Italy is the country where the civic tradition was born, although the term “civic” is preferably spelt “civil” in the Italian context.
In Italy the “civil tradition” is the product of a special blend of lay and religious motives, which stems from the re-discovery, at the twilight of the Middle Ages, of antiquity or the pre-Christian world.
That leads to a new taste for the earthly goods and pleasures, which is the substance of Humanism during the fifteenth century, a chemical fusion of classicism and Christianity. It is at that stage that we can see the roots of a new understanding of the relationship between market and society. The best contemporary author, analyzing Italian intellectual history along that line, is Eugenio Garin (1909—2004). More recently that same line of research on the civic tradition in Italy has been pursued by Bruni and Zamagni, who have launched the canon of the “civil economy” as characteristic of the Italian tradition of economic thought. We are today confronted with the big task of dusting off — as Bruni and Zamagni (2007, 13) write — “an Italian tradition of thought that began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as Civic Humanism and continued up until the golden period of Italian Enlightenment, represented by the schools of Milan and Naples.”It should be mentioned that a considerable stream of contributions on the civic traditions in Europe and America, largely inspired by the works of J.G.A. Pocock (b. 1924), has given rise to new views on the Enlightenment during the past 30—40 years. That stream of historical thought has bordered on a new view of the rise of political economy. Indeed the Scottish Enlightenment has been a preferred object of study in some quarters, which has entailed giving rise to an important historiographic revision of Adam Smith. It is hardly surprising that the same stream of literature has also touched Italy, as is shown by the recent book by John Robertson on Scotland and Naples. “In the two different ‘national’ contexts of Scotland and Naples” — Robertson (2005, 377) wrote — “there emerged one Enlightenment...
In both cases, the terms in which this objective was articulated were those of political economy.”Alberto Quadrio Curzio (2007) has also been using the same label, from the parallel angle of the theory of production. The phrase “civil economy” is taken from the outstanding treatise of Antonio Genovesi (1713—69). Genovesi is universally acknowledged as the pioneer of the Italian school of political economy (“civil economy” as he prefers to call the discipline) during the eighteenth century. He also was the first incumbent worldwide (1754) to an academic chair of the discipline at the University of Naples. It is imperative to re-visit the authors of the Italian tradition, in order to achieve a proper understanding of Adam Smith himself, so that the spell of civil life in shaping classical political economy can be properly understood.
Civil economy cannot accommodate the idea that self-interest is the only motivational drift to action for humans. The exclusive focus on self-interest — that would later turn into the hallmark of mainstream economics worldwide — is an idea that comes from an unduly pessimistic view of human nature and which was brought in contact with the economic discipline in the wake of the success of Hobbes' political philosophy and of Mandeville's view on achieving public virtue through private vices, of which self-interest is the common denominator. This view would conquer the field of political economy after Adam Smith and more explicitly during the latter part of the nineteenth century, but it was not dominant in the economics of the previous period. What we usually term classical economics should be kept separate, at least in its sources and early developments, from the subsequent developments of the discipline. The Italian tradition affords today a new appraisal of classicism in economics.
A reference to civil life, or vita civile, has been traced through a number of authors. Among them we mention here Leonardo Bruni (1370—1444), Matteo Palmieri (1406—75), Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), down to include Paolo Mattia Doria (1667-1746).
They are only a few of the champions of a line of thinking leading to the idea, during the Enlightenment, that what is “civil” has to be directly and explicitly associated with the “economic” element. That is the achievement of Genovesi's economia civile. It is a successful move, also in view of its long- run effects, as the notion of incivilimento would continue to be pervasive in Italy especially during the first part of the nineteenth century and onwards.A further force at work through the Italian tradition is given by the influence of the monastic culture, from the Middle Ages onwards, which — especially through Franciscanism — comes to shape the language of the market, property and forms of exchange: the contract, reciprocity, and gift. Monastic culture launched the early formative steps of a new economic and commercial language: on the other hand there were practical needs, for the abbeys were economic agents requiring new forms of accounting and management. Typically, once civil humanism had developed, the montes pietatis spread all over Italy, providing financial assistance and relief to the poor. Italy proved unable to achieve political unification at that stage, but had a strong civil culture with some considerable differences between north and south. Not surprisingly, between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, Italian economists came forward with a theory of public happiness. Achille Loria (1857—1943), in his book on social justice (1904), would reach the conclusion that all Italian economists — from whatever regional background — differently from Adam Smith, were not intent on the wealth of nations, but on public happiness.
During the Napoleonic period, Pietro Custodi (1771—1842) published in Milan an important collection of economic writings of the Italian economists since the sixteenth century. The collection consisted of 50 volumes and was designed to show the richness of the Italian contribution. It is still reprinted today.