Cesare Beccaria - Policies and Later Life

Policies and Later Life

The principles to which Beccaria appealed were Reason, an understanding of the state as a form of contract, and, above all, the principle of utility, or of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Beccaria had elaborated this original principle in conjunction with Pietro Verri, and greatly influenced Jeremy Bentham to develop it into the full-scale doctrine of Utilitarianism.

He openly condemned the death penalty on two grounds:

1. first, because the state does not possess the right to take lives; and
2. secondly, because capital punishment is neither a useful nor a necessary form of punishment.

Beccaria developed in his treatise a number of innovative and influential principles:

• punishment had a preventive (deterrent), not a retributive, function;
• punishment should be proportionate to the crime committed;
• the certainty of punishment, not its severity, would achieve the preventive effect;
• procedures of criminal convictions should be public; and finally,
• in order to be effective, punishment should be prompt.

He also argued against gun control laws. He was among the first to advocate the beneficial influence of education in lessening crime.

With the Verri brothers, Beccaria traveled to Paris, where he was given a very warm reception by the philosophes. He later retreated, returning to his young wife Teresa and never venturing abroad again. The break with the Verri brothers proved lasting; they were never able to understand why Beccaria had left his position at the peak of success.

Many reforms in the penal codes of the principal European nations can be traced to Beccaria's treatise, although few contemporaries were convinced by Beccaria's argument against the death penalty. When the Grand Duchy of Tuscany abolished the death penalty, as the first nation in the world to do so, it followed Beccaria's argument about the lack of utility of capital punishment, not about the state's lacking the right to execute citizens.

In November 1768, Beccaria was appointed to the chair of law and economy founded expressly for him at the Palatine college of Milan. His lectures on political economy, which are based on strict utilitarian principles, are in marked accordance with the theories of the English school of economists. They are published in the collection of Italian writers on political economy (Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia politica, vols. xi. and xii.). Beccaria never succeeded in producing a work to match Dei Delitti e Delle Pene, although he made various incomplete attempts in the course of his life. A short treatise on literary style was all he saw to press.

In 1771, Beccaria was made a member of the supreme economic council, and in 1791 he was appointed to the board for the reform of the judicial code, where he made a valuable contribution. He died in Milan.

His daughter Giulia was the mother of Alessandro Manzoni, the noted Italian novelist and poet who wrote among other things: I Promessi Sposi, one of the first Italian historical novels and "Il 5 Maggio", a poem on Napoleon's death.