Essay on Crimes and Punishments

In 1764 a twenty-six-year-old Milanese aristocrat published a small book, anonymously, because he was afraid of what would happen to him. Within three years it had been translated across Europe, placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, and read by Voltaire, Blackstone, Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush. Within twenty-two years the Grand Duke of Tuscany had read it and abolished the death penalty in his territory.Cesare Beccaria's argument was simple and has never been answered. The state's authority comes from what its citizens surrendered to it. No one surrendered his own life. The power to kill was therefore never given, and a government that kills is not exercising a right but only a power. Everything that has been said in defense of executions since — deterrence, public demand, the requirements of justice — Beccaria took apart before the American Revolution began.This edition modernizes the anonymous 1767 English translation, as corrected in the Albany edition of 1872. The eighteenth-century sentences have been broken apart and the archaic constructions brought into current English, with Beccaria's chapters, order, and arguments untouched. Nothing has been softened.