A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

when there is an authority against whom it can be directed. In these early cities, in which the king
regarded himself merely as a servant of the gods, crime was probably virtually non-existent. To
commit a crime - say theft or murder - a man would have to set himself up against the will of the
gods; and under the psychological conditions of a theocracy, this would be tantamount to suicide. It
was not until kings became tyrants - that is, men who had seized power in their own name - that the
basic psychological condition for crime came into existence. To commit a crime, a man must both
recognise authority and regard it with resentment. Crime is, by its essential nature, antiauthoritarian.
We can see the way in which this resentment comes to be formed in the following
story (quoted by Ludovic Kennedy in A Book of Railway Journeys):
Another Englishman travelling on the continent, Lord Russell,
Was acclaimed for putting a native with whom he was sharing a
compartment in his place. As the train drew out of the station the
foreigner proceeded to open his carpet bag, take out a pair of
slippers and untie the laces of his shoes.
‘If you do that, sir,’ proclaimed the great Victorian jurist, ‘I shall
throw your shoes out of the window.’
The foreigner remarked that he had a right to do as he wished in
his own country, so long as he did not inconvenience others.
Lord Russell demurred. The man took off his shoes, and Lord
Russell threw them out of the window.
What is interesting about this anecdote is the phrase ‘was acclaimed for putting a native... in his
place’. There seems to be no awareness that Lord Russell was behaving with the utmost
unreasonableness. As a leading citizen of the great British Empire, he felt he had every right to
order a foreigner not to take off his shoes; the British had been doing the same kind of thing all
over the world for centuries. We feel, as we read it, that the foreigner would have been justified in
taking Lord Russell by the throat and throwing him out of the window. Such self-confident
stupidity arouses murderous rage. And it is this feeling that authority deserves to be treated with
violence that constitutes the essence of crime. It was the same feeling that made Cromwell decide
to cut off King Charles’s head. Every crime is, in a sense, a one-man revolt against authority.
This kind of sentiment makes an appeal to the anti-authoritarian in all of us. It is the basis of all
left-wing political philosophies, from Rousseau to Marcuse. But before we allow ourselves to be
seduced into sympathy by the notion that crime is a healthy protest against authority, it is important
to bear in mind that anti-authoritarianism is a legacy of childhood. This emerges clearly in a
collection of children’s jokes made by an American sociologist, Children’s Humour by Sandra
McCosh.
There’s this little lass, and her mother’s in bed poorly and she don’t
want to be disturbed, and so she says to her father, Daddy, can I
come to bed with you? So he says no and she says I’ll scream, so he
says ok then. So they go to bed. And the daughter says, Daddy,
what’s that long thing? And he says it’s a teddy bear, so she says can
I play with your teddy bear? So he says no, so she says, I’ll scream,
so he says ok then, but let me get to sleep, I’ve got to get to work
early tomorrow. So in the morning he wakes up and there’s blood all