Crime and Punishment Baccaria & Dostoevsky

Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments is basically perceived as a precursor to Jeremy Bentham's theory of utility. However, we see in Bellamy's account of his writings that Beccaria's political philosophy is much broader in scope, encompassing other themes than utilitarianism like romanticism and liberalism. Beccaria was born into an aristocratic Milanese family, origins that could not have been more far removed from those of Fyodor Dostoevsky who was the son of a former army surgeon so drunk and brutal that he was murdered by his own serfs. Beccaria's family fought against bureaucratic tyranny, religious intolerance, and intellectual dogma despite their aristocratic origins. Dostoevsky, narrowly escaping his own execution, was tossed in a Siberian prison for a decade where he contracted epilepsy. Both Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment deal with punishment in relation to the role of the state and the nature of human beings. The contrasting backgrounds of each author make these works the result of contrasting perspectives, but in each of them we see the authors struggle with the relation of the individual to the state and the particular social institutions of prison and punishment.

In Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments, we are treated to an expose of the criminal justice system much as we are in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. In Beccaria's work, however, we are t

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nnous justice system, one in which the state does not appear to be aware of Beccaria's dictum that "Whilst every individual is bound to society, society is likewise bound to every individual member of it by a pact which, by its very nature, places obligations on both parties" (12). In Crime and Punishment we are treated to the perspective of a murderer, Raskolnikov, a man who murders an old woman for no good reason and then suffers from what might be called Russian guilt. An atheist in the Russian nihilist sense of the word, Raskolnikov's arguments for justifying his actions are, like Beccaria's utility, a philosophical reaction. However, Raskolnikov's justification appears to be a reaction against Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative which basically equates to the golden rule. Kant's philosophy was a reaction against the Enlightenment and its belief in the unlimited scope of reason. His categorical imperative basically states that one should act in such a manner so that he would not mind if that action became a universal law. Beccaria, as we have seen, embraces the concepts of the Enlightenment while Dostoevsky's protagonist seems to rationally justify his murderous actions. Raskolnikov thinks he is above the moral law

Category: Government - C