Inequality

For the most part, men leave the care of the most important regulations either to common sense or to the discretion of individuals whose interests are opposed to those most foresighted laws which distribute benefits to all and resist the pressures to concentrate those benefits in the hands of a few, raising those few to the heights of power and happiness, and sinking everyone else in feebleness and poverty.

Beccaria wrote Crime and Punishment in 1764, twenty-five years before the French Revolution. Europe was then a profoundly hierarchical society, where a few privileged people ruled over the entire population with an arbitrary and unaccountable authority. Enlightenment philosophers condemned inequality as the germ of social injustice, and Beccaria was passionate about it even though he belonged to an aristocratic milieu. He was a member of the academy of fisticuffs, a group of young Milanese aristocrats who rebelled against the stifling oppression of the local élite, which included their families.

The interests of the few systematically trumped the interests of the many, and the laws were designed to increase the power of the few while keeping the many under the thumb. That situation afflicted Milan, Italy and Europe. Beccaria and his young fellow pugilists had the ambition to radically reform their society, the institutions and the laws. It was an ambition shared by all enlightenment thinkers in Europe, although the means to achieve that reform were the object of disagreement. We know that France took a revolutionary path, while Milan engaged in steady reforms from within; indeed, Beccaria and other pugilists were to play an important part in the local administration.

European enlightenment thinkers agreed that the Church was one of the strongest forces of inequality and subjection, and religion was the instrument of mass control. Italian publicists – scholars of political philosophy and public law– never ceased to be inspired by Machiavelli’s central idea; namely, that Christian morality is incompatible with the morality of Civic Republicanism. The former is passive and requires obedience to the established authority, while the latter is active and demands participation in the political affairs of the city. Everyone must strive to take an active part in the running of the city. In this way, institutions and laws will reflect the interests of the whole society, and not just the vested interests of the privileged ones.

It is with the interest of the many in mind that Beccaria formulated his famous motto: la massima felicità divisa nel maggior numero (the greatest happiness shared among the greater number), which was subsequently adopted by Bentham. Beccaria sees this maxim as the centrepiece of a new science, whose object is human society and whose name is ‘the science of man.’ His ultimate intellectual ambition was very close to Hume’s project. Beccaria’s keen interest on mathematics and the sciences is poured into the development of political economy; indeed, Beccaria’s first public appointment was to the chair of political economy, the second oldest chair of its kind in the world. Political economy in the eyes of the pugilists aimed to replace religion as the guiding light of human behaviour:

“Now everyone speaks of public economy as if it were religion,” the Vallumbrosan monk Ferdinando Facchinei lamented in a 1764 manuscript held in the Venetian state archives. His fear was that while the lives of individuals and the ideals of societies alike traditionally had been understood and evaluated in theological terms, what we might call an “economic turn” was in the process of dramatically recasting how Europeans conceived of themselves and of their polities.

Political economy for Beccaria was not just a tool with which to administer the state more efficiently; it was a Copernican revolution on how to understand the place of man in the society, and the importance of reconceiving politics to serve the interests of the society. Political economy aimed to be the science of happiness and was intended to replace religion which was perceived as the source of misery.

Beccaria was aware that a lot of progress had been achieved in public matters through political economic reforms. Trade replaced wars, the press spread new ideas, and the relation between sovereign and subjects had been reconceived. But he also noted that little had been said and done about the cruelty and arbitrariness of criminal laws, the most immediate and visible display of brute force which had not yet been rationalised. It was not uncommon in those years to see people condemned to death and brutally ravaged in the public square.

Beccaria’s On Crime and Punishment was the first attempt to apply the principles of political economy to the practice of punishment with the intent of humanising and rationalising the use of coercion on the part of the state. After all, arbitrary and cruel punishment was the most immediate and visual instrument the state had to terrorise the people into submission, so as to avoid rebellion against the hierarchical structure of the society.

The problem that Beccaria faced then was the simple fact that the élite had the complete control of the law, which was a highly esoteric language that only the initiated could master. The path leading to the rational reform of penal law required first and foremost a fundamental philosophical rethinking of the role and place of the law in the society.