Italian Enlightenment

The Mediterranean «Situation» of Naples and Mezzogiorno in the Political and Cultural Project of the 18th Century Reformers.

The "Breve descrizione della città di Napoli e del suo contorno" (1792) by Giuseppe Maria Galanti begins with a brief paragraph on the «Neapolitan situation», that is the geographical position of the capital city of the Mezzogiorno of Italy. Naples was presented as the European city with the best «situation» because of its extraordinary natural resources and its geographical position in the Mediterranean Sea. Exploiting this «situation» in the right way it was possible to hinder the problems of economic underdevelopment of the Kingdom of Naples and the gap between the capital and the provinces.
It was not the first time that Galanti expressed this kind of ideas, and he was not the only one. This matter, in fact, is well known by the Southern illuministi of the 18th century (Antonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri, Giuseppe Palmieri, and so on). In the works of those reformers, the Mediterranean «situation» of Naples and of the Mezzogiorno was a crucial element to base the development of commerce and production on. It was also a way to the economic emancipation of the Kingdom of Naples from the foreign powers.
The essay focuses on this consideration, which played a central role for the political and cultural construction of the maritime and Mediterranean character of Naples and of the Mezzogiorno. The study of the works of the Southern Italy reformers takes to a deep critical analysis of a process that is part of the construction of the Italian national identity related to the geographical position of the peninsula.

Rassegna critica delle reazioni alla pubblicazione del "Viaggio a Parigi e Londra" di Pietro e Alessandro Verri (1980). Attraverso alcune analisi offerte dalla rassegna, determinazioni circa la tipologia della corrispondenza epistolare, in prospettiva europea.

Immergendoci nella realtà urbana della Verona del Settecento, questa monografia mette in primo piano gli intrecci tra attività scientifiche e tessuto vivo della società italiana di età moderna. Attraverso un dettagliato studio di ambienti e contesti, l’autore mostra come i dibattiti sulle scienze della vita si incarnino nelle diatribe tra medici galenici e «neoterici», pronti a pubblicare libri ed opuscoli, organizzare esperimenti, tenere lezioni pubbliche per convincere i concittadini della bontà delle rispettive filosofie e terapie. Nei retrobottega delle farmacie si ammirano le curiosità del sottosuolo raccolte dagli speziali, o si discute di storia naturale. I misteriosi «pesci impietriti» sono per alcuni la venerata reliquia del Diluvio biblico; ad altri, spalancano gli abissi di un mondo immensamente più antico in cui si dissolvono coscienze e certezze. Mentre la nobiltà scopre nei suoi salotti le nuove meraviglie elettriche e chimiche, le discussioni sulla generazione dell’uomo animano i caffè, contrapponendo conservazione e modernità, scienza sperimentale e teologia cristiana. In un tempo in cui le controversie scientifiche non rimangono circoscritte all’ambito degli ‘esperti’, anche l’élite del sangue e del denaro interviene nei dibattiti, preoccupata di preservare un ordine minacciato dalle derive materialiste della scienza moderna e dalla Rivoluzione che essa sta contribuendo a generare.

La legittimazione della schiavitù, radicata nella cultura classica e cristiana, venne messa in discussione a partire dal XVIII secolo. Fu un processo lento, che si confrontò con le forme peculiari (di forza lavoro servile importata dall’Africa sub-sahariana) assunte dall’istituzione con la colonizzazione europea dell’America in età moderna. Un processo in cui furono determinanti fattori economici e politici, ma che sul piano della storia intellettuale conobbe una svolta quando si pose il problema dell’universale riconoscimento dei diritti naturali dell’uomo nella società civile.
Di questa storia, che non riguardò soltanto le potenze coloniali, il volume indaga un capitolo inedito: il contributo della cultura dei Lumi italiana al pensiero antischiavista transnazionale. Negli scritti degli illuministi italiani, e particolarmente dei riformatori meridionali, l’interesse verso la scienza utile dell’economia, la riflessione sulla storia, sui trattati politici antichi e moderni, e la definizione di riforme ispirate ai principi del diritto naturale incrociavano la questione della schiavitù coloniale: lo schiavo nero delle piantagioni americane diveniva l’anti-modello del progetto di emancipazione dell’uomo proprio dell’illuminismo politico e, a fine secolo, della «rigenerazione» rivoluzionaria. La tratta degli uomini e dei loro intangibili diritti era, per gli antischiavisti italiani, il «commercio infame».

Il secolo dei Lumi e, in generale, l’Ancien Régime hanno risentito a lungo della loro ubicazione a cavallo di due grandi periodi della storia della tradizione dei testi: a monte, l’epoca medievale, in cui la trasmissione manoscritta è la sola possibile; a valle, l’epoca contemporanea, in cui l’importanza del manoscritto risiede nel suo valore di testimonianza e autentificazione del lavoro autoriale. Inibito da pregiudizi diversi, ma egualmente tenaci, sia in Italia, che in Francia lo studio degli archivi letterari del XVIII secolo si è affermato solo recentemente. Eppure, lo studio dei manoscritti d’autore può far emergere un’altra immagine del Settecento e contribuire a cambiare le frontiere di questo secolo dai confini mutevoli. Se si esaminano gli archivi letterari del Settecento e i dossier genetici di molti scrittori di quel secolo con la prospettiva offerta dalla critica genetica l’immagine della storia letteraria del XVIII secolo che possiamo trarne cambia. La critica genetica sembra mettere in discussione alcuni paradigmi interpretativi sulle modalità e sulle strategie legate al processo di creazione letteraria. L’articolo si domanda se questo approccio, spo¬stando l’attenzione dello specialista dall’autore allo scrittore, dallo scrittore alla scrittura, dalla struttura al processo, dall’opera alla sua genesi, non consenta an¬che di rivedere le numerose deformazioni che hanno isolato il XVIII secolo nella storia complessiva della cultura italiana.Il secolo dei Lumi e, in generale, l’Ancien Régime hanno risentito a lungo della loro ubicazione a cavallo di due grandi periodi della storia della tradizione dei testi: a monte, l’epoca medievale, in cui la trasmissione manoscritta è la sola possibile; a valle, l’epoca contemporanea, in cui l’importanza del manoscritto risiede nel suo valore di testimonianza e autentificazione del lavoro autoriale. Inibito da pregiudizi diversi, ma egualmente tenaci, sia in Italia, che in Francia lo studio degli archivi letterari del XVIII secolo si è affermato solo recentemente. Eppure, lo studio dei manoscritti d’autore può far emergere un’altra immagine del Settecento e contribuire a cambiare le frontiere di questo secolo dai confini mutevoli. Se si esaminano gli archivi letterari del Settecento e i dossier genetici di molti scrittori di quel secolo con la prospettiva offerta dalla critica genetica l’immagine della storia letteraria del XVIII secolo che possiamo trarne cambia. La critica genetica sembra mettere in discussione alcuni paradigmi interpretativi sulle modalità e sulle strategie legate al processo di creazione letteraria. L’articolo si domanda se questo approccio, spo¬stando l’attenzione dello specialista dall’autore allo scrittore, dallo scrittore alla scrittura, dalla struttura al processo, dall’opera alla sua genesi, non consenta an¬che di rivedere le numerose deformazioni che hanno isolato il XVIII secolo nella storia complessiva della cultura italiana.

"Presence and Legacy of Malebranche from Paris to Naples. A Brief Introduction". This introduction focuses on Malebranchean major issues and studies in Italy and abroad and explains the reasons at the basis if this collective work. In his numerous writings Malebranche developed an original philosophical system that he enriched in time by investigating various philosophical and theological themes (causality, mind-body relationship, the question of original sin) and by proposing new interpretive grids. Malebranche’s legacy deserves to be investigated further by means of a comparison with other authors of his time, by whom he was sometimes dragged into virulent polemics.

The International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) is pleased to announce the 2018 International Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars. Colleagues from all fields of eighteenth-century studies are invited to submit abstracts for this one-week event. Formerly called the East-West Seminar, the International Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars brings together young researchers from a number of countries each year. The 2018 meeting will take place in Viterbo, Italy and will be organized by Prof. Francesca Saggini and the Dipartimento di studi linguistico-letterari, storico-filosofici e giuridici – DISTU.
The seminar will be held from Monday, September 10 to Friday, September 14, 2018 in Viterbo.

The 2018 ISECS International Seminar for Early Career Scholars will engage discussions on the forms, representations and modalities of silence in the eighteenth century.
Silence, of individuals and cultures, of the physical voice or of the written word and information deleted from the page, has historically taken many forms. It may be reticent, dissembling or imposed by others. Voluntary or coerced, it might be the silence of women, of marginal social and religious groups, of communities that are denied the right to speak. There are other silences as well: the interruption of sound in a musical pause and the silence of religious practices, which speak to, and of, the inner life. All these forms of silence were present in the eighteenth century, as they had been throughout history, but perhaps for the first time, some of them were singled out for special scrutiny. Works on aesthetics, for example, investigated the use of silence and the implicit in rhetorical writing, or dwelled on reverie, and how it might be induced in the reader. In rhetoric, attention was paid to discursive figures and strategies capable of making silence more eloquent than the word. Conduct books devoted many pages to the art of conversation, emphasising the essential role of silence to ensure the correctness of social interactions, especially for women, but also for politicians. Censorship – whether institutional or self-imposed – also produces silences, as do the more or less conscious failures of memory found in life writing and in historical discourse: one need only think of the revisions required to write the history of colonialism, wars or slavery. Eighteenth-century historiography attempted to remove some of the silences it found in history, often filling in the lacunae through conjecture. Silence is also represented in the visual arts and, signally, in the novel, which devised new narrative techniques for the purpose, whether to evoke the silences in characters’ conversations, and the contexts and landscapes in which silence reigns (a hallmark of the picturesque, for example), or to leave the reader in suspense by strategically withholding information. And then there is the theatre, where after the triumph of pantomime and the illegitimate spectacles that deployed a hybridized combination of body, speech, stage machinery and lighting effects, the century comes to a close with the rise of melodrama, which replaced the spoken word with music and revolutionised the notion of acting as the art of speech, while giving new prominence to silent characters and heroes. Finally, there is the silence that becomes firmly and widely established in the eighteenth century through the practice of reading narrative texts for oneself, replacing the social activity of reading aloud for a group of listeners with a solitary, interiorized experience. On these and other silences, on silence in all its forms and meanings in the eighteenth century, the seminar calls for contributions. The theme of the conference, “Silence in eighteenth-century arts, history and philosophy,” must thus be understood in the broadest terms possible to include:


- anonymity
- silence, reflection, meditation
- social silence, silence and social interaction
- negation: denials, disclaimers, disavowals
- silence and secrets
- censorship and self-censorship
- ellipses, omissions, blank pages, hyphens, asterisks – the typographical and linguistic modes of silence
- ghost chapters (deleted, lost, rewritten)
- silenced characters, characters that disappear
- quiet spaces: the loci of silence
- reading and silence
- silence as resistance and rebellion
- scripting silence and muteness
- the performativity of silence
- silence and the canon
- silence and history
- silence in relation to cultural memory studies
- silence and/as remembrance

The seminar is limited to 15 participants. The proposals (approx. 3 pages, double-spaced, max 1,000 words) should be based on an original research project (e.g. a doctoral dissertation) which addresses one of the aspects mentioned above. Because this is a seminar rather than a conference, each participant will be given approximately one hour to present the texts and questions that will then form the basis of a group discussion led in turn by one of the participants. Preference will be given to scholars who are at the beginning of their academic career (ABD; PhD or equivalent for less than six years, including ECRs). The official languages of the seminar are English, Italian, French. Translations of abstracts and various seminar materials not in English will be made available to participants.

Applications should include the following information: a brief curriculum vitae with date of PhD (or equivalent); a list of principal publications and scholarly presentations; a brief description of the proposed paper (approx. 3 pages, double-spaced, max 1,000 words); and one letter of recommendation. Colleagues are invited to submit proposals by January 31, 2018. Please send abstracts by e-mail to Francesca Saggini: fsaggini@unitus.it, ccing into the conversation Alberta Boschi alberta.boschi@gmail.com . If your email programme supports the delivery receipt option we encourage you to request delivery receipt. We will attempt to notify all correspondents before February 28, 2018 regarding the status of their submission

The 18th century saw the periodical press make its mark in almost all European countries. On the Italian peninsula, the Veneto region was home to various printed periodicals, including the Giornale enciclopedico (1774-1781), directed by Elisabetta Caminer Turra, which reported on literary and scientific innovations of Enlightenment Europe. Even in the context of the contemporary publishing scene, this was an unusual periodical both for its female direction and for its editorial configuration, and was created as a free and independent space from which to freely express enlightened ideas and fight against the principle of authority and the prejudices of the century. Building on studies by Angelo Colla (1992), Rita Unfer Lukoschik (1997), Catherine M. Sama (2003), Michaela Liuccio (2010) and Rotraud von Kulessa (2015), this paper aims to illustrate Caminer Turra’s professional ethics through an analysis of a selection of her articles, written during the early years of her editorship of Giornale (1777-1779). I will focus on her interest in the writings of Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, and John Locke; her commitment to education as an instrument for social renewal, and – finally – on on the ideas underpinning her journalistic work.

https://clic.research.vub.be/en/volume-6-issue-1-2021-letteratura-e-coscienza-civile-nelle-riviste-italiane-del-settecento-e-0

En quel sens peut-on dire que le petit livre de Beccaria, Des délits et des peines (1764), apparaît comme un geste de rupture ? La question intéresse notre modernité : en quel sens peut-on dire que ce livre est la source de notre droit pénal ? Codification juridique, présomption d’innocence, laïcité du droit pénal, abolition de la peine de mort : comment Beccaria recueille-t-il un héritage tout en bouleversant un champ de discussions et de débats ?
***
Why is Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (1764) a break from tradition ? The question is central for our modernity : why is this book at the origin of our criminal law ? From legal codification to the presumption of innocence, secularism in criminal law, and the abolition of the death penalty, Beccaria both builds on an existing tradition and disrupts the field of discussions and debates.

Table of contents
· Prefazione, di Luigino Bruni > p. 9.
· Ringraziamenti > p. 15.
· Sigle archivistiche > p. 17.
· La diffusione e la ricezione del trattato sulle virtù e i premi di Giacinto Dragonetti nella cultura italiana ed europea del secondo Settecento, di Luca Clerici > p. 19.
· Le edizioni di "Delle virtù e de’ premi", di Luca Clerici > p. 231.
· Criteri di edizione, di Luca Clerici > p. 251.
· Delle virtù e de’ premi (Napoli 1767), di Giacinto Dragonetti > p. 257.
· Appendice documentaria > p. 339.

About this book
Giacinto Dragonetti (1738-1818), nobile aquilano che percorse la carriera di magistrato nei regni di Napoli e di Sicilia, ma che aderì anche alla Repubblica Napoletana, scrisse Delle virtù e de’ premi quando era ancora un giovane avvocato. Il breve trattato, pubblicato per la prima volta a Napoli nel 1767, ebbe una rapidissima fortuna, sebbene non incontrastata, come dimostrano le polemiche suscitate intorno all’opera e gli attacchi cui fu sottoposto l’autore. Nel giro di nove anni ne uscì quasi una ventina di edizioni e il libro fu tradotto in francese, tedesco, inglese, russo, svedese, polacco e spagnolo. I modelli immediati di Dragonetti erano, da un lato, il trattato Dei delitti e delle pene di Cesare Beccaria, pubblicato nel 1764, e, dall’altro lato, l’insegnamento dell’economia civile di Antonio Genovesi, del quale Dragonetti medesimo era stato allievo. Tanto Dei delitti e delle pene quanto Delle virtù e de’ premi si inserivano, peraltro, nel più ampio dibattito in corso intorno al tema delle punizioni e (più frettolosamente) delle ricompense, che aveva avuto la sua origine più prossima nella reazione alle tesi sostenute da Hobbes.
All’interno di questo variegato quadro di influenze, Delle virtù e de’ premi si venne a caratterizzare per tre elementi principali: la concentrazione del discorso sulle sole ricompense, dissociandolo da quello sulle punizioni; l’accantonamento esplicito di qualsiasi discorso sulle virtù cristiane e sugli esempi proposti dalla Sacre Scritture; il riferimento a una concezione eroica della virtù, fondata sulla tradizione dell’antichità classica. È proprio la complessità dei riferimenti filosofici, etici, giuridici, economici e politici presenti nel trattato, dettagliatamente analizzati nel saggio che accompagna il testo critico, che contribuisce a spiegare la vastissima diffusione avuta dal trattato stesso negli anni immediatamente successivi alla sua prima uscita, così come la nuova stagione di successo editoriale conosciuta nei decenni centrali dell’Ottocento, e che induce a riflettere sulle ragioni della terza fase della sua fortuna, quella attuale, iniziata alla fine del Novecento.

https://www.vitaepensiero.it/autore-giacinto-dragonetti-248097.html

Cet article analyse un corpus de manuscrits inédits composés par celui qui fut l’un des principaux collaborateurs de Cesare Beccaria au sein de l’"Accademia dei Pugni": Alessandro Verri. Diplômé de droit de l’Université de Pavie en septembre 1760 et admis trois ans plus tard au Collegio dei Nobili Giurisperiti, Alessandro Verri acquit une expérience des procédures pénales – cette fameuse expérience « pratique » que Beccaria disait n’avoir pas eue – en exerçant de 1763 à 1765, les fonctions de Protettore dei carcerati. Cette charge, que son aîné Pietro avait assumée en 1751-1752 et leur père avant eux, permettait aux jeunes juristes de se familiariser avec le milieu carcéral et le déroulement des procès. Alessandro Verri exerça son office à la prison de la Malastalla, ancienne œuvre pieuse destinée à l’enfermement des prisonniers indigents, qui était le siège de la société des Protecteurs. Au cours de cette période, il composa vingt-six défenses dont les manuscrits sont aujourd’hui conservés à l’Archivio Verri de Milan (Fondazione Raffaele Mattioli). Certaines sont de la plume de Beccaria, d’autres sont corrigées par Pietro Verri et Alfonso Longo, signe que ces travaux contemporains de la genèse puis des corrections des Delits et des peines se firent dans l’esprit de collaboration des Pugni. Ils offrent de ce point de vue une documentation d’une exceptionnelle richesse pour cerner le substrat concret qu’Alessandro, qui côtoyait dans l’exercice de ses fonctions le spectacle de la misère humaine, put fournir aux réflexions Beccaria.

At the end of the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the structural transformations that European societies were undergoing at the time were inextricably linked to the emergence of a new family model. In this paper, I shed light on the ways the idea of a correspondence between the structure of the family and the structure of society was formed in the eighteenth century. Of course, the family had long been used as a metaphor to describe the political community, but it was during the second half of the eighteenth century that intellectuals like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Cesare Beccaria realized that the structure of the family mirrored the wider structure of society, and that the family itself could be deployed as a tool of social control. Thus, the critique of the traditional family started to be linked to the critique of the existing political order.  Enlightened intellectuals censured the abuses of paternal authority, which mirrored the misdeeds of the monarchs. At the same time, defending freedom of marriage and advocating the reform of inheritance laws, they reshaped the family into a community based on strong emotional ties rather than on economic interests, and on more equal relationships among family members. Such a family, long dreamed of by the intellectuals, suddenly became real in the 1790s as a result of the reforms passed by the r​evolutionary assemblies in France and in the European sister republics—and in particular in Italy between 1796 and 1799. It was in this context that, once the family had been reshaped, the family metaphor eventually became one of the discursive tools most frequently used to describe the nation.

«Slavery is not in humankind’s interest». Notes on Antonio Genovesi.
In his treatise Della diceosina, Antonio Genovesi wrote a chapter on «domestic servitude». Starting from Grotius, he addressed some fundamental issues about the long-lasting debate on slavery. His dense analysis concluded with the non-convenience of the institution for humankind. This article aims to investigate Genovesi’s contribution to the history of anti-slavery. Slavery was not at the center of Genovesi’s reflection, but it can be found in some fragments of his numerous writings. Nonetheless, it represents a case study o f great interest, which reveals essential aspects of his thought, in the moral and economic field.

Di una riforma d’Italia: questo il titolo scelto da Carlantonio Pilati (1733-1802) per quella che sarà sotto ogni profilo la sua opera più fortunata, più citata e più commentata. A 250 anni dalla prima edizione del libro (1767), avvenuta in clandestinità nella città svizzera di Coira, vale la pena ritornare sulla proposta riformatrice dell’autore, intellettuale della secolarizzazione, collocato nell’empireo dell’illuminismo italiano da Franco Venturi, addirittura eletto a “guida attraverso il secolo dell’Illuminismo” da Ulrich Im Hof, ma sorprendentemente mai riletto in tutta l’ampiezza del suo progetto e del suo pensiero, a dispetto della sua fama e di qualche ripresa recente ma parziale. Sino ad ora mancava all’appello un’edizione commentata della Riforma d’Italia: basata su un accurato esame delle fonti e su una precisa ricostruzione della tormentata biografia dell’autore, l’edizione commentata consente finalmente di affrontare la Riforma d’Italia con piena consapevolezza della sua carica innovativa, ma anche dello stile compilatorio con cui il libro è stato costruito. L’introduzione, che intende essere una biografia del libro, darà conto anche delle modalità di ricezione del titolo, delle traduzioni (2 versioni in lingua francese, una in lingua tedesca), delle censure subite, della rinnovata attualità della Riforma nel corso dell’Ottocento italiano.

Antonio Montanari was a Veronese nobleman who lived in the second half of the 18th century. He wrote a number of works in defence of Catholicism, of the existence of God, of natural law, and death penalty, and he als wrote and a Catholic encyclopedia aimed at setting an ideal counter-model for the lay enterprise of Diderot & co (never completed, last letter is "D"). He can be defined a representative member of Italian "Enlightened Catholicism", along with Muratori, albeit much less known. The research on "Enlightened Catholicism" has been recently revamped by Ulrich Lehner.

This paper sheds light on how Jewish-Christian relations were reconfigured in late eighteenth-century Italy by analyzing the Italian debate over Emperor Joseph II’s Patent of Toleration (1781) and the status granted to religious minorities in the Cispadane constitution (1797)—the first “Italian” constitution. Religious difference had long provided the basis for Jewish legal separation from the non-Jewish world. This arrangement was based on a confessional framework—meaning that the organization of the state was supposed to reflect the religious belonging of the subjects. Such an arrangement was challenged at the end of the eighteenth century by the emergence of new regulatory frameworks—the Enlightenment framework of utility and the post-revolutionary framework of nationality. According to the former, membership in the political community was predicated on the basis of social utility, not on religious belonging, so religious difference should not provide the ground for any kind of social exclusion or legal discrimination. On the contrary, the emergence of the principle of nationality led to the singling out of the Jews as others from the national community, as Catholicism was soon identified as a key component of the emerging Italian national identity. Thus, the analysis of Jewish-Christian relations calls into question the traditional understanding of the age of revolutions as a period of secularization and illuminates the role that religion played in the emergence of national identities.

Sintesi ·
Giacinto Dragonetti (1738-1818), nobile aquilano che percorse la carriera di magistrato nei regni di Napoli e di Sicilia, ma che aderì anche alla Repubblica Napoletana, scrisse Delle virtù e de’ premi quando era ancora un giovane avvocato. Il breve trattato, pubblicato per la prima volta a Napoli nel 1767, ebbe una rapidissima fortuna, sebbene non incontrastata, come dimostrano le polemiche suscitate intorno all’opera e gli attacchi cui fu sottoposto l’autore. Nel giro di nove anni ne uscì quasi una ventina di edizioni e il libro fu tradotto in francese, tedesco, inglese, russo, svedese, polacco e spagnolo. I modelli immediati di Dragonetti erano, da un lato, il trattato Dei delitti e delle pene di Cesare Beccaria, pubblicato nel 1764, e, dall’altro lato, l’insegnamento dell’economia civile di Antonio Genovesi, del quale Dragonetti medesimo era stato allievo. Tanto Dei delitti e delle pene quanto Delle virtù e de’ premi si inserivano, peraltro, nel più ampio dibattito in corso intorno al tema delle punizioni e (più frettolosamente) delle ricompense, che aveva avuto la sua origine più prossima nella reazione alle tesi sostenute da Hobbes.
All’interno di questo variegato quadro di influenze, Delle virtù e de’ premi si venne a caratterizzare per tre elementi principali: la concentrazione del discorso sulle sole ricompense, dissociandolo da quello sulle punizioni; l’accantonamento esplicito di qualsiasi discorso sulle virtù cristiane e sugli esempi proposti dalla Sacre Scritture; il riferimento a una concezione eroica della virtù, fondata sulla tradizione dell’antichità classica. È proprio la complessità dei riferimenti filosofici, etici, giuridici, economici e politici presenti nel trattato, dettagliatamente analizzati nel saggio che accompagna il testo critico, che contribuisce a spiegare la vastissima diffusione avuta dal trattato stesso negli anni immediatamente successivi alla sua prima uscita, così come la nuova stagione di successo editoriale conosciuta nei decenni centrali dell’Ottocento, e che induce a riflettere sulle ragioni della terza fase della sua fortuna, quella attuale, iniziata alla fine del Novecento.

http://www.vitaepensiero.it/scheda-libro/giacinto-dragonetti/delle-virtu-e-dei-premi-9788834334454-346184.html

Recension de : Pietro VERRI, Méditations sur l’économie politique, André TIRAN (éd.), Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2015, 441 p., ISBN 978-2-8124-3780-9, 49 €.
Dans: Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 2017 - N° 1 [205-228], p. 217-219.

This paper is the very first part of a broader project on the Italian Enlightenment and its political thought that I hope to develop over the next few years. It combines the history of historiography, the history of ideas, and intellectual and conceptual history to set the stage for future work. 
The following pages examine one of the most pressing problems in XVIII-century political theory – that is, the nature, foundations, and implications of luxury in the context of modern commercial societies – through the prism of the Italian Enlightenment(s) and, more specifically, through an under-explored chapter in the intellectual history of the Milanese Enlightenment: Pietro Verri’s reading of David Hume’s "Political Discourses".
Together with his younger brother Alessandro, Pietro (1728-1797) was the co-founder of the Academy of Fists (“Accademia dei Pugni”) – a group of young aristocrats, including Cesare Beccaria, animated by common reformist goals and anonymously fostering public debate through their periodical "Il Caffè" (The Coffehouse, published from 1764). He wrote extensively in a variety of fields (literature, philosophy, history, and law) but made political economy the core of his intellectual project throughout his whole life. Praised by Kant, his writings played a crucial role in both introducing the multiple publics across the peninsula to some of the most influential ideas on commerce debated outside Italy and outlining a syncretic understanding of luxury beyond the traditional juxtaposition of moral and economic categories. However, the towering figure of Beccaria, with his land-marking pamphlet "On Crimes and Punishments" (1764), has almost irreversibly eclipsed the work and thought of Verri over the past two hundred and fifty years, with countless books, volumes, essays, and conferences on the former (Beccaria) and an incomparably less extensive scholarship on the latter (P. Verri). 
The tentative goal of this paper is to press Anglo-American scholars, among which this bias is more evident, to rescue Pietro Verri from his prolonged neglect and to explore his writings as a meaningful contribution to the development of political economy in Italy in the age of the Enlightenment. More specifically, it encourages to excavate the origins and sources of Verri’s economic thought, which dynamically evolved over the years and critically engaged, revisited, and combined at least two different intellectual traditions – the French and the British. While scholars have traditionally examined Verri’s thought through the lens of the former, with a predominant focus on his reading of Melon, they have paid less attention to the latter, though his oeuvre often references the work of Hume and Mandeville (and his private library included copies of Bacon’s "Opera Omnia" and Locke’s economic writings).
The recent publication of Verri’s opera omnia – eight volumes released between 2003 and 2014 by Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura in Rome, offering for the first time, and in the most philologically accurate form, the writings and extensive epistolary of a leading voice of the Milanese and Italian Enlightenment – allows to shed light on the ‘pre-history’ of his systematic writings in political economy. In particular,
the two books of the second volume of the first series ("Scritti di economia, finanza e amministrazione": I-II) enable to scrutinize the multiple intellectual legacies upon which he drew throughout the years and decades.
One source included in the first part of this volume, and  made available to a broader audience for the first time in 2006, deserves closer attention: the notes Pietro Verri took in 1760 when he first had the chance to read Hume’s "Political Discourses". Published as "Estratti da Hume", they do not offer a critical commentary. They are – literally – excerpts from Hume’s most famous, and most widely read, work in XVIII-century Italy (though predominantly through French translations); as such, their value lies not in the interpretation they disclose, but in the kind of reading they suggest. In other words, they help to better understand the influence Hume had in the forging of Verri’s early views on political economy through the textual selection they operate.
My paper tries to shed light on this intriguing, and so far under-explored, chapter in the history of modern European political thought. It also points at the far-reaching implications that a closer scrutiny of P. Verri's reading of Hume through the lens of economic concerns would have on the way Anglo-American scholars usually conceptualize the focus and nature of the Italian Enlightenment(s).

The invention of tradition (Eric Hobsbawm) in 18th-century Spanish Monarquia.  War of the Spanish Succession.  Spanish Austrian loyalists in Austria, Sicily.  Ignacio de Luzan.  Spanish epic poetry in Mexico, Peru.  Spanish rococo' painting (Gonzalez Velazquez, G. Tieopolo).  Dirigismo cultural/Bourbon cultural management.  Artists, architects, and authors as inventors of national traditions and identity.  Modernization of Spain.  Vichian heroism (Scienza nuova, 1725) as embodiment of Spanish Bourbon cultural values.