Paolo Mattia Doria

Celestino Galiani (1681-1753) was born in San Giovanni Rotondo, a small town in the Gargano, and from there began a long wandering through Italy, between his first religious training in the province of
Foggia and subsequent trips to Rome, where he will be appreciated for his wit, and Naples where he will become Chaplain Major and Prefect of the Royal Studies, with the task of reforming the University of Naples.
Galiani, who did not give any of his writings to print, is best known for spreading Newton’s theories and empiricism in Italy. The study of the theses of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) engaged the abbot for twenty years. His writings, which also include an outline of a work that remained unpublished entitled Ricerche sulla scienza morale (Researches on Moral Science), are the main
trace of the diffusion of Locke’s theories in the Italian panorama of the early 18th century and of how it was a fundamental component in preparing the season of the Southern Enlightenment of the mid-century.

"A pharmacopoeia for any prescription" (Paolo Mattia Doria). Machiavelliana after 1700
Recent research has gained many new insights into Machiavelli's influence on Early Modern European political history. This article focuses on a so far little researched, but decisive stage in the history of Machiavelli's influence, namely Paolo Mattia Doria's treatise "La Vita Civile" (1709/10; further editions in the 18th century), which was written in Naples, a centre of the Early European Enlightenment. In a peculiar mixture of anti-machiavellism that is inspired by Platonic thought and allegiance to Machiavellian ideas, Doria follows the structure and texture of Machiavelli's "Il Principe". The political treatise is still coloured by humanist ideas and includes a speculum principis ("L'Educazione del Principe"). Despite the similarities, Doria criticizes Machiavelli's amoral analysis of power politics and postulates, with reference to Machiavelli's "Discorsi", an ideal republic or a principality of virtue with a virtuous ruler (principe virtuoso) at the top. In the course of his analysis, Doria re-moralizes Machiavelli's morally neutral, praxeological concept of virtù. The treatise reflects the fork in the history of Machiavelli's influence both on a general level and in its details: the ambivalence of "Il Principe" as political advice for the successful and unscrupulous prince on the one hand but, on the other hand, as an exposure of unscrupulous power politics, written modo obliquo by the passionate Republican whom Rousseau, for example, wanted to see in Machiavelli.

Around 1700, Naples was in certain respects characteristic of the ambiguities of Pre-Enlightenment. This paper argues for a fresh view on two protagonists of early Eighteenth-century Neapolitan thought, focusing on common interests and affinities between Paolo Mattia Doria (La vita civile, 1710) and Giambattista Vico. They both anticipated Enlightenment as well as Counter-Enlightenment, heading (either explicitly like Doria or implicitly like Vico) toward a strong theory of civilization. Civilizations, according to both of them, were destined to decline, ruined by an excess of civilization. Doria was a critical reader and an early champion of Machiavelli, a fact not often acknowledged in Machiavelli scholarship. His critical writings, mostly  forgotten today outside Italy, seem to have influenced Montesquieu as well as Rousseau.