Cesare Beccaria

Italian economist and criminologist

• Born: March 15, 1738
• Birthplace: Milan (now in Italy)
• Died: November 28, 1794
• Place of death: Milan (now in Italy)

Beccaria’s An Essay on Crimes and Punishments became one of the major works of the Enlightenment, leading to prison reform, judicial reform, and the abolition of cruel and inhumane punishment. Translated into almost every European language, it remains the single most important work on criminology.

Early Life

Cesare Beccaria (CHAY-zahr-ay bayk-kah-REE-ah) was the eldest child of an aristocratic Milanese family. At the age of eight, he started his formal education at a Jesuit school in Parma. He found this education to be wedded to fanaticism and antithetical to the spirit of humanism. He attended the University of Parva, where he received a law degree in 1758. There was little about Cesare during his early years that marked him as particularly exceptional.

Cesare’s first life crisis came in 1760, when his parents objected to his engagement to the sixteen-year-old Teresa di Blasco. Cesare married her anyway in 1761, and his parents relented in their objections once the first of three children was born in 1762. At the time of his marriage, Cesare formed a close friendship with two brothers, Pietro Verri and Alessandro Verri, who were leading Milanese supporters of the Enlightenment. The three formed an intellectual society called the Academy of Fists. The group focused on the political writings of such philosophers as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Denis Diderot, and Montesquieu. Reform of the prison system became a topic of intense discussion, as did economics and the general reform of public policy. Pietro was interested in writing a history of torture, while Alessandro, who was a Milanese prison official, related the horrors he had witnessed in day-to-day prison life. From 1764 to 1766, the three friends published the Enlightenment journal Il Caffé, which contained both their own work and that of others.

Beccaria’s first published writing had been a 1762 article on monetary disorders in Milan. In it, he examined the value of goods and the relationship of value to quantity, transportability, tax policies, and the number of sellers in relation to buyers. His second economic piece, written in 1764, studied the relationship of high tariffs to smuggling. Beccaria found that high tariffs led to increased smuggling, which in turn led to decreased tariff revenues. He therefore concluded that raising tariffs was a self-defeating policy. However, it was another treatise Dei delitti e delle penne (1764; An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, 1767) that transformed a virtually unknown twenty-six-year-old into a famous Enlightenment intellectual and writer.

Life’s Work

The idea of writing an essay on crime and punishment originated with the Verri brothers, and they seem to have provided Beccaria with information as well as editorial help. The essay was first published anonymously. Beccaria put his name to future editions of An Essay on Crimes and Punishments only after the work received official praise instead of condemnation.

Beccaria’s landmark work begins by declaring that criminal laws, which have never been given proper study, are in great need of reform. For Beccaria, justice should be rational rather than emotional and based on the utilitarian principle of providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of individuals in society. The end goal of justice is not punishment or vengeance but rather bringing security and order to society, protecting the social contract, and promoting the public good. Punishments should fit crimes and be geared toward stopping individuals from committing crimes. Beccaria found certainty and swiftness of punishment to be a far greater deterrence to future crime than cruelty or severity of punishment. He also asserted that punishment should be based on clearly stated rational laws passed by a legislature and widely known by society. Laws should be clear enough to allow judges and juries to decide questions of fact, such as guilt or innocence, rather than becoming bogged down interpreting the law itself.

Beccaria found that the degree of virtue and education in society, as well as the rewards given for good behavior, were powerful deterrents to crime. Capital punishment, on the other hand, did not serve as a deterrent. Instead, it provided a nonvirtuous example for people that it is proper to take lives. He found the use of torture to be one of the worst of barbarities continued from the primitive past, because the practice condemned both the guilty and the innocent and favored the strong over the weak. Prisons, for Beccaria, became institutions where punishment was designed to reform the criminal and resocialize individuals so they could later contribute to the public good.

Beccaria’s work was an instant success. It was translated into French in 1766 by André Morellet (who also edited the structure to make it more logically cohesive) and underwent seven editions in six months. It was translated into most major European languages and was printed in the United States in 1777. Beccaria visited Paris in 1766 as an Enlightenment hero. However, something happened during the visit. Some historians refer to personality quirks that soon made Beccaria a subject of ridicule by fellow intellectuals. Others refer to his homesickness, which caused him to race back to Milan after a short three-week visit. Still others refer to a manic-depressive (bipolar) personality, which shifted after a few years of frenetic intellectual activity into incapacitating depression. Suffice it to say that Beccaria ended his friendship with the Verri brothers and other members of his intellectual circle. He stopped writing and did not produce a single essay again.

In 1768, Beccaria received a chair in public economy at the Palantine School in Milan, where he lectured for two years. In 1771, he was appointed to the supreme Economic Council of Milan, where he drew a salary as a public official until his death. On the council, he discussed many issues pertaining to economic and educational reform but did not choose to write about them. Beccaria remarried in 1774, three months after the death of his first wife. He then became involved in many depressing years of legal squabbling with his brothers and sisters over family inheritance. The coming of the French Revolution in 1789 filled Beccaria with joyful optimism that the French could build a rational society based on serving the public good. However, with the advent of the Reign of Terror in 1794, optimism turned into despair. He died in Milan on November 28, 1794, before the Reign of Terror reached its apex.

Significance

At the height of the Enlightenment, in a single essay, Cesare Beccaria introduced modern ethical and intellectual principles to criminal law and the penal system. An Essay on Crimes and Punishments found instant receptivity throughout Europe and was embraced by the so-called Enlightened Despots. Indeed, as his influence spread, if one wished to cast one’s national image as “modern” or “progressive,” Beccaria’s reforms simply could not be ignored. Beccaria’s ideas also found great acceptance in the United States, where they influenced the framers of the U.S. Constitution and the writing of the Bill of Rights, and became part of the basic principles of the U.S. judicial system. An Essay on Crimes and Punishments also was incorporated into the judicial reform movement in England: Reformers such as Samuel Romilly used Beccaria’s arguments to reduce the number of capital crimes in the nation.

In the twentieth century, Beccaria’s lucid arguments became the basis for renewed prison reform, for the termination of the death penalty in many European nations, and even for more humane means of execution in those nations that retained it. The fact that his treatise remains a “must read” in most classes in criminology through the early twenty-first century is ample testimony to both the power and progressive nature of his ideas. Since no individual system has completely enacted Beccaria’s proposed reforms, his influence is still felt in all efforts to further reform criminal law.

Beccaria’s utilitarian arguments advocating the greatest good for the greatest number influenced the formation of the British Utilitarian movement under Jeremy Benthem. Beccaria’s economic ideas, while having little lasting impact, are interesting in that they predated the writings of other tariff reformers and in their similarity to some of the major conclusions of the economistAdam Smith.

Bibliography

Akers, Ronald L., and Christine S. Sellers. Criminological Theories: Introduction, Evaluation, and Application. Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2000. A textbook study of Beccaria’s ideas and their influence on criminology to contemporary times.

Maestro, Marcello T. Cesare Beccaria and the Origins of Penal Reform. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973. Still the best of the few studies on Beccaria. Index and bibliography.

Phillipson, Coleman. Three Criminal Law Reformers: Beccaria, Bentham, Romilly. Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1970. An interesting study of Beccaria and the influence of his ideas on later judicial reformers. Bibliography and index.

Young, David, ed. On Crimes and Punishments. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1997. A textbook paperback translation of Beccaria’s famous essay containing a lengthy and informative introduction.