Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria-Bonesana (Italian: [ˈtʃɛ:zare
bekkaˈri:a]; March 11, 1738 – November 28, 1794) was an
Italian
jurist,
philosopher and
politician best known for his treatise
On Crimes and Punishments (1764), which condemned
torture
and the
death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of
penology.
Birth and
education
Beccaria was born in
Milan on
March 11, 1738, and educated in the
Jesuit college at
Parma.
Then he graduated in
law from the
University of Pavia in 1758.
At first, he showed a great aptitude for
mathematics, but the study of
Montesquieu redirected his attention towards
economics. His first publication, in 1762, was a tract on the
disorder of the currency in the
Milanese states,with a proposal for its remedy.
During this time, Beccaria, with the brothers
Pietro and
Alessandro Verri and a number of other young men from the Milan
aristocracy formed a literary society, which was named "L'Accademia dei
pugni" (the Academy of Fists), a playful name that made fun of the
stuffy academies that proliferated in Italy and also because relaxed
conversations that were taking place in there sometimes ending in
affrays.[citation
needed]
On
Crimes and Punishments
Frontpage of the original Italian edition
Dei delitti e
delle pene.
The Verri brothers and Beccaria started an important cultural
reformist movement centered around their
journal Il Caffè ("The Coffeehouse"), which ran from the
summer of 1764 for about two years, and was inspired by
Addison and
Steele's literary magazine,
The Spectator and other such journals.[2]
Il Caffè represented an entirely new cultural moment in northern Italy.
With their
Enlightenment rhetoric and their balance between topics of
socio-political and literary interest, the anonymous contributors held
the interest of the educated classes in
Italy,
introducing recent thought such as that of Voltaire and Diderot.
In 1794 Beccaria published a brief but justly celebrated treatise
On Crimes and Punishments, which marked the high point of the
Milan
Enlightenment. In it, Beccaria put forth some of the first modern
arguments against the
death penalty. His treatise was also the first full work of
penology, advocating reform of the criminal law system. The book was
the first full-scale work to tackle criminal reform and to suggest that
criminal justice should conform to rational principles. It is a less
theoretical work than the writings of
Hugo Grotius,
Samuel von Pufendorf and other comparable thinkers, and as much a
work of advocacy as of theory. In this essay, Beccaria reflected the
convictions of the Il Caffè group, who sought to cause reform
through Enlightenment discourse.
Policies and
later life
The principles to which Beccaria appealed were
Reason,
an understanding of the state as a form of contract, and, above all, the
principle of utility, or of the greatest happiness for the greatest
number. Beccaria had elaborated this original principle in conjunction
with Pietro Verri, and greatly influenced
Jeremy Bentham to develop it into the full-scale doctrine of
Utilitarianism.
He openly condemned the death penalty on two grounds:
- first, because the state does not possess the right to take
lives; and
- secondly, because capital punishment is neither a useful nor a
necessary form of punishment.
Statue of Beccaria in Pinacoteca Brera, Milan
Beccaria developed in his treatise a number of innovative and
influential principles:
- punishment had a preventive (deterrent),
not a retributive, function;
- punishment should be proportionate to the crime committed;
- the certainty of punishment, not its severity, would achieve the
preventive effect;
- procedures of criminal convictions should be public; and
finally,
- in order to be effective, punishment should be prompt.
He also argued against gun control laws.[3]
He was among the first to advocate the beneficial influence of education
in lessening crime.[4]
With the Verri brothers, Beccaria traveled to Paris, where he was
given a very warm reception by the
philosophes. He later retreated, returning to his young wife
Teresa and never venturing abroad again. The break with the Verri
brothers proved lasting; they were never able to understand why Beccaria
had left his position at the peak of success.
Many reforms in the
penal codes of the principal European nations can be traced to
Beccaria's treatise, although few contemporaries were convinced by
Beccaria's argument against the death penalty. When the
Grand Duchy of Tuscany abolished the death penalty, as the first
nation in the world to do so, it followed Beccaria's argument about the
lack of utility of capital punishment, not about the state's lacking the
right to execute citizens.
In November 1768, Beccaria was appointed to the chair of
law and
economy founded expressly for him at the Palatine college of Milan.
His lectures on political economy, which are based on strict
utilitarian principles, are in marked accordance with the theories
of the English school of economists. They are published in the
collection of Italian writers on political economy (Scrittori
Classici Italiani di Economia politica, vols. xi. and xii.).
Beccaria never succeeded in producing a work to match Dei Delitti e
Delle Pene, although he made various incomplete attempts in the
course of his life. A short treatise on literary style was all he saw to
press.
In 1771, Beccaria was made a member of the supreme economic council,
and in 1791 he was appointed to the board for the reform of the judicial
code, where he made a valuable contribution. He died in Milan.
His daughter Giulia was the mother of
Alessandro Manzoni, the noted Italian novelist and poet who wrote
among other things:
I Promessi Sposi, one of the first Italian historical novels and
"Il 5 Maggio", a poem on Napoleon's death.
See also