Preserving the Neapolitan state: Antonio Genovesi and Ferdinando Galiani on commercial society and planning economic growth

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History of European Ideas 32 (2006) 406–429 www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas

Preserving the Neapolitan state: Antonio Genovesi and Ferdinando Galiani on commercial society and planning economic growth Koen Stapelbroek Faculty of Social Sciences, Erasmus University, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands Available online 27 October 2006

Abstract Both Antonio Genovesi and Ferdinando Galiani devised strategies for Neapolitan economic development, which they realised was essential for preserving its recently acquired independent statehood. In order to avoid any socially disruptive effects they considered how economic processes changed the human mind. Both thinkers grounded their political visions on foreign trade on highly sophisticated ideas of the nature of self-interest. In spite of the similar characters of their projects, the political thought of Genovesi and Galiani has never been subject to serious comparison. Instead the two thinkers have tended to be portrayed as opposite characters with highly divergent political leanings. It is argued here that this view is historically questionable and itself a product of a distorting canonisation process that was set in motion in the second half of the eighteenth century. Ironically, comparing the moral philosophies and economic ideas of Genovesi and Galiani, a picture emerges that inverts the myth that started at the end of the eighteenth century and that until this day has determined accounts of the early Neapolitan Enlightenment. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Genovesi; Galiani; Naples; Commerce; Morality; Self-deceit; Political economy

Genovesi versus Galiani? Traditionally, a lot of emphasis has been placed on the contrast in character between the two most famous Neapolitan political thinkers of the mid eighteenth century: Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769) and Ferdinando Galiani (1728–1787).

E-mail address: [email protected]. 0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2006.08.008

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Previously a university lecturer in metaphysics, Genovesi was appointed to the new chair of ‘Commerce and Mechanics’ in 1754, and embarked on educating his countrymen in a wide range of matters belonging to commerce and agricultural improvement.1 To support his teaching, Genovesi wrote a series of moral and metaphysical handbooks, through which he conveyed what religion, justice and morality ought to mean in a rapidly modernising eighteenth-century society.2 In the later eighteenth century Genovesi’s pupils (Filangieri, Pagano, Galanti) acknowledged their teacher’s achievements and formed a movement that bore the hallmarks of a local Enlightenment culture.3 The figure responsible for the creation of the new chair (arguably the first ever professorship in political economy) was Bartolomeo Intieri. Interestingly, Genovesi admitted that Intieri, rather than just stimulate his interests, had directed the changes in his thinking that enabled him to dedicate himself to political economy.4 Hence, the question has always remained open whether, to put it simply, it was Genovesi, or in fact Intieri, who brought the Enlightenment to Naples.5 Fifteen years Genovesi’s junior, Ferdinando Galiani figured in Neapolitan intellectual life of the 1740s mainly as a precocious satirist and member of informal ‘academies’ to which he gave entertaining lectures on subjects like Platonic love and the Anti-Christ. Yet, Galiani was also, like Genovesi, a pupil of Intieri. In 1751 he published—to almost everyone’s surprise6—a book entitled Della moneta in which he discussed financial politics and suggested how best to go about developing the Neapolitan economy. From 1759 to 1769 Galiani was a diplomat in Paris where he wrote Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds,7 a brilliant critique of physiocracy and the liberalisation of the grain trade that managed to unsettle the French political reform debate for a while. Before its publication in 1770, Galiani was called back to Naples after Choiseul used a minor diplomatic indiscretion from the engine room of French foreign politics. Back in Naples, one of Europe’s least enlightened courts, Galiani manoeuvred himself into a favourable position and, after Tanucci’s fall in 1776, into the driving seat of foreign policy. If during his life there was already a tendency to portray Galiani as a bitter, short and opportunistic ‘machiavellino’,

1 On Genovesi’s educational efforts in print, see Maria Luisa Perna, ‘L’universo communicativo di Antonio Genovesi’, in: Editoria e cultura a Napoli nel XVIII secolo, ed. Anna Maria Rao (Naples, 1998), pp. 391–404. 2 See the article in this volume by Niccolo` Guasti. 3 On the Neapolitan Enlightenment in the later eighteenth century, the forthcoming work by Melissa Calaresu, Enlightenment and revolution in Naples: From Vico to Pagano, (Cambridge, forthcoming), on Filangieri see Vincenzo Ferrone, La societa` giusta ed equa: Repubblicanesimo e diritti dell’uomo in Gaetano Filangieri (Bari, 2003). 4 Franco Venturi, ‘Alle origini dell’illuminismo napoletano, dal carteggio di Bartolomeo Intieri’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 71[2] (1959), pp. 426–427, and Melissa Calaresu, ‘Constructing an intellectual identity: autobiography and biography in eighteenth-century Naples’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies (2001), pp. 166–167. For a bibliography of Genovesi’s works and career see John Robertson, ‘Antonio Genovesi: The Neapolitan Enlightenment and Political Economy’, History of Political Thought (1987), VIII/2, pp. 335–344 and his The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680– 1760 (Cambridge, Ideas in Context, 2005), chapter 7. 5 See the contributions to Atti del convegno 2501 anniversario dell’istituzione della cattedra di ‘Commercio e Meccanica’, Naples, 5–6 May 2005 (forthcoming), including my ‘L’economia civile’ e la societa` commerciale: Intieri, Genovesi, Galiani e la paternita` dell’illuminismo napoletano’ for a special focus on the question of the relations between Intieri and his two most famous pupils. 6 Raffaele Iovine, ‘Il trattato Della moneta di Ferdinando Galiani: la dialettica politica a favore e contro la pubblicazione’, Frontiera d’Europa (1999), pp. 173–236, discusses the history of the publication of the book. 7 Ferdinando Galiani, Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds (ed. Fausto Nicolini, Milan-Naples, 1958 [1770]).

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Galiani himself seemed to care little about this and even cherished his nickname. Also, Galiani’s reputation during his life for laziness, his express flirting with moral cynicism,8 and his eagerness to be at the social centre have been emphasised by historians as signs of a lack of serious reform spirit.9 Galiani’s lack of reform zeal frustrated Franco Venturi. In Venturi’s phenomenally authoritative works from the 1960s and 1970s on eighteenth-century enlightened reformers, Ferdinando Galiani figured as an ambiguous character. Venturi praised Galiani’s intellect and acknowledged his influence on eighteenth-century political debates.10 Yet, Venturi also showed his indignation and disappointment about Galiani’s statements in the conclusion of Della moneta against the monetary reform projects that were launched in Italy in the 1740s.11 The framework of Enlightenment political thought within which Franco Venturi placed Galiani had two main categories: enlightened reformers with utopian views and ‘machiavellian’ politicians. In the case of Naples, Venturi argued, both categories were equally hopeful about the prospects of political independence, but the true reformers always shaped their politics from a separate sphere where utopian ideologies created enlightened views of society. Here Venturi saw Galiani as the typical cynical ‘machiavellian and economist’, while Antonio Genovesi’s educational efforts and influence on the reform ideology of eighteenth-century Naples made him the incarnation of the enlightened reformer.12 Consequently, Venturi’s framework of the Enlightenment sustained the image of Galiani as more interested in the ‘atmosphere that surrounded him’ than in contributing to clarifying the issues of eighteenth-century political thought, and he concluded that the

8 Galiani expressly styled his own character as ‘machiavellino’ and an ‘esprit fort’. Typically, Galiani boasted to a shocked Diderot that in spite of losing his father, his brothers, his sisters and a mistress, he had never shed a tear. In reality all of Galiani’s five sisters and one brother were alive and well. See Francis Steegmuller, ‘The Abbe´ Galiani ‘‘The Laughing Philosopher’’’, The American Scholar (1990), p. 593. 9 Galiani’s joking flirts with various forms of religious and moral scepticism have always determined his reputation. See for example Benedetto Croce, ‘Il Pensiero dell’abate Galiani’, in: Saggio sullo Hegel seguito da altri scritti di storia della filosofia (Bari, 1913), pp. 325–334. In English, Steegmuller, ‘The Abbe´ Galiani ‘‘The Laughing Philosopher’’’ fits with this way of representing Galiani. His A woman, a man, and two Kingdoms (London, 1991) reinforces this image. To add to the image of a not so charitable figure, Galiani’s will contains, among a list of beneficiaries of his properties, the phrase ‘and to the Ospedale dei poveri I don’t leave anything [non lascio niente]’, Biblioteca della Societa` Napoletana di Storia Patria [henceforth BSNSP], ms. xxxi.a.8, ff. 85–88. 10 Franco Venturi, ‘Il dibattito sulle monete’, Settecento riformatore, Da Muratori a Beccaria (Vol. I, Turin, 1969), pp. 490–499 and ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 72[3] (1960), pp. 45–64. 11 Franco Venturi, ‘Il dibattito sulle monete’, p. 502. 12 Robertson, ‘The Enlightenment above national context: political economy in eighteenth-century Scotland and Naples’, The Historical Journal, 40[3] (1997), p. 694, aligns Galiani with Venturi’s non-utopian, non-reformist political thinkers, and opposes him to Genovesi. However, see Girolamo Imbruglia, ‘Enlightenment in eighteenthcentury Naples’, in: Naples in the eighteenth century: the birth and death of a nation-state (ed. Girolamo Imbruglia, Cambridge, 2000), pp. 74–82, who questions Genovesi’s character as a utopian reformer and argues that only his pupils were utopian enough to be enlightened. Robertson notes Venturi’s view of Genovesi as the incarnation of the ideal of the enlightened reformer and like Venturi opposes him to Tanucci in this way, emphasising Genovesi’s strategy of ‘pursuing Enlightenment before reform’ (‘Enlightenment and Revolution: Naples 1799’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1999), pp. 27, 30). Reinforcing Venturi’s model, Robertson detaches Enlightenment and patriotic reform (p. 24) to grasp the difference between the real reformers and politicians. In agreement with Venturi, Robertson also sees Galiani as a non-reformist ‘exception’ in the context of later eighteenth-century Neapolitan political thought (p. 34).

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Dialogues ‘did not contain a political and economic programme’.13 This idea of Galiani’s political thought has remained essentially uncontested. In recent decades, the picture of Galiani’s personality has dominated accounts of his works and actions. Raffaele Ajello, for example, described him in 1991 as a brilliant but cynical and lazy government advisor at the Neapolitan court after his return from Paris in 1770. This Galiani was more concerned with his own enjoyment than with the national interest.14 Thus, Galiani was effectively excluded from the Age of Reform. However, the question arises whether juxtaposing Genovesi and Galiani at this level is sufficiently instructive for understanding eighteenth-century political thought and letting it determine the notion of the Enlightenment, in Naples and in general. Depicting Galiani along these lines produces no clues as to how to dissolve the mysteries that surround his legacy. When Della moneta appeared Galiani stood alone in the 1750s Italian debate on money because he took a much less rigid view on the despicable injustice of devaluation policies. Galiani’s outlook on economic policies also differed from his Italian contemporaries, whose ideas about money, the nature of commerce and financial politics derived from different foundations. Yet, Galiani’s contemporaries were puzzled as to how his policy views (which were pro-luxury and not anti-devaluation) could be derived from ideas about the nature commerce, which, to them, seemed highly similar to their own. So how could Galiani both blend in with the current of Italian writings on money of around 1750 and at the same time end up an outsider to the mainstream of these authors on commercial politics?15 Furthermore, it seems that Galiani’s contemporaries in the 1770s and 1780s already preferred to view him as someone who, because of his personality, must oppose their cause, rather than to make an effort to grasp what it was that made him reject ambitious cosmopolitan reforms. After the publication of the Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, Galiani was frequently criticised, first by Andre´ Morellet in his Refutation16 (1774) of the Dialogues and in correspondence, for his scepticism about ‘the great issues of liberty, property and the rights of citizens’ as well as for a perceived contradiction between Della moneta and the Dialogues.17 In the aftermath of the publication of the Dialogues, Galiani defended himself against such accusations of inconsistency, claiming that both his books were part and parcel of the same intellectual enterprise.18 In the second edition of Della moneta, published in 1780, Galiani also publicly responded to Morellet’s accusations by

13

Franco Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 72[3] (1960), pp. 47, 53. R. Ajello, ‘I filosofi e la regina’, Rivista Storica Italiana (1991), pp. 398–454, 657–738. See also P. Amadio, Il disincanto della ragione e l’assolutezza del bonheur. Studio sull’abate Galiani, (Naples, 1997) which features an overdrawn portrayal of Galiani’s ‘disenchanted’ Enlightenment spirit. 15 Pompeo Neri, ‘Osservazioni sopra il prezzo legale delle monete’, in Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia, Edizione moderna (ed. by Custodi, Milan, 1804 [1751]), p. 367. 16 Andre´ Morellet, Re´futation de l’ouvrage qui a pour titre ‘Dialogues sur le commerce des bles’ (London [corr. Paris], 1774 [1770]). For the quarrel between Morellet and Galiani see Galiani, Dialogues, pp. 463–520. 17 From the two epigraphs of the book, taken from both works by Galiani, onwards, Morellet argued that because the earlier work was pro-free trade and pro-agricultural development and the latter anti-free trade and pro-manufacturing, they contradicted each other. The quote is taken from Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati’, p. 53. 18 Ferdinando Galiani, Correspondence avec Mme d’Epinay, Mme Necker, Mme Geoffrin, &c. Diderot, Grimm, d’Alembert, De Sartine, d’Holbach, &c (II Vols. eds. Perey & Maugras, Paris, 1881), I: 248–249. See also the letter by Galiani to Morellet dated 1 May 1770, in the BSNSP, xxxi.a.13, f. 41r. 14

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claiming that both his main treatises stemmed from the same approach to commercial politics and accomplished its implementation into realistic policy advice.19 These claims by Galiani have traditionally been overshadowed by his reputation as a ‘sceptic’, a qualification which despite its many meanings gave rise to surprisingly little distinctions in eighteenth-century political discourse. No doubt, Galiani’s scepticism about the foundations of society (which resembled Vico’s concept of a ‘Sympethetic nature’)20 always lay behind his idea of politics, and the success of his Dialogues was largely due to its elusive critique of the physiocrats’ dogmatism. Yet, Galiani also became the victim of his own strategy of exploiting the rift that was perceived to separate sceptics from reformers. Immediately after the publication of the Dialogues the idea arose of a presumed incoherence of Della moneta and the Dialogues, which developed into the notion that Galiani had no economic and political programme, but was an opportunist who was easily influenced by his environment. When the Dialogues was published, the physiocratic journal Ephe´me´rides du citoyen immediately explained Galiani’s unusual position as a response to having witnessed the 1764–1765 famines in Tuscany on his return to Paris from a diplomatic trip to Naples. Struck by the painful reality of faulty grain legislation, Galiani deterred from the path of ‘vigorous reform’ in general. Thus, it was this particular experience, the Ephe´me´rides claimed, that had driven a definite wedge between Galiani’s outlook on reform and the cosmopolitan quest for furthering the ‘happiness of humanity’ that his celebrated compatriot Cesare Beccaria was engaged in. Whereas Beccaria sought ‘sincerely for truth’, with regard to Galiani one could no longer ‘establish what hides behind the mask that the abbe´ likes to hide himself behind’. Hence, Galiani was judged to have given up on approaching ‘the government of commerce’ from the point of view of ‘principles of natural law’ and ‘the rules of justice’.21 Disillusion had to be the cause of Galiani’s disbelief in enlightened reform and his possession by the vagaries of ‘scepticism’. This contemporary account was adopted by Franco Venturi who concluded that the polemic in the Dialogues stemmed from Galiani’s ‘resignation and admission of defeat in the face of the obstacles which were blocking the way of more radical reform and which in Naples as in Paris had proved insuperable’.22 Consequently, Venturi argued, Galiani defaulted into ‘reason of state’.23 Influential as this account of the genesis of the Dialogues has been, it is not satisfactory.24 The famines in Tuscany were caused by the failure of the annona, the old 19 Ferdinando Galiani, Della moneta e scritti inediti (eds. Alberto Caracciolo & Alberto Merola, Milan, 1963 [1751]), pp. 334–335. Translations of quotations from this work are based on Ferdinando Galiani, On money: A Translation of Della Moneta by Ferdinando Galiani by Peter R. Toscano (Ann Arbor, 1977), but often with considerable modifications to improve the readability and to correct errors. Italian original terms are occasionally added in brackets. 20 See Chapter 3 of Koen Stapelbroek, Love, Self-Deceit, and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). 21 Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati’, pp. 50–54. 22 Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati’, p. 50. 23 Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati’, p. 51. 24 Venturi agreed with the account given by Fausto Nicolini in his introduction to the Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, which copied the ideas of the Ephe´me´rides (see Galiani, Dialogues, xi-xii, 297–306, and Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati’, pp. 46–48). The explanation for Galiani’s Wende was adopted for example by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, ‘Needs and justice in the wealth of nations’, in: Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (eds. Istva´n Hont & Michael Ignatieff, 1983), pp. 17–18,

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legislation of the grain provision. If anything, the sight of them would inspire recognition of the need for reforming the grain provisioning laws. More significantly, Galiani consistently argued, even after the publication of the Dialogues, that the grain trade ought to be liberalised across Italy and that this would not have the type of negative effects as in France. Thus, the famines in Tuscany did not make him change his mind. As he told Suard in a letter written in 1771, his job was, and always had been, to ‘correct here [in Italy] the excess of protection, whereas in France I had to correct the excess of liberty’.25 Rather than to rehabilitate Galiani or take away any of the lustre surrounding Genovesi, this article aims to set up a new comparison between the political and moral ideas of the two most outstanding Neapolitan thinkers of the mid-eighteenth century. Presumably because the obvious oppositions in character between Genovesi and Galiani have been taken to automatically represent opposite views on moral philosophical and political issues, such a comparison has never been made. The aim of this approach is to shed new light on Genovesi’s and Galiani’s ideas of self-interest and commercial morality and see in what way their respective views had an impact on their outlooks on the political future of the newly (since 1734) independent Neapolitan state. Genovesi: incarnation of the enlightenment or ‘esprit me´diocre’? Ferdinando Galiani did not believe in the originality of Antonio Genovesi’s vision of a ‘civil economy’ [l’economia civile]. This much is clear from what he wrote to one of his correspondents in Paris, Friedrich Melchior Grimm, in 1775. As he declared in his own characteristic style: The bent of all mediocre spirits [esprits mediocres] is to shine by the tone and the jargon of age. It takes a great deal of character of mind to disregard an infallible glory and applause, rather than to assume the tone that is in fashion, which is what Beccaria, Genovesi, Baudeau, Roubaud, etc do.26 Galiani did not accuse Genovesi and Beccaria of pursuing personal glory or of trying to be fashionable, he simply believed that they did not manage to transcend the fashion of the age in dealing with its political challenges. No doubt there are aspects of bitterness and jealousy to Galiani’s dismissive statement. Yet, his critical stance towards his contemporaries, to my mind, merits more serious interest. It can hardly be doubted that according to Galiani, Genovesi (like Beccaria) was an ‘esprit me´diocre’ because he was incapable of offering an adequate solution for the central problem of modern political thought: the explanation of commercial morality and its relations to the determinants of the wealth and power of states. In this way Galiani distanced himself from what, as he (footnote continued) Robertson, ‘The Enlightenment above national context’, pp. 690, 693–694, and by Philip Koch, in his introduction to Ferdinando Galiani, Dialogues entre M. Marquis de Roquemaure et Ms. Le Chevalier Zanobi: the autograph manuscript of the Dialogues Sur Le Commerce Des Bleds, diplomatically edited with introduction, notes and appendices (Frankfurt, 1968). Marco Minerbi, ‘Diderot, Galiani e la polemica sulla fisiocrazia (1767–1771)’, Studi Storici 14 (1973), p. 151 argued against Venturi that his view on Galiani’s anti-liberalism is not accurate and misrepresents Galiani’s perspective from which the Dialogues were written. 25 Galiani, Correspondence, I: 193. 26 Ferdinando Galiani, Il Pensiero Dell’Abate Galiani: Antologia di tutti i suoi scritti (ed. Fausto Nicolini, Bari, 1909), p. 138 (letter to Grimm, dated 20 march 1775).

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realised, most people considered the best his age had to offer on these points. Galiani felt that Genovesi and Beccaria exemplified the limits of the type of political thought that at a time was predominant. When Galiani attacked Genovesi he referred to the differences between his own and Genovesi’s conceptions of the nature of morality and of the elementary workings of commercial society and its implications for its politics.

Galiani: ‘patron’ of the neapolitan enlightenment? In 1780, 5 years after criticising Genovesi in his letter to Grimm, Galiani published the second edition of Della moneta. This was the time in which the pupils of Antonio Genovesi had become the standard bearers of the Neapolitan enlightenment and wrote their own new contributions to eighteenth-century political, social, legal and economic thought. Besides 35 notes and a commentary on the political intrigues surrounding the first publication of the book,27 Galiani added a new preface to the second edition. Here Galiani explained his motives in enlightened terms for writing Della moneta while referring to the teachings of Bartolomeo Intieri: The fortune [of the kingdom of Naples] had changed in 1734 with the acquisition of independent government. The long wars that were fought in Italy had not caused any significant damage to its kingdoms and had brought money from Spain, France and Germany and almost everywhere into the [Neapolitan] kingdom. The good initiatives by its government, which encouraged the arts and commerce, had completely altered the economy of the state when European peace was recovered in 1749. Hence, the new situation ensued from a fresh impulse of energy and was healthier than before, but its first appearances were trouble, complaints, dissatisfaction, ailment. There seemed to be a lack of money, the rates of exchange had altered, the prices of all goods had increased, the quick gains of whole-sale buyers and non-manufacturers were diminished. On the whole the ancient orders and the ‘mainsprings’ [le molle] of the state had been destroyed or upset. There were some who took luxury [il lusso], weakening of devotion or governmental negligence to be the cause. Some prescribed one thing, while others advised another. One simply could not blame the prince for new pressures and taxes, because his wisdom and moderation had been visible and clear, but for the rest every single thing was suggested to be the case. There were those who advised to make laws on rates of exchange, who wanted to change the type of money, who wanted to change the proportion between gold and silver or at least between silver and bronze. They believed that coined silver was liquefied by luxury. All talked about defects that did not really exist, as if they existed. And all proposed venoms [veleni] as the remedy. [y] In sum, the danger was evident. The nation was deceived by the false appearance of symptoms and signs and started to scare and disturb the spirit of the prince by proposing measures that impeded the strengthening and the new salubrity of the Kingdom, up to the point that the whole state was almost threatened by some internal weakness. Only Bartolomeo Intieri could see clearly through the darkness and he was happy and rejoiced at the century, the prince and the nation and welcomed the prosperity that in fact came to Naples. [y] 27

See Iovene, ‘Il trattato Della moneta di Ferdinando Galiani’.

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This was the main, if not the only reason that moved Galiani to write the present work.28 In contrast to the majority of Neapolitan economists at the time, Galiani did not think that the generally perceived failure of the reform projects of the 1740s was crucial for the future of the Neapolitan kingdom. Instead, as he wrote in a letter a few years after the first publication of Della moneta, he saw a ‘city of four-hundred-thousand inhabitants that is the only one in Italy and perhaps in the world which for two-thousand years has not breathed the air of liberty, has changed dominion more often than any other city in the world, and by itself demonstrates a wonderful contrast between beneficial nature and destructive art, which ends with the victory of the infinite force of nature.’ Galiani considered the changes taking place before his eyes to be an ‘amazing spectacle, which is the only object of my current activities.’29 Galiani agreed with the other economists of the time, such as Doria and Genovesi: (1) that agriculture was of primary importance for triggering economic growth. (2) that the international conditions of aggressive competition posed a real problem for maintaining Neapolitan independence.30 Yet, according to him, the crucial problem was the persistence of erroneous ideas regarding the nature of commerce and the social and moral determinants of economic development. Therefore, in 1780, Galiani explained in the added preface that the project of Della moneta had been to write an enlightened treatise in the spirit of Intieri. In this way Galiani seemed to want to send a message to the academic classes in Naples that he too was an enlightened thinker and effectively should be considered, as much as Genovesi, a ‘patron’ of the Neapolitan enlightenment. In fact, given Galiani’s idea that Genovesi was an ‘esprit me´diocre’, we can even go so far as to read into the words Galiani wrote in 1780 the pretension of superiour paternity. Galiani’s motives for affirming the enlightened character of his thinking can be established fairly easily. After the publication of his critique of the reformed vision of physiocracy in the Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, of 1770,31 Galiani was forced to defend himself against the great hostility with which this work was received in Italy. Rather than to recognise Galiani’s criticisms of the French liberalisation policies as a contribution to the reform debates of the time, he was branded as a traitor to the Enlightenment project. The well-known and respected Florentine journal Novelle letterarie even argued, in 1774, that it was a national scandal that an Italian had dared to betray the cosmopolitan principles of the age by criticising the French free trade policies of 1763–1764 in Paris, the centre of the Enlightenment.32 In 1780, Galiani sought to redeem himself to his Neapolitan audience. In the endnotes added to the second edition of Della moneta, he specifically addressed the critics of the Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds who had stressed his moral scepticism and presumed 28

Galiani, Della moneta, pp. 8–10, see also p. 6 and notes vi, xxvii and xxix in the second edition of 1780, in which Galiani refers to Intieri and related his own views to those of Intieri. 29 Letter Ferdinando Galiani to Antonio Cocchi, 20 February 1753, published in Franco Venturi, ‘Alle origini dell’illuminismo napoletano’, pp. 452–454. 30 Robertson, ‘The Enlightenment above national context’, pp. 684–695 identifies the hostile international context as a common concern among Neapolitan political thinkers in the first half of the eighteenth century. 31 Galiani, Dialogues. 32 Novelle letterarie, ed. by Giovanni Lami (Florence, 1774), p. 293.

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anti-reformism. Galiani claimed his message had been misinterpreted. Here he justified his actions saying that Morellet was ‘mistaken’ to see ‘contradictions’ between the Dialogues and Della moneta and that he had always been ‘in favour of freedom’ of trade.33 In another note Galiani also claimed that he had been right to warn for the ‘damage’ that was done to French politics by the physiocrats and others and argued that Montesquieu’s misguided ‘hate .. towards any form of absolute government’ had laid the basis for the ‘total ruin’ of the French state.34 Without denying his skepticism (particularly towards republican virtue), Galiani rejected the accusation that his political vision was inconsistent, nonexistent or unenlightened. In this way, despite his Machiavellian reputation, Galiani still presented himself as a pupil of Intieri, and even as a better pupil than Genovesi, since he claimed to be closer in spirit to Intieri’s own sceptical attitude towards overly ambitious reformist movements. Besides, Genovesi himself had already famously admitted that Intieri not just stimulated his intellectual interests but had also directed the changes in his thinking that enabled him to make the shift ‘from metaphysician to merchant’ [da metafisico a mercatante].35 The objective of the publication of the second edition of Della moneta seems to have been firstly to reinforce the place of Intieri at the beginning of Neapolitan enlightenment, and subsequently to replace Genovesi as his rightful successor. Regardless of the question whether or not Galiani ought to be considered Intieri’s best pupil, which would distort late eighteenth-century genealogies of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, taking the above into account opens up the comparison between Galiani’s and Genovesi’s ideas on the nature of self-interest as well as on Neapolitan commercial politics.

Love as the source of commercial sociability Genovesi: ‘homo homini natura amicus’ In the 1760s Genovesi returned to his pre-1754 interest in metaphysics, connecting his ideas about the principles of human behaviour to the realm of commerce and its government.36 Here Genovesi joined the great European Enlightenment debate on commerce and morality. Thus, the shift da metafisico a mercatante of 1754 paved the way for a sustained focus on the morality of market societies that was central to eighteenthcentury political thought.

33

Galiani, Della moneta, pp. 334–335. Galiani, Della moneta, pp. 342–343. 35 For the quote from Genovesi’s Discorso sopra il vero fine delle lettere e delle scienze, which was originally published in 1753 with Ubaldo Montelatici’s Ragionamenti sopra i mezzi piu necessary per far rifiorire l’agricoltura del abate Ubaldo Montelatici, see Franco Venturi, Riformatori napoletani (vol. 5, Illuministi Italiani, MilanNaples, 1962), p. 86. 36 Paola Zambelli, La formazione filosofica di Antonio Genovesi (Naples, 1972) highlights the continuity between the activities of the early and the later Genovesi. See J. Griziotti Kretschmann, ‘Le premesse filosofiche dell’economia civile di Genovesi’, in: Studi in onore di Antonio Genovesi nel bicentenario della Istituzione della cattedra di economia (Domenico Demarco ed., Naples, 1956), pp. 233–244, for an earlier attempt to reconstruct Genovesi’s moral philosophy. 34

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The first chapters of his main work, the Lezioni di Commercio o sia d’Economia Civile, of 1765, reveal Genovesi’s idea of sociability.37 Among the positions taken by Genovesi, we find his critique of Montesquieu. Genovesi, famously, considered ‘abstaining from doing harm to another’ insufficient for maintaining a society. A monarchy—the term that Genovesi, following Montesquieu, accepted as a synonym for a modern commercial society—also required true virtue.38In fact the insufficiency of justice, or any rules set up to sustain the stability of a society, has been noted as a central theme in Genovesi’s political thought, as has his use of the notion of ‘love’ for clarifying his view of the nature of morality.39 Yet, it is important the show the larger framework of human nature within which Genovesi saw virtue as a social necessity. Responding to his own question ‘what is the nature and the force and what are the natural rights and obligations of people’, Genovesi first declared that man was a hedonistic, even an egocentric, being: ‘every man naturally loves himself first and more than the others: but he has a capacity for pity that gives him the energy to come to the rescue of those who are in need. He is naturally jealous of his own good, but not envious of the others’.40 If this gave people the impression that Genovesi was a modern Epicurean, he immediately made an effort to correct this impression. From Genovesi’s point of view the Epicurean analysis of human nature and the idea of morality as false virtue by Hobbes’s recent followers Rousseau and Mandeville was profoundly mistaken. Genovesi held that to understand the idea of self-interest as amor proprio was a form of ‘self-deceit’, and at the same time distanced himself from any Manichean ideas of sociability: ‘those who say that man acts only in his own interest, like those who deny it, deceive themselves [‘s’ingannano] and both sides speak with little consideration’.41 And ‘there are those who see interest only as a reflexive amor proprio: but it is false that every man operates always relative to this kind of interest. But if one understands interest as that satisfying and pleasing of feelings of pain, trouble and irritation [y], of disquiet of the soul and of every good and evil passion one will find that we act according to no other principle: and he who believes we do deceives himself and makes a fool of himself [s’inganna e diventa il giuoco degli altri].42 Genovesi referred at the most crucial points throughout his oeuvre to Shaftesbury’s An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, 43 which was immensely influential across Europe in the early part of the eighteenth century.44 Genovesi saw any links between honesty, 37 Antonio Genovesi, Delle lezioni di commercio o sia d’economia civile, con elementi del commercio (ed. Maria Luisa Perna, Naples, 2005 [1765]). 38 Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio, p. 292. The insufficiency of the rules of justice for society, according to Genovesi is a well-known theme, see Eluggero Pii, Antonio Genovesi: dalla politica economica alla ‘politica civile’ (Florence, 1984), pp. 75–84 and chapters 4, 6 & 7 passimy 39 Vincenzo Ferrone, The intellectual roots of the Italian Enlightenment (New Jersey, 1995), p. 349. See also Richard Bellamy, ‘‘Da metafisico a mercatante’, Antonio Genovesi and the development of a new language of commerce in eighteenth-century Naples’, in: The languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. A. Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), p. 283. 40 Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio, p. 274. 41 Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio, p. 300. 42 Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio, p. 300. 43 Ashley Cooper Third Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, ed. David Walford (Manchester, 1977 [1699]). 44 The influence of Shaftesbury on Genovesi was also discussed—differently—by Richard Bellamy, ‘‘Da metafisico a mercatante’’, pp. 283–284, 286–287. Similarities between Genovesi and Shaftesbury are not usually played out enough to bring to light Genovesi’s moral philosophy. For Shaftesbury, see Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ 1640– 1740 (Cambridge, 1995), Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and

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interest, personal utility, virtue, love and beauty through Shaftesbury’s idea of a balance between personal and social forces.45 This balance, according to Genovesi, and following Shaftesbury, was naturally well regulated. Therefore Genovesi stated that Homo homini natura amicus.46 Man did not reflect upon his primitive selfish nature and become social. Instead, the possibility existed that under certain circumstances the naturally ordered balance between individual and society was upset, from which could emerge a Hobbesian state of war.47 Thus, Genovesi opposed Hobbes, of whom he wrote: ‘Hobbes was wrong to say that men by the law of nature are in a state of war. Had he said that in fact they were, he would have been right’.48 The idea of a highly vulnerable, but naturally well-regulated balance that had to be monitored was central to Genovesi’s history of mankind. Three types of progressively developing sensations existed, ranging from natural, instinctive ones to reflexive, cultured ones. Different sensations produced different energies by which man found himself moved.49 All three types of sensations were present in eighteenth-century commercial societies on an unprecedented scale, which made controlling them against each other and preventing the collapse of social ideas and the state as a whole a highly challenging enterprise. At all levels of sensation a dialectic between amor proprio and amor della spezia governed the balancing process. Here Genovesi used notions of love to discuss the functioning of the balance between individual and society.50 This balance structure might be taken to be a sign of a Manichean conception of the nature of morality. Yet, this is incorrect, as becomes clear when Shaftesbury’s influence on Genovesi is taken into account. Genovesi did not see hate as something to be directly countered by love and evil to be countered by good, nor did Genovesi regard reason as the crucial factor that decided an imaginary fight between self-interest and false other-regarding motives.51 In fact, Genovesi directly attacked Mandeville—who of course became famous in the eighteenth century as one of Shaftesbury’s most incisive critics52—on various occasions, as well as Rousseau.53 The way in which reason could influence social processes was actually rather indirect. Genovesi inserted education and reason into his scheme as the single social, and (footnote continued) Hutcheson, Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge, 2005), Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2004). Shaftesbury’s influence across Europe can be measured from Jan Engbers, Der ‘Moral-Sense’ bei Gellert, Lessing und Wieland: zur Rezeption von Shaftesbury und Hutcheson in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 2001). In a more historical key, see Istvan Hont, ‘Luxury and Commerce’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, eds. M. Goldie & R. Wokler (Cambridge, forthcoming), chapter 14. 45 Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio, pp. 306, 295. 46 Pii, Dalla politica economica alla ‘politica civile’, p. 139. 47 Pii, Dalla politica economica alla ‘politica civile’, pp. 157–158, for a different account of Genovesi’s idea of a divided mankind based on Rousseauian premises. 48 Pii, Dalla politica economica alla ‘politica civile’, p. 294. 49 Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio, pp. 296–300, 308. 50 See Stapelbroek, ‘‘L’economia civile’ e la societa` commerciale’ for this interpretation of Genovesi’s moral philosophy. 51 Bellamy, ‘‘Da metafisico a mercatante’’, p. 283, 286 comes very close to arguing this. See the same pages for some references to Shaftesbury by Genovesi in his Logica, his Metafisica and the Diceosina. 52 See Hont, ‘Luxury and Commerce’. 53 Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio, especially pp. 340, 764. See also p. 879: ‘Il Sig Mandeville si oppone a questa dottrina. La cupidigia delle ricchezze, dic’egli, e` una forza, che solletica e spinge alla fatica, e alla ricerca di quei comodi, de’ quali tutti abbisogniamo, e tanto piu`, quanto noi ci troviamo in una piu` polita societa`.’

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eventually political, factor of influence on human happiness in the course of history. Reason, shaped by education, served to prepare people’s capacity for balancing their own happiness in a modern commercial society and make them better at the delicate art of responding to the various interested passions they were exposed to. Viewed in this way, Genovesi’s outlook on human sociability and the nature of selfinterest serves to place him in the tradition that connected late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French and English theories of the passions and moral philosophy to Enlightened ideas of human nature and economic and political reform of the later eighteenth century.54 From the pages of the Diceosina, it even seems that Genovesi himself understood his project to take in this position.55 The most interesting aspect of Genovesi’s ideas on sociability is that he adopted Shaftesbury’s solution of radically avoiding the problems of moral scepticism that Hobbes had spelled out a century earlier.56 Genovesi’s response to Hobbes’s idea of commerce as determined by man’s innate desires of ‘glory, diffidence and pride’ meant he also avoided both Bayle’s scepticism and Locke’s rigorous hedonism. To adopt Shaftesbury’s idea of self-interest was to deny that self-interest was a basic moral problem for societies. The challenge was not to align private vice and public benefits but instead to create the conditions, through education and through political and economic institutions, that prevented people from slipping out of the carefully arranged natural balancing act that kept people together in societies throughout history. Yet, in spite of Genovesi’s adherence to a moral philosophy that was among the most sophisticated responses to neo-Hobbesian explanations of society and most advanced ways of avoiding Bayle’s scepticism and the sharp edges of Locke’s hedonism, Galiani disliked his idea of sociability. He believed that Genovesi’s views were too much within the mainstream of eighteenth-century cosmopolitan solutions to provide a morally robust idea of commercial society. Genovesi, he felt, like most famous contemporaries, expressed the spirit of Enlightenment, but his thinking did not make enough progress. Galiani: ‘l’amore: ammirabil resort, che muove e dar vita al commercio umano’ ‘Love drives and gives life to the commerce of mankind’ [commercio umano]: thus, the just 17-year-old Ferdinando Galiani presented his project of understanding the sociable nature of man in a letter written in 1745. As Galiani explained to his correspondent, an English speaking gentleman presumed to be a Scottish Jacobite57: ‘it is my usual habit with regard to all matters, however marginal, to examine them metaphysically. And if there is one thing that merits to be examined metaphysically it is love, that admirable resource.’58 One year later, the young Galiani lectured before the Accademia degli Emuli on lust and 54

See Hont, ‘Luxury and Commerce’ and Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ for two of the best works on these under researched fields. Benedetta Craveri, La civilta` della conversazione (Milan, 2001) shows the remarkable salon sociology of French seventeenth-century passion theory. 55 See the article by Niccolo` Guasti in this volume on the Diceosina, arguably Genovesi’s most enigmatic work. 56 Zambelli, La formazione filosofica di Antonio Genovesi, pp. 557–561, discusses Genovesi’s concern with Hobbes and does so using Vico as an intermediary. See also Bellamy, ‘‘Da metafisico a mercatante’’, pp. 283–284. 57 According to Nicolini the addresse´e of Galiani’s letter was a Scottish Jacobite, a follower of the Chevalier Ramsay, a disciple of Fe´nelon whose ‘pure love’ [pur amour] theories were very similar to Doria’s (F. Nicolini, ‘I manoscritti di Ferdinando Galiani’, Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 33 (1908), pp. 171–197). 58 BSNSP, xxxi.c.19, ff. 94–99; f. 94r.

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love, taking on the phenomenon of cicisbeismo (gallantry) as a metaphor of the modernising tendencies of his Neapolitan society. Following this lecture Galiani came to consider the social game of love on a par with the social game of commerce, which was the key to his main work Della moneta, of 1751. Galiani’s ideas about the nature of self-interest apparently differed enormously from Genovesi’s. In Della moneta, he argued that the ‘equilibrium’ of our passions ‘conforms neatly with the proper abundance of both the comforts of life and worldly happiness [terrena felicita`], although not from human prudence and virtue [dall’umana prudenza o virtu´] but from the lowest stimulus of all, private gain [sordido lucro]. For in spite of ourselves [a nostro dispetto], owing to His infinite love of mankind, Providence has so arranged all things that our base passions are often ordered for the benefit of all’.59 Galiani did not hint at all at any natural correspondence of moral virtue and commerce, as Genovesi following Shaftesbury had done. Rather, he seemed to reject the whole idea that morality was necessary for the persistence of society. Instead he argued, in a properly neoHobbesian fashion, that man had a natural ‘desire to distinguish oneself and to be superior among his fellows’.60 This passion was so strong that man often valued its gratification more than ‘the security of life itself [la sicurezza della vita istessa].’61 Galiani called this passion amor proprio and argued that because of its ‘supremacy’ [primogenita] over all other passions it was man’s ‘principle of action’ [principio d’azione].62 However, it is important to see that Galiani, rather than oppose Genovesi directly, had devised an alternative way to end up with similar views on the nature of self-interest. To understand Galiani’s project it is crucial to consider his earliest writings, a series of lectures from the late 1740s. In the same period he wrote to the Count of Punghino that he understood the task of moral philosophy to be to ‘explain this question of Mr. Hobbes’ whether ‘men are born naturally as enemies of one another’.63 When Punghino suggested that the solution had to be a concept of amour proper that had to resemble Rousseau’s views,64 Galiani countered by putting forward a dualistic view of two ‘loves’. At this stage Punghino opposed what he presumed to be Galiani’s dialectic of self-love and benevolence and suggested to Galiani that it would be more correct to reduce his ‘two loves to amour propre only’ [au seul amour propre].65 In his view Galiani simply repeated the mistake of the Manichaeans and Stoics, and all modern Christian philosophers, who rejected the view that morality was concealed selfishness. They concluded that there are not two principles but the combat [le combat] of two principles, so that one always has to suppose that there is another principle that brings the two acting principles in question to rest.66 But Galiani’s idea of two interrelated loves differed from the one that Punghino assumed him to hold. Galiani explained his views in two lectures that he gave to the informal Accademia degl’Emuli [‘the Academy of Emulators’] in 1746. In the first manuscript of his two lectures Galiani rejected Descartes’ physiological approach in Les passions de l’aˆme 59

Galiani, Galiani, 61 Galiani, 62 Galiani, 63 BSNSP, 64 BSNSP, 65 BSNSP, 66 BSNSP, 60

Della moneta, p. 55. Della moneta, p. 41. Della moneta, p. 41. Della moneta, p. 41. xxxi.c.12, f. 157r. xxxi.c.12, f. 9v. xxxi.c.12, f. 9v. xxxi.c.12, ff. 27v–28r.

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(1649) to explaining the passions. Cartesian ideas about the nature of the passions had been quite influential in Italian intellectual culture and still lingered in discussions about morality in the 1740s, such as Trojano Spinelli’s Degli affetti umani (Naples, 1741).67 Galiani explained that love does not ‘arise in us by our own determination, but is always excited involuntarily, and often also in spite of ourselves [spesso anche a nostro dispetto]’.68 Through ‘a capacity’ in the brain ‘to connect separate and distinct ideas’, love evolved into attitudes towards the world that governed man’s perception of reality.69 Love only varies depending on the diversity of objects, while the affection of the mind is always the same. If one were to consistently replace the word woman, in a treatise of love for a woman, for the word God, you would get an excellent mystical work. And love of money is called avarice, love of literature is called studiousness [applicazione] and love for women is called love wat’exowZn [‘par excellence’]U But all these different names for these passions denote only one thing.70 After defining love in this manner, Galiani turned to a number of famous examples from Descartes’s Les passions de l’aˆme and Locke’s Essay concerning human understanding to illustrate the originality of his own idea. For instance, Galiani used Descartes’s example of the love felt by a father who lost his son to criticise the parallels that were often imagined to exist between the pairs of love and hate, pleasure and pain, good and bad and virtue and vice: ‘the opposite of love is not hate, but not to love’ and ‘love does not imply the will or the desire to do good, nor does hate imply wanting to do evil’.71 For Galiani hate was frustrated love. It was not the counter-concept, but the obverse of love. If one’s attachments to the world were thwarted by ‘contempts and jealousies’ love would ‘change into hate’.72 67 See Claudio Manzoni, I cartesiani italiani (1660– 1760) (Udine, 1984), in English Brendan Dooley, ‘Veritas Filia Temporis: Experience and Belief in Early Modern Culture’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60[3] (1999), pp. 498–501. Vincenzo Ferrone, The roots of the Italian Enlightenment, shows how Cartesian natural philosophy was modified into Newtonianism. Trojano Spinelli’s Degli affetti umani (Naples, 1741) makes extensive use of the works on passions by Descartes, De la Chambre, Malebranche and—to a lesser degree—Senault in order to criticise their (as well as Locke’s) ideas of love and hate and take their discussion of the passions to the level of French and English moral philosophy of the first half of the eighteenth century. Spinelli’s work is in the form of dialogues that are set against the background of a lush Neapolitan garden from which the smoke rising from the mount Vesuvius can be seen. On Spinelli, see Franco Venturi, ‘Tre note su Carlantonio Broggia’, Rivista Storica Italiana, 80[4] (1986), pp. 830–853, which also has a list of works by Spinelli and an overview of his life and career. On his monetary theory and the work on money he published, probably in 1749, see Rosario Patalano, ‘La scienza della moneta more geometrico demostrata: le Riflessioni politiche di Troiano Spinelli’, Il Pensiero Economico Italiano, 10[2] (2002), 7–42. To my knowledge there is a conspicuous lack of any studies on Spinelli’s moral philosophy as well as his other political works (on the aristocracy and on legal history). However, I believe that his Degli affetti umani was an important source for Galiani’s idea of love and thereby of his entire political thought. 68 The manuscript is in the BSNSP, xxxi.a.9. ff. 91–100. References, apart from corrections in the manuscript by Galiani, are to Ferdinando Galiani, Opere (eds. F. Diaz & L. Guerci, Illuministi Italiani, Vol. VI, Milan-Naples, 1975), p. 694. 69 Galiani, Opere, pp. 691–692. 70 Galiani, Opere, p. 691. 71 Galiani, Opere, p. 693. 72 Galiani, Opere, p. 692. The idea that love under pressure would turn into hate itself was not Galiani’s invention. Vico, for example, in one of his orations from the first years of the eighteenth century quoted Cicero (from the Tusculanae disputationes, III.24) and argued that self-deceptive, reason-defying desire caused lust and made desire turn into hate, self-frustration and jealousy. See G.B. Vico, On humanistic education: six inaugural orations, 1699– 1707 (ed. Gian Galeazzo Visconti, transl. Giorgio A. Pinton & Arthur W. Shippee, introd. Donald

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Galiani’s notion of love leads to an idea of interest that resembles Genovesi’s. Love shapes individual self-interest, which was not essentially an anti-social (selfish) category, as both Hobbesian and Christian thinkers maintained, but rather an aspect of psychological development. To understand how societies developed, functioned and had to be managed politically, it was crucial to understand ‘why one loves’ and ‘dis-loves [disama], how love can turn into hate, hate into love, what produces love and how one can stop love.’73 The answers to these questions set Galiani apart from Genovesi and determined the originality of Galiani’s outlook not only on sociability, but ultimately on issues pertaining to political economy and international affairs. In his second lecture on love dedicated to ‘Platonic love’,74 Galiani diagnosed the Platonists of his time as ‘sfortunati in amore’. Being the victims of their own loves, the Platonists had tried to make themselves immune for the pain of their unrequited innocent loves.75 Thus, he carefully deceives himself [accortamente ingannato] by his belief that he is the object of her thoughts, so, that he is loved by a woman. Because in her he esteems and admires divine beauty [..]But the unhappy man that from his woman only receives rejections, disdain, cruelty and harshness, what can he do? His woman does not want to deceive him [ingannarlo]. So must he always remain unhappy because his deceit fails? [..] The man who does not find a person who wants to deceive him and make him happy starts to deceive himself and thereby make himself happy. [..] In order not to give in to the sadness of the hated truth, he exclaims a scream of enthusiasm and admiration for the rare beauty of his ideas and then falls asleep forever. [..] This is the real Platonist.76 According to Galiani, all people were constantly engaged in creating new loves. His description of Platonic love was the general template of the way in which humans responded to fears, frustrations, pain, and to all the emotions that were the result of encountering obstacles in fulfilling their desires. The new loves were not properly ‘loves’ in the sense of natural passions. Rather, they were self-deceptive opinions that suppressed one’s real loves, making it impossible to ever have them again in their single natural form. Galiani used various cognates to describe self-deceit (inganno, ingannar se stesso, il proprio inganno as well as menzogna) and various terms to signal its epistemic characteristics (illusione, falsita`, inganno utile e innocente) to define a kind of false perception that man developed in pursuit of his ‘loves’ and to prevent them from remaining unsatisfied. (footnote continued) Phillip Verene, Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), p. 62. However, by stripping love completely of reason and presenting it independently of any natural self-interest, Galiani abandoned the classical moralising character of the relation between desire and hate. 73 G.B. Vico, On humanistic education: six inaugural orations, 1699– 1707 (ed. Gian Galeazzo Visconti, transl. Giorgio A. Pinton & Arthur W. Shippee, introd. Donald Phillip Verene, Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), p. 691. 74 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., ff. 57–66. ‘di cui questa presente potra` riguardarsi un proseguimento’, 57v. 75 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., ff. 64v–65r. 76 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 64r. Galiani’s notion of the Platonist’s treatment of his own dysfunctional love resembled the main line of Bossuet’s critique of Fe´nelon’s concept of virtue as self-denial by the will of the will. Fe´nelon claimed, like Doria, that the virtuous man gave himself over to pure love of God, which Galiani believed was the manner in which the Platonist silenced his emotional frustrations and sent himself to sleep. P. Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise (Cambridge MA, 1996), p. 147.

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In using these terms, as well as in shaping his ideas about sociability, Galiani’s inspirations were literary, rather than philosophical ones. He remarked that there was no need to unmask self-deceit and declared himself in favour of the compulsive manner in which people created society and quoted approvingly Jonathan Swift’s definition in A tale of a tub of happiness as ‘a perpetual possession of being well deceived’.77 In his lecture Dell’amor platonico, Galiani copied from Joseph Addison’s Spectator the case of the poor farmer who sleeps twelve hours every day and during those hours dreams that he was king.78 Why, Galiani asked, was this man not in fact a king then? In the last lines of the lecture he also referred to the first paragraph of John Milton’s Paradise lost by stating that the purpose of the whole exercise was to ‘giustifie the wais of God to man’.79 Apart from these English language sources Galiani also referred, in his earlier lecture on love, to the Italian poet and librettist Paolo Rolli, who was also responsible for the Italian translation of Paradise lost.80 Galiani’s favourite source for quotes in both his lectures on love was the poet Pietro Metastasio whose Asilo dell’Amore seems to have been a genuine inspiration for Galiani’s views on the social dimensions of love.81 In particular, these literary sources represented a clear understanding of how the products of love sustained interactions between people. Another case of an Italian writer who used almost exactly the same sources as Galiani, but held rather different views of self-deception was Ludovico Antonio Muratori.82 The obvious problem with fake loves was that they were not generated naturally and their gratification required the creation of new, artificial pleasures. To validate new loves, people needed confirmation through other people’s opinions. Religion, the first form of society, emerged as a Platonic love that served people’s common need to see the world through the optics of self-deceit. Galiani saw people as credulous addicts to their selfcreated beliefs. Their compulsive tendency to create false beliefs was the cause of religion. By means of religion people ‘mutually deceived each other’ in order to sustain happiness in each other.83 At this stage it is possible, particularly in comparison with Genovesi’s framework, to recognise the purpose of Galiani’s scepticism. The duality of natural and social love enabled Galiani to present self-deceit as a positive key to understanding morality and explain its emergence without presupposing either any innate virtuous or self-interested capacity in man. In the process Galiani had devised a notion of self-interest that he felt more accurately reflected the causes of human pleasure than any previous notion. Since self-interest was an expression of a subjective desire-led false world view of individuals, its configuration changed along with people’s self-deceit and had much greater flexibility than any idea of self-interest that hinged on any innate virtuous or selfish capacity. Unlike 77

Jonathan Swift, A tale of a tub: with other early works, 1696– 1707, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford, 1965), p. 108. Joseph Addison & Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, V Vols (Oxford, 1965), No. 487, Thursday, September 18, 1712. Ideas of the imagination, the theme of dreaming and forms of self-deception that resemble Galiani’s can be found throughout the different volumes of the Spectator. 79 John Milton, Paradise lost, ed. Fred E. Bumby (London, 1909) p. 3. 80 Paolo Rolli, Rime (London, 1717), p. 156. Rolli’s translation of Paradise lost first appeared in 1730 in Verona and had a number of reprints. 81 Pietro Metastasio, ‘Asilo d’Amore’, in: Opere, ed. Mario Fubini (Milan-Naples, 1968 [1732]). 82 Chiara Continisio, Il governo delle passioni, Prudenza giustizia e carita` nella riflessione politica di Lodovico Antonio Muratori (Florence, 1999), pp. 45, 83, 116. 83 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 66r. 78

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Genovesi, for Galiani reason and education were not even indirectly important for keeping humanity on the right track. Neapolitan economic development Genovesi: managing the shift towards a commercial society If Shaftesbury was Genovesi’s model in the field of moral philosophy, John Cary was Genovesi’s main influence in the field of political economy.84 In 1757, three years after Genovesi had been appointed to the chair of ‘commercio e meccanica’ an (indirect85) translation of Cary’s Essay on the State of England in Relation to its Trade, its Poor, and its Taxes, for Carrying out the Present War against France (originally published in 1695 in Bristol) appeared in Naples. The translation had been prepared first by Antonio’s brother Pietro and later by Antonio himself. Antonio had written numerous additions and notes, including a Ragionamento sul commercio in universale, in which he paid special attention to the Neapolitan situation, and a Ragionamento sulla fede publica. From an extended pamphlet that took position in the British domestic struggles over the status of Ireland and the strategy to follow for preserving the British economic empire, Cary’s work had turned into a full-scale handbook for how to rival the English manufacturing and trading success by using their own instruments against them. When the Genovesi brothers published their three large volumes of the first edition of the Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, they were operating in the footsteps of Bartolomeo Intieri and Celestino Galiani who, since the late 1730s, had realised that the key to protecting Neapolitan independence was to learn the art of political economy, which Europe’s dominant nations had developed and which weaker states were now forced to adopt.86 At the outset of the first volume of the Storia del commercio Genovesi provocatively argued that the reasons for British greatness were not the spirit of its people, its climate or geographical conditions, but ‘singular art and diligence that promotes the sources of commerce and navigation’.87 The English nation had operated the machinery of economic growth in a totally new and highly effective way by fixing a set of special legislations aimed at the promotion of manufacturing industry, which, after agriculture, was the most important precondition for foreign trade. 84 Most accounts emphasise the cosmopolitan nature of Genovesi’s political economy. See the contributions to Atti del convegno 2501 anniversario dell’istituzione della cattedra di ‘Commercio e Meccanica’, Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment and Pii, Dalla politica economica alla ‘politica civile’. But see the article by Sophus Reinert in this volume and his ‘Emulazione e traduzione: la genealogia occulta della Storia del Commercio’, in Atti del convegno 2501 anniversario dell’istituzione della cattedra di ‘Commercio e Meccanica’ for a more interesting way of laying out the original tension between Cary and Genovesi. 85 See the article by Sophus Reinert in this volume: Genovesi’s Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna was a rough, often exceedingly literal, translation of George-Marie Buˆtel-Dumont’s 1755 Essai sur le commerce de l’Angleterre, itself a liberal translation of Cary’s Essay on the State of England. 86 Intieri set out to teach a generation of Neapolitan scholars the art of political economy, in order to catch up with the dominant states who had cultivated this knowledge in an earlier stage. This he argued in a letter to Celestino Galiani of 30 December 1738, BSNSP, ms. xxxi.a.7, f. 23r. Yet, for Intieri the model to follow was not Cary’s ‘English model’ but De la Court’s ‘Dutch model’. 87 References are to Antonio Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna scritta da John Caryy Tradotta in nostra volgar lingua da Pietro Genovesi... con un ragionamentoy di Antonio Genovesi. (3 vols., Venezia, 2nd ed., 1764), I, iii–vi.

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Until 1689 the English had failed to consider agricultural goods as commercial goods. When this changed, due to a series of new innovative policies by a new government, English economic ‘glory’ arose and sectoral interdependencies started to generate surpluses that turned British trade into an economic Empire.88 The security of domestic trade, guaranteed by a host of institutional arrangements, was the basis of international competitiveness. It was now high time for Naples to imitate the English and join the ranks of the French, the Dutch and the English, as already the Swedes and the Russians had managed to do.89 In order to achieve the same as these other smaller states had, it was necessary for Naples to build up an economic bureaucracy that facilitated economic growth. By copying the strategies of the dominant states, particularly the British economic Empire, it would be possible for Naples to escape underdevelopment. Here Genovesi saw the possibility of the emergence of a new world order in which small and weak states did not necessarily have to be subjected to the established political order and could emancipate themselves by using the economic advantages that poor countries had over rich ones (low labour costs, low price levels of subsistence goods).90 Naples could simply refuse to be an extraction economy and use export tariffs and other protectionist measures to nurse its own manufacturing industry and create space for the modernisation of domestic agriculture. Thus, Genovesi concluded his Ragionamento by launching a new slogan that illustrated the idea that to be poor and weak was no longer a necessity, but a choice that represented stupidity or a lack of courage: Chi non e` savio, paziente e forte, Lamentasi di se, non della sorte. [Who isn’t wise, patient and great (strong), should complain of himself, not of fate.]91 Yet, Genovesi still saw a number of social and political obstacles, which mirrored the great economic opportunities that existed for setting up Neapolitan manufacturing industry. He was worried about the inequality in land possessions and felt that Naples was still hardly distinguishable from a feudal society.92 He also feared that financial inequality hindered circulation of funds, so that effectively there would not be enough money to facilitate economic development.93 To repair these problems he recommended agrarian laws and paper money.94 The taste of the Neapolitan aristocracy for foreign luxury goods was a further hindrance—one that was noted by virtually all Neapolitan political thinkers during the eighteenth century—that required countervailing legislation.95 The main obstacle, however, was the fact that agricultural modernisation required a revolution in the minds of the Neapolitan people, who had to learn to use machines and 88

Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, lxviii. Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, lxxix–lxxx. 90 See Istvan Hont, ‘The ‘‘Rich Country-Poor Country’’ Debate in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (2005, Cambridge MA), pp. 267–324, for an account of Hume’s view on the economic advantages of underdeveloped countries. 91 Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, lxxx. 92 Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, xxxv. 93 Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, xxxvii–xviii. 94 Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, xxxv and xxxvii–xxxviii. 95 Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, lxxvii. 89

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believe in the mechanisation and new institutional framework through which the rich natural resources of the country were henceforth to be exploited.96 Genovesi’s proposals for overcoming these obstacles reflected his basic view of commercial sociability. The key to mobilising the full Neapolitan labour force was an ‘improvement of civil philosophy’.97 Maintaining the rules of justice was not sufficient for getting people to develop the domestic economy. The exercise of natural economic ‘virtue’, as Genovesi called it, had to be promoted by educating the people.98 Merchants, civilians and government officials had to be instructed in the laws of commerce, while the number of skilled labourers had to be increased.99 The programmes Genovesi had in mind were necessary as much as a form of self-government as they were straightforward triggers to enhance economic activity. Religious faith, moral virtue, diligence and industry went hand in hand with self-interested desires in producing mentally stable commercial citizens who could stand the pressure and temptations involved in a rapid modernisation process and would not be deceived by false pleasures.100 Here Genovesi based himself on his moral philosophy. It was no coincidence that at the end of the third volume of the Storia del Commercio Genovesi included a Ragionamento sulla fede pubblica, in which he explained that states disintegrate and collapse if their ‘natural societies’ underneath fail to keep up with the mental consequences of new commercial processes on the manners of the people. A good government was one that protected trust and religion as much as it protected the law and the balance of trade. Throughout his political economic works, Genovesi was concerned with maintaining the natural balance that had existed from the beginning of time between a rather self-interested human nature and the societies that individuals formed. Throughout history, societies had always been able to absorb man’s more or less primitive selfish desires. Yet, the transition to a modern economic state stretched this balance and, Genovesi felt, required an extra nationwide politically organised effort to avoid upsetting the natural equilibrium between individual and society. If Cary delivered the model for how to engender progress, Shaftesbury taught Genovesi the nature and importance of preserving moral rectitude. In taking his lessons from Shaftesbury, Genovesi eventually parted ways with Cary, who saw religion—particularly Catholicism—as a threat to a disciplined industrious society. Moreover, Genovesi’s vision of a new political order in which a Neapolitan commercial society had the right, the power and the knowledge to assert itself on a European stage is not that easily reconcilable with Cary’s, sometimes shockingly ruthless, policy advice aimed at preserving English imperial hegemony. Nevertheless, Genovesi was otherwise convinced enough by the accuracy of Cary’s strategies for economic growth to buy into them with very few reservations. Galiani: the providential commerce order in human history Galiani’s Della moneta intervened in the Neapolitan debate on economic reform. Like other Italian works of the time Della moneta was a reflection on the European debate on 96

Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, xxxix–xlix. Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, iii–v. 98 Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, xxv. 99 Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, vii. 100 Genovesi, Storia del commercio della Gran Brettagna, I, xii–xvii. 97

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finance as an instrument of economic growth politics. In the late 1740s, Galiani had attempted to turn his observations on the nature of morality and the history of trade into Dell’arte del governo, which was originally meant to provide a complete theory of modern politics. Della moneta was derived from this project. Chapter 1 of Book I discusses the history of money and the rise and fall of states in antiquity and modern times. Using historical facts, Galiani shaped the idea that commerce was neglected by political rulers throughout the whole history of humankind. States in history grew and became rich by means of conquest, but could not consolidate their power, territory and wealth. Galiani argued, for example, that all the wealth in antiquity had been ‘absorbed by Rome’ when it used its ‘poverty’ and ‘austere customs’ [severi costumi] as the cultural foundations of a politics of military conquest. Consequently, Rome ‘wallowed in deep pools of gold and silver’, which caused such ‘changes of its ancient customs’ [la mutazione degli antichi costumi] that its political culture collapsed: ‘born poor [..] and grown by arms’ Rome became oppressed by its own ‘wealth and luxury’.101 Galiani described how the decline went along with financial mismanagement that represented the vices of the political system and its inherent contradictions. Those contradictions were the foundation of the feudal politics that existed in medieval times when ‘trade had been halted and was all but extinguished’.102 He went on to describe how the discovery of America and the development of navigation fuelled ‘the industry of subjects and the greed of princes, who all hoped to be able to enrich themselves.’103 They began to employ funds that were previously spent on arms and destroyed in war for shipbuilding and the establishment of colonies, the construction of ports and fortresses, and for the creation of roads and warehouses. People who had first cast their lot with war now turned with unbelievable zeal to the sea, to exploring and to discovery and conquest. For Europe [..] this meant peace, humanity, improvement in the arts, luxury and magnificence, increasing her wealth and happiness. But for the innocent Indians it meant plunder, servitude, slaughter and desolation. [..] Just as Roman conquests had rendered Italy prosperous, we too enriched ourselves on the misery of others, although we did not consider ourselves conquerors, like the Romans.104 The distinction between modern territorial trade competition and ancient conquest was not so definite. In ‘those centuries’ of antiquity, ‘wealth was companion to arms and therefore followed the vicissitudes of war’, whereas ‘today, wealth follows the path of peace.’ Similarly, ‘whereas at that time the bravest of men were the richest, today the richest are the most unwarlike and peaceful.’105 However, the underlying difference was only a ‘different virtue of combat’ [diversa virtu´ nel combattere].106 Greed inspired ‘men’s minds’ to turn ‘to thoughts of peace.’ Yet, the competition between states was as relentless and aggressive, even though in appearance it had been pacified. Consequently, the history of humankind, as ‘an uninterrupted history of errors, by and [self-inflicted] punishments 101

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of, the human race’, had not come to an end.107 In fact, Galiani wrote, ‘I find no other distinction between the centuries of antiquity and our own but that which runs from the great to the small. What was then Oceanus, is known today as the Mediterranean.’108 Galiani believed that European states still attempted to manipulate what he saw as the providential rules of commerce and that France and Britain, the dominant states in the eighteenth century, neglected the development of their commercial potential. This ominous first chapter was followed by various explanations of the nature of money. Because Galiani argued vehemently in Della moneta that societies that were ruled by money were less corruptible by politics than earlier forms of society and he discussed man’s wellbeing, rather than the moral foundations of markets, the book gave its readers the impression of an Epicurean treatise. But Galiani’s position was different. Following up his earlier studies on the nature of love and sociability, in the interchange of desire and attractiveness in both love and commerce, Galiani had come to see similar processes at work. Hence, he could now see that just as ‘love drives and gives life to the commerce of mankind’, ‘the order of the universe is completely maintained by money’.109 In the core chapter of the book Galiani explained that the value of money at any point in time ultimately derived from principles that were part of human nature itself; money was certainly not a human invention by which people deliberately changed the societies they lived in. It emerged naturally out of the gradual modification of people’s loves into social ideas of value that inspired commercial interaction. Money did not emerge by agreement and its existence was not reliant on promises, trust, or any additional moral capacity of self-restraint. If this had been different commerce could never have become central to modern societies. Galiani defended commercial sociability on the grounds that it was the outcome of the historical progress of human nature, which was a process that realised its own objective moral criteria. In Della moneta Galiani constantly described the effects of human actions in terms of providential rewards and punishments. He used the term providence to reconcile the historical dynamic of commercial progress with a set of fixed moral rules that lay at the core of successful human interaction. Galiani presented any moralistic dismissals of natural price formation and self-interested profit-seeking as reproaches to the way God intended human societies to function. Providential mechanisms were also involved in the history of money, the rise and fall of states in both antiquity and modernity, and regulated the development of cultural characteristics of the dominant societies in the course of time. Throughout history man constantly reshaped the fictional moral beliefs, thereby creating the mental preconditions for commercial society.110 People’s self-interested judgements of utility were based on their ideas of justice and their assessment of other people’s talents and merits compared with their own. Galiani claimed that each person’s actions in a market context derived from what he or she believed was virtuous behaviour. He argued that commerce was beneficial for mankind precisely because self-denial or benevolence were not fundamental components of its morality. It was not any form of moral purity, Galiani believed, but the widespread use of gold and silver as money that was capable of regulating interaction that prevented societies 107

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from collapsing into a ‘miserable state of nature’ [lo stato infelicissimo di natura].111 He concluded that ‘the good moral order of the universe’ [il bell’ordine dell’universo] was ‘completely maintained by money’ [il quale tutto sulle monete si mantiene] and the ‘Author of nature’ guarded over it.112 Galiani did not revert to a general moral relativism about the relation between politics and commerce. On the basis of his reflections on the nature of money, which were central to Della moneta, he developed a prescriptive political economy. He believed that the development of people’s ideas about what was genuinely useful, which itself led to the emergence of money after gold and silver were considered useful, was related to a natural order of the commercial development of any country. Della moneta incorporated a model for natural commercial development which it recommended to its Neapolitan audience. For Galiani, clever political management of the economy went along with understanding what money actually was. The problem, he argued in the preface to Della moneta, was that the ‘Arte del governo’, the practise of politics throughout history, had never been based on philosophical considerations. This remained a problem in modern times.113 Because of the internal mechanisms of the order which Galiani had explained through money, it was not necessary for politicians to motivate people’s industriousness. Even those people who did not buy luxury goods were forced by its mechanisms to increase their productivity. As Galiani explained, when an economy developed, the prices of basic subsistence goods rose in comparison with higher-order goods, because of an increase of the velocity of the circulation of money. This triggered people’s industry, because there were more profits to be made. The development of the country’s economy attracted money from abroad, which amplified the increase in the price level, which prompted people to work harder to gain their daily bread.114 Abundance, the wealth of the country and the price level were each reflections of the others’ development. Galiani lamented that in Naples ‘many can be heard saying, more and more, ‘‘trade, trade’’, always, mechanically, but with more and more praise without understanding it, simply because it has become fashionable’.115 He realised that it was the worst possible idea for Naples to try to emulate Europe’s dominant states. While many of his Neapolitan contemporaries demanded reforms that were aimed at boosting Neapolitan trade, Galiani believed that trade should be a natural effect from a country having realised a trade potential, which required agriculture, ‘the mother of trade’.116 In order to unleash the potential increase in agricultural productivity, Galiani found, as had Intieri earlier, that the problem did not require large-scale reform projects, but that it was only necessary to change a small part of the tax system and keep on believing in the future of the Kingdom.117 In a set of passages redolent of Pieter de la Court’s works, Galiani pointed out that agriculture was crucial even for the United Provinces: ‘following agriculture there is fishing, which is the other source of goods and of wealth, and finally, there is hunting, from which many nations, such as Muscovy draw a great income. All the rest is a minor

111

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matter’.118 Applying his ideas about the sources of wealth to the case of Naples, Galiani indicated how to think about the future of the Neapolitan economy by sketching an alternative to setting up a trade company: ‘thus, trade of which we lament the loss, for which we blame ourselves, would be reclaimed by us, by discovering in the Mediterranean some area full of whales, some streams of herrings, or some codfish beds.’119 According to Galiani, the dominant states of Europe were in conflict with the providential mechanisms of commerce. His message to his Neapolitan audience was that a clear view of the nature of money and its constraints on politics and reform programmes would enable Naples to survive in a world in which other states, even if more powerful militarily, were less clear about the commercial limits to politics. Della moneta was intended to convince Naples that it could be the first nation that fully acted upon these constraints. The past of all nations, Galiani concluded from his historical studies of early commerce in the Mediterranean and its modern equivalent, was ‘an uninterrupted history of errors, by and [self-inflicted] punishments of, the human race’. Moreover, the contemporary political economic strategies of European states were still replete with such errors.120 Montesquieu had famously argued that the English political constitution was especially conducive to commercial growth. Galiani, too, believed that Great Britain had the most advanced political economic government, but he found it far from perfect. He believed the English protectionist laws neglected agricultural development and in their aim to preserve their Empire did not lead to maximum population increase. In fact, the English constitution, he suggested, favoured the rich travelling abroad rather than the poor staying alive. The price of the British class system was economic underachievement and lack of growth.121 While the most advanced states of Europe failed to use opportunities for boosting their commercial potential and protecting their leading role in the world, this opened up space for Naples to fill the gaps. Galiani’s political vision for the future was that, by developing its economy in accordance with the laws of commerce, Naples could protect its freedom in modern Europe through trade. Conclusion: The ‘blazes of warfare’ enlightening the skies over Europe How did it come about that Antonio Genovesi and Ferdinando Galiani became symbols for two opposed camps within eighteenth-century political thought? Why are their ideas never seriously compared if they were engaged in the same project? And why did Genovesi—a follower of Cary—become the hero of cosmopolitan enlightened thinking, while Galiani—a fervent anti-moralist as much as an anti-Colbertist—became known as a bitter sceptical opportunist? By 1780, Genovesi’s activities and positions in the mid eighteenth-century Neapolitan reform debate had already been overshadowed by the reception of his works by his pupils, who had assimilated his legacy into an ideology of cosmopolitan Enlightened reform. Their movement was notoriously powerless at court and condemned the old-fashioned dynastic intrigues that held Ferdinand IV and Marie Caroline in their grips. The one philosopher who did manage to pull political strings was Galiani, who consequently 118

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became excluded from the Neapolitan genealogy of the Enlightenment, that ran from Intieri and Celestino Galiani (Ferdinando’s uncle!) to Antonio Genovesi and his followers in the 1780s.122 When Galiani published the second edition of Della moneta in 1780, he interfered with this canonisation process. The image of Intieri that Galiani set out to correct was the one in which the cosmopolitan benefactor Intieri recognised the importance of letting a benevolent educator—Antonio Genovesi—teach the masses how to liberate themselves from feudalism and politics in general and become defenders of the rights of man and democracy. This image distorted both Genovesi’s and Intieri’s actual positions and, more importantly, failed to recognise their political project from the 1730s until the 1760s of devising strategies to preserve Neapolitan independence. When Della moneta appeared, anonymously, it was believed by many people that Intieri was the author.123 Yet, the logical nature of this mistake had become unintelligible to the late eighteenth-century Neapolitan thinkers who had detached their own images of their heroes from the categories of the political thought of only a few decades ago. Against the background of the American Independence War, Galiani tried to break the image of Intieri and of himself that had been shaped in the immediately preceding years. Perhaps Galiani simply wanted to rehabilitate himself and had started to dislike being known as ‘machiavellino’. But maybe it was a sign of a different kind of resentment. In his last work, Dei doveri dei principi neutrali, of 1782, written in support of the Neapolitan accession to the League of Armed Neutrality, Galiani bitterly joked that the only Enlightenment that he could see as a result of the political thought of the last number of years was caused by the ‘blazes of warfare’ that coloured the skies over Europe at night.124 This was a highly laden remark. Galiani, ‘machiavellino’ after all, knew full well that if at the turn of the eighteenth century it was not abnormal to argue that natural law sometimes should yield to ragion di stato, in the Neapolitan political discourse of the 1770s and 1780s this openness to political force had become taboo.125 The downside of the story, Galiani suggested, was that the political correctness of the Enlightenment had rendered the movement completely useless in coming up with proposals for protecting weak states from the perils of international economic competition and belligerence. Could it be that it was the waning of a tradition of political thought that he considered superiour to the one in vogue at the time that inspired Galiani to confront the Neapolitan Enlightenment in 1780? 122 See Calaresu, ‘Constructing an intellectual identity: autobiography and biography in eighteenth-century Naples’. For a hostile account of Galiani’s role at court see Ajello, ‘I filosofi e la regina’. 123 Carlantonio Broggia believed for a long time that Intieri was the author and that Galiani at most executed parts of the writing: Broggia, ‘Dalla ‘‘Memoria ad oggetto di varie politiche ed economiche ragioni’’ & ‘Nota Introduttiva’, in: Politici ed economisti del primo settecento, dal Muratori al Cesarotti (La letteratura Italiana, Storia e testi , vol. V, ed. R. Ajello et al., Naples-Milan, 1978), pp. 1027–51. From the correspondence between Intieri and Ferdinando Galiani appears that Broggia’s claim was unfounded. Intieri was greatly surprised when it turned out that Galiani was the author of Della moneta and congratulated him in a letter written 13 August 1751 (see BSNSP xxxi.b.18, ff. 27–28, as well as ff. 29–36). This issue is discussed also by Raffaele Iovine, ‘Il trattato Della moneta di Ferdinando Galiani’, pp. 173–236. Already in 1788, Luigi Diodati–Galiani’s first biographer— ridiculed Broggia’s idea that Intieri was behind Della moneta (see Luigi Diodati, Vita dell’abate Ferdinando Galiani (Naples, 1788), pp. 23–4. 124 Ferdinando Galiani, Dei doveri dei principi neutrali verso i principi guerreggianti, e di questo verso i neutrali, libri due, ed. G.M. Monti (Bologna, 1942 [1782]), p. 241. 125 John Robertson, ‘Gibbon and Giannone’, in: Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays (eds. David Womersley, John Burrows, John Pocock, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 355, Oxford, 1997), pp. 9–10.