Beccaria e Bentham

Abstract

The philosophies of Beccaria and Bentham have a number of features in common: the juspositivist principle of legality, the project of minimizing criminal law, the dependence of punishment on types of action rather than types of actors, the idea of the trial as an inductive ascertainment of truth. Beccaria’s thought, however, is more radical both in its utilitarian conception, which hinges on the idea of the social contract that underpins the critique of the death penalty, and in its liberal conception, which forecloses the association of freedom and property that we find in Bentham.