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Updated: June 5, 2025
The Argenis was published in 1621; but amongst the ideas on religion, carefully elaborated or obscurely suggested, which throng its pages, we find curious anticipations of the position of Locke and even of Hume, just as in politics, in the remarks on elective monarchy put in the lips of the Cardinal Ubaldini, or in the conceptions of justice and law, Barclay reveals a sympathy with principles which appealed to Algernon Sidney or were long afterwards developed by Beccaria.
What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and Farinace is alive.
Beccaria was even of opinion that all men might be poets and orators, and Reynolds that they might be painters and sculptors. If this were really so, that stolid Englishman might not have been so very far wrong after all, who, on Canova's death, inquired of his brother whether it was "his intention to carry on the business!"
His chief authority for more merciful methods is Beccaria; and it is worth remarking, for reasons which will appear hereafter, that he does not in this connection refer to Bentham, although he speaks enthusiastically of Bentham's model prison, the Panopticon. Colquhoun shows how strangely the severity of the law was combined with its extreme capaciousness.
With a curious ignorance of the conditions of a people, who could not read and rarely saw a printed book, and never owned a printing-press during the French régime, references were made by the congress that assembled at Philadelphia in September in 1774, to the writings of Beccaria and the spirit of the "immortal Montesquieu."
He studied at various places and times under Tiraboschi, Beccaria, Jacquier, and Le Sueur; and having entered the Theatine order of monks at the age of eighteen, he taught philosophy, science, and theology in several of the Italian cities, as well as in Malta, until 1780, when the chair of mathematics in the University of Palermo was offered to and accepted by him.
In his talks with Vivaldi he first explored the course of Italian thought and heard the names of the great jurists, Vico and Gravina, and of his own contemporaries, Filangieri, Verri and Beccaria.
This utilitarian view acquires a still greater importance when applied to criminals under sentence of capital punishment. Soon after Beccaria, it was asked, if we mistake not, by Voltaire: "Of what use is the dead body of a criminal? You cannot restore the victim to life by the execution of the murderer."
These Italians could build Giotto's campanile; could paint the Transfiguration; could carve the living marble on the tombs of the Medici; could produce the Vita Nuova; could beget Galileo, Galvani, Beccaria; but still they were Foreigners.
When Beccaria wrote of Crimes and Penalties, the whole world was for torturing either innocents, or criminals, because divines with the bible in their hands, were against Beccaria. And they were against astronomy, and Galileo was one of the victims.
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