Cesare Beccaria (March 11, 1738 - November 28, 1794) was an Italian 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 criminology.
He was born in Milan and educated in the Jesuit College at Parma, where he showed a great aptitude for mathematics. The study of Montesquieu redirected his attention towards economics; and his first publication, in 1762, was a tract on the disorder of the currency in the Milanese states, with a proposal for its remedy. It was in this period that Beccaria, in conjunction with his friends, the brothers Alessandro and Pietro Verri, as well as 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 which proliferated in Italy.
The Verri brothers and Beccaria started an important cultural reformist movement centered around their journal Il Caffè, 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. 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 1764 Beccaria published a brief but justly celebrated treatise Dei delitti e delle pene ("On Crimes and Punishments ), which marked the high point of the Milan Enlightenment. In it, Beccaria put forth the first arguments ever made 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 Caffe group, who sought to cause reform through Enlightenment discourse. The book's serious message is put across in a clear and animated style, based in particular upon a deep sense of humanity and of urgency at unjust suffering. This humane sentiment is what makes Beccaria appeal for rationality in the laws.
Within eighteen months, the book passed through six editions. It was translated into French by André Morellet in 1766 and published with an anonymous commentary by Voltaire. An English translation appeared in 1767, and it was translated into several other languages.
The book was read by all the luminaries of the day, including, in the United States, by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson in his "Commonplace Book," copied a passage from Beccaria related to the issue of gun control. The quote reads, "Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. make things worse for the assaulted and better for the Such laws assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
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