Una violenza necessaria? Il dilemma della pena giusta tra populismo, abolizionismo e garantismo (A proposito di Philippe Audegean, Violenza e giustizia. Beccaria e la questione penale)

In his essay Violenza e giustizia, Philippe Audegean re-examines Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments and questions the legitimacy of criminal violence, an unresolved paradox: how can a punishment, which is inherently violent, be just? For Beccaria, punishment is a “necessary evil”, justified only if it reduces overall social violence by avoiding unnecessary cruelty. Caught between penal populism, which exalts punishment as a reassuring spectacle, and abolitionism, which denies any legitimacy to the punitive system and proposes alternatives such as restorative justice (Hulsman), Beccaria’s Penal Enlightenment offers a third path: that of minimal criminal law. Populism, by fueling fears, transforms justice into a tool of control; abolitionism, by contrast, challenges criminalization as a mechanism of exclusion. Beccaria calls for humane and effective justice, which punishes less in order to punish better, replacing punitive logic with prevention and inclusion. The challenge lies in reconciling security and humanity, avoiding both repressive excess and the utopian ideal of a world without punishment. The book stands as a manifesto for a less cruel justice, where the “mildness of penalties” becomes a measure of civilization.