On Crimes and Punishments [antikvár]

IntroductionCesare Beccaria (1738-1794) is known almost exclusively as the author of On Crimes and Punishments, a short book on criminal law reform that excited keen interest and great controversy when it was first published in 1764 and that still commands attention both for some of the issues it raises and for the answers it suggests. In many respects, however, the book was greater than its self-effacing author, a man of almost crippling shyness. Neither before nor after the publication of his seminal work did he do much to distinguish himself beyond the confines of Lombardy, his native province.The eldest son of an aristocratic Milanese family, Beccaria received an education which he later described as "fanatical," studying at the Jesuit school in Parma and taking his law degree at the University of Pavia in 1758. In 1761, he fell madly in love with a young woman of lesser social standing than his own, and he eventually married her despite the vehement protests of his father, who claimed the full authority of a patrician paterfamilias.At about the time of these domestic quarrels, Beccaria met and came under the influence of Pietro Verri, another Milanese aristocrat ten years Beccaria's senior. Verri had traveled abroad and had become familiar with the writings of British economists and French philosophes. Eager to bring Italy into the mainstream of Enlightenment culture and to institute practical reforms in Lombardy, which was under Austrian rule, Verri was at the center of a group of young men known as the "Academy of Fists." It was in the Verri circle that Beccaria began to read Enlightenment authors, and it was at the suggestions of Pietro Verri that Beccaria undertook to write a brief work on criminal justice. Although busy with their own projects, other members of the Academy of Fists aided Beccaria, and the first copies of On Crimes and Punishments were printed in the summer of 1764.The book was an immediate sensation. In large measure, this was because Beccaria went beyond the narrow confines of criminal law (he knew relatively little about the technicalities of criminal justice) and placed his subject in a broad social and philosophic context. Criminal