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This work describes the reception of the positivist school in the Spanish criminal law doctrine in the late nineteenth century. In doing so, the main authors, their works and mutual influences are critically analysed, giving a complete picture of the reception of the primary theory, the positivist or anthropological criminal one -leaving aside the correctionalist and the sociologist one- in a precise chronological context, from 1885 to 1899.

In the Western world, the end of the 19th century is marked by the birth of criminology. This new discipline, which, from the outset, was created as an auxiliary science to criminal law, calls into question the traditional criminal law which was the dominating theory and practice of the time. This new "truth regime" on crimes, criminals and sentences, in the Foucauldian sense of the term1 , arises in a specific context from an epistemological, political and legal point of view. From an epistemological perspective, that time is marked by the advent of scientific positivism. By distancing itself from the philosophical and metaphysical approaches that dominated until that time, scientific discourse takes a positivist turn: anchored in reality, science will, from now on, privilege an empirical approach based on observation, experimentation and testing, in order to update the laws of nature and unveil the major causes of the phenomena that are observed. First observed within the natural sciences, this epistemological attitude is quickly transmitted into the social sciences in order to study the "physical laws" and the "social laws" that govern society and its evolution.