The Italian Enlightenment is one of the great intellectual achievements of Europe’s siecle des Lumieres.
Both its Southern (Naples) and its Northern (Milan) branches cooperate to produce perhaps the greatest contribution of Italian culture to the development of a modern European tradition of civil rights and enlightened governance.
After the Second World War, there was an intense flourishing of studies, particularly in Italy (with a worldwide readership, though), on the Italian Enlightenment. Much of the post-war Italian production on the Enlightenment has been a response to the emerging need for deeper research on the roots of western culture and on the civic values of our societies so much shattered by the traumatic experiences of a new kind of war ravaging our cities in Europe and in other parts of the world. A single name, among many others, will be enough to give the idea: Franco Venturi’s studies on the eighteenth-century’s reforms.Much less has been done by economists and historians of economics but economic analysis is the core issue of the Italian Enlightenment, as illustrated by Schumpeter (see below). The economic discipline - originally called civil economy in eighteenth-century Naples and Cameral science (or public economy) in Milan - was indeed prominent in the historical experience of the Italian Enlightenment, although the salience of the discipline still is, to the present day, only imperfectly reflected in much of the recent historiography. A new line of research on the Italian Enlightenment, rooted in a retrieval of the economic discipline of the time, is currently developing (for an overview, see Porta and Scazzieri 2014). It is not surprising that Italy is the country where the first university Chairs in the world were created for the discipline during the second half of the eighteenth century.
Schumpeter’s classic History of Economic Analysis (1954: 177) is outspoken in his assessment of the high level of the Italian contribution.
Italian economists, Schumpeter observes, deserve “the honours of the field of pre-Smithian system production”. He adds: “The regionalism of Italian life divides them into groups. But I can discern only two ‘schools’ in the strict sense of the term... the Neapolitan and the Milanese.” This entry presents a comparison and discusses the reciprocal integration of these two main schools in Italy, taking into account also the teaching and influence of the two incumbents to the respective Chairs, Antonio Genovesi (1712-1769) in Naples, from 1754, and Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) in Milan, from 1769, especially through their respective textbooks, the Lezioni di economia civile of Genovesi (1765-67 [2013]) and the Elementi di economiapubblica of Beccaria (1984-2014). The two professors do share an economic perspective, which appears to be at the root of the whole of their literary production.In general terms the Italian Enlightenment shares the French Enlightenment’s interest in rational governance and the Scottish Enlightenment’s interest in civil society. However, it is different from both in its close attention to the interplay between legislation and moral sentiments, civic culture and economic development, fiscal technique and social structure.
The Italian Enlightenment largely focuses on sociability embedded in the country’s civic traditions. Both the Neapolitan and the Milanese branches of the Italian Enlightenment address social co-ordination and analyse existing civil arrangements by comparing those arrangements with suitable prototypes derived from ethics and philosophy. That is conducive to a characteristic combination of theoretical ambition and practical outlook, which leads the Italian Enlightenment to be interested in a detailed investigation of the institutional context of rights, entitlements and reform policies.
After a general overview (“A Civil Enlightenment”), the two subsequent sections deal with the historical contexts of the Milanese and Neapolitan Enlightenments respectively. Those sections also discuss the key figures of the Italian civil Enlightenment, from the Milanese economists, legal theorists and administrators such as Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri (1728-1797) to the Tuscan economist Pompeo Neri (1706-1776) and the Neapolitan philosophers, economists and legal theorists among whom Paolo Mattia Doria (1667-1746), Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1787), Antonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri (1752-1788) and Francesco Mario Pagano (1748-1799) are particularly important. A section summarizing the core contributions of the Italian Enlightenment to the history of economic thought and their influence on subsequent stages of the developments of political economy in Italy concludes.