Lexington Books
Pages: 312
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-4985-6550-9 • Hardback • December 2017 • $129.00 • (£99.00)
978-1-4985-6551-6 • eBook • December 2017 • $122.50 • (£95.00)
Cary Federman is associate professor in the Department of Justice Studies at Montclair State University.
Chapter 1: Looking Backward: The History of an Unknown Assassin
Chapter 2: Sociology: The Problem of Social Forces
Chapter 3: Criminology: From Individual to Social Responsibility
Chapter 4: Criminal Anthropology: The Criminal as Morphological Sphinx
Chapter 5: Psychology: Regarding the Boundaries of Insanity
Chapter 6: Anti-Political Science: Violence and Anarchism from Haymarket to the Assassination of William McKinley
Conclusion
Described in his time as 'an aggravated specimen from the insane borderlands,' the political assassin that sits at the center of this provocative new case study challenged the medical, social, and natural sciences to make sense of his desperate act. In his original analysis of the legal and medical issues surrounding the criminal and his crime, Federman proffers the existence of a ‘borderland’ between medicine and law: a space in which the insane can be both dangerous and responsible.
— Joel Peter Eigen, author of Mad-doctors in the Dock: Defending the Diagnosis: 1760-1913
In this remarkable and original study, political scientist Cary Federman, examines the rise of the social sciences through the story of McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, and vice versa, he shows how the social sciences gave life to Czolgosz. What results is a fascinating rumination on understandings of criminal behavior, moral responsibility, and free will that is still relevant in the present day.
— Amy Louise Wood, author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America
Through the unlikeliest of characters—William McKinley’s assassin Leon Czolgosz—Cary Federman chronicles the emergence of modern social sciences at the turn of the twentieth century. As sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists vied to demonstrate that their respective disciplines best explained the reasons for McKinley’s killing, Czolgosz the volitional killer was transformed into Czolgosz the symbol of the zeitgeist. Federman’s interpretation is a provocative challenge to those who maintain that social structure, not individual agency, explains violence and determines responsibility.
— Eric Rise, University of Delaware