Abstract
This paper challenges existing images of the context and object of Cesare Beccaria's (1764) Dei delitti e delle pene. It offers textual and other evidence that the chief object of Beccaria's famous treatise was the application to crime and penality not of humanism and legal rationality, as convention holds, but of the Scottish‐inspired “science of man.” This latter was a deterministic discourse whose key principles—utilitarianism, probabilism, associationism, and sensationalism—implicitly defy, conventional assumptions about the volitional basis of classical criminology. The paper thus questions Dei delitti's proper place in the history of criminology and, in so doing, casts doubt on the very existence of a distinctive “classical criminology.”
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