Willem Adriaan Bonger

Willem Adriaan Bonger (September 6, 1876 – May 15, 1940) was a Dutch criminologist and sociologist. 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. Biography Bonger was born in to a middle-class and intellectual family. 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. Both of his parents were Remonstrant Protestants. Willem's older brother Andries was an art dealer and friends with the brothers Theo and Vincent van Gogh, and his sister Johanna was the wife of Theo van Gogh. Bonger attended the Barlaeus Gymnasium in Amsterdam and took up law studies at the University of Amsterdam in 1895, where he heard, among other things, criminal law from GA van Hamel. He was active in the Amsterdam student corps and joined the CLIO brotherhood, in which many students were interested in socialism at the time. After the parliamentary elections in 1897, Bonger joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party and was particularly active in the Socialist Reading Society. Bonger took part in a writing competition in 1900, which the University of Amsterdam had advertised. The task was an analysis and criticism of the literature dealing with the influence of economic factors on crime. Bonger received an honorable mention and expanded his text to his dissertation Criminalité et conditions économiques, on which he received his doctorate in 1905 under van Hamel. He then joined the insurance company Brak en Mees as an authorized officer, where his father also worked. At the same time, however, he continued his university studies, including with the ethnologistand sociographer S. R. Steinmetz. He also published in various magazines such as De Kroniek, Tijdschrift voor criminal law, Die Neue Zeit, Het Volk and De Nieuwe Tijd.