Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
In a study in Florence around 1760, a thirty-year-old nobleman named Giuseppe Pelli worked out the argument that would make Cesare Beccaria famous - and then put the manuscript in a drawer, where it stayed for two hundred and fifty years. Four years later, Beccaria published substantially the same case in Livorno. Within a decade, Tuscany had abolished the death penalty outright, the first modern state on earth to do it.The Enlightenment gathers four volumes of The Abolition Classics. Pelli and Beccaria establish the argument from the social contract: no one owns his life in the sense required to hand it to a magistrate, so the power to kill was never transferred. Jeremy Bentham runs the same comparison as arithmetic. Maximilien Robespierre delivers it to the Constituent Assembly in 1791 - three years before he would sign the lists himself. And Benjamin Rush drags the case into the American pulpit, taking on Genesis 9:6 directly, with his Reply to Theocratos printed alongside.The modern theories of abolitionism were born in these volumes...in this era.
