From responsibility to dangerousness? The failed promise of penal positivism*

The substitution of the notion of social dangerousness for that of criminal responsibility as the justification of the state’s right to punish will be considered in this chapter as both a relatively neglected aspect of criminological positivism and possibly its most significant one. After examining the theoretical roots of this idea, the chapter focuses on its more controversial implications (such as the vagueness of the definition of dangerousness and the risk of discretionary judicial assessment) as well as on the legal and political arguments elaborated to limit its implementation. The chapter argues that to reject the more radical meaning of ètat dangereux, penal classicists were forced to reconceptualize the liberal notion of culpability and elaborated the dual-track system.