Italian criminalist Cesare Lombroso went down in history as the author of the theory about the biological predisposition of a number of people to commit crimes. A great resonance at the time was caused by the publication of Lombroso’s book “Genius and Madness”, which considered this work the key to understanding the “mysterious essence of genius”, as well as those religious manias that throughout human history have repeatedly caused social cataclysms. In the newly published works of Lombroso, it is interesting to trace the emergence of views that had a certain significance for the development of social thought of the twentieth century.