Cesare Beccaria and the Aesthetic Knowledge of On Crimes and Punishments

Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments has had a profound impact on, and made significant contributions to, among others, the study of law, justice, crime, and punishment. Unsurprisingly, there is a voluminous literature on this text. This article subjects Beccaria’s treatise to an exegetical reading and focuses on the aesthetic inquiry at heart of the text. Beccaria professes to undertake a rigorous scientific inquiry into crime and punishment. He repeatedly invokes language from modernity and the enlightenment—e.g., probability, correlation, and other mathematical tools (e.g., geometry)—to ground the scientific nature of his treatise. Yet, what Beccaria engages with is aesthetic and what is produced is not scientific knowledge but aesthetic knowledge. Rather than read this as a criticism, the article highlights how the concept of justice—like beauty or virtue—is, and can only or largely be, a matter of aesthetic inquiry, and explicates why Beccaria’s text ought to be read as an aesthetic inquiry into justice.