On Crimes, Punishments, and Words: Legal and Language Issues in Cesare Beccaria's Works

When Cesare Beccaria’s Essay on Crimes and Punishments appeared, anonymously, in 1764, enlightened intellectuals and sovereigns from all over Europe welcomed it as a manifesto of human rights. The resonance of the treatise was enormous: in France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Poland, Russia, and even in Catholic, conservative Spain Beccaria was hailed as the author who had made “the standard of reason” triumph against obscurantism and tyranny. In fact the fortune of the Essay was due not only to its contents but also to the powerful language used by the author. Beccaria was perfectly aware that he had to find a new language to articulate his revolutionary ideas on society and human rights. In this search for a clear and scientific style, besides drawing inspiration from the French philosophes - particularly Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hélvetius, Condillac, and d’Alambert - he was clearly affected by Locke. The legacy of An Essay on Human Understanding is apparent in his reflections on the importance of cognition and the idea that there is no one-to-one correspondence between language and reality, so that the former, though deriving from processes generated by experience, may express general ideas independently from immediate perception. Even more blatantly, Beccaria started from the Lockian assumption that language may be deceitful, since its nature is inevitably arbitrary and metaphoric. Meaning can oscillate and become unstable, causing dangerous misunderstandings and misjudgements, especially when decisions have to be taken in courts. On the other hand, precisely because it is irreducible to a hard science, language is a carrier of freedom and has the power to multiply perceptions and make concepts visible. Beccaria himself resorted to numerous figures of speech. In particular, he found an ideal metaphor in the body to express a) the wavering between sensation and cognition; b) the object par excellence to exemplify his criticism towards physical punishments; and c) the nature of language itself, the word as embodiment. These ideas, as well as Beccaria’s general concern for language were expanded and dealt with in detail in a less-known essay, the Disquisitions on the Nature of Style published in 1770. My essay is an attempt at drawing parallels between On Crimes and Punishments and this latter work, highlighting significant connections between Beccaria’s views on language and his ideas on human rights.