Willem Adriaan Bonger

Born in Amsterdam in 1876, Willem Adriaan Bonger became one of the Netherlands’ best-known early criminologists and sociologists. He is especially remembered for arguing that crime cannot be understood in isolation from poverty, inequality, and the wider social order.

His 1905 dissertation, Criminalité et conditions économiques, became his best-known work and helped establish his reputation. In 1922, he was appointed the first professor of sociology and criminology in the Netherlands, at the University of Amsterdam.

Bonger is often described as an early Marxist criminologist, but his writing also reflects a broad social concern with justice, altruism, and the pressures created by modern economic life. He died in Amsterdam in 1940, and his name lives on through the Bonger Institute of Criminology.