Cesare Beccaria

Works

• 1764On Crimes and Punishments

  Grounds the right to punish in the social contract and the common good and concludes that punishments must be certain, prompt and proportionate, without torture or the death penalty.

Position

Beccaria is on the map as the author of a widely received programme of Enlightenment criminal law reform. Starting from Montesquieu and the social contract, he argued that the right to punish rests only on the small portion of liberty each person surrenders for common security; laws must be clear and public, judges must apply rather than interpret them, and punishment must be certain, prompt and proportionate to the harm done to society. Torture punishes the innocent and spares the robust; the death penalty is neither necessary nor useful, since lasting penal servitude deters more, though he admitted exceptions in times of anarchy or where a prisoner still threatened the nation’s security. His formula of “the greatest happiness shared by the greatest number” was taken up by Jeremy Bentham. Voltaire wrote a commentary on the book (1766), Diderot annotated it, and Catherine II drew on it for her Instruction (1767); the Tuscan criminal code of 1786 abolished torture and the death penalty. Kant rejected Beccaria’s argument in the “Metaphysics of Morals” (1797) as sophistry born of sentimentality and insisted that a murderer must die; Hegel too criticised the contract argument in the “Philosophy of Right” (1820). Historians also discuss how much the book owes to Pietro Verri.

Life & context

Cesare Beccaria was born in Milan on 15 March 1738 into a family of the Lombard nobility. He was educated by the Jesuits in Parma and took a law degree at Pavia in 1758. His marriage to Teresa Blasco in 1761, against his father’s will, led to a long family quarrel. In Milan he joined the circle of Pietro and Alessandro Verri, the Accademia dei Pugni, and wrote for its journal “Il Caffè”. Encouraged by Pietro Verri, he wrote “On Crimes and Punishments”, which appeared anonymously in Livorno in 1764; in 1766 it was placed on the Index, while André Morellet’s French translation of the same year made it famous. Beccaria travelled to Paris in 1766 with Alessandro Verri but returned after a few weeks, and the friendship with the Verri brothers broke down. From 1768 he taught political economy (cameral sciences) at the Palatine Schools in Milan, and from 1771 he served in the Austrian administration of Lombardy, working on currency, trade and public order; in 1791 he joined a commission on the reform of criminal law. He died in Milan on 28 November 1794. The writer Alessandro Manzoni was his grandson.

Further main works

• On the Disorder of Currencies in the State of Milan (Del disordine e de’ rimedi delle monete nello stato di Milano, 1762)
• Inquiries into the Nature of Style (Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile, 1770)
• Elements of Public Economy (Elementi di economia pubblica, lectures 1769–71, printed 1804)