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Cesare Beccaria, Italian rationalist penal reformer and author of On Crimes and Punishments (1764). A third group involved in English penal reform were the "rationalists" or "utilitarians". According to historian Adam J. Hirsch, eighteenth-century rationalist criminology "rejected scripture in favor of human logic and reason as the only valid ...
Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio [1] (Italian: [ˈtʃeːzare bekkaˈriːa, ˈtʃɛː-]; 15 March 1738 – 28 November 1794) was an Italian criminologist, [2] jurist, philosopher, economist, and politician who is widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment.
Beccaria's strongly opposed the state's right to take lives and criticized the death penalty as having very little deterrent effect. After the American Revolution , influential and well-known Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson , Benjamin Rush , and Benjamin Franklin made efforts to reform or abolish the death penalty in the United States.
In criminology, the classical school usually refers to the 18th-century work during the Enlightenment by the utilitarian and social-contract philosophers Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria. Their interests lay in the system of criminal justice and penology and indirectly through the proposition that "man is a calculating animal," in the causes ...
Rational choice theory, a utilitarian approach to criminology which justifies punishment as a form of deterrence as opposed to retribution, can be traced back to Cesare Beccaria, whose influential treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764) was the first detailed analysis of capital punishment to demand the abolition of the death penalty. [49]
Cesare Beccaria. Rational choice theory is based on the utilitarian, classical school philosophies of Cesare Beccaria, which were popularized by Jeremy Bentham. They argued that punishment, if certain, swift, and proportionate to the crime, was a deterrent for crime, with risks outweighing possible benefits to the offender.
[99] [89] Similarly, law professor John Bessler points to "An Essay on Crimes and Punishments", written by Cesare Beccaria in the 1760s, which advocated proportionate punishments; many of the Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, read Beccaria's treatise and were influenced by it. [100] [101]
Beccaria argued that crime was not only an attack on an individual but on society as well. That extended the issue of punishment beyond retribution and restitution to aggrieved individuals. Society was cast as victim, not merely bystander, and what had been seen as a dispute between individuals, expanded to an issue of criminal law.