Willem Bonger

He is considered an early Marxist criminologist which through his work, criminology stood out as an autonomous science, making its interrelationship with sociology more evident according to a scientific approach.

His father Hendrik worked in an insurance company in Amsterdam and was the first to enable him, the youngest of ten children, to study at university.

After the parliamentary elections in 1897, Bonger joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party and was particularly active in the Socialist Reading Society.

He represented a reformist intellectualism and pursued a parliamentary course of social democracy, which was characterized by cautious rapprochement with the bourgeois parties.

Together with Emanuel Boekman and Jan Goudriaan, Bonger played a key role in the reorientation of the SDAP, which abandoned pacifist positions.

He emphasized that the classification of certain types of behavior as criminal does not depend on their moral character, but on their relation to the prevailing socio-economic order.

Following Kautsky's concept of altruism, Bonger saw capitalism a strengthening of egoism, which weakens people's morality and encourages certain forms of crime, especially among the socially disadvantaged.