On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria
Published 1764 · 35,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Philosophy, Political Theory, Nonfiction
How hard is On Crimes and Punishments to read?
On Crimes and Punishments scores 44 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Enlightenment legal and political vocabulary — sovereignty, the social compact, utility, the vocabulary of torture and criminal procedure — in translations that preserve the eighteenth-century register.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Formal periodic sentences with heavy subordination in the manner of Montesquieu, though the chapters are short and each argument is completed before the next begins.
- Abstraction: 76 out of 100
- Pure argument from first principles about the origin of the right to punish, with almost no cases, examples or narrative to hold on to.
- Information density: 68 out of 100
- Forty-seven short chapters, each carrying a complete argument, with almost no repetition or padding. The compression is the reason it could be read in an evening and legislated the next week.
- Narrative indirection: 34 out of 100
- Direct and declarative. The only indirection is the anonymity of publication and the occasional rhetorical caution around religion and monarchy.
- Symbolic density: 24 out of 100
- A legal treatise with almost no figurative language beyond the occasional image of the scaffold and the balance.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Beccaria uses steady understatement against judicial torture, describing the procedure in neutral technical language until its absurdity is self-evident, and treating the pieties of his opponents with cold politeness.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- Every chapter concludes with an explicit position, and the book ends with a general theorem stating exactly what punishment should be.
- Structural complexity: 36 out of 100
- Forty-seven short numbered chapters in a broadly logical order, though the arrangement was reshuffled by his French translator Morellet and Beccaria approved the change, so editions differ.
How On Crimes and Punishments is regarded
On Crimes and Punishments holds a literary regard score of 82 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.