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.