor who weighs pleasure against pain, and replaced spiritual remedy with a fixed, published schedule of penalties.

The deterrence mechanics, the certainty-severity-swiftness framework and the evidence for and against it, belong to that topic and are not repeated here. What matters for this topic is the premise the classical school shared with demonology despite rejecting its content: both treated every offender the same way, one through a uniform supernatural suspicion, the other through a uniform rational-actor assumption.

That uniformity is where the classical school's rigidity showed. A starving adult who stole bread and a calculating adult who stole out of greed received the same sentence for the same offence. A child was, in some classical-era codes, treated no differently from an adult, because the theory made no room for a distinction.

It was this gap, between the classical school's theoretical uniformity and the courtroom's daily encounter with genuinely different offenders, that produced the movement discussed here. Judges and legislators who had to apply the classical code in practice were the ones who pressed hardest for change, since it was their courtrooms, not the philosophers' treatises, where the mismatch between doctrine and desert was felt most directly.

The neo-classical school, associated above all with the Italian-born jurist Pellegrino Rossi, who taught and wrote on criminal law in France in the early nineteenth century, did not reject the classical premise that offenders act with free will. What it rejected was the classical assumption that free will is a fixed, all-or-nothing capacity possessed equally by every person in every situation.

Rossi argued instead that responsibility comes in degrees. A child, a person with a diagnosed mental illness, or someone acting under extreme provocation is not wholly free in the way an adult of sound mind acting with calculation is, and the law's response should track that difference.

This is a modest but consequential move. Neo-classicism kept the classical school's rational-actor model as the default case, so it never collapsed into the deterministic biological and social explanations that the later positivist school, associated with Cesare Lombroso and his contemporaries, would go on to propose.

Instead, it introduced graduated responsibility as an exception-handling mechanism inside the classical framework: most offenders remain fully responsible, but specific, recognisable categories of offender are treated as less than fully responsible, and the sentence should reflect that. The correction is narrow by design.

It does not ask why a person became the kind of person who offends, a question positivism would later make central, it only asks whether this particular offender, at this particular moment, possessed the same capacity for rational choice the classical model assumed in everyone.

The clearest institutional expression of this idea appeared in France. The Penal Code of 1810, itself a product of classical thinking in the wake of the Revolution, was revised in 1832 to permit courts to recognise extenuating circumstances when passing sentence. This single procedural change is often treated as the practical birth of neo-classical sentencing, because it converted a philosophical argument about degrees of responsibility into a working power that a judge could actually exercise in a courtroom.

It is worth being precise about what neo-classicism did not do. It did not abolish the idea of a fixed maximum penalty for a given offence, and it did not hand judges unlimited discretion to invent punishments. It carved out a defined space, below a statutory ceiling, within which a court could adjust a sentence in light of specific, arguable facts about the offender or the offence.

That combination, a fixed frame with room to move inside it, is the structural template that most modern sentencing systems still use. Later French codifications carried this template forward into the twentieth century, and legal systems well outside France borrowed the same underlying structure of a statutory range paired with judicial discretion, even where they never adopted French terminology for it.

Two connected ideas do the practical work of the neo-classical correction: mitigating circumstances and the individualisation of punishment. Mitigating circumstances are facts, about the offender or about how the offence happened, that a court can weigh to bring a sentence down from the maximum a statute permits.

Youth, an absence of premeditation, provocation, genuine remorse, and a first offence are recurring examples across common law and civil law systems alike. Aggravating circumstances work in the opposite direction, allowing a court to move toward the upper end of the permitted range when facts such as cruelty, planning, or abuse of a position of trust are present.

Individualisation of punishment is the broader principle that these specific circumstances serve. Rather than asking only what category of offence was committed, an individualised approach asks who committed it and under what conditions, and lets the answer shape the sentence within the statutory band. This is a direct descendant of Rossi's graduated-responsibility argument: if people are not uniformly and equally free in every situation, then a sentencing system that pretends otherwise will systematically mismatch punishment to culpability.

Individualisation does not mean two people who commit an identical offence in identical conditions should receive different sentences on a judge's unexplained preference. It means the sentence should track differences that are actually present in the case, and a court is generally expected to state which mitigating or aggravating facts it relied on.

Age was the first and most durable category to receive special treatment. Nineteenth-century legal reforms across Europe increasingly recognised that a child could not be held to the same standard of criminal responsibility as an adult, a recognition that eventually produced separate juvenile justice systems in most jurisdictions. Diminished mental capacity followed a similar path, moving from an all-or-nothing insanity defence toward a more graduated recognition that impaired, but not entirely absent, capacity could reduce culpability without eliminating it.

None of this is confined to nineteenth-century France. Common law systems in England and jurisdictions that inherited English criminal procedure built mitigating and aggravating factors into sentencing guidelines and judicial practice long before those factors were formally codified. The underlying logic, however, traces to the same neo-classical insight: a fixed penalty attached only to a legal category ignores information that any reasonable observer would think relevant to how much blame an offender actually deserves.

Modern sentencing guidelines in several common law jurisdictions now list recurring mitigating and aggravating factors explicitly, which is itself a sign of how thoroughly the neo-classical premise has been absorbed into ordinary legal drafting rather than treated as a special exception.

It is useful to set the three worldviews covered in this topic side by side. The demonological view located the cause of crime outside the natural world and used procedures such as trial by ordeal to let a deity settle guilt.

The classical view relocated causation inside the rational, choosing individual and demanded fixed, uniform penalties regardless of the offender's particular circumstances. The neo-classical view kept the classical premise of a rational, responsible actor but accepted that responsibility varies with age, mental state, and circumstance, and built that variation into sentencing through mitigating and aggravating factors.

Each worldview produced a matching institution. Demonology produced ordeal and ecclesiastical judgement. Classicism produced published, fixed penalty schedules meant to guarantee certainty and deter calculation. Neo-classicism produced graduated sentencing within a statutory range, administered by a judge who could weigh individual facts. The later positivist school, associated with Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri, and Raffaele Garofalo, would go further still, arguing that biological and social forces could largely determine an offender's conduct, a claim well beyond what neo-classicism ever asserted.

Neo-classicism is best understood as the midpoint: it preserved free will as the default, but no longer pretended that free will was a switch fixed identically in every offender. Reading the sequence this way also explains why textbooks group demonology, classicism, and neo-classicism together as a single pre-positivist arc: each is a successive answer to the same question, what makes a person responsible for a crime, rather than three unrelated topics.

The legacy of that midpoint is visible in ordinary sentencing practice today across very different legal traditions. Judges in common law jurisdictions such as England and jurisdictions modelled on English criminal procedure routinely cite an offender's age, remorse, and personal circumstances as reasons to move a sentence within a statutory band. Separate juvenile justice systems, which treat children as categorically less culpable than adults and prioritise rehabilitation over uniform punishment, are a direct institutional descendant of the same reasoning.

Indian criminal law reflects the same pattern: sentencing under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which replaced the Indian Penal Code, 1860, retains judicial discretion within prescribed ranges, and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, carves children in conflict with law out of the ordinary adult sentencing track entirely.

Italy, where Rossi's ideas found a receptive academic audience, and other civil law jurisdictions across continental Europe developed comparable extenuating-circumstances doctrines through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so the pattern is not a French peculiarity but a broadly shared response to the same problem classical rigidity created.

Seen this way, the neo-classical school is not a minor historical footnote between two more famous movements. It is the reason a modern criminal court can look at two people convicted of the same offence and, without abandoning the idea that both chose to act, still arrive at two different sentences.