Beccaria

It's both impressive and disheartening that so many of Beccaria's ideas are actually more progressive than a number of people today.

He argued against the death penalty on both moral and practical grounds. On a moral level, he referred to the idea of the social contract, in which the authority of the state derives entirely from the freedoms voluntarily sacrificed by individuals. Since no individuals willingly sacrifice their right to life, the state therefore has no right to kill. He argued that the sight of the state committing such a great crime will only convince the audience of the hypocrisy of the law. On a practical level, Beccaria argued that execution does not actually reduce crime. He envisioned punishment not as revenge but purely as deterrence. Criminal penalties are worthless (and even unjust) unless they seek to reduce the occurrence of crime. He argued that the brief pain of death pales in comparison to years of imprisonment, and whatever deterrence execution may have would fade rapidly unless there were a constant stream of people to execute, which requires a constant rate of fresh crimes. Execution therefore cannot ever be an effective deterrent.

The influence of the Enlightenment is clear when Beccaria dismisses the past as a "sea of errors" and expresses his conviction that the greatest truths are most often ignored by the majority of the population. He regarded the previous two or three centuries as a prime example of progress, during which "from the lap of luxury and effeminacy have sprung the most tender virtues, humanity, benevolence, and toleration of human errors." The progress narrative was an important shift from one in which the past was considered more pure than the degenerate present.

"I should have every thing to fear if tyrants were to read my book; but tyrants never read."

I don't have much to say about this line; it's just funny. Maybe you could say something about the association between morality and education.

Foucault

There are a bunch of complex ideas in here, and I'm not certain I really understood them all.

I'm really drawn to the idea of people being defined by their societies. A common theme through this course seems to be that people act the way they are expected to act, and see what they expect to see. The mainstream conception of reality in fact creates and reinforces that reality. If you believe in witchcraft, suddenly there are a bunch of witches everywhere, and conveniently they all display the same characteristics. The idea also has something of the tabula rasa in it. People are products of their environment, their culture.

It's also pretty interesting the way power changes over time. Or rather, the way that power is used changes. The form of absolute control ("Discipline") being exercised in prisons and other institutions probably is a much greater display of power than physical punishment. What greater power is there than to change a person's definition of themselves? Naturally, this emphasis on discipline arose in parallel to the modern bureaucratic state, that is capable of wielding greater power than ever before.

I feel that there's something really profound in the claim that society created homosexuality in the 19th century, but I'm having trouble getting a grip on it. Maybe writing this out will help. Obviously same-sex relations happened before that. Probably there is a biological basis to same sex attraction. But the image of the "homosexual" includes a lot more than simply same-sex sex, doesn't it? The idea that a person can be defined by who they are attracted to is probably significant. Why should a person's personality have anything to do with who they want to have sex with? Why are gay men perceived as feminine? (Two sexual roles: dominant and submissive, active and passive. If you are not one, you must be the other.)

Everything comes down to power in the end.

Anne Gunter

Oops, haven't been writing blog entries.

The main point of the book seemed to be that people, even very well-educated ones, were not only perfectly willing to believe in witchcraft but tended to be rather credulous of individual cases. Most of the explanations for Anne's apparent suffering are quite simple, and in reading the descriptions I find it rather surprising that hardly anyone thought to simply test her symptoms in any sort of systematic fashion. (But of course, that's my 21st-century skeptical self talking.)

I think it's important to note how much the narrative of possession and witchcraft was a part of the culture of the time. Anne knew how a bewitched person was supposed to act (from books! the printing press causes nothing but problems), and played to people's expectations. I suppose that's part of the reason they were so credulous; it matched what they already believed.

My notes for the book wonder whether it's significant that the good witches were called "cunning men". Were women more commonly associated with dark magic?

I was surprised that the Reformation increased the number of witchcraft accusations, as I would have expected the secularization and disenchantment effects to reduce them. I had not anticipated that it would naturally inflame religious passions and make people more paranoid about purity.