Scipio Sighele

Scipio Sighele (1868 to 1913) was an Italian psychologist, sociologist and criminologist and a pioneer of mass psychology. Born in Brescia, he studied law at the University of Rome and taught at the Free University of Brussels from 1892 to 1902. He is best known for The Criminal Crowd, in which he examined how a crowd influences its members and who should bear criminal responsibility for what a crowd does. He shared these views with his friend and colleague Enrico Ferri, and the same fundamental idea appears in the work of Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon; Sighele and Tarde debated how criminal responsibility within a crowd should be assigned. A later book, L'intelligenza della folla, appeared in 1903. He died in Florence at the age of 45. English readers can find his work in The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society, reissued by the University of Toronto Press in 2018.