A Civil Enlightenment

Recent analyses (particularly Bruni and Zamagni 2007; Quadrio Curzio 2007) argue that the tradition of economic thought in Italy has a characteristic expression in the form of “economia civile”, which is the result of the combination of three different elements:

(1) a conception of the economic order based on civil society rather than based on state authority; (2) a setting based on the evolution of institutions through continuing reform; (3) a scientific and cultural emphasis on practical applications or policy issues.

The resulting discipline has been showing since the start the strong tendency to cluster around the following points: (1) a social and ethical concern, leading to a close analysis of institutions and more generally the link of economic with extra-economic elements;

(2) a close interest into dynamic economics; (3) the adoption of an ante-litteram history- of-economic-analysis approach.

That the idea of “vita civile”, or “civil life”, is a staple reference in the Italian tradi­tion since the Middle Age and through the Renaissance is shown by classic examples of authors from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century such as Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Matteo Palmieri, Paolo Mattia Doria. They are some of the scholars discussed by the intellectual historians of humanism: Eugenio Garin, Jacob Burckhardt and Hans Baron. Expressions such as “vita civile” and “umanesimo civile” go together. Eugenio Garin’s book (1952) on Italian humanism - first published in Bern as Der itali- enische Humanismus in 1942 and translated into other languages after the war - prob­ably provides the best source for the interested reader. As Hans Baron (1955: 92) writes, Italian humanism is civic humanism precisely because it sympathizes with the ideals of the “vita activa et politica” of the citizen of the ancient republics.

Coluccio Salutati, for example, was the mentor of Bernardino da Siena (1380-1444), one of the greatest representatives of the Franciscan world and a refined intellectual, who extolled civil life and had a view of social and economic development as the main focus of his whole approach. (On the active and creative role of the Franciscans, see Negri Zamagni and Porta 2012.)

A “glacial period”, as it were, would very soon follow historically and produce a time of “civil darkness”. Contradictory to appearances, that was a necessary passage to be understood in the reconstruction of the Italian Enlightenment as civil enlightenment. While the economic discipline through modern times in Europe reflects the diverse attempts of different schools to resolve the question of the nature and the causes of the wealth of nations, the debate on the foundations of social order gradually turns into a vital crossroad in economic research. That is, the perspective where the Italians are outstanding. Machiavelli and Hobbes respectively - though at a distance in time - both disseminate a pessimistic view on the nature of man and on the chances of a spontane­ous social order, thus opening the way to a whole breed of thinkers who were strongly inclined to rely on some kind of demiurgic intervention as the unavoidable condition for a civil order to come about and survive. Their influence shakes the faith in civic virtues as the foundation of civil life. A further turning point occurs early in the eighteenth century, when Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705 [1714]) argues convincingly that virtue is not necessarily conducive to social order and prosperity.

From that angle, the British classical school owes something to the Italian Enlightenment, perhaps even more than it owes to the Physiocrats, although, admit­tedly, the Italian influence was largely an indirect one and it is not explicitly discussed, for example, by Adam Smith. The Italian Enlightenment is no longer naively civil (in the humanists’ sense), but it is civil in a more sophisticated sense. As Bruni and Zamagni argue (2007: 68 ff.), the Italian economists develop and share the persuasion that “without civil virtues there is no room for market economy”, thus paving the way to “laying down a new anthropological and ethical foundation for a new commercial society”. The competitive market must be conceived as a form of co-operation based on trust. The novelty introduced by the Italian authors, with respect to Mandeville, is that the work of the principle of the heterogenesis of ends is not seen to be opposed to civic virtues (as it is in Mandeville), but it is subsidiary to them. This is clear, at least since the work of Giambattista Vico (see Bruni and Zamagni 2007: 84-5), and Vico “was a univer­sal reference point in Naples in eighteenth-century philosophy” (ibid.).

Giambattista Vico (Scienza nuova, 1725) writes of a “divine legislative mind”, which “takes man’s passions... and turns them into civil orders”. Smith would later speak of an “invisible hand” (see Roncaglia, 2005), particularly in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759 [1976]) and later in the Wealth of Nations (1776 [1976]). The Italian tradition is at the source of such developments: the old civic tradition of Italian Humanism re-surfaces in a new, more sophisticated form. That is the basis of the Italian Enlightenment.