The Enlightenment story that torture was abolished for its cruelty is suspect and self-serving

Evidence

Why has the infliction of physical pain now become scandalous? A well-known part of the answer is this progressivist story: two centuries ago critics of torture like Beccaria and Voltaire recognized how inhuman it was, and how unreliable as a way of ascertaining the truth in a trial. Thus they saw and articulated what others before them had (unaccountably) failed to see. Their powerful case against judicial torture shocked Enlightenment rulers into abolishing it. The theme of its intolerable cruelty emerged more clearly because the pain inflicted in judicial torture was declared to be gratuitous. Pain inflicted on prisoners to make them confess was immoral, it was argued, particularly because it was grossly inefficient in identifying their guilt or innocence. … But why was this gratuitous pain not condemned by critics earlier? What had prevented people from seeing the truth until the Enlightenment? — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 519

Categorization

• XREF: Asad’s skepticism of the progressivist abolition narrative mirrors the reader’s critical stance on secular modernity’s self-narratives in the vaulted Cooper texts.