Dei delitti e delle pene
Contributions
- Anonymous (Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria)
- author
- Anonymous (Giuseppe Aubert)
- publisher
- Anonymous (Marco Coltellini)
- publisher
Related resources
- has translation
- Traité des délits et des peines translation
- has translation
- An Essay on Crimes and Punishments: translated from the Italian, with a commentary attributed to Mons. de Voltaire, translated from the French. translation has paratext
Summary (extracted citations)
Epigraph from Francis Bacon: “In rebus quibuscumque difficiloribus non expectandum, ut quis simul, et serat et metat, sed praeparatione opus est, ut per gradus maturescant” ('Sermones fideles', XLV).
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Notes
Beccaria's stylish plea for penal law reform was one of the most important works of the Italian Enlightenment. Written between March 1763 and January 1764, with the encouragement of members of the Milanese intellectual circle known as the 'Accademia dei pugni' ('Academy of Fists'), it was published anonymously in Livorno in July 1764. It had no listed place or publisher – later editions carried the false imprint of 'Monaco' – for fear of repercussions, and indeed, it was put on the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books in 1766.
On its publication, it enjoyed an immediate success, and its influence reached out across Europe and over the Atlantic. Its humane ideas inspired the introduction of legal reforms by Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany (the first to abolish the death penalty in 1786), Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, and Catherine II of Russia.
His central theme was to argue for a more deterrent-based and less retributive attitude to criminality based around proportionate punishment, while calling for the abolition of torture and capital punishment. He developed his position by appealing to utilitarian theories, arguing that punishment was only justified when it motivated people to honour the social contract, and that laws should be created for “the greatest happiness shared among the greater number”. Beccaria compared the ideal lawgiver to “a skilled architect, who raises his building [i.e. the social contract] on the foundation of self-love”, where the interests of all should derive from the interests of each.
Beccaria’s relevance lies in his reconception of the problem of punishment within the framework of a new idea of politics birthed from the Enlightenment. One which imagined a new kind of framework in which state authority is subjugated to laws protecting individuals. Conceived this way, criminal law could no longer be a royal instrument used by a sovereign to underpin their strength and guarantee social order, but rather the neutral instrument of citizens to protect their liberty and safety against public or private violence.
See Philippe Audegean & Luigi Delia, eds., 'Le moment Beccaria: naissance du droit pénal moderne, 1764-1810' (2018, Liverpool University Press).