Enlightened Criminal Policy or the Struggle Against Evil

Abstract

A few years ago a new German translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment was published. According to the book jacket, the old translation, which was published under the title Guilt and Atonement, was moralizing and distorted the literal meaning of the original. What is surprising about the novel, however, is the almost total absence of remorse, which could help lead to atonement. Dostoyevsky’s world is harder, his concepts more archaic. Yet the question of punishment remains unresolved to this day. When Dostoyevsky published his novel in 1866, the second phase of the empirically oriented enlightenment—the one influenced by technology and the natural sciences—had just begun in the human sciences, jurisprudence, and in social practices; and it reached, after a small intermezzo at the end of the eighteenth century, criminal policy for the first time with full force. In his own way, Dostoyevsky took a stand, and quite a progressive one at that. In the meantime, the entire spectrum of what is conceivable and researchable about punishment seems to