1) Paul Ricouer, “State and Violence” in History and Truth, 1957:
In its most elementary and at the same time most indomitable form, the violence of the State is the violence of a penal character. The State punishes; in the last analysis it is the Sate which has the monopoly over physical restraint. It has taken from individuals the right to do justice themselves; it has taken upon all the diversified forms of violence inherited from the primitive battle of man against man. For all violence, the individual may call upon the State, but the State is the last court of appeal beyond which there is no recourse. By approaching the violence of the State by way of its punitive, penal side, we have directed ourselves to the central problem; for the multiple functions of the State, its power to legislate, its power to make rulings and to execute them, its administrative function, its economic function, or its educational function, all these functions are ultimately sanctioned by the power of constraining as the final authority. To say that the State is a power and that it is a power of constraining is one and the same thing.[1]
2) Gianni Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, 2011:
Today the defense of creationism, even in the face of the (adequately) proven Darwinian theory of evolution, acts as a barrier, a pietra di scandalo or “pebble of scandal,” as we say in Italian, to the acceptance of Christianity. But it’s the same pebble on which many believers stumble when they find themselves rationally unable to accept the sexual and family ethics preached by the pope, just as they found totally unacceptable John Paul II’s repeated prohibition of the use of condoms, in disdain of the potentially lethal effects such a ban might have, and may indeed have had, on a world ravaged by AIDS. What keeps on recurring is the “scandal,” in one form or another, of Christian preaching claiming to dictate the “truth” about how matters “really stand” with nature, mankind, society, and the family …[2]
3) Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, 1764:
There is no liberty whenever a law in some cases permits a man to cease to be a person and to become a thing. Then you will see the efforts of the powerful man directed entirely to drawing whatever may legally to his own advantage from every possible social arrangement. This discovery is the magic secret that transforms citizens into beasts of burden; in the hands of the strong, it is the chain with which he binds the actions of the unwary and the weak. This is why, in some regimes that have all the appearance of liberty, tyranny lies hidden, or insinuates itself into some corner neglected by the legislator, where it subtly gathers strength and grows. For the most part, men erect the most solid dikes against overt tyranny, but they do not see the imperceptible insect that gnaws those dikes and opens a path for the invading flood, a path that is all the more secure because it is concealed.[3]
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1748:
Severity in penalties suits despotic government, whose principle is terror, better than monarchies and republics, which have honor and virtue for their spring.
In moderate states, love of the homeland, shame, and fear are motives that serve as restraints and so can check many crimes. The greatest penalty for a bad action is to be convicted of it. Therefore in moderate states civil laws will make corrections more easily and will not need as much force.
In these states a good legislator will insist less on punishing crimes than on preventing them; he will apply himself more to giving mores than to inflicting punishments.
Chinese writers have perpetually observed that, in their empire, the more severe the punishments, the nearer the revolution. This is because punishments increased in severity to the extent that mores were lost.
It would be easy to prove that in all or nearly all of the states of Europe penalties have decreased or increased in proportion as one approached or departed from liberty.[4]
In moderate states, love of the homeland, shame, and fear are motives that serve as restraints and so can check many crimes. The greatest penalty for a bad action is to be convicted of it. Therefore in moderate states civil laws will make corrections more easily and will not need as much force.
In these states a good legislator will insist less on punishing crimes than on preventing them; he will apply himself more to giving mores than to inflicting punishments.
Chinese writers have perpetually observed that, in their empire, the more severe the punishments, the nearer the revolution. This is because punishments increased in severity to the extent that mores were lost.
It would be easy to prove that in all or nearly all of the states of Europe penalties have decreased or increased in proportion as one approached or departed from liberty.[4]
5) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651:
A PUNISHMENT is an evil inflicted by public authority on him that hath done or omitted that which is judged by the same authority to be a transgression of the law, to the end that the will of men may thereby be better disposed to obedience.[5]
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It belongeth also to the office of the sovereign to make a right application of punishments and rewards. And seeing the end of punishing is not revenge and discharge of choler [anger], but correction either of the offender or of others by his example, the severest punishments are to be inflicted for those crimes that are of most danger to the public; such as those which proceed malice to the government established; those that spring from contempt of justice; those that provoke indignation in the multitude and those which, unpunished, seem authorized, or when they are committed by sons servants, or favourites of men in authority …. The punishment of the leaders and teachers in a commotion, not poor seduced people, when they are punished, can profit the commonwealth by their example. To be severe to people is to punish ignorance which may in great part be imputed to the sovereign, whose fault it was they were no better instructed.[6]
[1] Paul Ricoueur, History and Truth, tr. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 234,235. The chapter “State and Violence” was first published in Geneva in 1957.
[2] Gianni Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, tr. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 51.
[3] Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, tr. David Young (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1986), p. 38.
[4] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, trs.and eds. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 82 (Part 1, Book 6, Chapter 9). Cf. Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, p. 8 (chapter 2): “Every punishment which does not derive from absolute necessity, says the great Montesquieu, is tyrannical.”
[5] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 230 (Chapter 38.1). Original in italics.
[6] Ibid., p. 260 (Chapter 30.23). Original without italics.
