In a review, a while back, I mentioned Dr. John Snow, the founder of modern epidemiology, as an example of a person who should be incredibly famous, but is not. Our received connect-the-dots history of the world highlights many inconsequential and phony personalities, and generally ignores the people who really do things for the human race.
Two striking examples would be the seldom mentioned Enlightenment thinkers, Cesare Beccaria and Joseph Michel Antoine Servan, with whom I would contrast the endless historical references to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Despite many attempts to credit events like the American Revolution and “the advent of modernity” to the influence of Rousseau, the case is overblown. Rousseau was indeed a celebrity at the time, and widely read. But his ideas were, in the main, childish and incoherent. They were of little use to anyone who wanted to reform society. There were serious people around at that time who were building afresh in the New World, and improving and reforming the Old, and few of them drew much on Rousseau for ideas. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, whose name is routinely linked to Rousseau in the connect-the-dots template, rarely mentioned him.
Jefferson did acknowledge many influences, including Montesquieu (who is at least moderately well-known to readers). Montesquieu was the most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary America. But, Montesquieu was already old stuff when Jefferson’s philosophy geled. Other, newer, and more radical writers excited his special interest. Prominent among them was the Italian thinker Cesare marchese di Beccaria-Bonesana. John Adams also read Beccaria with great attention. So did almost anyone in Europe and America with a sincere interest in improving humanity’s social and political conditions. His Dei Delitti e delle Pene (“On Crimes and Punishments”), published in 1764, when Beccaria was only twenty-six years old [my sources conflict, one (Louis Crompton) giving it as 1761 ] was a call to reform Europe’s legal codes.
Beccaria was a Milanese. Among the chaotic states of Italy, it was in Milan that the Enlightenment took hold. There, a group of pugnacious young students and literatti formed a satyrical “Accademia dei pugni”, making fun of the ponderous institutes of the day, and then a journal, significantly named Il Caffé. Coffee played the socio-political role of marijuana in the eighteenth century.
The opening of his Dei Delitti e delle Pene sets its radical tone. I’ve only read it in French, but in English it would read: “Some remains of the laws of an ancient predatory race [Beccaria means the Romans], compiled by an Emperor who lived in Constantinople twelve centuries ago, then mixed with the customs of the Lombard tribe, then cobbled together in a mess of obscurantist, badly translated tomes, forms the basis of what Europeans call Law.” Beccaria was particularly offended by torture and cruel punishments, and called for an end to the death penalty. He may even have been the first to do so. But he did not end with these innovations. He set forth, in plain language, almost all the noblest principles of modern justice: that the accused should be seen as innocent until proven guilty, punishments proportional to crimes, justice unduly delayed is not justice, the separation of the law from arbitrary customs and religious obsessions, the invalidity of confessions under duress. He called for an end to the barbarities that rendered law arbitrary, irrational, and tyrannical. We could easily use his catalog of issues to separate the advanced and backward states in what we would now call “human rights”.
Beccaria was not unheeded. His youthful treatise had a profound influence on the laws of Europe. Within a few years, it had been translated into most major European languages, and was republished by Voltaire wih an interesting commentary. It was the central text of legal reform throughout the continent. Within a generation, judicial torture was struck down in the practices of most European states (at least officially). He was less successful in promoting his most advanced idea, the abolition of the death penalty. Beccaria argued that the claim of the State to the right to kill people was essentially a claim to own them, and was the ultimate expression of the State as slave-holder. He convinced almost no-one, except the legislature of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which was the linear descendant of the Florentine Republic. In 1786, that state became the first to abolish the death penalty, citing Beccaria directly.
I don’t find all of Beccaria’s influence entirely good. Many of his arguments presage the Utilitarian movement, which placed freedom on slippery sands and crippled political thought in the English-speaking world with incoherence. But, on the whole, his influence was for the good, and his work displays both intellectual clarity and gentle humanity. He was a voice of reason in a world of brutes, screaming savages and hystrionic poseurs.
Another example of neglect is Joseph Michel Antoine Servan (1737–1807), with his Discours sur La justice criminelle, published shortly after Beccaria. Servan was less radical than Beccaria, but he made eloquent protests against the severity and inequalities of legal codes. He turned down many honours and profitable appointments when they proved corrupt or compromising, and stood up against Napoleon’s Empire.
I’m sure that scholars of legal history know these two men well, but they are unlikely to turn up in broader histories as anything but footnotes. Part of the reason for the neglect of Beccaria is that he was Italian. The Enlightenment has come to be seen as a French thing. This is disingenuous. France, at the time, was a totalitarian state, similar in many ways to the Communist Imperialist powers of the twentieth century. State censorship, secret police, and informers made most enlightened discourse and publication impossible in that country. The bulk of Enlightenment thinking took place in the Netherlands, the freest state in Europe, where radical books could be published and discussed openly. Milan, and some cities in Germany, Scandinavia and Switzerland were secondary centers. Enlightenment intellectuals were drawn from everywhere in Europe, and were part of a cosmopolitan culture. French writers were among them, but they were some among many voices. A subsequent “sorting process”, which favoured the superpowers of the nineteenth century, created the impression that this was all taking place in Paris, and consigned writers in Dutch, Italian, Danish, and other “minor” languages to oblivion.
Today, it would be salutory for people in the United States and Canada to take another look at men like Beccaria and Servan. Especially in the United States, where some of Beccaria’s lessons where never learned, and where what was absorbed is now rapidly disintegrating. The most fundamental principles of justice and liberty are under attack in the U.S., and the country is rapidly descending into ignorance and savagery. It’s time to crack open the books, and read something with a little more substance than Rousseau.
[for citations, go to Reading for November, 2006]
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