The Significance of the Italian Enlightenment in the History of Economic Thought

The privileged place of the economic problem in the political views of the Italian Enlightenment is one of the historical preconditions to the rise of the classical school with the work of Adam Smith.

What has been left out in the revision is the important fact that the resulting image of Adam Smith owes something to the Italian Enlightenment, so that it is plausible to talk of some special connection between the Italian and the Scottish Enlightenments. A pro­longed overemphasis on the theory of value (particularly on the labour theory of value) together with a widespread retrieval of the surplus approach under the spell of Sraffa’s work had, for a long time, created a standard image of the classical school based on the sequence Smith-Ricardo-Marx, with the Physiocrats as forerunners. That conception has merits, but it is at the same time lopsided and, in particular, it is singularly prone to pushing aside interest in the Italian tradition. It is among the characters of the Italian tradition that it generally stands aloof from a close involvement with the theory of value: this is a point that must be mentioned even if it cannot be treated here (see Bruni and Porta 2007; also Porta 1982).

What the Smithian revision today really amounts to is a reconsideration of the Enlightenment and its role in the history of economic ideas. It is a characteristic of much of the recent literature on Smith that an increasing restraint is being applied to the traditional, almost exclusive, emphasis on self-interest as the motive for action. That Smith was familiar with the Italian language and politico-economic literature transpires from a number of passages in his works. Smith carefully followed the developments of the economic discipline in Italy, as is proved by Luigi Einaudi’s analysis of the Italian section of Smith’s library (Einaudi 1953). There is an objective connection between the teachings of the Italian tradition and the public-spirited attitude which Smith attributes to the legislator. That extends from the legislator to the economist, in Smith’s view, and he explicitly conceives of political economy as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator.

It is interesting to note that the Italian tradition has repeatedly echoed, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ideas of the same kind as the civil economy of the eighteenth century. Examples of that are afforded by Gian Domenico Romagnosi’s (1761-1835) emphasis on “incivilimento” and “civile concorrenza”. That also links up with the approach to industry and creativity: the spur of ingenuity is prominent particularly in Verri and it would later find significant developments through the nine­teenth century in the work of Carlo Cattaneo (1801-1869). Both Francesco Ferrara (1810-1900), on the one hand, and the Italian historical school, on the other, are sources of many more examples. However, even in the marginalist and neoclassical camp, where the Italians were pioneers, public economics came to prominence with the rise of the “Scienza delle finanze”, as a special kind of public economics. In the twentieth century we should single out the case of Luigi Einaudi (1874-1961) as an example of a mid-way theorist, linking institutionalism, historicism and marginalism. That special blend gives rise to a line of social economy, which must, in many respects, be considered the child of the Enlightenment as it grew in Italy during the eighteenth century.

Pier Luigi Porta

See also:

Formalization and mathematical modelling (III); French Enlightenment (II); Scottish Enlightenment (II); Adam Smith (I).