“Economics was primarily an Italian science until the last quarter of the eighteenth century”. Thus, an oracle of Schumpeter has inspired a few Japanese scholars to investigate Italian precursors of modern economic theory, with special regard to F. Galiani. But the cynical Galiani was also, as Ajello points out, a machinist of ‘illuminated’ absolutism by which Queen Maria Carolina corrupted every serious effort of Neapolitan
Philosophes and transformed them into a ‘mimic’ of reform.
The aim of this paper is to verify, under such circumstances, the
Fortuna of the socalled Genovesian tradition (by Di Battista), which had been celebrated by the ‘first’ chair of political economy in the world (1754).
In the European-wide circulation of economic thought, Antonio Genovesi had chosen Great Britain as a model of civilized commercial society, though he criticized its tendency toward imperialism and foretold a postcolonial crisis. His
Economia civile was an idealization of England in which property rights should be ensured by the equity of justice and everyone's industry can be stimulated by the domestic free trade, so that the development of a balanced national economy might be carefully protected by ‘mercantilist’ policies. Moreover, this idealization looked something like an Arcadia of virtuous gentries and independent free-holders. The reality of Southern Italy, however, did not permit such an eclogue. Therefore, the quest for a missing middle class (
ordine mezzano) became the primary theme of the Genovesian tradition.
Among Genovesi's followers, young G. Filangieri expected a utopia of ‘American Liberty, ’ while old G. Palmieri, as president of the Supreme Council of Finances, pursued the transformation of feudal nobilities into modern landowners. His scheme, however, resulted in a kind of ‘cynic economy’ that imposed abstinence on the poor people.
Why the precocious ‘institutionalization of economics’ was ultimately fruitless (see the tragedy of 1799) remains mysterious. Soon after Genovesi's death in 1769, the Neapolitan Enlightenment had become gloomy, and there we may find in F. Grimaldi another example of exalting the Diogenean lifestyle, which sheltered freemasons and canalized them into the Italian Jacobinism. Regardless, further research is required with regard to the vast economic literature produced by the contemporaries of Genovesi and by the first generation of his disciples: G. B. M. Jannucci, N. Fortunato, F. Villano, F. Longano, M. Torcia, and so on.
During the Napoleonic era we finally encounter the solitary exception among the mediocre successors of Genovesian professorship: L. d. S. Cagnazzi was considered to be a pioneer of Smithianism in the Kingdom of Naples and a founder of the Italian school of statistics. However, Cagnazzi's substantive liberalism with regard to the macroeconomy was coexistent with his insistence on the minutest interventionism in the microeconomy, and “the role of a
entrouvable [sic] bourgeoisie came to be occupied by a new class of bureaucratic-intellectuals” within such ‘administrativism’ (Salvemini). We therefore cannot easily conclude that there was a significant break nor a seamless continuity with the Genovesian tradition.
According to Robertson, who emphasizes the Venturian concept of the Enlightenment ‘above national context’, the Scottish and Neapolitan economists were exemplars “of the achievements of the political economy of Enlightenment.” Free trade and protectionism were two different but complementary alternatives that derived from a common intellectual framework of the cosmopolitan century. However, it must also be considered that the 19th century economic theories were influenced by the international diffusion of a classical political economy. As the honeymoon of cosmopolitanism
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