Beccaria's Essay on Crimes and Punishments: A Scholarly Review

Introduction

Cesare Beccaria's An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1764) is one of the most influential works in the history of criminology and legal reform. This seminal text was written during the Enlightenment and is lauded for paving the way for contemporary criminal justice systems — in particular for its opposition to the death penalty and the use of torture. The work calls for a justice system grounded in the humane treatment of offenders. Beccaria's seemingly revolutionary ideas still resonate among scholars and theorists in the field and fill modern discussions surrounding crime and punishment.

Historical Context and Significance

The 18th century still held to traditions in criminal justice that relied heavily on punitive measures such as torture and the death penalty. Beccaria promoted Enlightenment principles that emphasized humanism and reason — not based on religious principles, but on humanistic ideals. In doing so, he challenged the norms of the old-world culture of Europe. An Essay on Crimes and Punishments quickly gained recognition and has been viewed as a seminal text for legal theorists and reformers throughout Europe. This was especially true for figures like Voltaire, who provided commentary on the text. The work was equally important for later criminological theorists and reformers who called for an overhaul of legal systems to make them more equitable, transparent, and humane.

The preface of the book emphasizes the need for reducing penal laws to a standard grounded in Enlightenment reason. This introduces the reader to Beccaria's core argument: that penal systems should be crafted not to satisfy the vengeful instincts of old-world society, but to maximize social welfare through more humanistic punishment.

Opposition to Torture and the Death Penalty

Beccaria (1764) is clearly opposed to the methods of punishment practiced prior to the Enlightenment era. For example, he describes how under Louis IX, profaners would have their tongues pierced with a hot rod. He decries this as excessive, arguing that the offender "deserved chastisement, but did he deserve such excruciating torture, and the most horrible death?" (p. 90). Beccaria often dismisses such offenses as the unruly excesses of youth — largely meaningless, and hardly justifying torture such as the removal of one's upper lip. What Beccaria is doing, however, is judging a different era, culture, and set of values according to the standards of Enlightenment philosophy. What he views as a minor offense would have been viewed very differently during the time of St. Louis.

Yet there is an underlying purpose to Beccaria's method. His essential argument is this: if the enlightened citizens of the 18th century are going to abandon the religious beliefs and practices of the prior age, they should also abandon the punishments and practices of that age. From the perspective of someone like St. Louis, Beccaria's staunch opposition to torture and the death penalty would have been among the most radical elements of his essay. For St. Louis, profanity and blasphemy were not only sins against God but also crimes against the order and stability of a Christian society. However, that Christian society had weakened to such a point that by the 18th century its entire foundation seemed imperiled — and in fact it would be violently attacked during the French Revolution at the end of that century (Delia, 2021). To men like Voltaire and Beccaria, the old-world hierarchies were no longer relevant (Quastana, 2023). Beccaria, with his treatise on crimes and punishment, paves the way for an overthrow of the old-world order by, first, excusing the sin or crime as negligible (the result of frivolous youthful passion), and second, by characterizing torture as both barbaric and counterproductive. He asserts plainly that it undermines the very objective of justice and even the Christian concept of mercy. Beccaria thus subtly critiques Christian society by suggesting it is hypocritical for punishing sin so severely; he remarks that one should "imitate God in your proceedings against [the offender]. If he be penitent, God forgives him. Impose a penance, and let him be pardoned" (p. 90).

Regarding the death penalty, Beccaria's arguments are both philosophical and pragmatic, grounded in the cause of humanity and Enlightenment thought. He asserts that the state does not possess the moral authority to take a life, given that life is an inalienable right. Moreover, he argues that capital punishment is ineffective as a deterrent and only serves to brutalize society by endorsing violence at the highest level of government: "the punishment of death has never prevented determined men from injuring society" (p. 51). Beccaria states elsewhere that "the punishment of death is not authorised by any right; for I have demonstrated that no such right exists. It is therefore a war of a whole nation against a citizen, whose destruction they consider as necessary or useful to the general good" (p. 51). His opposition to both torture and the death penalty laid the groundwork for modern movements against inhumane treatment in the penal system.

Conclusion

Cesare Beccaria's An Essay on Crimes and Punishments remains one of the earliest and most important works in the modern field of criminology. His arguments against torture and the death penalty, as well as his insistence on proportionality in punishment and the prevention of crime, have resounded across centuries into our own. Although some aspects of his work may appear idealistic or less applicable to the contemporary world — and at times unsympathetic toward the past — Beccaria nonetheless advanced the ideals of humanism within modern law and justice. He helped elevate Enlightenment-era humanism to the level of policy, an influence that has stretched from the 18th century to the 21st. The relevance of Beccaria's work lies in its call for a justice system grounded in humane treatment — one that values the prevention of crime over the punishment of conduct that may mean little in the broader social sense. He calls for treating all people with dignity and exercising more of the virtue and charity that the old world espoused in theory, if not always in practice.

References

Beccaria, C. (1872). An Essay on Crimes and Punishments. By the Marquis Beccaria of Milan. With a Commentary by M. de Voltaire. A New Edition Corrected. Albany: W.C. Little & Co.

Bez, D. J. (2018). Reformative and rehabilitative treatments of offenders: A general overview. MSSV Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2(1), 70–87.

Delia, L. (2021). The migration of Beccaria's penal ideas in encyclopedic compilations (1770–1789). Translation and Transfer of Knowledge in Encyclopedic Compilations, 1680–1830, 167.

Fosse, C. (2020). Restorative justice: The politics and philosophy of an alternative approach to criminal justice. Xavier Journal of Politics, 9, 1–12.

Freilich, J. D. (2015). Beccaria and situational crime prevention. Criminal Justice Review, 40(2), 131–150.

Quastana, F. (2023). Voltaire. In Handbook of the History of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy: Volume 1: From Plato to Rousseau (pp. 381–387). Cham: Springer International Publishing.