Cesare Bonesana Beccaria

From Philosopedia

Beccaria, Cesare Bonesana [Marchese di] (1738—1794)

An Italian criminologist, jurist, and economist, Beccaria wrote one of the most influential books of the eighteenth century, Crimes and Punishments (1764). His ideas, which were praised by Voltaire, affected penal methods for the better throughout the whole of Europe.

According to J. M. Robertson, “Even were he not known to be a deist, his strictly secular and rationalist method would have brought upon him priestly suspicion; and he had in fact to defend himself against pertinacious and unscrupulous attacks, though he had sought in his book to guard himself by occasionally ‘veiling the truth in clouds.’ ”

Beccaria owed his intellectual awakening first to Montesquieu and above all to Helvetius - another testimony to the reformative virtue of all freethought.”

Other 18th-century Italian freethinkers Robertson names are as follows:

• Alfieri, one of the strongest anti-clericalists of his age;

• Count Algarotti (1712—1764), a distinguished aesthetician;

• Bettinelli, the correspondent of Voltaire and author of The Resurrection of Italy (1775);

• Count Dandolo, author of a French work on The New Men (1799);

• Filangieri, whose work on legislation won high praise from Franklin but was put on the Index by the papacy;

• Ferdinando Galiani, a wit among the French philosophes;

• Antonio Genovesi (1712—1769), “redeemer of the Italian Mind” and chief establisher of economic science for Italy;

• Giannone, author of the great anti-papal History of the Kingdom of Naples (1723), who died in Sardinia after having been confined there for twelve years.

McCabe, however, speculates as to whether or not Beccaria was an atheist. Italy was not a safe place for heretics. Beccaria had to publish his treatise abroad and anonymously - and he, as he said, “heard the noise of the chains rattled by superstition and fanaticism.”

{BDF; CE; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}