Against the Death Penalty: Writings from the First Abolitionists—Giuseppe Pelli and Cesare Beccaria ed. by Peter Garnsey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Against the Death Penalty: Writings from the First Abolitionists—Giuseppe Pelli and Cesare Beccaria ed. by Peter Garnsey Germano Maifreda Peter Garnsey, translator and editor, Against the Death Penalty: Writings from the First Abolitionists—Giuseppe Pelli and Cesare Beccaria (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 226. $35.00 cloth. The interest of Anglophone historiography in late eighteenth-century Italian intellectual life has markedly increased in the last two decades. The recent publication of philologically rigorous critical editions—which stand on the shoulders of Franco Venturi's tireless commitment in the second half of the twentieth century—have contributed significantly to this recuperation. These include new and ongoing editions of the complete works of Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri, which, with path-breaking tomes such as Sophus A. Reinert's The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy (2018) and The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe, coedited by Reinert and Steven L. Kaplan (2019), indicate the important and expanding field in which Peter Garnsey's Against the Death Penalty is a welcome and valuable addition.1 Garnsey's recent interest in the Italian Enlightenment developed from his previous work on the ideology of slavery and related debates about property among philosophers, jurists, and theologians from classical antiquity to the late nineteenth century. His insightful book Thinking about Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution (2007) highlighted the historical interrelation of the ideas of slavery and property crimes. His interest in the ways that property crimes were punished in the early modern era has developed into Against the Death Penalty, both a study of imprisonment as a punishment and a history of the concept of penal servitude, with particular attention to both Cesare Beccaria's conceptualization [End Page 116] of it as a form of slavery and his proposal that hard labor replace capital punishment in his pioneering On Crimes and Punishments (original publication 1764, definitive edition 1766). This stance against the death penalty underlies Garnsey's term of reference in the book—abolitionist—for both Beccaria (1738–1794) and Giuseppe Pelli (1729–1808). Garnsey emphasizes that the aim of Against the Death Penalty is not to draw comparisons between the writings of Pelli and Beccaria. In fact, their differences, reflective of their different intellectual traditions, are certainly more interesting than the similarities: Pelli's thought was shaped by Catholicism and the natural jurists, and Beccaria, by French Enlightenment philosophers. The book instead aims, first, to offer translations of the relevant texts, including the first English translation of Pelli's works. Against the Death Penalty additionally explores the historical and intellectual contexts in which Pelli and Beccaria lived and wrote. In both of these aims, the volume succeeds admirably. The book is bipartite. Its first section sees the translation of Pelli's Against the Death Penalty, some fragments on the punishment of talion and on vengeance, and Pelli's correspondence with Beccaria of 1766–67. This material is followed by a contextualization and analysis of Pelli's argument. The book's second section contains Garney's translation of both the chapters of Beccaria's On Crime and Punishment in which the founding father of modern criminal-law reform pronounced himself against the death penalty and for forced labor, and the Opinion ("Voto"), written in opposition to the death penalty by Beccaria, his pupil Francesco Gallarati Scotti, and the judge Paolo Risi as part of the 1792 imperial Commission for Legal Reform in Lombardy. Garnsey's analysis of the political-cultural context in the second half of the eighteenth century Lombardy follows, together with his critical reconsideration of Beccaria's argument against death penalty. The volume is closed by a postscript that closely considers the significance of Beccaria's advocacy of life imprisonment and that describes the reception and revision of these views by successors including Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Jefferson. Contemporaries and near neighbors, Pelli and Beccaria were unaware of each other's existence and intellectual activities: Pelli was a minor aristocrat from Florence who pursued a career within the Austrian Habsburg administration in the Gran Duchy of Tuscany, finally rising to the position of director of the Uffizi Gallery. He wrote...