Beccaria e l’Inghilterra

Abstract

This essay investigates Beccaria’s ideas on Great Britain and his contacts with British intellectuals and their published works. His interests were not restricted to philosophy but included history and fiction. Particular attention will be devoted to all those authors – either acknowledged or not – that are to be listed among his sources – namely Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hutcheson, Hume, and Ferguson. While Beccaria’s debt to French culture is self-evident, it is useful to address the impact of British culture on thought, although he read British authors mainly in French translations or in the Latin.