This collection of Cesare Beccaria's writings, conducted with critical rigor and, as far as possible, complete, was promoted by Mediobanca to honor the memory of Adolfo Tino (1900-1977), its president for twenty years, who abandoned the profession of journalist so as not to serve despotism, was a great lawyer, one of the founders of the Action Party, animator of the Resistance, inflexible supporter of the ideals of justice and freedom.

The Edizione Nazionale Beccariana is not only a complete collection of texts, but it is also a critical edition, with philological notes, appendices for manuscripts and outdated drafts, commentary notes, critical essays aimed at giving an account of previous editions and the criteria followed, and traces a history of each of Beccaria's writings, from the first draft to the last printing supervised by the author. The corpus will ultimately be composed of 16 volumes, to which will be added a final one of addenda, documents, indexes. This collection, now published in its entirety,documents the intense activity of management of public affairs that took place within the magistrates of the State of Milan at the end of the 18th century, as well as Beccaria's fundamental contribution to that new cultural and political climate in which public administration and economic reflection were becoming increasingly important.

VOLUME I. Dei delitti e delle pene Scritti filosofici e letterari.(20.7 MB)

VOLUME II. Scritti filosofici e letterari (14.7 MB)

 VOLUME III. Scritti economici (21.4 MB)

 VOLUME IV. Carteggio (17.8 MB)

 VOLUME V. Carteggio (20 MB)

 VOLUME VI. Atti di governo (Serie I: 1771 - 1777) (13.4 MB)

 VOLUME VII. Atti di governo (Serie II: 1778 - 1783) (16.5 MB)

 VOLUME VIII. Atti di governo (Serie III: 1784 - 1786) (16.5 MB)

 VOLUME IX. Atti di governo (Serie IV: 1787) (14.1 MB)

VOLUME X. Atti di governo (Serie V: 1788) (10.9 MB)

VOLUME XI. Atti di governo (Serie VI: 1789) (15.1 MB)

VOLUME XII. Atti di governo (Serie VII: 1790) (3.5 MB)

VOLUME XIII. Atti di governo (Serie VIII: 1791) (2.3 MB)

VOLUME XIV. Atti di governo (Serie IX: 1792) (2.7 MB)

VOLUME XV. Atti di governo (Serie X: 1793) (4.9 B)

VOLUME XVI. Atti di governo (Serie XI: Gennaio - Dicembre 1794) (1.9 MB)

VOLUME XVI bis. Atti di governo (Serie XI: Gennaio - Dicembre 1794) - (2.2 MB)

By Sophus A. Reinert

The Milanese Marquis Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) dedicated his life first to theorizing a more just and equal society grounded in individual rights, anchored in secular political economy rather than in religious dogma, then to realizing this bold vision through decades of administrative and regulatory work for the Milanese state. His project was not merely to reform the criminal system of the Old Regime but to challenge the very inequalities—legal, economic, educational, and so on—which drove crime to begin with.2 During his lifetime, however, his fame as a “friend of humanity” derived mostly from his impassioned pleas against torture and capital punishment, though on the basis of his temperament and his ideas it would also be easy to count him as part of what, for the later eighteenth century, the late Yves Bénot dubbed the “internationale abolitionniste.”3 This is, in large parts, also how he is remembered, but not only. It is of course a truism that ideas can have ironic, even sarcastic afterlives, but there is nonetheless something slightly perverse about Beccaria’s treatment in parts of American historiography.4 I have previously highlighted how his paternity has been claimed for both libertarian atheism and Catholic social democracy, but his name now appears ever more frequently in contemporary debates over “gun rights,” the “carceral state” and the rise of “racial capitalism.”5 We often hear of the “centrality of penal slavery” in Beccaria’s thought, for example, to the point where he repeatedly has been given the rather unenviable title of “father of prison slavery” and “father of penal servitude.”6 Some of these commentators are generous enough to admit that Beccaria can “be credited with voicing some humanitarian concerns,”

Boston, MA: Harvard Business School, 2021. 49p.

By Coleman Phillipson.

THE following three essays are not intended to be considered as separate, independent studies; they are meant to be taken together as supplementing each other, and as constituting one whole. With this intention in view, the author has been able to avoid a good deal of overlapping and repetition, which would otherwise have been inevitable. Though three men and their works are here discussed, we are concerned with but one epoch, one movement, one phase in legal evolution, which represents in many respects a turning-point in European history, and is of the utmost importance in the development of our modern civilisation. Beccaria, Bentham and Romilly are among the greatest law reformers of modern times. In their assault on the folly, injustice and cruelty of the then existing criminal jurisprudence, in their trenchant criticism of outworn codes, obscurantist traditions, blind superstitions, dogmatic technicalities, oppressive fictions, and useless relics of the past, in their proposal of rational substitutes, in their pointing the way to the light, they were intimately united. Their resemblances, like their differences, are as striking in their work as they are in their personal characteristics. In the case of Beccaria—a diffident Italian youth, shrinking from the struggles _ of men, whose small work was almost forcibly extracted from . him by his friends, and whose guarded oracular utterances soon arrested the attention of the world—we shall see vital conceptions and principles of penology in the process of germination and crystallisation; we shall see them in their triumphant conflict with the prevailing régime of sanguinary laws and barbarous methods of procedure. In the case of Bentham—that myriad-minded man, the dauntless explorer of institutions, the arch-legislator ever ready, in his jealously guarded “‘hermitage,”’ to make laws for all the nations of the earth—we shall see a prodigious multitude of ideas, schemes and systems, lavishly given to the world from a rich mine that could, surely, never be exhausted; we shall see this prolific progenitor scattering them broadcast, infusing new life into many barren places…

London: J.M. Dent, 1923. 344p.