Beccaria Publishes On Crimes and Punishments
The purpose of punishment is to prevent future crime, not to inflict suffering, a young Italian jurist argues, and torture should end
Quick facts
- Author
- Cesare Beccaria
- Work
- On Crimes and Punishments
- Published
- 1764, Livorno (anonymously)
- Key idea
- Punishment as deterrence, opposition to torture and the death penalty
What happened
Cesare Beccaria, a young Milanese jurist, published On Crimes and Punishments anonymously in 1764. He argued that the sole legitimate purpose of criminal punishment is deterrence, preventing the same person and others from offending again, not vengeance or the infliction of suffering for its own sake. On that basis he denounced judicial torture, secret accusations, and the death penalty as excessive and counterproductive, and called for punishments to be proportionate to the crime and applied swiftly and consistently, arguing that certainty and promptness of punishment deterred crime more effectively than severity. The book was translated across Europe within a few years and read by reform-minded rulers as a practical blueprint.
Why it matters
On Crimes and Punishments became the founding text of modern penology and directly influenced legal reforms in several European states and, later, the framers of American criminal law protections against cruel and excessive punishment.
How we know
The book survives in its original Italian and in period translations; the National Constitution Center's document library, which reproduces and summarizes the text, quotes Beccaria's argument that punishment exists only to prevent future offenses.
Sources
- Cesare Beccaria (Internet Archive). On Crimes and Punishments · Primary source (author-declared)archive.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- National Constitution Center. On Crimes and Punishments (1764) · Reputable sourceconstitutioncenter.org · The domain "constitutioncenter.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineThe Enlightenment23 events · How a new faith in reason and evidence remade philosophy, science, and government between 1620 and 1800View all →