Note 88 — Chapter XIX · FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES

4. Between 1737 and 1798 may be counted twenty-eight Italian writers on political economy; and among them was one, Cesare Beccaria, who on another theme produced perhaps the most practically influential single book of the eighteenth century,88 the treatise on Crimes and Punishments (1764), which affected penal methods for the better throughout the whole of Europe. Even were he not known to be a deist, his strictly secular and rationalist method would have brought upon him priestly suspicion; and he had in fact to defend himself against pertinacious and unscrupulous attacks,89 though he had sought in his book to guard himself by occasionally “veiling the truth in clouds.”90 As we have seen, Beccaria owed his intellectual awakening first to Montesquieu and above all to Helvétius—another testimony to the reformative virtue of all freethought.