Cesare Beccaria Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), a key figure of the Italian Enlightenment, established his reputation as a political writer with On Crimes and Punishments, published anonymously in 1764.Widely read in the eighteenth century, the pamphlet was prominent in debates on penal reform in Europe and colonial America.

Born in Milan, Beccaria was sent, at the age of eight, to a Jesuit school in Parma, where his “sentiments of humanity” were “stifled by eight years of fanatical and servile education” (Beccaria 2008, xvii) as he later recalled. After studying law at the University of Pavia from 1754 to 1758, he returned to Milan and frequented the city’s literary salons. There he befriended Pietro Verri, a writer and intellectual who founded his own circle in 1761, bringing Beccaria with him.

Beccaria traced his “conversion to philosophy” to this milieu with readings of, among others, Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) and Claude-Adrien Helvétius’ De l’esprit (On the Mind, 1759). Beccaria’s first work, a study of currency problems in the Milanese state published in 1762, grew out of this experience. His writings, like others of the coterie, aimed to influence a receptive Habsburg administration in Lombardy.

In On Crimes and Punishments, Beccaria combined social contract theories with utilitarianism to criticize existing criminal jurisprudence, which he held to be unnecessarily cruel, ineffective, arbitrary, and too often muddled with religious notions such as the expiation of sin. For Beccaria, laws sometimes unfairly protected the particular interests of class and clergy, in part through the “terrible and perhaps unnecessary right” (2008, 43) to property. A more just social order, he argued, would craft laws to achieve “the greatest happiness shared among the greatest number” (9).

In Beccaria’s view, laws should be written clearly and enforced by impartial judges. Trials should be public and by a jury of one’s peers, and punishments prompt and proportional to the crimes committed. Beccaria argued that detentions prior to trial must be made on the basis of law rather than at the sovereign’s whim and that torture should be eliminated because it was unreliable in securing accurate information and constituted a punishment prior to the determination of guilt. Long prison sentences and hard labor were to be used for serious crimes. The death penalty was to be abolished as an ineffective deterrent and gross spectacle that was illegitimate under the very terms of the social contract.

In Italy, On Crimes and Punishments was attacked by a Benedictine friar, Ferdinando Facchinei, who denounced its contractualist postulates and branded Beccaria a socialist. Nonetheless, the pamphlet saw several editions in the span of two years. Parisian philosophes championed the text, praised Beccaria as a “defender of humanity,” and invited him to Paris in 1766. A French translation appeared in 1765, followed shortly by editions in other European languages. A substantial commentary by Voltaire further raised the book’s visibility.

Catherine II sought Beccaria’s guidance in reforming Russia’s criminal codes, but his shyness forced him to retreat from the public spotlight. He taught economics in Milan for two years, wrote briefly on aesthetics, and took various positions in the Lombard administration, for which he wrote numerous policy recommendations. In a 1792 report, Beccaria reaffirmed the ineffectiveness of capital punishment and added a further reason for its abolition: namely, its irrevocability in the event of an erroneous execution.

Bibliography:

Beccaria, Cesare. On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, edited by Richard Bellamy, translated by Richard Davies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Thomas, translated by Aaron Thomas and Jeremy Parzen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Maestro, Marcello. Cesare Beccaria and the Origins of Penal Reform. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973.
Venturi, Franco. Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, translated by Susan Corsi. London: Longman, 1972.
Young, David. “Cesare Beccaria: Utilitarian or Retributivist?” Journal of Criminal Justice 11, no. 4 (1983): 317–326.