Classical Theory The term “classical” and “positivist” refer to certain ideas and certain people who have been very important in the long history of trying to understand, and trying to do something about, crime. “Classical” criminology is most often associated with the name of the Italian Cesare Bonesana, Marchese de Beccaria. Classical criminology emerged at a time when the naturalistic approach of the social contract thinkers was challenging the spiritualistic approach that had dominated European thinking for over a thousand years. Classical criminology was a protest against those criminal justice policies and against the spiritual explanations of crime on which they were based. Aquinas argued that there was a God-given “natural law” that was revealed by observing, through the eyes of faith, people’s natural tendency to do good rather than evil. While Aquinas argued that people naturally do good rather than evil, Hobbes argued that people naturally pursue their own interests without caring about whether they hurt anyone else. Becarria’s theory changed criminal justice policies, especially in France and led to the expectation that crime would soon decrease. Today, we take such regularity in crime statistics for granted, but at that time, those who held a “free will” theory of crime expected random changes in the number of crimes, especially in the number of unpremeditated crimes such as passion murders. The development of national crime statistics in France reflected the larger development in Europe of relatively accurate official records as part of the development of stable social and political organization. In the 1600s various items in the official records began to be counted and compared as part of an analysis of economic conditions and their consequences. In England such studies came to be called “political arithmetic,” while in Germany they were