Beccaria, Cesare (1738–1794)

Cesare Beccaria, born in Milan into a noble family, was one of the most important representatives of the Italian Enlightenment. He was active, with the brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri and other friends, in the Accademia dei Pugni (Punch Academy) and in organizing the review Il Caffé. He was not primarily a jurist, and his intellectual interests concerned mainly political economy. He taught economic sciences at the Scuole Palatine in Milan and wrote some treatises on those issues, especially about money. However, today scholars associate his name with the classic book Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crimes and Punishments), which appeared in 1764.

The book was a great success in Europe, especially after André Morellet's translation into French (1766). Voltaire (1694–1778) was a great admirer of it, and Beccaria himself spent a short period in France. Others also translated the book into different European languages. In Germany, Karl Ferdinand Hommel (1722–1781) wrote a detailed criticism of it, giving him the moniker the “German Beccaria.”

Beccaria's book was a fundamental contribution to the reform of criminal law in Europe; he wrote in order to humanize a system of criminal law characterized by cruelty and inhumanity. Beccaria recognized his debt toward Charles-Louis de Montesquieu (1689–1755), who had already written—mainly in Esprit des lois (Spirit of the Laws) and Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters)—against injustice and cruelty in criminal law. Francesco Pagano (1748–1799) indicated that Montesquieu and Beccaria were the two thinkers who most importantly contributed to the reform of criminal law.

Beccaria based his theory on the idea of social contract, according to the main principles of the modern natural law from Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). According to Beccaria, the state's right to punish resides in the minimal portion of natural liberty that individuals, entering into society, have [Page 118]given up. A punishment that goes beyond this base is misused, not justice, and is, in fact, not law.

Therefore, Beccaria recommended a strict limit on the state's power to punish. According to him, only the laws—issued from the states' legislative power—could establish which facts constitute crimes and determine a punishment for them. Judges do not have the faculty to interpret and provide meaning to criminal law, but have only the duty to apply the general criminal law to particular facts. The appropriate criterion to measure the severity of crimes, and thus punishment, is the damage to society. The severity of punishment must be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime.

Beccaria also contributed to the humane reform of criminal procedure. He condemned severe torture as a means to discover the truth, to compel the accused to confess. He argued for precise limits to the circumstances in which imprisonment might occur before conviction. In cases in which this might occur, the law ought to clearly establish it.

There is a clear distinction between Beccaria and other criminal law reformers (even Montesquieu) in his rejection of capital punishment: since people give up only a small part of their natural liberty in the social contract, it is impossible that they would relinquish the crucial condition of liberty, namely, life. It is absurd, according to Beccaria, that the law—which abhors and punishes murder—should commit a murder itself. The state cannot dissuade citizens from murder when it commands a public murder.

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