BECCARIA, Cesar Bonesana, Marquis, a celebrated writer on the principles of jurisprudence and national economy, was born at Milan in the year 1735. He was educated in the Jesuit College at Parma, and showed at first a great fondness and aptitude for mathematics. The study of Montesquieu seems to have directed his attention towards economical questions; and his first publication (in 1762) was a tract on the derangement of the currency in the Milanese states, with a proposal for its remedy. Shortly after, in conjunction with his friends the Verris, he formed a literary society, and began to publish a small journal, in imitation of the Spectator, called II Caffé. In 1764 Beccaria published his brief but justly celebrated treatise Dei Delitti e delie Pene (“On Crimes and Punishments ”). The weighty reasonings of this work were expounded with all the additional force of a clear and animated style. It pointed out distinctly and temperately the grounds of the right of punishment, and from these principles deduced certain propositions as to the nature and amount of punishment which should be inflicted for any crime. The book had a surprising success. Within eighteen months it passed through six editions. It was translated into French by Morellet in 1766, and published with an anonymous commentary by Voltaire. An English translation appeared in 1768, and other countries followed the example. Many of the reforms in the penal codes of the principal European nations are traceable to Beccaria’s treatise. In November 1768 the marquis was appointed to the chair of public law and economy, which had been founded expressly for him at the Palatine College of Milan. His lectures on political economy, which are based on strict utilitarian principles, are in marked accordance with the ...theories of the English school of economists. They are published in the collection of Italian writers on political economy (Scrittori Classici Italiani, vols. xi. and xii.) In 1771 Beccaria was made a member of the supreme economic council; and in 1791 he was appointed one of the board for the reform of the judicial code. In this post his labours were of very great value. He died in 1793. A notice of his life will be found prefixed to his lectures, referred to above.
BECCARIA, Giovanni Battista, a distinguished electrician and practical astronomer, was born at Mondovi on the 2d of October 1716, and entered the religious order of the Pious Schools in 1732. He became professor of experimental physics, first at Palermo and then at Rome, and was appointed to a similar situation at Turin in 1748. ∏e was afterwards made tutor to the young princes de Chablais and de Carignan, and continued to reside principally at Turin during the remainder of his life. In May 1755 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London, to which he afterwards communicated several papers relating to his favourite pursuits. He died on the 27th of May 1781. Beccaria’s name is associated with no great discovery in physical science; but he did much, both in the way of experiment and exposition, to spread abroad the researches of Franklin and others in the science of electricity. His own experiments, which were skilfully conducted, demonstrated a number of curious facts bearing on the relations of electricity to meteorological phenomena, to chemical action, and to some other points which have been since more thoroughly investigated. His principal work was the treatise DeW Elettricismo Artificiale e Naher ale, 1753, which was translated into English in 1776. He also contributed a number of papers to the Philosophical Transactions. In 1759 he was commissioned to measure an arc of the meridian in the neighbourhood of Turin. The result, which he published in the Gradus Taurinensis, 1774, is not now considered perfectly correct.
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