Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments

Abstract

Cesare Beccaria’s pamphlet, On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene) of 1764, takes us back to the School of Milan, the core of the Lombard Enlightenment during the latter half of the eighteenth century. This is the only work of the whole School of Milan that almost immediately achieved worldwide fame. Its treatment of the fundamental issues of penal law is one of the main pillars of the age of rights from the Enlightenment down to the present day. To understand the work properly it must be set in context within the utilitarian view of public happiness which was the key element of the whole Italian School at the time.