Italian · 1738–1794
A shy Milanese aristocrat who belonged to a reading club called the Academy of Fists and who wrote, at twenty-six, the short book that abolished judicial torture in half of Europe. On Crimes and Punishments appeared anonymously in Livorno in 1764 because Beccaria expected to be prosecuted. Instead Catherine the Great invited him to Russia, Voltaire wrote a commentary on it, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany became the first state in the world to abolish the death penalty in 1786. He hated travelling, turned down the offers, took a chair in political economy in Milan, and spent the rest of his career as a competent civil servant working on currency reform and public education. He had one great idea and it changed the law of most of the world.