Cesare Beccaria - On Crimes and Punishments

On Crimes and Punishments

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. 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 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.