Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment 0802092888, 9780802092885

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LOVE, SELF-DECEIT, AND MONEY Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment

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KOEN STAPELBROEK

Love, Self-Deceit, and Money Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press 2008 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-08020-9288-5

Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Italian Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Stapelbroek, Koen Love, self-deceit, and money: commerce and morality in the early Neapolitan enlightenment / Koen Stapelbroek. (Toronto Italian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9288-5 1. Naples (Kingdom) – Commerce – History – 18th century. 2. Naples (Kingdom) – Economic conditions – 18th century. 3. Naples (Kingdom) – Politics and government – 1735–1861. 4. Galiani, Ferdinando, 1728–1787 – Political and social views. 5. Commerce – Moral and ethical aspects. 6. Enlightenment – Italy – Naples (Kingdom). I. Title. II. Series. HN488.N3S68 2008

945'.73034

C2007-907467-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction: Neapolitan Eighteenth-Century Visions of a Small State in the Modern World 3 1 Commerce, Morality and the Reform of Naples

12

2 Celestino Galiani: The Moral Power of Commerce 3 Doria and Vico: True Utility against Pleasure

56

88

4 Galiani’s Moral Philosophy: ‘Love’ as the Principle of Society 5 Della moneta: Commercial Sociability and Monetary Politics Epilogue: Galiani and the Limits of the Enlightenment Bibliography Index

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127 165

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Acknowledgements

This book grew out of a research project which started in 1997 at the end of my undergraduate studies in philosophy and economies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. During a year in which I frequented the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi in Turin, Maria Luisa Pesante taught me the first principles of how to be a historian, while Hans Blom, who has been my mentor throughout, encouraged my early attempts to come to terms with the nature of eighteenth-century Italian political debates. My interest in the history of political thought subsequently led me to Cambridge, where my PhD supervisor, István Hont, helped to completely reshape my thinking, while Mike Sonenscher gave important clues as to how to unravel the mystery of Galiani’s critique of the physiocrats. In Cambridge as well as in many other places, notably in Naples and Turin, I met many established academics and promising young scholars whose warm enthusiasm for my research project over the years has been greatly inspiring. While the study of eighteenth-century Italian topics is gradually becoming a less exotic activity in universities in the English-speaking world, I am indebted to two pioneers in this field, John Robertson and Melissa Calaresu, who gave constructive criticisms and suggestions for future improvements when this study was still a thesis. At this stage Béla Kapossy generously took the time to read and correct errors in the first three chapters and John Grimley Evans kindly checked the entire manuscript for linguistic problems. At University of Toronto Press, I am indebted to Ron Schoeffel and Anne Laughlin for their insightful suggestions, efficiency, and patience, and to Judy Williams for her meticulous copy-editing. Without financial support from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, King’s College Cambridge, the Associazione Anna-Maria Battista,

viii Acknowledgements

and the Isaac Newton Trust, this book could not have been written. My research also benefited greatly from a contribution by the Centro di Studi sull’Illuminismo Europeo ‘Giovanni Stiffoni.’ Equally significant in a different way has been the help I received at a host of libraries across Italy, especially in Naples, mostly during hot summer months. Besides the Biblioteca Nazionale, an obviously important source of materials, I would like to thank in particular the staff of the library of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria. Accompanied by the humming of a blowing fan and the background noises of the street traffic around the Maschio Angioino castle, they tirelessly kept me supplied with Galiani’s manuscript volumes. Closer to home, it has been inspiring throughout the years to have the support of a circle of friends so many of whom ended up pursuing academic careers. My parents will hopefully appreciate this book as the result of a number of years during which they may have worried what might become of their eldest son. My dearest thoughts go out to my wife Sophie, my daughter Elsa and son Ben, to whom I dedicate this book. Whether self-deceptively or not, their love is what has come to drive me. Helsinki/Rotterdam, August 2006

LOVE, SELF-DECEIT, AND MONEY Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment

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Introduction: Neapolitan Eighteenth-Century Visions of a Small State in the Modern World

Ferdinando Galiani (1728–1787) was one of the most visionary political thinkers of the eighteenth century. He was a major contributor to the Neapolitan political debate, which throughout the whole of the eighteenth century was intimately related to European discussions about the future of the existing states system. However, these things have been difficult to recognise. The young Galiani was a precocious, classically educated scholar with a love for satire. At the age of nineteen he published Componimenti varii per la morte di Domenico Jannacone (1748), a series of imaginary obituaries in honour of the public hangman in the pompous style of a number of local notables. A similar design underpinned his commedia dell’arte entitled Il socrate immaginario (1775), a tale of self-deceit by an academic Don Quixote, as Galiani himself described the piece for which Giovanni Paisiello wrote the music. Naples laughed at his jokes, but Galiani used satire equally, throughout his career, to structure his political thought. A series of lectures given between 1746 and 1749 shows Galiani’s take on the culture of the early Enlightenment.1 In these short, light-hearted pieces Galiani applied classical humanist tropes and techniques to declare himself ‘in praise of self-deceit’: though he ridiculed Platonic love as folly, he argued that it was to be welcomed as the sentiment that sustained society. Likewise, the modern chivalrous phenomenon of cicisbeismo was not a barbaric remnant, but an expression of the transformation

1 The majority of these lectures have not been published. I am finishing a bilingual edition of a number of the texts discussed in chapter 4.

4 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money

process of pre-modern refined manners.2 In reality, these lectures embodied Galiani’s own moral philosophy, which reconsidered the nature of pleasure and self-interest and prepared his political argument in Della moneta (1751) that warned against any unrealistic moralising about the nature of modern commercial societies. Moving from ideas on the nature of love to ideas of self-deceit in his lectures, he directly applied them in Della moneta: the first Neapolitan work on political economy that welcomed commercial sociability and was optimistic about the future of Neapolitan economic development in a hostile world. The tone of both Galiani’s teenage lectures and Della moneta is one of confidence in the future and reconciliation with the past through a positive appraisal of Neapolitan popular culture. Drawing on literary and spectatorial sources, for example by the Italian poets Pietro Metastasio and Paolo Rolli and by John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and Joseph Addison, Galiani explained moral commonplaces in Neapolitan culture through his own interpretation of European moral philosophy. By understanding Platonic love, a ‘love that is not real,’ as naturally similar to the fashions that Neapolitans admired in foreign people, Galiani tried to replace the Neapolitan inferiority complex towards Europe’s dominant states with a sober self-ironising pride. In that way Galiani voiced a spirit of optimism without idealism, which Naples craved, and which (even then) neither the people nor its intellectuals could provide. Yet, Galiani’s political thought has proved hard for most historians to understand. Rather than come to grips with the, admittedly, elusive character of Galiani’s political views by exploring the relatively unknown margins of eighteenth-century political discourse, most historians have approached his works through the lens of traditional historiographical categories and oppositions. As a result, Galiani is mainly known today as an opportunist who, between 1759 and 1769, flourished in Parisian literary and diplomatic circles. Here, his knowledge about Horace was appreciated, his humorous take on popular debate admired. What this really means is that historians have failed to appreciate why Galiani’s political views were immensely praised and admired by the most famous icons of the French Enlightenment, like Grimm,

2 Thus, Galiani drew the opposite conclusion to David Hume in An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour, where chivalry was disqualified as excessive dysfunctional gothic ornamentation. See Ernest C. Mossner, ‘David Hume’s “An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour,”’ Modern Philology, 45 (1947), 54–60 and Donald T. Siebert, ‘Chivalry and Romance in the Age of Hume,’ Eighteenth-Century Life, 21[1] (1997), 62–79. Thanks to Mikko Tolonen for drawing my attention to this text by Hume.

Introduction

5

Diderot, d’Holbach, and Voltaire. In this book, I seek to correct this approach and thereby provide a deserving account of Galiani’s early political thought. However, the problem that this book responds to concerns not only Galiani, but the nature of Neapolitan eighteenth-century political thought in general. By focusing strongly on the main political events in Naples and their immediate circumstances, historians have tended to divide the Neapolitan eighteenth century and its political writing up into separate parts and isolate domestic from international developments. Before and after Naples became independent in 1734, its political climate was restless and uncertain. Frequent shifts in power, extremely vulnerable socio-economic bases, and failed reforms created nervousness among the ruling classes. Because domestic upheavals were so dominant, it has tacitly been presumed that Neapolitan political writers were mainly concerned with issues of the acquisition of independent statehood and self-government, or (after independence) the desire to reform perverted institutions into national bodies animated by enlightened ideas. Guided by these views, interpretations of Neapolitan eighteenth-century political thought have developed as a number of rival views about who were the purest exponents of the local Enlightenment. So far, in my opinion, this approach has proved inadequate for understanding the nascent ideological movements that eventually led to the 1799 Parthenopean Republican Revolution. In fact, the crucial issue for all Neapolitan eighteenth-century writers, from Paolo Mattia Doria to Gaetano Filangieri and Vincenzo Cuoco, was under what conditions small, vulnerable states could preserve themselves in the international arena and how that arena could realistically be expected to civilise itself. Neapolitan writers in the first half of the eighteenth century discussed the principles of sociability and the effects of commercial development on human nature and thereby explored how individuals and societies alike responded to new desires and temptations in the form of new products, forms of monetary exchange, fashions, and luxuries.3 In this way Celestino Galiani, Paolo Mattia Doria, Giambattista Vico, and Ferdinando Galiani looked into the future of European states by considering the viability of different strategies of commercial politics.

3 For a clear idea of how local debates about sociability, commercial reform, etc. across Europe were driven by a concern with the reform of the European states system, see István Hont, ‘Luxury and Commerce’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. M. Goldie and R. Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 379–418.

6 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money

What these writers had in common was that they all, at different levels, used the notion of self-deceit to criticise the prevailing culture of modern European commercial politics. Europe’s dominant states, Britain and France, had in their misguided, self-interested quest for wealth and power cultivated a set of backfiring political passions that, so Neapolitans argued, would cost them dearly and might ultimately give weaker small states a chance to throw off the yoke imposed on them. This outcome would amount to a providentially orchestrated victory of a more natural kind of self-loving politics over perverted self-deceptive strategies. The short-lived rise and inevitable fall of, successively, the Italian city republics, Spain, Portugal, the United Provinces, France, and (as Neapolitans were keen on arguing) England as dominant states provided abundant evidence to feed this hope; although this same commonplace history also showed – as Neapolitan writers were deeply aware – that the decline of any dominant state gave rise to the same selfdeceptive ambitions in a new state aspiring to world leadership. Neapolitan writers used their own distinctive language of self-deceit to argue against misguided politics by other states. Most of them echoed earlier Italian political writers who had sought to correct Machiavelli by distinguishing between true and false and good and evil Ragion di stato. Early eighteenth-century Neapolitan critics of universal monarchy and the Balance of Power combined this native Italian discursive tradition with state-of-the-art (post-Locke and post-Cartesian) French and English moral philosophy. Their idea that misconstrued moral knowledge and material temptations easily overwhelmed individuals and states and conditioned dysfunctional responses to the challenges of the modern commercial world provided an attractive explanation for how Naples became a victim of history. Ferdinando Galiani twisted this outlook on how to treat the Machiavellian heritage in eighteenth-century Italy. In contrast to his moralising contemporaries, he refused to conveniently presuppose a connection between truth and moral goodness leading to a superior modern art of government. Galiani instead argued that self-deceit was not a destructive variable, but a pre-condition of human interaction, culture, and monetised commercial exchange, and thus the principle of society and social change throughout history.4

4 From chapters 3 and 4 it emerges that Galiani was surprisingly close to Vico’s account of the origin of society, which served to counter Bayle’s scepticism. Here my conclusions

Introduction

7

When Galiani applied this positive idea of self-deceit in Della moneta, his purpose was to redirect the pessimistic anti-Machiavellian sentiments of his contemporaries that governed the Italian reform programmes of the first half of the eighteenth century. Whereas they identified Epicureanism in relation to epistemological scepticism as the root cause of perverted European politics, Galiani saw this diagnosis itself as the problem. There was no need or opportunity to launch reforms that aimed to protect Italy’s small states from the modern world, as the main reform movements of the time attempted to achieve with their policies. The desire itself to do so was based on a traumatised and misconstrued understanding of the emergence of modern commercial societies. It was a step back, rather than forward, from Machiavelli’s critique of the virtues of ancient Rome. To get this message across, the final words of the conclusion of Della moneta gave a biting twist to the citation from Petrarch that featured in Machiavelli’s ‘exhortation to reclaim Italy and liberate her from the hands of the barbarians’ at the end of Il Principe.5 Once the principles of Galiani’s political thought, which are most clearly present in his juvenile lectures, are better understood, the coherence in his writing career becomes clear and one can glean his vision of the future of Naples in the European states system. Fully in tune with the celebrated image of Galiani, when he died (laughing, as the story goes), on 30 October 1787, his last words, allegedly, were: ‘The dead up

resemble the ones by John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), except that his emphasis lies on the influence of Epicureanism on Vico, while I focus on epistemological scepticism (i.e. the idea of self-deceit) as the crucial element in Vico’s critique of Bayle. Owing to its recent publication, I have not been able to engage with Robertson’s work throughout this book. The focus on epistemological scepticism as a dividing line within eighteenth-century political thought that is central in this book would suit further development, perhaps through considering the influence of literary works and popular cultural forms of expression on moral philosophical notions of the socially creative powers of the imagination and self-deception. Since the 1970s, the idea of self-deception has made a comeback in political philosophy. Until recently, this has mainly resulted in interpretations falling either on the side of fruitless poststructuralist relativism or rigorous analytical denial of the idea of self-deception as a psychological impossibility. Accounts of the socially creative aspects of self-deceit that I have seen, interestingly, appear to be influenced by equivalents of the eighteenth-century notions of selfless Christian virtue and neo-Hobbesian self-interest that Galiani’s idea of self-deceit was meant to avoid (see chapter 4). 5 See the last page of chapter 5 in this book.

8 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money

there are boring themselves to death. They have sent me an invitation letter urging me to join them as soon as possible and cheer them up a bit.’6 But on his deathbed, Galiani also received a jewelled snuffbox from Catherine the Great with her portrait, together with a letter thanking him for his role in the Russian-Neapolitan negotiations over a trade agreement that was concluded earlier that year.7 Galiani had been working on the Russo-Neapolitan treaty since 1780, and although historians have described Galiani after his return from Paris in 1769 as bitter, bored, lazy, and cynical, this is a myth. In fact, during the last years of his life, Galiani dedicated great efforts to the same problems that Della moneta had addressed. In 1751, Galiani had argued in Della moneta that rather than embark on state-led foreign trade projects, Naples should try to modernise its agriculture, find new fishing grounds in the Mediterranean, and explore the possibility of extending trade by cutting through the isthmus of Suez. For now, it was best to wait for new political opportunities to come along while Mediterranean trade was aggressively dominated by France and Britain, which had even concluded treaties with North African barbaric states aimed at hindering the trade of Italian states. Around 1780, the situation suddenly changed. Russia was now a dominant power in Eastern Europe, and Catherine II explored possibilities for accessing the Mediterranean and for setting up trade there. The Russian interest dictated that the Mediterranean became something of a neutral trade zone. When, in 1780, in the midst of the American War of Independence, Catherine launched the first League of Armed Neutrality to protect neutral ships against belligerent powers, Galiani started a major campaign to turn Naples into the dominant trading nation in the southeast Mediterranean. In his role of secretary of the Tribunale del commercio, Galiani drafted a number of policy advice memoranda

6 Quoted by Eugène Gaudemet, L’abbé Galiani et la question du commerce des blés à la fin du règne de Louis XV (PhD thesis, University of Dijon, 1899). 7 See Francis Steegmuller, A Woman, a Man, and Two Kingdoms (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), 242. Through his Parisian contacts, who repeatedly told Galiani to have himself sent to St Petersburg as a Neapolitan diplomat, Galiani had also personally approached Catherine and had on previous occasions received gifts from the Empress, who also bought Galiani’s brother’s library. See the Notizie del mondo of 23 April 1782, 366–7. Galiani had sent Catherine the Great a text for an inscription for the statue of Peter the Great.

Introduction

9

that outlined the diplomatic strategy of his plan.8 At the same time he republished Della moneta (1780, second edition) to bring his earlier views on foreign trade politics back to the attention of his Neapolitan audience and started to write his last big work, Dei doveri dei principi neutrali (1782), to prepare the Neapolitan accession to Catherine’s league. Historians have always struggled with the meaning of Galiani’s natural law theory in Dei doveri dei principi neutrali and even regarded it a hypocritical expression of cynical Machiavellian dissimulation.9 To my mind, it seems plausible that Galiani genuinely hoped that Catherine’s League of Armed Neutrality would impose an alternative logic of commercial politics upon the Anglo-French struggle for hegemony and eventually result in a new global political equilibrium in which small states like Naples could more easily preserve themselves. This interpretation would be in line with Galiani’s ambitions to reorganise Neapolitan foreign politics. Moreover, the argumentative strategy of Dei doveri dei principi neutrali strongly resembles the one that I argue is central to Della moneta. A better understanding of Della moneta, derived from Galiani’s early lectures, can in its turn provide important insights into the real meaning of Dei doveri dei principi neutrali. In that work, Galiani argued that even those writers (Vattel and Hübner) who had genuinely attempted to curb the abuse of power politics in the realm of international trade had focused their basic idea of moral obligation too much on the principle of justice and had neglected beneficence as a source for civilising the anarchical society of states. Galiani did not accuse these authors of Epicureanism or Hobbesianism; instead their well-meaning characters had predisposed them too much to the juridical chimera of a stable international order based on the principle of justice. Thus Galiani sketched the whole history of natural law thought since Grotius as a Kantian parade of ‘sorry comforters.’ Galiani argued that rather than concentrate on correcting Grotius’s theory of justice, it was necessary to rehabilitate the idea of beneficence – the equivalent of his early notion of morality through self-deceit – as the

8 See Furio Diaz, ‘L’abate Galiani consigliere di commercio estero del Regno di Napoli,’ Rivista storica italiana, 80[4] (1968), 854–909. All of Galiani’s foreign policy advice texts (preserved by the Biblioteca della Società Napoletana di Storia Patria and the Archivio Nazionale in Naples) that have been published are collected in Ferdinando Galiani, Scritti di politica economica, ed. F. Cesarano (Lanciano: Rocco Carabba, 1999). 9 Paolo Amadio, Il disincanto della ragione e l’assolutezza del bonheur. Studio sull’abate Galiani (Naples: Guida, 1997), 308–24.

10 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money

source of an international society of sovereign states. Because writers had failed to develop international politics along the right lines, Galiani bitterly joked that the only Enlightenment that he could see as a result of the political thought of the age was caused by the ‘blazes of warfare’ that coloured the skies over Europe at night.10 It is easy to see how statements like this have made Galiani an unpopular figure among historians of the Enlightenment. Yet, it is precisely through discussing writers like Galiani, whose views are not so easy to align with historiographical traditions and textbook accounts, that I believe the authentic sense of urgency of eighteenth-century debates can be evoked and history becomes useful for better understanding the challenges of present-day politics. With this perspective in mind, chapter 1 of this book makes a case for closely investigating the Neapolitan debate on commerce and morality in the first half of the eighteenth century. It provides an outline of the contexts of the early Neapolitan Enlightenment in such a way that Ferdinando Galiani no longer can be excluded from its accounts. Chapter 2 concentrates on the moral philosophy of Celestino Galiani, Ferdinando’s uncle, who saw commercial development as the realisation of the plan of Creation. Two unpublished sources help us to define Celestino’s providential outlook on self-interest, morality, and policy reforms: first, his correspondence of the late 1730s with Bartolomeo Intieri on the economic and monetary problems of the Neapolitan Kingdom; and second, Celestino’s unpublished treatise on ‘The origins of moral knowledge.’ Chapter 3 engages with Paolo Mattia Doria and Giambattista Vico, two famous anti-Epicurean writers and critics of Celestino Galiani. This chapter sketches their philosophical positions on morality and sets them next to their ideas of cultural decline and the vices of commercial society. It draws attention to the resemblance between Vico’s famous cyclical account of the rise and moral decline of nations in history and Doria’s ordering of political systems from virtuous republics to necessarily absolutist regimes, but also reconsiders Vico’s understanding of the sociable nature of man as rooted in an imaginary belief of being surrounded by a ‘sympathetic nature.’

10 Ferdinando Galiani, Dei doveri dei principi neutrali verso i principi guerreggianti, e di questo verso i neutrali, libri due, ed. G.M. Monti (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1942), 241.

Introduction 11

Chapter 4 revolves around a discussion of the manuscripts of Ferdinando Galiani’s early lectures on ‘love’ and self-deceptive ‘Platonic love.’ The chapter shows how the young Galiani’s obsession with ‘love’ lay at the heart of his intervention in the Neapolitan debate on commercial politics in Della moneta. Chapter 5 investigates Galiani’s outlook on commercial society in Della moneta and its derivative policy recommendations with regard to the Neapolitan situation. The chapter treats Galiani’s characterisations of commerce and money as critiques of the Neapolitan writer Carlantonio Broggia, the reformist views of Neapolitan government officials, and Italian writers who preferred Locke’s ideas of money over Melon’s. The Epilogue places the Neapolitan debate on commerce and morality in a broader perspective by looking at the major controversy raised by Galiani’s Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, of 1770, and the reasons for the second edition of Della moneta, in 1780, through which Galiani tried to redeem himself by restating his earlier political message to a new Neapolitan audience.

1 Commerce, Morality, and the Reform of Naples

Naples in the Early Eighteenth Century At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Italian peninsula was divided into a handful of states that were directly ruled by or under the influence of foreign powers. Since the Renaissance, Italy’s role in Europe had shifted from a major cultural and commercial centre to a main battleground of extra-Italian dynastic rivalries. The sequence of succession wars of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century had caused a depopulation of the countryside, which confronted the major cities with problems of rapid urbanisation. The concomitant complex of a shortfall in agricultural productivity, increasing tax pressures, and monetary disorders had seriously affected the economy of the Italian peninsula and created threats of dearths and famines. Foreign visitors on their grand tours paid tribute to Italy’s glorious past and natural beauty, but were shocked by its current state of depravity.1

1 The image of Italy – the south in particular – as a ‘paradise inhabited by devils’, which was first coined in the sixteenth century, became a commonplace in the eighteenth century (see Benedetto Croce, Storia del Regno di Napoli [Bari: Laterza, 1980], 69). Like many of his contemporaries, Ferdinando Galiani was irritated by travellers from oltremontaigne who only sought confirmation of this stereotype on their journeys; see his letter to Antonio Cocchi from 1753, published in appendix to Franco Venturi, ‘Alle origini dell’illuminismo napoletano, dal carteggio di Bartolomeo Intieri,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 71[2] (1959), 453. For a more elaborate account of the Neapolitan perspective on foreign travellers see Melissa Calaresu, ‘The End of the Grand Tour and the Cosmopolitan Ideal: Neapolitan Critiques of French Travel Accounts (1750–1800),’ in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. J.Elsner and J.P.Rubiés (London: Reaktion, 1999), 138–61. Two general works on Italy and the Grand Tour are A. Wilton

Commerce, Morality, and the Reform of Naples

13

During the seventeenth century, the economies of Italy had already been in decline. Manufacturing industries increasingly failed to compete with much cheaper and more fashionable northern European goods. As a result of high labour costs, outdated institutional organisation (industries were often still ruled by guilds), and relatively high taxes, Italian exports had gone down and made the country increasingly dependent upon its agricultural sector.2 While imports of manufactured (luxury) goods rose, these exerted pressure on the balance of trade, which governments attempted to alleviate by devaluations in the monetary system.3 Thus, Italy lost its position as a dominant manufacturing country and became an exporter mainly of primary products. Consequently, by reverting to an old-fashioned agricultural economy, a class of landed property holders gained political power, which drove large parts of Italy back into feudal structures.4 Against the background of dynastic succession crises and economic underdevelopment, Italian intellectuals were forced to channel their desires for reviving republican glory into a mould of political deliberation that accepted the predominance of foreign political-military

and I. Bignamini, eds., Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tate Gallery, 1996), and Jeremy Black, Italy and the Grand Tour (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 2 Carlo Cipolla, ‘The Economic Decline of Italy,’ in Crisis and Change in the Venetian Economy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Brian Pullan (London: Methuen, 1968), 127–45; T. Wahnbaeck, Luxury and Public Happiness: Political Economy in the Italian Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 83–5, 138–40, 154; D. Carpanetto and G. Ricuperati, Italy in the Age of Reason (London: Longman, 1987), chapters 1–5; D. Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1997). 3 Carlo Cipolla, Le avventure della lira (Milan: Edizioni di Comunità, 1958), 63–4. 4 Cipolla, ‘The Economic Decline of Italy,’ 142–5. During the eighteenth century the price of grain (to some degree fixed by means of voci) was a highly disputed political topic in southern Italy, which from year to year divided the nation. See Paolo Macry, Mercato e società nel regno di Napoli. Commercio del grano e politica economica del ’700 (Naples: Guida, 1974), as well as, with regard to the role of voci on other goods, Patrick Chorley, Oil, Silk and Enlightenment, Economic Problems in XVIIIth Century Naples (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1965). John A. Marino, Pastoral Economics in the Kingdom of Naples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) stresses the moral aspects of agricultural politics, while Ruggiero Romano in Le commerce du royaume de Naples avec la France et les pays de l’adriatique au xviii siècle (Paris: Colin, 1951) and in Napoli, dal viceregno al regno. Storia economica (Turin: Einaudi, 1976) provides useful economic historical data.

14 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money

alliances.5 Circumstances of external political pressure also complicated relations between domestic factions, which further impeded attempts to turn the tide. Such was the case in Naples. The decline in the seventeenth century of the Spanish Empire, of which Naples had long been a ‘province [provincia],’ had caused the south of Italy to revert to a neo-feudal system.6 After the Masaniello popular revolt of 1647–8,7 Spanish rule was never properly reinstalled but was gradually replaced with a system in which the southern Italian aristocracy raised taxes to finance Spanish warfare

5 Eluggero Pii, ‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century Italy,’ in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, Vol. 2: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 249–54. Similarly, John Robertson, ‘Enlightenment and Revolution: Naples 1799,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1999), 25, urges historians to recognise the limits to Italian eighteenth-century reform debates posed by the culture of court politics. On the relation between dynastic struggles and Italy’s problems see also Guido Quazza, Il problema italiano e l’equilibrio europeo, 1720–1738 (Turin: Deputazione Subalpina di Storia Patria, 1965) and his La decadenza italiana nella storia europea. Saggi sul sei-settecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1971). 6 The preface of the fifth edition of Rosario Villari’s La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli: Le origine (1585–1647), fifth edition (Bari: Laterza, 1987) mentions the controversy triggered by his idea of refeudalisation. See also Guido Quazza, ‘Rifeudalizzazione e ceto civile: Napoli,’ in La decadenza italiana nella storia europea. On feudalism in eighteenthcentury Naples see Anna Maria Rao, L’amaro della feudalità: la devoluzione di Arnone e la questione feudale a Napoli alla fine del ’700 (Naples: Guida, 1984), and Tommaso Astarita, The Continuity of Feudal Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Virtually all Neapolitan writers in the entire eighteenth century took up the theme of feudalism. For an overview see Pasquale Villani, Il dibattito sulla feudalità nel regno di Napoli dal Genovesi al Canosa, in: Saggi e ricerche sul Settecento, ed. Ernesto Sestan (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1968), 252–331. David Winspeare’s Storia degli abusi feudali (Naples, 1811) has influenced the subsequent debate on Neapolitan feudalism until this day. 7 The most important work on the Masaniello revolt is Rosario Villari, La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli. For an interesting discussion on the historiography of the revolt see Peter Burke, ‘The Virgin of the Carmine and the Revolt of Masaniello,’ Past and Present, 99 (1983), 3–22 and Villari’s reaction in ‘Masaniello: Contemporary and Recent Interpretations,’ Past and Present, 108 (1985), 117–32 and, again, Burke in ‘Masaniello: A Response,’ Past and Present, 114 (1987), 197–9. The abundance of contemporary pamphlets published across Europe in the aftermath of the events are still to be studied in depth. For Villari’s more general interpretive framework of the revolt see his Ribelli e riformatori dal XVI al XVIII secolo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1983).

Commerce, Morality, and the Reform of Naples

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in exchange for legal authority.8 Finally, in 1707, during the series of European succession wars, Spanish rule ended altogether and Naples became incorporated into the Austrian Habsburg Empire. Before 1707, both the Spaniards and the aristocracy benefited from the country’s underdevelopment. The aristocracy’s taste for foreign luxury goods and their refusal to invest in the domestic economy became symbols for what many considered to be a perverted political order. One of Naples’s main intellectuals in the early eighteenth century, the lawyerhistorian Pietro Giannone, in his Istoria civile del regno di Napoli (1723), famously described Neapolitan history as consisting of layers of foreign juridical principles and institutions, and Papal oppression smothering all attempts to escape the country’s social and economic backwardness.9 Thus, Giannone sketched how Naples, from the rise of the Roman Empire to the present oppression by Spain, was held back by conquering powers that were prepared to use legal manipulations and tax extortions, even to their own detriment, in order to suppress Neapolitan freedom. Another main figure of the period, Paolo Mattia Doria, added to this perspective by arguing in his Massime del governo spagnolo a Napoli (which he started writing in 1709 and finished after 1712) that the Spaniards had deliberately created a culture that obstructed the country’s

8 See A. Pagden, ‘The Destruction of Trust and Its Economic Consequences in the Case of Eighteenth-Century Naples,’ in Trust, Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, ed. Diego Gambetta (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 127–41. For the financial-economic aspects of this abuse see Antonio Calabria, The Cost of Empire: The Finances of the Kingdom of Naples in the Time of Spanish Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Luigi De Rosa, Studi sugli arrendamenti del regno di napoli, aspetti della distribuzione della ricchezza mobiliare nel mezzogiorno continentale (1649–1806) (Naples: L’arte tipografica, 1958), and his ‘Alle origini della questione meridionale: problema e dibattito monetario al tramonto del viceregno spagnuolo di napoli (1690–1706),’ in Studi storici in onore di Gabriele Pepe, ed. G. Musca (Bari: Laterza, 1969). 9 Pietro Giannone, Istoria civile del regno di Napoli (Naples, 1723). This image of the history of Naples became (and remains until this day) a commonplace. On Giannone see the essays in Raffaele Ajello, Pietro Giannone ed il suo tempo (ed. R. Ajello, 2 vols. Naples: Jovene, 1980), Raffaele Ajello, ‘Pietro Giannone fra libertini e illuministi,’ Rivista Storica Italiana (1975), 104–31 and Giuseppe Ricuperati’s important L’esperienza civile e religiosa di Pietro Giannone (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1970) and his more recent La città terrena di Pietro Giannone: un itinerario tra crisi della coscienza europea e illuminismo radicale (Florence: Olschki, 2001).

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social and economic development.10 The efforts of the Austrian government after 1707 to invest in Naples’s domestic political and economic institutions therefore gained wide support in Naples. From the earliest years of the eighteenth century, members of two rival Neapolitan factions, the aristocracy and the bourgeois class, or ceto civile, had anticipated a regime change and solicited the Austrian government to take control over Naples and heed their proposals for reform. The most dramatic event in these years was the Macchia conspiracy, in 1701, led by a group of country noblemen.11 Yet, although the defeat of the Spaniards could be understood as a triumph of the aristocracy, it gave the ceto civile the chance to extend its grip on political processes under the new government.12

10 Paolo Mattia Doria, ‘Relazione dello stato politico, economico e civile del regno di Napoli nel tempo ch’è stato governato da i Spagnuoli, prima dell’entrata dell’armi tedesche in detto regno,’ in Massime del governo spagnolo a Napoli, ed. Vittorio Conti, introd. by Giuseppe Galasso (Naples: Guida, 1973 [1709, finished after 1712]). See also Pagden, ‘The Destruction of Trust,’ 131–8; John Robertson, ‘The Enlightenment above National Context: Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Naples,’ Historical Journal, 40[3] (1997), 685; and Conti, Massime del governo spagnolo a Napoli, 21–34. 11 See Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘Alessandro Riccardi e le richieste del “ceto civile” all’Austria nel 1707,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 81[4] (1969), 745–77. The most high-profile document related to the event is Giambattista Vico’s ‘Principum Neapolitanorum Coniurationis Anni MDCCI Historia,’ which was recently published as La congiura dei principi napoletani 1701 (prima e seconda stesura), ed. Claudia Pandolfi (Naples: Morano/Centro di Studi Vichiani, 1992). Vico’s work was suppressed originally because it included remarks on the French ambition to turn Spain into a Bourbon colony. A nineteenth-century apology for the event is included in Marchese Angelo Granito Principe di Belmonte, Storia della congiura del Principe di Macchia e della occupazione fatta dalle armi austriache del Regno di Napoli nel 1707 (Naples, 1861). A contemporary source which documents the division of the urban and provincial aristocracy is the anonymous Histoire de la dérnière conjuration de Naples en 1701 (Paris, 1706). 12 Specific aspects of the effects of the Macchia conspiracy and the Austrian takeover on the power balance between nobility and the ceto civile are much discussed in the secondary literature, as is the rise of the ceto civile. Salvo Mastellone, ‘Il pensiero politico-giuridico di Francesco d’Andrea e l’ascesa del ceto civile (1648–98),’ Il Pensiero Politico, 1[1] (1968), 7–15, and his Francesco d’Andrea politico e giurista (1648– 1698): l’ascesa del ceto civile (Florence: Olschki, 1969) invoke an earlier – late seventeenth-century – opposition between a French and a Spanish party within the proto-ceto civile. Accounts of the roles of central figures in the crises of the earliest years of the eighteenth century and of institutions under the Austrian regime are in Vittorio Conti, ‘Il “Parere” di Tiberio Carafa a Carlo D’Asburgo,’ Il Pensiero Politico, 6[1] (1973), 57–67;

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After the mid-seventeenth century, Neapolitan scholars had developed a keen understanding of the country’s history of foreign oppression and its legal, political, moral, and economic conditions.13 This

Ricuperati, ‘Alessandro Riccardi e le richieste del “ceto civile” all’Austria nel 1707’; Raffaele Ajello, ‘Il banco di San Carlo: organi di governo e opinione pubblica nel regno di Napoli di fronte al problema della ricompra dei dritti fiscali,’ Rivista Storica Italiana (1969), 812–81; A. Di Vittorio, ‘L’Austria e il problema monetario bancario del viceregno di Napoli (1707–1734),’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 81[4] (1969), 778–811; and, by the same author, Gli Austriaci e il Regno di Napoli (1707–1734), 2 vols. (Naples: Giannini, 1969–73). Ajello, in particular in the chapter ‘Vico e Riccardi’ in his Arcana Juris: diritto e politica nel settecento Italiano (Naples: Jovene, 1976), has emphasised the antagonism between two groups of lawyers that were loyal to, respectively, the aristocracy and the new bourgeois class. In recent years Imma Ascione, following Ajello’s leads, has focused on reconstructing on a larger scale both the origins of the ceto civile, which she links more strongly than before to Francesco d’Andrea, and the internal divisions within the influential camp of lawyers. These divisions she sees as representing the escalation, after 1709, of animosity between new urban classes and the aristocracy, which Ascione relates to enduring tensions between Naples, Papal Rome, and the Spanish powers at Barcelona. See her ‘Le virtú e i pregi dell’Imperator Federico. F.D’Andrea e la nascita del partito austriaco a Napoli (1682–1698),’ Archivio Storico per le Province Napoletane, 111 (1993), 131–212; Il governo della prassi. L’esperienza ministeriale di Francesco D’Andrea (Naples: Jovene, 1994); and ‘Schiaffi, politica e poesia. Il radicalismo napoletano al tempo di Vico: Alessandro Riccardi,’ Frontiera d’Europa, 1 (1996), 5–68. Taking a more familiar and abstract approach to understanding the origins of the Enlightenment, Elvira Chiosi, Lo spirito del secolo, politica e religione a Napoli nell’eta dell’illuminismo (Naples: Giannini, 1992), instead stresses the breaking down of tension between Rome and the state of Naples in the eighteenth century as a consequence of modernised forms of dynastic rivalry overwhelming the structures of influence of the Church, thereby triggering the Neapolitan Enlightenment (14). 13 Raffaele Ajello, Il problema della riforma giudiziaria e legislativa nel regno di Napoli durante la prima metà del secolo XVIII, 2 vols. (Naples: Jovene, 1965) and his ‘Gli “afrancesados” a Napoli nella prima meta del settecento. Idee e progetti di sviluppo,’ in Borbone di Napoli, Borbone di Spagna, ed. M. Di Pinto (Naples: Guida, 1985), 115–92 show the maturation of the class of jurists as a reform movement. For the environment in which this maturation took place see Giuseppe Galasso, Napoli spagnola dopo Masaniello: politica, cultura, società (Florence: Sansoni, 1982); Biagio de Giovanni, ‘Cultura e vita civile in Giuseppe Valletta,’ in: Saggi e ricerche sul Settecento, ed. Ernesto Sestan (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1968), 1–47; Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘La prima formazione di Pietro Giannone: l’Accademia Medinacoeli e Domenico Aulisio,’ in Saggi e ricerche sul Settecento, 94–171; John Robertson, ‘Gibbon and Giannone,’ in Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, ed. David Womersley, John Burrows, John Pocock, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 355 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997); Raffaele Ajello, ‘Pietro Giannone fra libertini e illuministi,’ Rivista Storica Italiana (1975), 104–131; and Vittor Ivo Comparato, Giuseppe Valletta. Un intellettuale napoletano della fine del Seicento (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1970).

18 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money

understanding formed the basis for the ideas on reform of members of the ceto civile. The initial key figure was Francesco d’Andrea, a lawyer who during the 1660s and 1670s criticised Louis XIV’s imperialism as well as the machinations of Neapolitan aristocrats.14 His works inspired a group of young lawyers who, during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, nested themselves into offices within the Spanish and Austrian vice-regencies.15 In this capacity they proffered perspectives on how to develop the country’s social and economic conditions and reform the legal system under Spanish and Austrian rule.16 Even 14 For D’Andrea see Salvo Mastellone, Francesco d’Andrea politico e giurista (1648–1698), following up his earlier Pensiero politico e vita culturale a Napoli nella seconda metà del Seicento (Messina-Florence: G. D’Anna, 1965). See also Biagio de Giovanni, Filosofia e diritto in F. d’Andrea: contributo alla storia del previchismo (Milan: Giuffrè, 1958) and Imma Ascione, Il governo della prassi. L’esperienza ministeriale di Francesco d’Andrea. The most recent edition of d’Andrea’s most famous work is Avvertimenti ai nipoti, ed. Imma Ascione (Naples: Jovene, 1990). 15 Like Gaetano Argento, Pietro Giannone, Serafino Biscardi, Pietro Contegna, Alessandro Riccardi, Niccolò Fraggianni, and Francesco Ventura, to name a few of the most famous figures. Dario Luongo, Serafino Biscardi. Mediazione ministeriale e ideologia economica (Naples: Jovene, 1993) shows the career of one of the central figures in the tradition of the lawyers associated with the ceto civile. 16 Eluggero Pii argued that Italian literati formed a culture independent from court politics that tried to reconcile Machiavelli’s republican perspective with the actual reality of dynastic monarchism (‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century Italy,’ 249–54). As such, the ‘regalism’ of lawyer-reformers and their descendants might be defined (see Girolamo Imbruglia, ‘Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Naples,’ in Naples in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth and Death of a Nation-State, ed. Girolamo Imbruglia [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 72–3, and Elvira Chiosi, Andrea Serrao: apologia e crisi del regalismo nel Settecento napoletano [Naples: Jovene, 1981]). Ajello’s ‘Gli “afrancesados” a Napoli nella prima meta del settecento’ captures the range of reforms that were imagined under this model. The extent to which such reform views can actually be seen as contributing to a Neapolitan Enlightenment and may have created the preconditions for the 1799 Revolution is subject to debate. Here the legacy of Croce looms. John Robertson, ‘Enlightenment and Revolution: Naples 1799,’ 19–24 warns against this kind of partisan history of Naples in general. Key aspects in the debate over Croce’s history of Naples can be gleaned from Raffaele Ajello, ‘Benedetto Croce e la storia “ideale” del regno di Napoli,’ Archivio Storico per le Province Napoletane, 110 (1992), 351–40 and Giuseppe Galasso, ‘Per la riedizione della “Storia del Regno di Napoli” di Croce,’ Archivio Storico per le Province Napoletane, 110 (1992), 441–67. In a different manner, Melissa Calaresu, ‘Constructing an Intellectual Identity: Autobiography and Biography in Eighteenth-Century Naples,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies (2001), 157–77 counters any ideal history by tracing the complicated engagement with the jurist reform in biographies of persons from the time of the Neapolitan preEnlightenment during the eighteenth century.

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though supported by the Austrian government, most of their proposals came to nothing because they conflicted with vested interests, most notably of the nobility and the Catholic Church.17 Not surprisingly, Neapolitan intellectuals soon lost faith in the Austrian reform efforts. Moreover, with Naples under foreign rule, they could not envisage any alternative. Giannone’s Istoria, for example, offered an analysis of the internal mechanisms of the rise and fall of empires in relation to the perennial oppression of Naples, but nowhere a vision of how this cycle might be broken.18 The independent Kingdom of Naples came into existence when Charles of Bourbon, son of Philip V of Spain and Elisabeth Farnese, seized Naples for himself in 1734. Under the new government, the jurists became a prominent force. As regalisti, between 1734 and 1742 they directed many reform programmes during what is known as the Neapolitan ‘heroic age [il tempo eroico]’.19 This was especially so after 1738, when the more cautious minister Santisteban was replaced by Joachim de Montealegre, Marquis of Salas. Under his leadership the beginnings of large-scale legal reform programmes were developed in order to reorganise the courts and constrain the power of the aristocracy.20 A second objective of the reform movement was the creation of a safe environment

17 Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘Napoli e i vicere austriaci 1707–1734,’ in Storia di Napoli, vol. 7, (Naples: Società Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1972), 347–457. See also Franco Venturi, ‘Alle origini dell’illuminismo napoletano,’ 417–19, on the crisis of 1726 related to Riccardi’s funeral; A. Di Vittorio, Gli Austriaci e il Regno di Napoli (1707–1734, 2 vols. (Naples: Giannini, 1969–73). 18 Giannone’s Istoria, for example, contained no element of how commerce or any commercial sociability might break the abusive powers of foreign oppression. See Luigi de Rosa, ‘Pietro Giannone e i problemi economici del suo tempo,’ in Pietro Giannone e i suo tempo, ed. R. Ajello (Naples: Jovene, 1980), 537–64. In that sense Giannone’s ideas can be fitted into the shifting concerns (as alluded to by Mastellone in ‘Il pensiero politico-giuridico di Francesco d’Andrea e l’ascesa del ceto civile (1648–98),’ 14–15) of the ceto civile in the course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century and might be characterised as ‘previchian’ – as de Giovanni defined ‘pre-enlightened’ lawyers. 19 An account of this ‘heroic age’ is in Raffaele Ajello, ‘La vita politica napoletana sotto Carlo di Borbone,’ in Storia di Napoli, vol. 7 (Naples: Società Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1972), in particular 489–503. 20 For accounts of the reforms see Raffaele Ajello, ‘Legislazione e crisi del diritto comune nel regno di Napoli: il tentativo di codificazione carolino,’ in Arcana Iuris, 29–108, as well as his ‘La vita politica napoletana sotto Carlo di Borbone’; Elvira Chiosi, ‘Il Regno dal 1734 al 1799,’ in Storia del Mezzogiorno, vol. 4, part 2, Il Regno dagli Angioni

20 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money

for Neapolitan economic development and the protection of foreign trade through direct political support. To this end the Supremo Magistrato del Commercio was established in 1739. It soon appeared, however, that the functioning of this government organ suffered too much from internal disunity to be effective.21 For the same reason the old institution of the Collaterale, which represented all social and political groups, was abolished in 1734, after having been restored under Austrian rule on Doria’s recommendation.22 As a result of strife between political movements and the fact that the court was not in the first instance committed to the reform projects, the governments of the first decades since independence were perceived to be failing to reform the country’s laws and institutions. Domestic discord between factions and the external pressure under which the reforms had to be carried out placed too much strain on the whole enterprise. The aristocracy blocked measures that potentially affected their position, while Neapolitan sovereignty continued to be threatened by foreign powers that wanted either to conquer it, or to enforce trade treaties that were disadvantageous for Naples.23 Critics of the government, often

ai Borboni (Naples: Edizioni del sole, 1986), 373–467; Anna Maria Rao, ‘Il riformismo borbonico a Napoli,’ in Il secolo dei lumi e delle riforme, ed. Giuseppe Armani et al. (Milan: Teti, 1989), 215–90. Whereas Michelangelo Schipa (in his classic Il regno di Napoli al tempo di Carlo di Borbone [Milan-Rome-Naples: Società editrice Dante Alighieri di Albrighi: Segati e Co., 1923]) judged that Montealegre’s loyalty to the Spanish cause restricted the reform programme, Ajello repeatedly insisted that instead Montealegre’s allegiance crucially gave direction to the activities of the government. 21 Antonio Allocati’s ‘La Soprintendenza Generale delle finanze nel regno di Napoli (1739–1789),’ Studi Economici, 9 (1954) and ‘Il Supremo Magistrato del commercio del regno di Napoli (1739–1808),’ Studi Economici, 10 (1955) are still the basic works. Robertson, ‘Enlightenment and Revolution: Naples 1799,’ 26–7 has an interesting discussion of the failure of the ‘Supremo Magistrato’ due to factions. 22 Ajello, ‘La vita politica napoletana sotto Carlo di Borbone,’ 498, where Intieri declares to Bottari in a letter that the Collaterale had made itself ‘intolerable.’ Doria’s argument is in ‘Relazione dello stato politico, economico e civile del regno di Napoli nel tempo ch’è stato governato da i Spagnuoli, prima dell’entrata dell’armi tedesche in detto regno,’ in Massime del governo spagnolo a Napoli, ed. Vittorio Conti, intro. Giuseppe Galasso (Naples: Guida, 1973 [1709, finished after 1712]). 23 Anna Maria Rao, Il regno di Napoli nel settecento (Naples: Guida, 1983) emphasises these and other problems of the Neapolitan eighteenth century, after declaring the ‘triumph’ of the ‘ministero togato’ (the lawyers) under the Austrians (44). See also her ‘Il riformismo borbonico a Napoli’ for a similar account of the problems of reform.

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lawyers who held minor government offices, argued that more sustained efforts should be made and that generating economic growth required reshaping the legal environment. The most extreme was Giovanni Pallante, a lawyer who sought to increase his political influence in the late 1730s and who wished to see the reforms take a much more radical form. In a treatise that was harshly critical of the government, he unfolded his vision of a monarchical economic order that restrained every individual’s selfish desires and converted them into a public spirit. Rehearsing one of the most characteristic commonplaces of eighteenthcentury Neapolitan political thought, Pallante took issue with the spendthrifts of the aristocracy and their resistance to reforms, which both impeded the country’s economic growth and sustained its underdevelopment. Pallante judged that only a radical solution could work to eliminate the problem. He argued for the abolition of the aristocracy and the total subjugation to the control of an absolute monarch. This monarch was to direct people’s labour to economic growth while maintaining the most austere Christian values.24 Pallante’s response to the stagnation of the Neapolitan reform project and his understanding of its problems displayed characteristics that were common not only in Naples, but across Europe in the eighteenth century. While most Neapolitan intellectuals and politicians were concerned about the lack of success of the government’s attempts to change things and felt that the stalemate involving the ceto civile, the nobility, and the government hampered all progress, at least one person had a different idea of the situation. The precocious teenager Ferdinando Galiani (1728–1787) was not worried by the limited impact of the government reforms. In his opinion, Naples was already undergoing a marvellous process of selfliberation. Galiani described Naples as a ‘city of which the government, the culture, and the political system are the only things worth study by a man.’ In fact, he continued, this ‘city of four hundred thousand inhabitants 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

24 Giovanni Pallante, Memoria per la Riforma del Regno: Stanfone, ed. Imma Ascione (Naples: Guida, 1996). See also Ajello, Arcana iuris, 89–93.

22 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money

the changes taking place before his eyes to be an ‘amazing spectacle, which is the only object of my current activities.’25 It was true, Galiani also realised, that the population of the capital had increased dramatically, leaving the rest of the country almost deserted. The urbanisation process, its critics claimed, had turned the city of Naples into a pool of corruption while the agriculture and towns in the rest of the country languished. But Galiani believed that moral corruption would disappear automatically and the demographic imbalance would disappear once the whole country had absorbed the social and economic shocks of the new situation of independence that first made an impact on the capital.26 Galiani’s opinions about the importance of the institutional and legal reforms after independence were representative of his general view about the future of Naples and its commercial development, which set him apart from almost all of his contemporaries. He agreed with virtually everyone else that the kingdom’s economic potential was first of all agricultural and that external circumstances of international politics would make it difficult to build on this potential in order to transform the domestic economy into a system that generated its own foreign trade.27 But whereas other Neapolitan political economists, such as Doria and Antonio Genovesi, drew the conclusion that the protection of Neapolitan commerce was the crucial element for setting up foreign trade, in Galiani’s opinion the biggest threat to Neapolitan commercial development was the people’s erroneous ideas about which general economic and monetary policies in fact facilitated economic growth and led to foreign trade. Thus, he declared towards the end of his life that his first major work, Della moneta, of 1751,28 was written to be a decisive intervention in a hopelessly entangled Neapolitan debate on commercial reforms.

25 Letter Ferdinando Galiani to Antonio Cocchi, 20 February 1753, published in Franco Venturi, ‘Alle origini dell’illuminismo napoletano,’ 452–4. 26 See R. Colapietra, ‘Capitale e provincia in Ferdinando Galiani,’ Critica storica, 27[3] (1990), 443–74, who defends Galiani against the current of those who emphasise that his scepticism affected his contribution to Italian eighteenth-century political thought. 27 Robertson, ‘The Enlightenment above National Context,’ 684–95, identifies the problem of the international context in which economic development had to be realised as a common concern among Neapolitan thinkers in the early eighteenth century. 28 Ferdinando Galiani, Della moneta e scritti inediti, ed. Alberto Caracciolo and Alberto Merola (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963 [1751]). Translations of quotations are taken from Ferdinando Galiani, On Money: A Translation of Della Moneta by Ferdinando Galiani translated by Peter R. Toscano (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International,

Commerce, Morality, and the Reform of Naples

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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 wholesale 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 making 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. 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

1977), but often with considerable modifications to improve the readability and to correct errors. Italian original terms are occasionally added in brackets. For the discussions surrounding the publication of Della moneta and the crucial support for the book by Niccoló Fraggiani see Raffaele Iovine, ‘Il trattato Della moneta di Ferdinando Galiani: la dialettica politica a favore e contro la pubblicazione,’ Frontiera d’Europa (1999), 173–236. A previous manuscript of the work has been transcribed recently by Rosario Patalano, ‘La teoria del valore di Ferdinando Galiani alla luce di una versione inedita di Della moneta,’ Il Pensiero Economico Italiano, 13[2] (2005), 115–45. While it has been supposed that manuscripts of Della moneta no longer exist (for example by Diaz and Guerci in their introduction to Galiani, Opere, ed. F. Diaz and L. Guerci, Illuministi Italiani, vol. 6, [Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1975], 3), the whole text in an earlier version, supplemented with the notes for the second edition of 1780, is among Galiani’s papers in BSNSP, xxix.e.13, and remains to be studied.

24 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money and the new salubrity of the kingdom, up to the point that the whole state was almost threatened by some internal weakness.29

Against these undisciplined calls for further measures, Galiani took the side of the government and defended its sober attitude towards reform. In general, his judgement was that many of the problems Naples seemed to be facing were mere teething troubles; there was no reason to panic. Thus, he explained in Della moneta that rising prices, contrary to popular belief, were a sign of increasing wealth, not of imminent famine; and that luxury was an effect of good government, not of moral decay. Galiani concluded that misjudgements of the signs of the development that was taking place inspired well-meant reform proposals that threatened economic and political stability. As he added, after giving his account of the restless political situation around 1750, ‘this was the main if not the only reason that prompted Galiani to write the present work.’30 Moreover, he questioned whether reforms in Naples could have any positive effect. Turning Giannone’s conclusions about the piling up of legal and political institutions against the advocates of reform, Galiani argued that history had made Naples resistant not only to oppression, but also to political interference.31 The 1730s Clash on Academic Reform In the second edition of Della moneta, of 1780, Galiani explained his position towards the reform of Naples by paying homage to his teacher Bartolomeo Intieri. As Galiani wrote in the new preface: Only Bartolomeo Intieri could see clearly through the darkness and he was happy and rejoiced at the century, the prince, and the nation … He said that it was well known that when young children grow up and become

29 Galiani, Della moneta, 8–9. 30 Ibid., 10. 31 Ibid., 114. In contrast, Vincenzo Cuoco would later, after the failed reforms in the 1799 Neapolitan Revolution, famously despair that the Neapolitan nation consisted of ‘due popoli’ which made it impossible to govern them without oppression (see Rao, Il regno di Napoli nel settecento, 139). Cuoco’s claim that the unruly nature of the Neapolitans necessitates strong force was recently revived by Fulvio Tessitore (the ex-rector of the Neapolitan University and a prominent Italian politician) in his Per Napoli e la legalità (Naples: Guida, 2005).

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stronger, the process announces itself through symptoms of fever and sickness. Yet, these fevers are not to be feared or to be remedied as they are only the motion and growth that the ‘machine’ makes to extend and feed itself. Likewise, every improvement causes fevers to the state.32

After 1734, voices like Intieri’s had provided a counterweight to the pressure that was exerted on the new government to embark on large-scale reform programmes. Intieri worried that the difficulties of precisely reforming those things that needed reforming and leaving the rest untouched might be too great, which could result in destroying the country.33 The combination of Intieri’s faith in the future of Naples and his scepticism about major reforms, which was echoed by Galiani, emerged from a particular understanding of the nature of commerce and politics. Paving the way for his political ideas, Intieri and others in the south of Italy previously revived the Italian academic environment during the first decades of the eighteenth century. At the centre of Neapolitan intellectual life in the second half of the seventeenth century were a number of academies, which had difficult relations with both the Spanish vice-regency and the Roman Catholic Church. The most important of these institutions was the Accademia degli Investiganti, established in 1663 by Tomasso Cornelio.34 The Investiganti academy was the platform for the dispersal of the first waves of Cartesianism and post-Galilean natural philosophy in the south of Italy.35 This academy had strong links with the juridical tradition led by Francesco d’Andrea, which gave it a political edge.36 The fate of this flourishing

32 Galiani, Della moneta, 10. 33 Ajello, ‘La vita politica sotto Carlo Borbone,’ 489. 34 Maurizio Torrini, ‘L’Accademia degli Investiganti. Napoli 1663–1670,’ Quaderni Storici, 48 (1981), 845–83. 35 For the manner in which Italian intellectual culture absorbed Cartesianism and then moved on see Claudio Manzoni, I cartesiani italiani (1660–1760) (Udine: La nuova base, 1984) and Brendan Dooley, ‘Veritas Filia Temporis: Experience and Belief in Early Modern Culture,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 60[3] (1999), 498–501. 36 Vittor Ivo Comparato, ‘Due lettere di Francesco d’Andrea a Francesco Redi e l’Apologia in difesa degli atomisti,’ Il Pensiero Politico, 11[1] (1978), esp. 76; Biagio de Giovanni, Filosofia e diritto in F. d’Andrea and his ‘Cultura e vita civile in Giuseppe Valletta,’ in Saggi e ricerche sul Settecento, ed. Ernesto Sestan (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici), 1–47 for the intellectual context of the Investiganti. See also Galasso, Napoli spagnola dopo Masaniello and Mastellone, Pensiero politico e vita culturale a Napoli nella seconda metà del Seicento, 13–23 for their relations to the politics of the ceto civile.

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intellectual environment was sealed when its questioning of second scholastic Aristotelian philosophy and its presumed heterodoxy triggered a reaction by the twin powers of the Roman Papacy and Spanish officials. The return of the Inquisition and the first atheist trials in 1685, just after the death of Tomasso Cornelio, forced most Neapolitan intellectuals underground. Others continued their activities in the new Accademia di Medinaceli, which was established in 1698 and named after the Spanish viceroy. Consequently, Rome became the ‘only European city’ left in Italy.37 By the early eighteenth century, free intellectual inquiry gained ground again in Austrian-ruled Naples. Underground print shops were very active in publishing works by English and French scholars in the

37 Comparato, ‘Due lettere di Francesco d’Andrea,’ 74–5 on the presumed connection between the death of Cornelio and the start of the atheist trials. For the Accademia del Medinaceli see Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘A proposito dell’accademia Medina Coeli,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 84 (1972), 57–79, as well as his ‘La prima formazione di Pietro Giannone: l’Accademia Medinacoeli e Domenico Aulisio’; Silvio Suppa, L’Accademia di Medinacoeli fra tradizione investigante e nuova scienza civile (Naples: Istituto Italiani per gli Studi Storici, 1971); and, for the range of lectures given there, Enrico Nuzzo, Verso la ‘Vita civile’: antropologia e politica nelle lezioni accademiche di Gregorio Caloprese e Paolo Mattia Doria (Naples: Guida, 1984); Vittorio Conti, ‘Paolo Mattia Doria e l’accademia di Medinacoeli,’ Il Pensiero Politico, 8[2] (1975), 203–18; and Alfonso Mirto, ‘Appunti sul “pensiero civile” di Gregorio Caloprese,’ Il Pensiero Politico, 14[3] (1981), 458–66. In general about the intellectual climate of those years see A.A. Rosa, La cultura della Controriforma (Bari: Laterza, 1974) and Luciano Osbat, L’inquisizione a Napoli: il processo agli ateisti, 1688–1697 (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1974). About a highprofile interaction by a member of the Investiganti, Costantino Grimaldi, with the Inquisition through the work of the neo-Aristotelian de Benedictis see Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 186–211, which also shows how the Investiganti were threatened by the Inquisition and how they ridiculed the Medinaceli academy (202), and Vittor Ivo Comparato, Giuseppe Valletta. Un intellettuale napoletano della fine del Seicento (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1970). For Grimaldi see, also by Comparato, Memorie di un anticurialista del Settecento, Constantino Grimaldi (Florence: Olschki, 1964) and ‘Ragione e fede nelle discussioni istoriche teologiche e filosofiche di Costantino Grimaldi,’ in Saggi e ricerche sul Settecento, ed. Ernesto Sestan (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1968), 48–93. Biagio de Giovanni, ‘La vita intellettuale a Napoli fra la metà del ’600 e la Restaurazione del Regno,’ in Storia di Napoli, vol. 6, (Naples: Società Editrice Storia di Napoli, 1970), 403–42 includes an argument about the decline of the influence of the ceto civile in the last years of the seventeenth century. Controversially, on the same subject, Guido Quazza, ‘Rifeudalizzazione e ceto civile: Napoli,’ in La decadenza italiana nella storia europea. Saggi sul sei-settecento (Turin: Einaudi, 1971).

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fields of physics and natural and moral philosophy, while Neapolitan writers became interested in Epicureanism as a way to counter scepticism. The reference points in this debate were Gassendi and Bayle.38 Whilst refraining from succumbing to neo-Hobbesian as well as to neoAugustinian interpretations of the nature of society, Neapolitan writers embraced ideas of self-interest and reconciled them with Christian notions of morality. Here, Bayle’s scepticism about the possibility of demonstrating the truth of Christian morality loomed large among writers who confronted this challenge,39 until deep into the eighteenth century.40 Like Celestino Galiani in Rome, many scholars across Italy were engaged in this project of rethinking the nature of society during the first decades of the eighteenth century.41 This was the context in which Vico first conceived of the plan for his famous Scienza nuova in the early 1720s.42 To make his ideas about the

38 Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, maps the intellectual circles formed around clandestine print shops and the figures of Ciccarelli, Gimma, and perhaps most importantly Valletta (186–7). On Valletta, whose library played a crucial role in Neapolitan intellectual life in the earliest decades of the eighteenth century, see Vitto Ivo Comparato, Giuseppe Valletta. Un intellettuale napoletano della fine del Seicento and Michele Rak, La parte istorica: storia della filosofia e libertinismo erudito: documenti per una ricerca sulla struttura del genere storia della filosofia nella cultura europea dell’eta libertina, con alcune lezioni storico-politiche di Giuseppe Valletta (Naples: Guida, 1971). For understanding the attraction of Gassendi’s views in Naples, see, besides the work by Ferrone, Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) and most interestingly John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 39 See Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, chapters 3 and 5. For the significance of Bayle in Italy in the eighteenth century see, originally, Eugenio Garin, ‘Per una storia dei rapporti fra Bayle e l’Italia,’ in Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo. Studi e ricerche (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1970), 157–72; more recently, Carlo Borghero, ‘L’Italia in Bayle, Bayle in Italia: una ricerca mancata,’ in Pierre Bayle e l’Italia, ed. L. Bianchi (Naples: Liguori, 1996), 3–33; and, in the same volume, Gustavo Costa, ‘Bayle e l’arcana mundi,’ 107–22. 40 Eluggero Pii, ‘Bayle e la cultura napoletana intorno al 1750,’ Il Pensiero Politico, 5[3] (1972), 509–16. 41 See chapter 2. 42 See chapter 3. Originally, Gianfranco Cantelli, Vico e Bayle: premesse per un confronto (Naples: Guida, 1971). Peter Burke, Vico (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 77 also noted the importance of Bayle for Vico on the basis of Vico’s autobiography. The significance of Bayle’s influence in Italy for Vico was also recognised by Ferrone, but only given a far more elaborate treatment and made absolutely central to the enterprise of Vico’s development of his Scienza nuova by John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, chapter 5. Other works expanding on the connection

28 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money

sociable nature of man known to some of Italy’s most prominent scholars, Vico sent his first major works to Rome to Celestino Galiani, Ferdinando’s uncle, who had long been one of Intieri’s main contacts.43 In 1727, Celestino Galiani and Intieri directed the publication of Gassendi’s Opere omnia in Florence. After long negotiations with the Florentine censors and the ecclesiastical authorities, their statement in favour of Christian Epicureanism was granted permission.44 Intieri’s staunch support of Gassendi’s moral philosophy as well as his enthusiasm for the translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura in 1717 by Alessandro Marchetti reflected his belief that ultimately the current state of political debates about commerce could be challenged by reconciling self-interest and morality in new ways.45 Thus, Intieri pursued ideas of sociability based on self-interest in order to eventually change the nature of the Neapolitan reform debate. The person who understood Intieri’s project best and became his strongest ally was Celestino Galiani. In 1732, Celestino Galiani was appointed as cappellano maggiore, the head of the Neapolitan education system.46 After many years of studying

43

44

45

46

between Vico and Bayle and arguing that Bayle determined the context for Vico are Lorenzo Bianchi, ‘“E contro la politica de’Governi di Baile, che vorrebbe senza Religioni poter reggere le Nazioni”: note su Bayle nella corrispondenza di Vico,’ Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani (2000), 17–30; Maria Rascaglia, ‘Gli interlocutori di Vico nei manoscritti della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli,’ Bollettino del centro di studi vichiani (2000), 109–24; and Enrico Nuzzo, ‘Vico e Bayle, ancora una messa a punto,’ in Pierre Bayle e l’Italia, ed. L. Bianchi (Naples: Liguori, 1996), 123–202. Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 169 notes the friendly bond between Vico and Celestino. See also Fausto Nicolini, ‘Giambattista Vico e Ferdinando Galiani, Ricerca Storica,’ Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 71[2–3] (1918), 139, which lists the contacts between the two men. See Pierre Gassendi, Opera omnia (Florence, 1727). Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 57–62 discusses the context of the publication of Gassendi’s works, the activities of Intieri and others, and their dealings with the Florentine Inquisition. Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 193–4, on Intieri’s admiration for Gassendi and Marchetti, the translator of Lucretius, as well as his connections with Celestino Galiani and another key figure, the Florentine Giovanni Bottari. Not much has been written about Celestino’s influence on Neapolitan politics, apart from his famous role in the negotiations with the Vatican of the late 1730s concerning southern Italian tribunals and the independence of Naples from ecclesiastical powers that led to the famous concordat of 1741. However, recently a substantial number of memoranda and policy advice notes by Celestino Galiani have been found in the Neapolitan Archivio Nazionale, which are now scheduled for publication in the near future under the direction of Raffaele Ajello.

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ecclesiastical history, moral theology, and natural philosophy in Rome as well as having served as a diplomat to the Vatican, Celestino was entrusted by the Austrian authorities with reshaping the old academic system. This involved making politically sensitive choices about which strands of scholarly analysis should be favoured by the reforms.47 Immediately after his appointment, Celestino decided to establish a new Accademia delle Scienze. Rumours soon spread that the Accademia had been founded as a platform for spreading John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). When these rumours reached the Vatican, Celestino was placed under investigation. Two years later, in June 1734, Pope Clement XII ordered the Essay Concerning Human Understanding to be placed on the Index of prohibited books.48 Celestino’s academic reforms were delayed and his reputation was tarnished.49 One of the causes for the rumours about Celestino’s heterodoxy was the publication in 1732 of Doria’s Difesa della metafisica degli antichi filosofi contro il signor Giovanni Locke ed alcuni altri autori moderni. Accompanied by a long critique of Locke’s moral epistemology, Doria’s work was a lament for the spread of Locke’s un-Christian Epicurean ideas in Naples and attacked Celestino’s Accademia in particular.50 In fact Locke’s Essay had already reached southern Italy much earlier51 and Doria’s attack had very little to do with a specific dispute about Locke. Yet, Locke’s Essay represented a controversial type of approach that Christian philosophers across Europe could take in attempting to explain how self-interested man could be moral and society was possible, without reducing morality to opinion or custom. Thus, Locke’s Essay created one of the main dividing lines within early eighteenth-century moral philosophy, not just in Naples, but in the whole of Europe. Doria rejected Locke’s approach,

47 See Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 201–4; Franco Venturi, ‘Alle origini dell’illuminismo napoletano, dal carteggio di Bartolomeo Intieri,’ 421. 48 See Paolo Amadio, ‘La diffusione del pensiero di John Locke a Napoli nell’età di Vico, contributo critico-bibliografico,’ Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche (1997), 183–94 and Nicoletta De Scisciolo, ‘Presenza lockiana a Napoli tra fine Seicento e inizio Settecento: dagli Investiganti alle eredita genovesiane,’ Studi filosofici (1997), 73–111. 49 Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 201–4 on the 1731–2 clash over Celestino’s Academy reveals the structure of his network across Italy. 50 I will argue in chapter 2 that Celestino was not a Lockean as Doria presumed and in fact shared the standard objection to Locke’s moral epistemology that contemporary Christian authors had developed. 51 See Amadio, ‘La diffusione del pensiero di Locke.’

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which was dominant in England in the 1720s and 1730s, and argued that virtue, for Locke, was mere opinion.52 For Doria, as for many writers at the time, any hedonistic philosophy was inevitably Epicurean, sceptical about true morality and incompatible with Christianity. It has hardly been recognised how deep the causes of the controversy surrounding Celestino’s Accademia actually were. The clash between Celestino and Doria implicitly concerned visions of the options of reform for Naples as well as the moral underpinnings of Celestino’s academic reform programme. What was at stake was whether the most innovative way of grounding political ideas on notions of sociability across Europe could be accepted in Naples. Central to Doria’s own moral and political vision was the rejection of any derivation of a Christian law of nature based on pleasure and pain. Doria’s conception of commerce was part of a philosophical system that resembled Fénelon’s Christian perspective, which was as radical as it was influential. Like Fénelon, Doria focused, in his philosophical works, on man’s morally self-degrading nature and its political consequences, contrasting this with a superior natural moral order requiring selfsubjection and political control over man’s passions. He also believed that trade in Naples should be politically controlled and directed towards an increase in the production of subsistence goods. His recommendation to set up three ports in Naples where trade was fully controlled echoed Fénelon’s statements on the trade of Tyre and was essentially based on the latter’s vision of agrarian economic development. Although Doria’s moral views were radical, his political opinions had been valued since the early decades of the eighteenth century by various prominent reformers. Doria was a major political advisor. When Celestino came to Naples in 1732, he brought with him an entirely new vision of how economically and militarily weak states, like the Naples that would emerge in 1734, could survive in the climate of European international politics at that time. Although there is as yet not much evidence that Celestino had a strong influence on government policy, it has been suggested that this was the case.53 Certainly, the fact that he and Intieri left

52 The sophistication of the British early eighteenth-century moral philosophical debate comes out in Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 53 The image of Celestino Galiani not only as an intellectual and academic reformer but also as a politically active and influential person has long been promoted by Raffaele Ajello, but has always remained a hypothesis. However, see note 44 above.

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Naples in a rush in 1734 to be the first to welcome Charles of Bourbon to his new kingdom supports the idea that Celestino had political ambitions.54 Doria recognised Celestino as a serious rival whose moral views accorded with a vision of reform and a political ideology that fundamentally conflicted with his own. Doria stressed that one of the functions of an intellectual class in society was to monitor the moral quality of social developments to prevent the corruption and disintegration of society. Apparently neglecting this threat, Celestino’s reforms were an attempt to modernise the country’s knowledge basis and its technological capacities in order to dramatically increase the productivity of the domestic economy. Celestino’s and Doria’s moral philosophies, which I will discuss in the next two chapters, were the basis of their disagreement in the 1730s, and the resolution of their opposition would become central to Ferdinando Galiani’s thinking of the late 1740s and the idea of sociability behind Della moneta. Galiani’s History of Commerce Ferdinando Galiani and his older brother Berardo were sent to Naples in 1735 to be educated by Celestino’s academic acquaintances.55 Among them was Bartolomeo Intieri, who, in the 1740s, began teaching Ferdinando and other promising youngsters in the field of political economy.56 Intieri had initially trained as a mathematician and he used

54 Franco Venturi, ‘La Napoli di Antonio Genovesi,’ in Settecento riformatore, Da Muratori a Beccaria, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 556. 55 Fausto Nicolini, ‘La puerizia e l’adolescenza dell’abate Galiani 1735–1745, Notizie, lettere, versi, documenti,’ Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 43[4] (1918), 105–32. See also his ‘La famiglia dell’abate Galiani,’ Archivio Storico Italiano, 74[3–4] (1918), 136–57. Luigi Diodati’s biography of Ferdinando Galiani, Vita dell’abate Ferdinando Galiani (Naples, 1788), 3–4 has a list of contacts of Celestino Galiani who taught Ferdinando or influenced his thinking through gatherings in Celestino’s salon. 56 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 at an earlier stage. This he argued in a letter to Celestino Galiani of 30 December 1738, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 23r. The other dominant figure in Ferdinando Galiani’s education was the Tuscan nobleman Alessandro Rinuccini, whose views are discussed by Raffaele Iovine, ‘Il trattato Della moneta di Ferdinando Galiani: la dialettica politica a favore e contro la pubblicazione,’ Frontiera d’Europa (1999), 204–10. The same author is currently preparing the publication of an unknown manuscript written by Rinuccini on money and financial politics that was found in a private archive in Florence and which will appear in the journal Frontiera d’Europa.

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his skills in order to design agricultural machines.57 When Celestino came to Naples, Intieri immediately recognised him as someone who would get rid of antiquated studies and inactive scholars and put academic activities in the service of the development of the Neapolitan economy.58 In the years that followed, the two men began working together on plans for how to realise their vision of an economically successful and thereby politically viable Neapolitan state. During the late 1730s, Intieri’s and Celestino’s plans for the economic development of Naples became increasingly concrete.59 These plans were very different from the proposals of Doria and the leaders of the Neapolitan reform movement under the Austrians, who rejected luxury and modern commerce and ruled out the possibility that Naples could enter the arena of international trade. Intieri had made profound studies of Jean-François Melon’s Essai politique sur le commerce (1734, first edition) and recognised that the principles of political economy in this book could provide a realistic programme for national state development. Melon’s ideas, which I will discuss at the end of this chapter, formed the inspiration for Celestino’s and Intieri’s hope that Naples could preserve its independence by developing a basis for foreign trade. 57 See Ferdinando Galiani [Bartolomeo Intieri on titlepage], Della perfetta conservazione del grano, discorso di Bartolomeo Intieri (Naples, 1754), a work that, scholars agree, was written by Galiani, in which the working of a storage device and its effects on agricultural productivity were explained. A source which reveals Intieri’s activities and commercial and political views in the mid-1730s during his employment in Naples by various Tuscan noble families is Cesare Cantù, ‘Notizie su Napoli dall’archivio di Firenze,’ Archivio Storico Italiano, 10[1] (1869), 27–39. 58 Intieri wrote to Giovanni Bottari in December 1731: ‘For once the Emperor has acted worthy of an Emperor by appointing Monsignor Galiano as the cappellano maggiore, and it has been so greatly approved that words cannot express it … I have not felt such consolation for many years, as it seems to me that this great man who does not have his equal would be able to reconstruct the condition of the arts, which, if they are asserted and root well, will be difficult to uproot for centuries, notwithstanding all the efforts made by barbarians, of which we have many; but whose decline has begun. Our University, under the direction of this great man, who has all the credit of the court of Vienna, will get rid of certain smudges that now soil it. Ultimately, it seems to me that this provision has arrived at the right time, a time in which the barbarism has commenced to be known,’ (Venturi, ‘Alle origini dell’illuminismo napoletano,’ 421). Intieri complained to Celestino about the fact that Neapolitan scholars only concentrated on frivolous studies. He felt that ‘if the educated men approach’ research on economic matters ‘they free themselves from the bad reputation of being useless, which they are mostly’ (BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 34v). 59 See chapter 2.

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Intieri’s teachings on Melon’s works would later become central to Galiani’s own intellectual development. Inspired by the company of Intieri and other members of the intellectual circle of which Celestino was the centre, Ferdinando Galiani followed his uncle and took lower Church orders in 1745 to accommodate his scholarly activities. In the following years he gave a number of lectures on various antiquarian and moral subjects to an informal gathering of mostly young scholars, called the Accademia degli Emuli.60 During this period, Ferdinando had secretly been working on a treatise called Dell’arte del governo, an overview of the ruling manners and institutions in human history as well as a theoretical analysis of the principles of government. The moral theory that Galiani developed in his lectures was the backbone of his overview of the history of mankind. A mere threepage sketch of the work which he planned to write is all there is of the manuscript of Dell’arte del governo itself.61 Yet, the project should be recognised as the platform from which Galiani developed his thinking in these highly formative years of his life that led directly to the writing of Della moneta. The manuscripts Dell’idea di dio, Delle streghe, Dell’amore, Dell’amor platonico, Della superstizione, and Dello stato della moneta ai tempi della guerra trojana, to name the ones that I will discuss in chapter 4, and all other lectures and notes by him in these years had a place in this general design, which occupied Galiani until the moment he embarked on Della moneta.62

60 Diodati, Vita dell’abate Ferdinando Galiani, 5 lists a number of talks held by Galiani and mentions that the patron of the Accademia degli Emuli was Girolamo Pandolfelli. Meetings of this group of young intellectuals were held at Pandolfelli’s house. Diodati also lists a few members of the group, including Berardo Galiani, Pasquale Carcani, Giacomo Martorelli, and a certain ‘cavalier Perfetti.’ 61 The manuscript is preserved at the BSNSP, xxxi.c.8, ff. 1r-16v. The text that is seen as the actual remaining part of Dell’arte del governo is interrupted by empty pages on ff. 3–7 and 12–14r, while ff. 8–11 contain several notes on antiquarian subjects. The same manuscript volume has a few pages with lists drawn up by Galiani of subjects on which he planned to write in those years (BSNSP, xxxi.c.8. ff. 121v-122r). Here, Galiani’s projected writings are divided neatly into categories, like ‘materi d’antiquità,’ ‘teologiche,’ and ‘fisiche, e di storia naturale.’ 62 See endnote XVI of the second edition of Della moneta for Galiani’s statement about his project Dell’arte del governo (Galiani, Della moneta, 326; see also 109). Not nearly all of Galiani’s Neapolitan manuscripts have been published. On their general subject matter and their ownership since Galiani’s death see Fausto Nicolini, ‘I manoscritti di Ferdinando Galiani,’ Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 33 (1908), 171–97 and Giuseppe Galasso, ‘I manoscritti napoletani dell’abate Galiani,’ in La filosofia in soccorso de’ governi: la

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The project Dell’arte del governo was itself a spin-off from a work Galiani intended to write on the ancient history of trade in the Mediterranean. In 1788, Galiani’s first biographer, Luigi Diodati, referred to this lost manuscript, entitled Sull’antichissima storia delle navigazioni nel Mediterraneo, and Della moneta contains references to it.63 Book I chapter 1 of Della moneta, which discusses the history of money and the rise and fall of states in antiquity and modern times, builds on Galiani’s conclusions from his studies of trade in antiquity. It also shows how the young Galiani, following the lead of his uncle and Intieri, formulated the beginnings of a typical Enlightenment vision of commercial politics, which he used to set out a strategy for the economic regeneration of Naples. After describing how money first emerged and how it became a universal means of trade in the Mediterranean, Galiani explained shifts in power and wealth between states in history. Using historical data, Galiani shaped the idea that commerce had been 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.’64 Galiani described how the decline went along with financial mismanagement that represented the vices of the political system and its inherent contradictions. Those

cultura napoletana del Settecento (Naples: Guida, 1989), 353–68. Specifically on Galiani’s correspondence, Luciano Guerci, ‘Aspetti e problemi dell’epistolario di Ferdinando Galiani,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 84 (1972), 80–110. These studies have differently organised lists of Galiani’s writings and correct each other on various counts, such as the themes that Galiani wrote about. However, all of them are still incomplete, as are the catalogue at the library of the Società Napoletana di Storia Patria and the list of writings recently published on the internet through the ‘Archivio Storico degli Economisti’ project (http://ase.signum.sns.it/archivio.html). 63 Diodati, Vita dell’abate Ferdinando Galiani, 6; Galiani, Della moneta, 20–9, 308–9 (endnote IV of the second edition in which Galiani explained the nature of his project on trade in antiquity). 64 Galiani, Della moneta, 27–9.

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contradictions were the foundation of the feudal politics that existed in medieval times when ‘trade had been halted and was all but extinguished.’ Because there was no trust between people in this ‘wretched state,’ people only ‘heaped destruction and theft upon each other.’65 Inevitably, when our greed [l’avidità nostra] upsets orderly government, everyone becomes impoverished and no one is enriched. When, on the other hand, greed is restrained, the state is enriched, and power and happiness [felicità] increase. Fortunately, in the fifteenth century, Europeans began to live more in accordance with the laws [of commerce], even before the discovery of the Indies, and at that point gold and silver began to appear again in greater quantities.66

Talking about the ‘laws’ that were inherent to commerce as requirements for power and wealth, Galiani suggested there was a specific type of commercial morality that had always been at the core of the cultures of states that had been successful at any time in history. This idea was central to his account of the history of mankind and its progress towards commercial societies. Galiani described 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.’67 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.68

65 66 67 68

Ibid., 29. Ibid. Ibid., 30. Ibid.

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The separation between modern territorial trade competition and ancient conquest was not so definite, according to Galiani. 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.’69 However, the underlying difference was only a ‘different virtue of combat [diversa virtú nel combattere].’70 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 of, the human race,’ had not come to an end.71 In fact, Galiani declared: ‘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.’72 Galiani believed that European states still attempted to manipulate what he saw as the providential rules of commerce. He discussed the relation between the excessive nature of Spanish trade imperialism and the decline of their wealth and power in terms of the providentially monitored value of gold and silver. The Spaniards had taken all the gold and silver from South America to Europe and mistakenly believed that these materials would keep their value. When Spanish scientists went to Quito, to study why the primitives did not work their gold mines properly, they ‘incorrectly attributed this attitude to laziness and stupidity, but,’ Galiani insisted, ‘I believe the people of these regions wished to abandon mining, which was depopulating and destroying them, in order to live a better life. Indeed, these people regarded us as the barbarians.’73 Galiani also thought that France and Britain, the dominant states in the eighteenth century, neglected the development of their commercial potential. In the late 1740s Galiani attempted to turn his observations about 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 69 70 71 72 73

Ibid. Ibid., 27–8. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 33.

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from it as Galiani’s response to the condition of the Neapolitan reform debate in the late 1740s. By that time the leaders of the reform movement of the late 1730s and early 1740s had lost their influence and the debate on commerce and political economy had reached a deadlock. When Della moneta appeared, anonymously, it was believed by many people that Intieri was the author. This was no coincidence, since Dell’arte del governo itself was set up to bring out how the history of humankind and the progress of man’s morality and religion could theoretically be reconciled with the notion of commercial society; Della moneta was the completion of the project that Intieri and Celestino together had started in the late 1730s. Exclusion from the Age of Reform In spite of the tone of the first chapter of Della moneta and of Galiani’s reasons for intervening in the Neapolitan reform debate, he has not commonly been recognised as an Enlightenment thinker or a reformer. This is mostly due to the reputation of his second main work, the Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, of 1770,74 which I will briefly discuss in the Epilogue. Almost 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. No doubt these views have influenced the current understanding of Della moneta in its Neapolitan context. Also, Galiani’s reputation during his life for his laziness, his express flirting with moral cynicism,75 and his eagerness to be at the social centre have been emphasized by historians as signs of a lack of serious reform spirit.76 Yet, looking

74 Ferdinando Galiani, Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1958 [1770]). 75 Galiani 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 Abbé Galiani “The Laughing Philosopher,”’ American Scholar (1990), 593. 76 Galiani’s joking flirtations 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: Laterza, 1913), 325–34. In English, Steegmuller, ‘The Abbé Galiani “The Laughing Philosopher”’ fits with this way of representing Galiani. His A Woman, a Man, and Two

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at the historiography of eighteenth-century Neapolitan political thought, it also appears that considerable difficulties of a different sort exist in placing Galiani in a general picture of Naples and the Enlightenment. In Franco Venturi’s phenomenally authoritative works from the 1960s and 1970s on eighteenth-century enlightened reformers, Ferdinando Galiani figured, quite naturally, as an ambiguous character. Venturi praised Galiani’s intellect and acknowledged his influence on eighteenth-century political debates.77 Yet, Venturi also showed his indignation and disappointment about Galiani’s statements in the conclusion of Della moneta against the reform projects that were launched in Italy in the 1740s.78 The framework of Enlightenment political thought within which 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 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 eighteenthcentury Naples made him the incarnation of the enlightened reformer.79 Consequently, Venturi’s framework of the Enlightenment

Kingdoms (London: Secker and Warburg, 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],’ BSNSP, xxxi.a.8, ff. 85–88. 77 Franco Venturi, ‘Il dibattito sulle monete,’ Settecento riformatore, Da Muratori a Beccaria, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 490–99 and ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 72[3] (1960), 45–64. 78 Venturi, ‘Il dibattito sulle monete,’ 502. 79 Robertson, ‘The Enlightenment above National Context,’ 694, aligns Galiani with Venturi’s non-utopian, non-reformist political thinkers, and opposes him to Genovesi. However, see Imbruglia, ‘Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Naples,’ 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’, 27, 30). Reinforcing Venturi’s model, Robertson separates Enlightenment and patriotic reform (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 (34).

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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 Dialogues ‘did not contain a political and economic programme.’80 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.81 Thus, Galiani was effectively excluded from the Age of Reform. However, the question arises whether juxtaposing Genovesi and Galiani at these levels is instructive for understanding the Enlightenment, in Naples as well as in general. As Eluggero Pii and John Robertson have pointed out, from 1753 onwards Genovesi used philosophy in a typically enlightened way, to clarify the nature of sociability and commercial morality.82 Lately, projects of this type have been related to the term ‘modern republicanism.’ In a recent article written to outline the state of ‘modern republicanism’ in eighteenth-century Italy, Pii compared different models of man’s political and moral character and drew attention to one limitation of Genovesi’s moral philosophy. Pii explained that, unlike Vico’s, Genovesi’s idea of a commercial republic required men to have a great deal of control over their own actions and regulate their morality.83 The same feature of Genovesi’s moral philosophy had previously been brought out by Richard Bellamy, who also argued that

80 Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati,’ 47, 53. 81 Raffaele Ajello, ‘I filosofi e la regina,’ Rivista Storica Italiana (1991), 398–454, 657–738. See also Paolo Amadio, Il disincanto della ragione e l’assolutezza del bonheur. Studio sull’abate Galiani (Naples: Guida, 1997), which features a slightly overdrawn portrayal of Galiani’s ‘disenchanted’ Enlightenment spirit. 82 John Robertson, ‘Antonio Genovesi: The Neapolitan Enlightenment and Political Economy,’ History of Political Thought, 8[2] (1987), 335–44. See also Eluggero Pii, ‘Filosofia ed economia in Antonio Genovesi,’ Il Pensiero Politico, 6[3] (1973), 439–47; ‘Le origini dell’economia “civile” in Antonio Genovesi,’ Il Pensiero Politico 12[2] (1979), 334–43; and Antonio Genovesi: dalla politica economica alla ‘politica civile’ (Florence: Olschki, 1984). 83 Pii, Antonio Genovesi: dalla politica economica alla ‘politica civile.’

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what separated him from utilitarianism was not just the feeble notion that the passions were controlled by reason.84 At the same level of ideas about commerce and morality, Galiani has usually been depicted as a neo-Hobbesian, a utilitarian, or a follower of Mandeville. In spite of Galiani’s own denials, the most authoritative interpretations of the political thought behind Della moneta still echo Carlantonio Broggia’s immediate judgement that the book was based on extreme ‘Epicurean’ moral principles and arose from the Neapolitan movement led by Celestino Galiani, who himself had been accused of moral heterodoxy.85 Yet, the reasons, discussed above, that Galiani himself gave for writing Della moneta and the relationship of his project to Bartolomeo Intieri’s works point in a different direction. In the last few decades, similar difficult aspects of commerce and morality in the writings of great authors like Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu, have attracted considerable attention in the historiography of eighteenth-century political thought, and the debate about these themes has been recognised as fundamental to the Enlightenment.86 Therefore, particularly if Galiani referred to the same authors as Genovesi and engaged in the same challenge as he did, it seems legitimate to suspend temporarily the link between utopia and Enlightenment and see whether a focus on Neapolitan perspectives on commerce

84 Richard Bellamy, ‘“Da metafisico a mercantate” – 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: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 277–302. 85 See Bellamy, ‘“Da metafisico a mercantate”’ and Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, for two pioneering attempts to draw the dividing lines in the Neapolitan debate on commerce and morality. 86 Among the most influential works for changing the agenda in this way are J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) and publications by the range of contributors to István Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hont’s articles have been brought together now in Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) and are followed up by his forthcoming ‘Luxury and Commerce,’ in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. M. Goldie and R. Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 379–418. Another work with a major influence on modern historiography of eighteenth-century political thought is Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).

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and morality in the early eighteenth century sheds new light on the dynamics of eighteenth-century reform discussions. In this book I will discuss the development of Galiani’s view of man’s sociable nature in relation to three main participants in the Neapolitan debate of the first half of the eighteenth century on this subject, namely Celestino Galiani, Paolo Mattia Doria, and Giambattista Vico. The detailed focus of this study on Neapolitan views of self-interest and virtue reveals a shared discourse of different ideas of love, self-deceit, commerce, and money, through which modernising tendencies in Naples were commented on and the problems of scepticism and Epicureanism were approached. Galiani attempted to dissolve what he saw as weaknesses in his contemporaries’ views and by syncretization developed his own outlook on man’s self-interest. By tracing this process, it is possible to demonstrate how, in the specific case of Della moneta, Galiani applied his insights into the nature of morality to the challenge of developing a solid strategy for the economic reform of Naples in his early political economy. This way, it emerges that Galiani’s works were part of a larger debate about the theoretical and practical possibility of a Christian commercial society that was of a European scale. Philosophy and Political Economy in the Early Eighteenth Century The Options for Reform Perceptions in Naples during the first half of the eighteenth century of the options for economic and political reform were heavily influenced by debates in the rest of Europe on the same issues.87 These debates did not in the first place deal with the economic dimension of government policies, but with their moral effects on the societies whose well-being lay at the basis of the state’s wealth and power. Thus, the focus of attention was not directly on the price effects or the development of the costs of labour of various economic policies, but more generally on the moral dimension of commercial reforms as processes that engendered a profound cultural transition. Political theorists who discussed the effects of reforms sketched a wide range of images of how an increase of market mechanisms changed the future moral character of society. This was the

87 This section draws on István Hont’s ‘Luxury and Commerce,’ as well as the introduction to his Jealousy of Trade.

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fundamental form of early eighteenth-century reform debates. Across Europe different local versions of the same general debate took place. These local debates were determined by domestic issues and historically developed circumstances, which created local discourses of commonplaces through which similar moral concerns were approached. The most influential national debate in the rest of Europe was the one that took place in France from the second half of the seventeenth century, when radical responses were developed to the expansionist politics of Louis XIV and the economic policies of his minister of finance, Colbert.88 Among these, Archbishop Fénelon’s Les avantures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse (1699)89 became one of most read political works of the eighteenth century across Europe. In Fénelon’s view, modern market interaction led to luxury, resulting in great inequality among the people, a corruption of their virtue, and, ultimately, the disintegration of states. Fénelon contrasted natural commerce, which was related to satisfaction of needs, with modern market interaction. Luxury, arising from Colbert’s attempts at modernisation, was the root of the evils affecting France’s wealth and power during the rule of Louis XIV. Fénelon explained Louis’s militarism as necessitated by luxury. He argued that Colbert’s attempts to modernise directed France’s economy not towards the satisfaction of people’s true basic needs, but towards false desires awakened by a culture that promoted vanity. The result was a deterioration of France’s productive capacities, forcing Louis into conquest in order to regulate the state’s finances. By linking markets and warfare, Fénelon displayed his deeply pessimistic vision of man’s weak

88 See Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). The movements discussed by Rothkrug continued to be a main current in French eighteenth-century politics and were linked ideologically with the views of Jacobites like the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay, whose A translation of the philosophical discourse on the love of God: explaining the sentiments of the Archbishop of Cambray (Glasgow, 1767) popularised Fénelon’s teachings in Britain. On an international scale, the cosmopolitanism of French anti-Colbertism inspired freemasonry. See Michael Sonenscher’s ‘The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: The French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789,’ History of Political Thought, 18[1–2] (1997), 64– 103, 267–325, for a masterly account of the enduring effects of these moralising ideologies through the realm of political economy at the advent of and in the course of the French Revolution. 89 François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, ed. and trans. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 [1699]).

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nature in the form of an overall fear of modernity. This direct association of markets with turbulence in the European state system gained Fénelon his strongest support and was the reason his ideas threatened to gain so much influence across Europe. It was also what inspired his fiercest critics. Galiani too would object to the causality of Fénelon’s reasoning in the only phrase of Della moneta that would also feature in the Dialogues: ‘war is the luxury of the monarchy.’90 Fénelon’s remedy for a corrupted state involved reforms that brought markets back to their essence in basic need satisfaction. These reforms would serve to purge people’s vanity and false desires, and they would submit their labour to building up the true wealth of the state. Such reforms reinstalled a more natural economy and reduced the inequality of social status introduced by luxury to a mere difference of people’s natural capabilities. Fénelon believed that God created mankind as a universal society in which people were linked to each other through a cosmopolitan economy in which they assisted each other in their satisfaction of need. Free-trade ideologies, as opposed to protectionism, were often inspired by such ideas. Fénelon favoured the use of political power in the form of royal absolutism to force an already corrupted society to rediscover its more natural moral and economic principles. The interest of any state, he believed, was best served by such reforms because they increased the economy’s real productivity, that of agricultural goods. On the other hand, highly unequal societies that revolved around false needs would fail, in real terms, to be as productive. Fénelon’s political and economic ideas would inspire a number of large reform projects in France during the eighteenth century, among them the liberalisation of the grain trade in 1763. His political vision arose from a model of ancient republics in which the people were united by military leadership. Though he was an archbishop, his concept of virtue was ancient rather than Christian91 and his notion of ‘pure love [pur amour]’ prescribed as much an austere love of ‘order’ as a love of God. In both cases it entailed the rigorous subjection of one’s own desires and feelings to the rule of a superior.

90 Galiani, Della moneta, 219. Galiani, Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, 107, 113. 91 See François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon, Oeuvres spirituelles, ed. François Varillon (Paris: Aubier, 1954) and Patrick Riley, ‘Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 78–93.

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The threat that these ideas would become influential in England during the first years of the eighteenth century prompted the Anglo-Dutch satirist Bernard Mandeville in 1705 to write the first version of his satirical Fable of the Bees.92 His own allegiance to the Dutch regime after the Glorious Revolution led him in the context of a domestic succession debate to praise luxury as the principle of a happy and economically superior society. In strong opposition to Fénelon and his English Jacobite followers, he argued that the submission of people’s desires to a political unity of moral restraint was impossible in the modern age and such attempts to revive these principles of ancient virtue could only result in poverty and unemployment. Mandeville’s own vision of the political logic of morality and wealth hinged on the role of the wise politician just as much as Fénelon’s, but was based on a very different concept of morality. Morality, according to Mandeville, was a political invention which first emerged when, in a Hobbesian state of nature, one wise politician managed to neutralise man’s natural aggression by creating moral norms. In the modern age it was the task of political leadership to instil artificial desires for possessing new goods in people, thereby pushing their productivity and building up a stronger economy and a more powerful state. In other words, Mandeville reduced his idea of moral behaviour to a socially and politically refined form of natural self-interest. The political leaders of a society should encourage people to act on their desires, rather than to suppress them. Both Fénelon’s and Mandeville’s visions of the nature of morality in relation to the options for reform would be very influential. They represented the extreme positions of a constantly evolving Europe-wide debate on these matters that would continue during the entire eighteenth century.93 Much of the Enlightenment literature on specific political, economic, and legal issues is best understood in line with this debate.

92 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F.B. Kaye (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988 [1714]); E.J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 93 For the form of this debate in Naples in the course of the eighteenth century see Paolo Frascani, ‘Il dibattito sul lusso nella cultura napoletana del ’700,’ Critica Storica, 11 (1974), 45–72 and Cosimo Perrotta, ‘Il “lusso” negli economisti italiani del settecento,’ in Gli Italiani e Bentham: dalla “felicita pubblica” all’economia del benessere, ed. Riccardo Faucci, vol. I (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1982), 171–90. An attempt to capture the central oppositions at stake is provided by Luciano Guerci, Libertà degli antichi e liberta dei moderni: Sparta, Atene e i “philosophes” nella Francia de ’700 (Naples: Guida, 1979).

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Accordingly, this study traces how Galiani shaped his particular views on the moral quality of markets and ultimately applied them in a controversial manner to the question whether politicians had to be fundamentally concerned with the moral effects of devaluation policies, or whether the outcome of their separate political economic calculations already led to the optimal solution with respect to the moral effects on society. Christian Moral Philosophy Across Italy, developments in the main European debate on reform were followed with great attention. For instance, in 1744 the Florentine journal Giornale della letteratura italiana published three lengthy reviews of William Warburton’s Divine legation of Moses, which was published in London in two volumes in 1738 and 1741.94 Written as an anti-deist treatise, Warburton’s book was also a critique of Bayle’s religious scepticism as a precursor to Mandeville’s neo-Hobbesianism. In response to these writers the book presented a modification of Locke’s approach to morality. In the more than one hundred pages of the entire review in the Giornale della letteratura italiana, Warburton’s views with regard to luxury, commerce, and morality were put in the context of a general European debate, to which the Divine legation contributed and which ultimately determined the options for reform. The review of Warburton’s work in the Giornale della letteratura italiana gave an accurate account of the state of the art of the European debate, which was at its most advanced in Britain. Mandeville’s works had immediately triggered antagonistic responses in Britain from Christian moral philosophers who strongly contested his concept of virtue, and refuting Mandeville stayed on the agenda for a number of decades. Francis Hutcheson and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury specifically mentioned their opposition to Mandeville in titles of their works from the early

94 William Warburton, The divine legation of Moses demonstrated: on the principles of a religious deist, from the omission of the doctrine of a future state of reward and punishment in the Jewish dispensation. In six books, 2 vols. (London, 1738–41). The book had many reprints and triggered a host of moral theological critiques and defences. It was translated into French by Etienne de Silhouette (Dissertations sur l’Union de la Religion, de la Morale, et de la Politique, tirées d’un Ouvrage de M. Warburton [The Hague, 1742]), who also translated, for example, William Wollaston’s The religion of nature delineated and Alexander Pope’s An essay on man. Through Silhouette’s translations these works reached Italy and people like Celestino Galiani.

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decades of the eighteenth century.95 However, these Christian philosophers were not on the side of Fénelon. They disagreed as much with his ancient ascetic idea of virtue as with Mandeville’s Epicureanism. Though basing themselves on opposite conceptions of morality, both advocated a political interventionism that conflicted in similar ways with the ordinary moral and political cultures of contemporary European societies. Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, among other British philosophers, attempted to dissolve the moral and political extremes in the debate between Mandeville and the Fénelonians by developing concepts that explained markets and morality as naturally coherent entities. By reconsidering the foundations of moral philosophy, they developed moral theories to correct both Fénelon’s and Mandeville’s radical concepts of virtue. Subsequently, they found alternative understandings for the common notions of luxury and commerce to cohere with their new ideas on virtue. These were highly innovative theories that recognised and moved beyond the limitations of pre-eighteenth-century moral philosophy as determined by earlier thinkers like Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke. British responses to Mandeville and Fénelon indirectly influenced the Neapolitan debate on the options for reform in the first half of the eighteenth century. As Hutcheson described it, a ‘full-blown debate on the nature of society’ had emerged in the 1720s and 1730s,96 and this debate was not exclusively British and French, but European. Within it, participants attempted to reach a new understanding of modern societies as natural entities, but frequently accused others of defaulting into positions associated with the earlier extreme views of ancient virtue and Epicureanism. In this way the old polarised debate on the options for reform became absorbed by a new one, which was conceptually and geographically much larger. Mandeville himself adapted to this debate and added a new principle of ‘self-liking’ to his earlier view, making it a serious moral theory, rather than a satire. But Mandeville retained his extreme position on the nature of morality. His concept of ‘selfliking,’ which harked back to ideas of late seventeenth-century French

95 Irwin Primer, ‘Mandeville and Shaftesbury: Some Facts and Problems,’ in Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr. Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), ed. Irwin Primer (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1975), 126–41. In the following passages I follow István Hont, ‘Luxury and Commerce.’ 96 Francis Hutcheson, Two Texts on Human Nature, ed. Thomas Mautner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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philosophers who developed ideas of ‘amour propre’ later modified by Rousseau, was at heart still a purely Epicurean idea.97 Moreover, as a result of Mandeville’s influence, during the rest of the eighteenth century, any association of morality with pleasure or utility was generally regarded with deep suspicion. The opponents of commercial society tended to associate self-interested behaviour with the idea of ‘Epicureanism,’ as a label for sceptical explanations of the origin of society and the nature of morality. This had significant effects on actual reform debates and the development of policy-making across Europe. In this study I am focusing on the specific case of the development of ideas about self-interest by Christian moral philosophers in Naples. This development took place against the backdrop of the European commonplaces and shared themes of inquiry that existed in the first half of the eighteenth century. In particular, my object is to show how in Naples, as partially an instantiation of what happened in Europe, this debate led to new visions of the relations between markets, morality, and politics in general. I will argue that Galiani’s Della moneta was inspired by these Neapolitan theories and that he used them to derive his political economy, just as other authors who wrote about money based themselves on different views of commercial sociability. Money in the Italian 1750s Della moneta was among a wave of treatises on the subject of financial politics that all appeared in Italy in the early 1750s. Around that time, after the wars of the big Succession Crises of the first half of the century, a number of lawyers, merchants, bankers, and political advisors across Italy saw themselves confronted with the challenge to develop strategies for the revival of Italy’s commerce. For this purpose, they focused on the possibilities for small Italian states to develop their economies by means of accurate financial policies. These Italian writers were influenced by earlier debates in other parts of Europe on these issues. The English recoinage crisis of the 1690s and, even more so, the French debate on financial politics in the aftermath of the collapse of Law’s Mississippi Scheme produced a wide range of ideas about how the commercial

97 See Nannerl Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), for the history of the concept of amour propre.

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development of states was related to financial politics. When these debates became influential across Europe, the domestic positions of authors who engaged in these debates, such as John Locke in England,98 and Jean-François Melon, Pierre Dutot, and Joseph PârisDuverney in France,99 were interpreted as if they directly represented general political ideologies about commerce. This was the case as well in Italy, where the mainstream of Galiani’s Italian contemporaries tried to develop coherent theoretical and political positions on money that celebrated modern commerce, but rejected luxury.100 Taking the ideas of particular authors about the legitimacy of devaluation policies as representative for the character of their political economy, they saw Locke and Dutot as the standard-bearers of good political economy, while they considered Melon’s Essai politique sur le commerce (1734, first edition) to be advocating forms of political abuse of markets. Yet, as everyone understood, this dividing line that was thus created, between critics and advocates (under particular circumstances) of devaluation policies, referred to a more fundamental ideological schism about the options for economic reform in Italy and across Europe in general in the course of the eighteenth century. Among the Italian critics of Melon who published their works on money around 1750 was Pompeo Neri, a prominent lawyer and government official from Tuscany, who became famous for his role in the census reform in Lombardy in the years after 1750.101 In 1751, Neri

98 John Locke, Locke on Money, ed. Patrick Kelly, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 99 Jean-François Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce, nouvelle edition ([Paris], 1736); Pierre Dutot, Réflexions politiques sur les finances et le commerce (The Hague, 1738); Joseph Pâris-Duverney, Examen du livre intitulé Réflexions politiques sur les finances et le commerce (Paris, 1740). 100 The same was done in Italy’s literary journals of the time. The Novelle letterarie and the Giornale della letteratura italiana published long reviews of French and English works, such as the French translation by Silhouette of Warburton’s critique of Mandeville, that dealt with luxury, commerce, and morality. See Vieri Becagli, ‘L’economia nei periodici del granducato di Toscana. La prima reggenza lorenese (1737–1765),’ in Riviste di economia in Italia (1700–1900), ed. Massimo M. Augello, Marco Bianchini, and Marco E.L. Guidi (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1996), 69–88, for an impression. 101 See Pompeo Neri’s work of 1750, Relazione dello stato in cui si trova l’opera del censimento universale del ducato di Milano nel mese di maggio dell’anno 1750 (Milan, 1750). For a more elaborate description in English of Neri’s career and for further references to works on Neri see Koen Stapelbroek, ‘The Devaluation Controversy in EighteenthCentury Italy,’ History of Economic Ideas (2005), 83–8. The main work on Neri is

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published his Osservazioni sopra il prezzo legale delle monete, a work that has to be seen as a crucial statement in the context of a series of (ultimately unsuccessful) negotiations with the court of Turin to form a ‘monetary union,’ together with Tuscany.102 Moreover, the Prezzo legale delle monete also represents Neri’s general theory of commerce and politics. Neri believed that in a modern ‘commercial nation, everyone who did not live in solitude’ had ‘his interest linked to foreigners.’ This natural and necessary ‘universal commerce of mankind’ and its rules represented ‘the whole society of mankind that forms one single universal republic.’103 Neri rehearsed Fénelon’s positions about the nature of true commerce. He argued that the unity of mankind in commerce created universal need satisfaction. But Neri’s ideas with regard to monetary policies were based on a peculiar perception of the political debate of the early eighteenth century. In spite of the fact that John Law’s system was inspired by anti-Colbertist reform theories, Neri presented Melon and Law as fellow ‘projectors [progettisti]’ who lured governments with chimerical schemes offering them ‘lucrative prospects.’104 Neri believed that all reforms that interfered with the economy were political attempts to manipulate the universal commerce of the human race for the sake of reaching global hegemony. He regarded pro-luxury policies and a willingness to consider inflationary policies as morally depraved neo-Colbertist views that justified the continuation of commercial competition between states. On the other hand, anti-luxury reforms to manipulate markets were almost equally misguided and reprehensible. Neri’s views on money were determined by his political aversions to both luxury and any interventionist monetary policies. He adopted the

A. Fratoianni and M. Verga, eds., Pompeo Neri: atti del colloquio di Castelfiorentino (Castelfiorentino: Società storica della Valdelsa, 1992). On monetary reforms in Lombardy in the eighteenth century see C. Capra, ‘Riforme finanziarie e mutamento istituzionale nello Stato di Milano: gli anni sessanta del secolo XVIII,’ Rivista Storica Italiana (1979), 313–68. 102 Pompeo Neri, ‘Osservazioni sopra il prezzo legale delle monete,’ in Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia, Edizione moderna, ed. Pietro Custodi, (Milan, 1804 [1751]). For the state of financial politics in Piemonte at the time see G. Felloni, Il mercato monetario in Piemonte nel secolo XVIII (Milan: Banca commerciale italiana, 1968) and his more general ‘Finanze statali, emissioni monetarie ed alterazioni della moneta di conto in Italia nei secoli xvi–xviii,’ in La moneta nell’economia europea, ed. V. Barbagli Bagnoli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1981), 197–222. 103 Neri, ‘Prezzo legale delle monete,’ 121, 40. 104 Ibid., 167.

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Aristotelian position that the value of money arose out of agreement among people to use gold and silver as representations of goods. ‘The metals chosen’ to be money enabled human beings to ‘communicate their ideas to each other through weights of the materials.’ In Neri’s opinion, money prevented a lapse into ‘the obscure and confused ancient language’ of the pre-commercial ‘infancy of the nations,’ and thereby served the efficiency of people’s need satisfaction. Devaluations only disturbed people’s perception of the monetary value and were an ‘attack’ on the ‘clarity’ of human interactions.105 To support his argument, Neri referred to John Locke’s contribution to a large English debate in the 1690s on inflationary recoinage.106 In the first half of the eighteenth century Locke’s works were generally perceived as constituting a moral and political argument against devaluation. Supporters of Locke’s interpretation of commerce considered devaluations as disturbances of a supra-political moral order. Because of this, most Italian writers on monetary policy drew on an opposition between Melon and Locke as a central theme. Neri was no exception. He cited Locke and agreed with Dutot’s criticisms of Melon that, through devaluation policies, ‘the law did [by authority] what clippers did tacitly.’107 Out of an idiosyncratic interpretation of Locke’s theory of money, he argued that devaluations threatened the very existence of money by relegating gold and silver to the status of luxury goods. As soon as money acquires some value unrelated to its quantity, that is, for its rarity, its antiquity, or its particular beauty, it leaves the category of money and becomes a non-exchangeable good; and who has found himself in countries where arbitrary price reductions have been practised, knows very well that they immediately stagnate the monetary system.108

A number of Neri’s Italian contemporaries contested the view that the value of money was a human invention and that luxury was a result of political violation of that invention. Giovanni Francesco Pagnini, a government minister in the grand duchy of Tuscany, who was responsible for financial administration and thus on the receiving end of Neri’s proposals 105 Ibid., 134–5, 140. 106 See Locke, Locke on Money. I will discuss Locke’s monetary theories in comparison with Galiani’s in chapter 5. 107 Neri, ‘Prezzo legale delle monete,’ 166. 108 Ibid., 346.

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for an Italian ‘monetary union,’ writing in 1751, also saw Locke as the standard bearer of good fiscalism and advocate of a world order of peaceful commerce.109 To that extent, he even approved of Melon’s dictum that commerce and conquest excluded each other, but criticised his treatment of devaluations. Like Neri, Pagnini cited Dutot and Locke and described ‘commercial society [società commerciante]’ as ‘a type of society’ that created ‘universal’ ties between people and which was ‘supereminente’ – it transcended all categories of political power. However, although he associated the Roman spirit of conquest with luxury and with Melon’s financial politics, Pagnini realised that commerce did not depend only on the satisfaction of bare physical needs. Pagnini also differed from Neri in his idea of the relation between political society and universal commercial society. Pagnini argued that political societies had the same purpose (rather than opposite ones) as cosmopolitan social interaction: to bring together people with the same interests under the same laws. Commercial interaction in a supra-national sphere was complementary to ‘the provincial society of the nation and the kingdom.’110 To underline the way in which the laws of commerce complemented the laws of political societies, Pagnini stated that ‘because the governments of our time can no longer derive the same advantages from war, they have the orders of commerce as their object.’111 The way in which commerce changed the world ‘obliged’ governments ‘to compete with others for the society of commerce, in order to attain their own conservation, their wealth and power.’112 Whereas military strategy used to be crucial in warfare, now ‘one watches with the same eyes those citizens who by means of arts and manufactures, no less than soldiers, contribute to’ the conservation of the state. This new international order had

109 See the preface to Pagnini’s Italian translations of Locke’s monetary writings that were published in 1751. Giovanni Francesco Pagnini, ‘Uno Discorso sopra il Giusto Pregio delle Cose, e della Moneta e il Commercio de’ Romani da G.F. Pagnini,’ in Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia, Edizione moderna, ed. Pietro Custodi, vol. 2 (Milan, 1806 [1751]), 155–397. See also endnote II of the second edition of Galiani, Della moneta, 307. 110 Pagnini, ‘Giusto Pregio delle Cose,’ 161–3. 111 Ibid., 266. As an indicator of the different type of aggressive competition between states then and in modern times, Pagnini cited Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois (book 21, chapter 11), who argued that ‘the Romans never knew jealousy of trade. They attacked Carthage as a rival nation, instead of as a commercial nation’ (Ibid., 223–64). 112 Ibid., 272.

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civilised humankind in all its aspects.113 It was in the interest of states to pursue ‘not the maximum extension of one’s territory, but the maximum of people engaged in the arts and manufacturing industry’ as this ‘constitutes the force and wealth of the state.’114 Pagnini’s political vision was reflected by his moral philosophy, where he invoked Hobbes. Referring to Hobbes’s definition of commercium in De Cive (first published in 1642), Pagnini argued that people wanted not only to preserve themselves, but also to obtain profit and glory and possess luxury goods.115 The view that human beings were neither naturally inclined nor easily persuaded politically to act in markets geared only towards the preservation of the human race was clearly incompatible with the ideas of writers like Neri, since it led to gold and silver being recognised as luxury goods with a value independent of their use as money. This insight undermined the validity of the critiques of devaluation that writers like Neri put forward, as well as their notions of luxury and their general political views (as well as Neri’s proposal for an Italian monetary union).116 Some participants in this Italian debate recognised these differences as obstacles to integrating defences of honest markets and critiques of aggressive markets with a proper theory of the value of money.117 It was even admitted by one of them that Locke’s theory was chimerical and failed to explain how money, as a ‘human invention [invenzione umana],’ functioned so perfectly and had such creative powers that it managed to transform ‘the primitive state of mankind [lo stato primitivo dell’uman genere]’ into ‘the cultured and proper state [stato culto 113 Ibid., 273–4. 114 Ibid., 276 115 Pagnini, ‘Giusto Pregio delle Cose,’ 162; Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Howard Warrender, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1642]), 1:2. 116 Thus, Pagnini compared Locke’s and Pufendorf’s theories of money with Aristotle’s and showed that not much theoretical progress had been made (Pagnini, ‘Giusto Pregio delle Cose,’ 181–3). 117 Gianrinaldo Carli, who was also a Lombard government official and a supporter of Neri’s monetary views, judged that it would be impossible to reconcile Dutot’s ideas and Melon’s as he claimed Forbonnais had tried to do. Quoted by Venturi, ‘Il dibattito sulle monete,’ 461. Carli seems a much more interesting figure than has hitherto been recognised. For a brief account in English of Carli’s career and his views on money see Stapelbroek, ‘The Devaluation Controversy in Eighteenth-Century Italy,’ 88–91. In Italian see Antonio Trampus, ‘L’illuminismo e la “nuova politica” nel tardo settecento italiano: L’uomo libero di Gianrinaldo Carli,’ Rivista Storica Italiana 106[1] (1994), 42–114 and Venturi’s seminal account of the dispute with Verri in ‘L’Italia dei lumi,’ Settecento riformatore V/1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1989).

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e pulito] in which we now live.’118 No one claimed to have a good alternative explanation. Evaluating the positions adopted by all the Italian writers on money in the early 1750s, Neri commented that Galiani was the only one who ‘defended Melon’s sentiments on arbitrary devaluations of the price of money against the by now common opinion.’119 He was puzzled by how Galiani’s theoretical position on money and commerce, which he believed did not significantly ‘disagree with the common opinion,’ could be coherent with his tolerance towards Melon.120 In the same vein, Girolamo Costantini, another Italian writer, declared: ‘I am convinced that any … follower of the opinion of Melon, like … the author of … Della moneta … will change sentiment and will eventually subscribe to the sacred and true defence of Locke and Dutot and many other worthy men, both foreigners and Italians.’121 Galiani stood alone in the 1750s Italian debate on money. His outlook on economic policies differed from his contemporaries’, whose ideas about money, the nature of commerce, and financial politics derived from different foundations. Galiani’s contemporaries did not understand how his policy views (which were pro-luxury and not anti-devaluation) could be derived from ideas about commerce which, to them, seemed 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? This question is answered in this study by recognising the project of Della moneta first and foremost as an attempt to shift the moral foundations of enlightened political economy. The Project of ‘Della moneta’ Ferdinando Galiani’s Della moneta was published in 1751 to intervene in the Neapolitan debate on economic reform. Like other Italian works of the time, Della moneta was a reflection on the European debate on finance as an instrument of economic growth politics. Galiani declared

118 Giovannantonio Fabbrini, Dell’indole, qualità naturali, e civili della moneta e De’ Principj istorici e naturali de’ contratti (Rome, 1750), 11, 14; also quoted by Venturi, ‘Il dibattito sulle monete,’ 446. 119 Neri, ‘Prezzo legale delle monete,’ 366–7. 120 Ibid., 367. 121 Quoted by Venturi, ‘Il dibattito sulle monete,’ 517.

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himself to be fully in accordance with the project that nowadays is called enlightened political economy, yet in stark contrast to his Italian contemporaries he singled out Jean-François Melon, rather than Locke, as the person who had contributed most to this project. Of those who have dealt with the subject of money, only the author of the Saggio sul commercio, believed to be signor Melon, a man of great genius and a truly honest and virtuous mind, has distinguished himself. But even he has failed to provide any proofs for the truths he has taught in his work. Hence, he has been followed less than all others, despite the superior quality of his work, which was read only to be confuted, by people whom heaven denied the sharpness of mind to understand it.122

Galiani understood that Melon’s Essai politique sur le commerce was the fruit of an analysis of how France could overcome the enduring negative effects of seventeenth-century politics on the state’s finances. Melon had reconsidered what went wrong under Louis XIV and drew the conclusion that Colbert’s pro-luxury policies were not the cause, but rather mitigated the disastrous effects of Louis’s territorial policies. Melon argued that modern forms of imperialism as means to increase power and wealth were as self-defeating in the modern world as purely military conquest. Instead, national governments had to focus on their domestic economies. Thus, on Melon’s principles, states in the modern world were much more nearly equal than before, when power still ruled wealth. Their future depended on whether politicians managed to induce a popular ‘spirit of commerce [l’esprit du commerce].’ Melon also made clear that commercial development required decisions about its direction. In his view the supply of agricultural goods was the basis of any national economy. But because the growth of agricultural productivity was related to natural resources and therefore strictly limited, it could not be the foundation of a exceptionally wealthy state. In the modern world, competition between states revolved around the productivity increases and technological development of manufacturing industries. Such competition inevitably caused luxury and inequality within societies. Furthermore, to lift France out of its dire debt situation and boost economic growth, Melon proposed a devaluation of the currency. Such

122 Galiani, Della moneta, 13.

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an interventionist proposal reminded many of Colbert’s policies. This, in combination with his defence of luxury, meant that it was no surprise that Melon was seen across Europe as a neo-Colbertist in the worst sense of the word. Critics, initially Dutot and Pâris-Duverney, regarded his policy views as favouring the outright manipulation of people’s capacities to provide for their subsistence. Della moneta intervened in the moral debate about luxury and modern commerce in which Melon was severely criticised by Galiani’s Italian contemporaries. According to Galiani, Melon’s main fault was that he had not demonstrated how his politics derived from a basic perspective on the nature of commerce. Therefore, as well as to correct some of Melon’s technical positions, Galiani set out to provide a fundamental analysis of people’s commercial behaviour in relation to the nature of money. On this analysis Galiani built a theory of economic development and a set of views concerning financial politics that addressed his Neapolitan audience. In the Preface to Della moneta Galiani claimed that developing the ‘science of money,’ rather than spouting frivolous knowledge of useless facts, was true wisdom.123 Expressing himself in enlightened language, Galiani indicated that the objective of Della moneta was to ground the ‘more necessary sciences’ of society on solid philosophical views, just as Socrates had ‘revived interest in philosophy, applying it to human life.’ By way of this contrast he questioned the competence of Neapolitan reformers who were ‘regarded as worthy of assuming leadership over others.’ In order to fundamentally correct their errors, Galiani meant to provide the means for improving the ‘art of government [l’arte del governo],’ which had always been based on historical fact and was aimed, ‘unfortunately,’ at counselling ‘princes in the arts of acquiring and maintaining empires’ instead of those ‘which would render their subjects happy and more readily obedient.’124 Carrying out this enlightened project required a major reconsideration of the Neapolitan debate on commerce and morality that had taken place in the decades before the publication of Della moneta.

123 Ibid., 12: ‘It is somewhat bewildering and most difficult to explain why men devoted to the cultivation of the mind, men who have eagerly wished to be thought of as wise and virtuous, are growing useless to human society. As though they were not a part of that society they have devoted themselves to a variety of studies and to a life of the sort in which they are anything but useful, either to themselves or to others.’ 124 Ibid., 13.

2 Celestino Galiani: The Moral Power of Commerce

Rome and Naples A few scribbles on a piece of paper attached to Celestino Galiani’s main manuscript indicate the nature of the challenge that he found himself confronted with during the first decades of the eighteenth century. Celestino explicitly referred to Pierre Bayle’s famous Dictionnaire and wrote that ‘the true principle of our customs [costumi] lies so little in the speculative judgements [giudizi speculativi] that we form out of the nature of things, that there is nothing more common than seeing orthodox Christians who live badly and Libertine spirits who live well.’1 Here, Celestino did not revert to atheism, but acknowledged that Christian theology had developed dogmas about morality that did not take into account the way in which human beings actually developed virtues and vices. Celestino’s objective was to strengthen Christian ideas of morality and to neutralise Bayle’s attack on theology. In order to avoid Bayle’s scepticism and save the privileged relation between morality and Christianity, Celestino instead turned to moral philosophy and sought to

1 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 63r. For a different interpretation of the same phrase see Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment (Atlantic Highlands, NJ : Humanities Press, 1995), 170. The importance of Bayle for Italian writers was first argued by Eugenio Garin, ‘Per una storia dei rapporti fra Bayle e l’Italia,’ in Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo. Studi e ricerche (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1970), 157–72. Relations between Vico and Bayle are briefly discussed in both the previous and the following chapters. Eluggero Pii, ‘Bayle e la cultura napoletana intorno al 1750,’ Il Pensiero Politico, 5[3] (1972), 509–16 very interestingly shows the lasting influence of Bayle in Neapolitan debates on sociability.

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redefine the relations between religion, morality, human knowledge, and the historical development of sociable behaviour in general. Here he joined one of the major intellectual fields of the time, to which the most distinguished thinkers across Europe, notably in England and France, contributed.2 The core of this chapter is a discussion of the lengthy manuscript, entitled Ricerche intorno alle prime origini della scienza morale,3 which forms Celestino Galiani’s response to the problem of explaining the sociable

2 British moral philosophy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was in many ways a discussion with Locke. Authors like Cudworth, the Cambridge Platonists, and Shaftesbury criticised Locke for devising morality as merely a way of constraining ‘animal selfish passions’ (Cudworth, quoted by Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ 1640–1740 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 176), instead of a type of self-government. On the other hand, Cumberland and Hutcheson saw society as sustained by people’s passive perception of moral motives that were directly obligating. In contrast to both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, the two most famous moral sense philosophers, Celestino Galiani construed moral obligation in society as ensuing from interactions between people, as a consequence of which societies had self-correcting and self-balancing properties. See, for an overview of and more specific references to these British debates: Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought,’ Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and, in a more historical way, István Hont, ‘Luxury and Commerce,’ in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. M. Goldie and R. Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 379–418. 3 Celestino Galiani, Ricerche intorno alle prime origini della scienza morale, BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 1r–101r. This manuscript is a later version of xxx1.b.1, ff. 174r–266r. It includes the interlinear corrections included in the latter text. The sheets following f. 62 in xxx.c.16 are a set of short discussions of various moral subjects, most of which touch upon the subject of moral freedom and the will. On the nature of human morality there is also another manuscript by Celestino (BSNSP, xxx.d.2, ff. 69r–74v), entitled Schediasmata delle morali scienze (which was also noted by Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 320). In the pages of the main manuscript xxx.c.16 the pagination (which was added to the pages when the texts were put together in the bands currently preserved by the BSNSP) jumps from 43r back to 34v and then continues. In this chapter, I refer to the main pagination and indicate [bis] when quotes can be found in the second section of folios 34 to 43. Here I follow Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, who discusses the same issues on 320–1 (footnote 25). In contrast to Ferrone’s short references to Celestino’s work in the main text of his book as a ‘moral science,’ I will not use this phrase. The reason is that in the manuscript the phrase scienza morale is used by Celestino, on the first page for example, in the meaning of ‘moral knowledge’ or ‘moral understanding,’ rather than ‘moral science.’

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nature of man. The text most probably stems from the first decades of the eighteenth century in Rome, before Celestino was appointed to the post of Cappelano maggiore in 1732.4 The manuscript presents Celestino’s view of sociability in the form of a conjectural history of mankind. Through this history he sought to disprove the ideas of those who insisted that modern commercial society was the expression of man’s natural selfishness. Instead, he found that modern commercial society had to be understood as the product of a complex interplay between man’s continuously developing physical and intellectual needs. Firmly embedding his moral philosophy in a number of digressions into the fields of moral theology, natural philosophy, and quite technical epistemological issues, Celestino Galiani shaped a Christian moral philosophical justification of commercial society as the realisation of God’s plan of Creation. I will briefly show the intellectual context from which Celestino’s manuscript emerged and suggest how this text may have provided the foundations for his later concern with Neapolitan economic development as well as his reform of the Neapolitan education system. Born poor, in a small village in the east-coast countryside of southern Italy, Nicola Simone Agostino Galiani became a monk in the congregation of the Celestines. In 1701, at the age of twenty, the young man, now named Celestino Galiani, enrolled as a student at the monastery of Sant’Eusebio in Rome, where he dedicated himself to the study of natural philosophy, theology, classical languages, and biblical exegesis.5 His

4 The form of the manuscript (a text with sets of notes and small essays added at the end) gives the impression that this was a work in progress that was still to be finished at some point. Because it is known from Ferrone’s study of Celestino’s career, also through his correspondence, that in the first years of the eighteenth century Celestino’s activities were concentrated on the fields of moral theology and natural science, it seems likely that he started his project on understanding the nature of morality around 1710 and that it evolved, say until his move to Naples in 1732. Looking at Celestino’s correspondence and the content of his manuscript entitled Animadversiones physis (BSNSP, xxx.d.5., ff. 1r–40v), Ferrone’s dating of the text on morality is a reasonable hypothesis (see The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 321). Ferrone’s claim that the manuscript also circulated among friends and colleagues of Celestino is not supported by evidence. 5 Celestino’s life and career are described by Fausto Nicolini in Monsignor Celestino Galiani, saggio biografico (Naples: Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, 1931); Un grande educatore italiano, Celestino Galiani (Naples: Giannini, 1951); and ‘Su taluni rapporti di cultura tra l’Italia, l’Olanda e l’Inghilterra al principio del settecento: da lettere inedite di Gugliemo Burnet, Gugliemo Giacobbe ’s Gravesande, Tomasso Johnson e Celestino Galiani,’ Archivio storico per le province napoletane (1930). His philosophical development and network are focused on by Ferrone’s richly detailed The Intellectual Roots of the

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first academic positions were in moral theology and ecclesiastic history. Through his interest in natural philosophy, science, and mathematics, he was especially attracted to the works of Descartes. Comparing these with the ‘meaningless words and occult qualities of the Aristotelians,’ he felt he ‘had escaped from a dark prison and begun to enjoy the light of the sun.’6 Cartesian metaphysics, Celestino experienced, opened up new approaches to scientific, epistemological, and moral philosophical issues. Yet Celestino soon rejected Cartesianism and started concentrating on works by Newton and his followers (such as Samuel Clarke, William Derham, and George Cheyne, whose clandestine publication in Naples he supported) as well as on Locke’s philosophy. From this period stem most of the manuscripts by Celestino’s hand that are still extant.7

Italian Enlightenment, 7–13, 18–22, 56–82, 122–82. Interestingly, Celestino’s own rather detached and sometimes apparently stylised account of his own life in the manuscript entitled Ristretto della vita di Celestino Galiani (BSNSP, xxix.c.7) was recently published by Maria Natale accompanied by her introduction, ‘Ecletticismo teoretico e pragmatismo, alle origini delle riforme illuministiche. L’autobiografia di Celestino Galiani,’ Frontiera d’Europa (2002/1), 115–219, and her final remarks, which echo Ajello’s and Imma Ascione’s views on the origins of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, in ‘Notazioni integrative: continuità degli orientamenti empiristici da F. d’Andrea a C. Galiani,’ Frontiera d’Europa (2002/2), 5–78. Finally, Ferdinando Galiani, on the basis of this manuscript, had started to write a work, presumably in the mid-1750s, in honour of his uncle, which had as its working title Vita di Celestino Galiani tratta dalle memorie da lui stesso lasciate e distesa da Ferd.o Galiano suo nipote (BSNSP, xxxi.c.8, ff. 65v–68v). 6 Quoted by Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 125. 7 Besides the manuscripts mentioned already, a great number of early works, presumably from the 1710s, are collected in BSNSP, xxx.d.2. These include natural philosophical texts such as Osservazioni sopra il libro del Newton, intitolato ‘Principia Matematica’; Differenze tra le scoperte di Newton e l’ipotesi cartesiana; De gravitate; Osservazioni al Discourse de la cause de la pesanteur di Cristiano Hugenio stampato a Leida 1690; Epistola de gravitate et cartesianis vortibus; as well as historical theological works such as Excerpta ex Hugoni Grotii notis; De Aegyptiorum origine; Excerpta ex dissertationibus Clerici de lingua hebraica, auctore Pentateuchi et S. Scripturae interprete; Observationes in Genesim et alias quattuor Moysis libros; Dimostrazione dell’errore della pasqua dell’anno 1700; Chronologiae elementa; and historical notes such as Notizie ricavate dalla storia del Regno d’Italia del Sigonio; Estratto della storia del Guiccardini. A different volume (BSNSP, xxx.d.5) contains, besides the earlier version of the manuscript on morality, another natural philosophical work, the Animadversiones nonnullae circa opticem Isaaci Neutoni. The volume BSNSP, xxxi.b1 has a number of essays apparently written in the context of Neapolitan policy discussions: Rappresentazione per la causa delle controversie cinesi, Parere teologico sopra alcuni punti appartenenti all’introduzione degli ebrei ne’ due Regni di Napoli e Sicilia. Finally the BSNSP preserves a host of letters, mainly from Celestino’s Roman decades. For an impression of Celestino’s correspondence see Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment.

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They represent Celestino’s turn from his earlier moral theological writings to his discovery and maturing understanding of Newtonian natural philosophy. At this stage, Celestino’s interests turned towards understanding the sociable nature of man. The manner in which Celestino cultivated his ideas in this field can be gleaned from the notes of lectures given at Sant’Eusebio and before the Accademia Gualtieri, which was founded under the patronage of Cardinal Filippo Gualtieri.8 These lecture notes were kept together by Celestino as a collection of papers called Animadversiones physis.9 In these texts, put in the form of chapters, Celestino for the first time explored the relationships between pleasure and pain and God’s law of nature, taking hints from Gassendi and Locke. By 1720 Celestino had grown out of the intellectual environment in which he started his natural philosophical investigations and had become the main representative in Europe of Italian scientific culture.10 He had now collaborated with famous international philosophical journals and was in contact with the Royal Society and Europe’s most prominent natural philosophers. In the earliest decades of the eighteenth century Celestino could only have risen to this status in Rome, which at the time was Italy’s one main intellectual centre. Until the moment he wrote his manuscript on moral philosophy, his intellectual development, too, was very much the product of the Roman academic ambience. Celestino’s development of new interests went along with his emancipation from this environment. Since 1708 Celestino had maintained contacts with Neapolitan scholars and through them he kept in close touch with the academic culture of the south.11 As a result of the political instability and the pressure that

8 Ibid., 30–1, 125–6. For the intellectual environment in papal Rome in the eighteenth century and the manner in which it specifically influenced reform discussions, see Hans Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 254–5; Alberto Caracciolo, Domenico Passionei tra Roma e la repubblica delle lettere (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1968), and Luigi Dal Pane, Lo stato pontificio e il movimento riformatore del Settecento (Milan: Giuffrè, 1959). 9 Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 126–9. The Animadversiones physis are in BSNSP, xxx.d.5, 1r–40v. 10 Montesquieu, for example, recognised Celestino Galiani as one of the ‘leading savants of Italy’ (Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 320). 11 Raffaele Ajello, ‘Cartesianismo e cultura oltremontana,’ in Pietro Giannone ed il suo tempo, ed. Raffaele Ajello (Naples: Jovene, 1980), 1–181 shows the character of the interplay between Roman and Neapolitan political, philosophical, and scientific issues as well as Italian academic networks in the first decades of the eighteenth century.

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was exerted on academics in Rome by Church authorities, the balance between the intellectual centre Rome and the academically peripheral Naples changed. Naples became more and more a haven for academics from elsewhere and quickly developed a flourishing publishing culture. Among Celestino’s contacts in Naples was Bartolomeo Intieri. Together they were the driving force behind the publication of Gassendi’s collected works in Florence in 1727. This was a major public statement that went along with the spread in Italy of new British and French works in the field of moral philosophy. The message of the publication, which featured prominently in the general preface by the anonymous editors, was that morality could not be grounded on the presupposition of a human capacity for self-denial.12 By supporting this modern version of Epicureanism, certain Italian scholars allowed self-interest to be part of their perspectives on the nature of morality, which were also Christian.13 When in 1732 Celestino Galiani was appointed Cappellano maggiore he entered a new career. As one of Italy’s most respected scholars, and because Neapolitan parties could not agree on anyone from Naples, he became the most powerful person in its intellectual life. Before his move he was already an influential ecclesiastic in Rome. In the years following his appointment Celestino became a prominent figure in Neapolitan politics.14 Besides being the leading figure to decide on the direction of the educational system, he was also a keen follower of political and economic reform debates across Europe. Celestino’s respectable political reputation in Naples was made by his diplomatic activities in the negotiations between the Vatican and the Austrians over southern Italy’s tribunals and its legal independence. These negotiations started in 1725 and were finally concluded in 1741. When Naples became independent, two years after Celestino’s inauguration as Cappelano maggiore, he was one of the few civil servants asked to stay in office by the King.

12 Pierre Gassendi, Opera omnia (Florence, 1727), v. 13 See also Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 56–61. For an idea of how the moral philosophy of Gassendi related to contemporary ideas and why it was attractive to Italian intellectuals see Fred S. Michael and Emily Michael, ‘Gassendi’s Modified Epicureanism and British Moral Philosophy,’ History of European Ideas, 21[6] (1995), 743–61 and Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 14 This was suggested by Ajello throughout his oeuvre. Recently manuscripts have been found in the Neapolitan Archivio nazionale by colleagues of Ajello that apparently strongly support this claim. They are due to be published in the journal Frontiera d’Europa.

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Immediately following his appointment Celestino started a major academic reform programme.15 The purpose of this reform of the educational system in Naples was to pave the way for the country’s economic development by modernising its academic institutions and creating an environment in which knowledge would be directed much more effectively towards the good of the country. In fact, Celestino’s intellectual reforms might be seen as an indirect application of his theory of the history of society and the development of human knowledge of the laws of nature in his late 1720s manuscript on moral philosophy. Through his reform programme and his influence on Neapolitan politics, Celestino promoted a vision of how economically and militarily weak states, like Naples, could survive under the current conditions of European international politics. Whereas Doria and the leaders of the Neapolitan reform movement under the Austrians rejected luxury and modern commerce and ruled out the idea that the newly independent Naples could enter the arena of international trade other than through strong protection of its domestic economy, Celestino, together with Bartolomeo Intieri, came to the opposite conclusion. Following the publication of the various editions of Jean-François Melon’s Essai politique sur le commerce on the foundations of modern political economy in the mid-1730s, Celestino and Intieri had intense discussions on monetary and economic theory and the political measures needed to strengthen the Neapolitan economy. Both hailed Melon’s Essai politique as providing key guidelines for how the Neapolitan economy and its foreign trade could be developed securely. As Intieri wrote to Celestino, ‘you know better than I with what wisdom this book was written.’16 A series of Intieri’s letters to Celestino from the late 1730s shows how greatly indebted their thinking about the future of the Neapolitan economy was to Melon’s ideas.17 The central message of Melon’s work, they realised, was that any politics of conquest was self-defeating. What was decisive in the modern age for establishing and maintaining a state’s political power was the construction of a set of solid domestic economic policies that encouraged industry and drew wealth to the country through trade. Thus, Intieri hoped to persuade the government of

15 See chapter 1. 16 Letter from Intieri to Celestino, 4 October 1738, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 3v. 17 BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, ff. 1r–43r. The correspondence between Intieri and Celestino is forthcoming in publication by Raffaele Ajello and Liliana Palmese.

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Naples that ‘one could not live comfortably … without mixing with the other nations.’18 On that principle, Celestino and Intieri understood, Naples had to try to consolidate its political independence in the modern world. Melon’s Essai politique was used in particular by Intieri in order to develop his ideas on the ‘science of commerce [la scienza del commercio].’ Convinced by Melon’s views, Intieri made a clear choice about how the Neapolitan commercial potential, which he believed was huge,19 could be realised. Intieri rejected development projects initiated by the state and protection of the domestic economy. He could understand that ‘the world desired novelties [novità]’ (after independence the people wanted changes), and that Montealegre, who was loved by everyone, satisfied this desire with his reform programmes.20 But it was generally recognised that the projects carried out at the time, between 1738 and 1746, did not work. While this did not surprise Intieri, who did not believe in large-scale reforms, he was disappointed in those who he felt were responsible for directing the state’s commercial politics. Intieri complained that Neapolitan government advisors ignored the French debate on commercial politics set in motion by Melon and that members of the Giunta del Commercio were incompetent in economic affairs.21 Intieri paid close attention to the mechanisms governing a state’s commercial system and investigated how foreign trade was generated. He used Melon’s insights into the relation between technological innovation and the development of prices of manufactured, luxury, and agricultural goods, and concluded that there were specific circumstances under which an underdeveloped country’s agricultural development would take off and generate new industries. When this started to happen in a country, the allocation of labour would shift from basic to more

18 As he wrote to Antonio Cocchi, as late as 1752; see Franco Venturi, ‘Alle origini dell’illuminismo napoletano, dal carteggio di Bartolomeo Intieri,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 71[2] (1959), 433–4. 19 Intieri was ‘fully convinced of the happy wealth of the Kingdom’ and believed its inhabitants were ‘capable of everything and extremely talented,’ letter to Celestino Galiani, 11 October 1738, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 5r. According to Intieri it had been observed by political thinkers from other countries too that the regno diprezzato, once its economic potential was developed, could make a bella figura in Europe. Letter to Celestino Galiani, 13 January 1739, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 25r. 20 Letter to Celestino Galiani, 27 December 1738, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 21r. 21 Letter to Celestino Galiani, 13 January 1739, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 25r.

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advanced forms of industry. This growth process would be unlimited and economic underdevelopment and institutional abuses would disappear automatically as a result of the changes in society. Because such a truly modern economy was a system in which the dynamic of agricultural productivity was linked to the state of its manufacturing industry, luxury played an integral role. Intieri was genuinely excited about the power of Melon’s argument about luxury and economic growth. He sent a set of transcriptions from Melon’s chapter on luxury in the Essai politique to Celestino with one of his letters.22 When Intieri read Voltaire’s famous letter about Law, Melon, and Dutot, he judged that even Voltaire had failed to recognise Melon’s merits.23 Melon’s Essai politique provided Intieri with a framework for identifying what would really create commercial development. Instead of favouring a set of extensive institutional and legal reforms and the establishment of a trade company, Intieri agreed with Melon in arguing for the liberalisation of the grain trade. Abundance of grain that could not be sold abroad led to lower domestic prices and to negligence of its production, so that in a bad year the country was prone to dearths and famines. For Intieri, this argument was the touchstone of Melon’s genius: ‘Mr Melon wisely writes that … abundance is more frightening than famine.’24 Intieri saw the government of the country’s agricultural sector as the key to a modern economy. If the grain trade ‘were to be freed from the many obstacles that it has’ and ‘the prince facilitated transportation to the sea by building safe and comfortable roads,’ Naples would not only stop importing grain from Poland and England, but would also be able to supply the whole of Italy.25 Intieri identified the antiquated grain tax system as the main disorder that prevented the modernisation of Neapolitan agriculture.26 Intieri also sent Celestino a number of technical accounts of the state of the Neapolitan economy. He analysed fluctuations of the exchange

22 Letter to Celestino Galiani, 30 December 1738, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, ff. 23r–24v. 23 Letter to Celestino Galiani, 11 November 1738, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 12. Intieri himself was convinced that there was a wide gap between the quality of Dutot’s and Melon’s works on money because Melon was simply the ‘man of more profound wisdom [l’uomo di piú profondo sapere],’ as he wrote to Celestino, 30 December 1738, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 23r. 24 Letter to Celestino Galiani, 25 January 1739, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 27v. 25 Letter to Celestino Galiani, 31 January 1739, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 30v. 26 Letter to Celestino Galiani, 31 January 1739, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 30v.

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rate and the balance of trade,27 made observations on the apparent scarcity of money in the country,28 and started to list demographic figures to calculate the development of the country’s population in relation to the economic productivity of the capital and the country.29 Intieri also wrote to Celestino about the subject of devaluation (alzamento), which Melon had discussed in the most controversial parts of his Essai politique. Intieri used Melon’s ideas to judge the Neapolitan alzamento that had been carried out in 1691 by the Count of San Stefano and that had been rejected, unjustly according to Intieri, by his predecessor the Marquis del Carpio.30 The style and the conclusions of Intieri’s analysis anticipate Ferdinando Galiani’s treatment of the subject in Della moneta.31 Celestino encouraged Intieri to develop his arguments about commercial politics, but was not an unconditional follower of Melon. At least a decade before he and Intieri enthusiastically welcomed Melon’s views on political economy, Celestino had developed his own perspective on the moral and epistemological foundations of commercial development. Celestino Galiani’s understanding of the nature of morality would be a crucial stepping-stone for Ferdinando in constructing the foundations of Della moneta, to the point of anticipating Ferdinando Galiani’s project of restructuring the moral foundations of modern commercial politics. Needs versus Society Celestino’s Ricerche intorno alle prime origini della scienza morale started with an assertion: ‘I have always believed that in order to understand well which aspects of moral understanding [scienza morale] derive from nature and which from human institutions [dall’istituzione degli uomini]’ it is useful to ‘consider man in his primitive state [nel suo primitivo stato].’32 Celestino wanted to make sure he explained morality historically, as a modification of human nature. This way he avoided laying too much emphasis on the role of natural necessity, or the role of human effort; either approach to explaining morality would lead to human

27 28 29 30 31 32

Letter to Celestino Galiani, 17 June 1741, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 40r. Letter to Celestino Galiani, 16 December 1739, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 19v. Letter to Celestino Galiani, 14 April 1739, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f. 39rv. Letter to Celestino Galiani, 29 November 1738, BSNSP, xxxi.a.7, f.15r. See chapter 5. BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 1r.

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behaviour in modern market societies (which were the products of the development of ‘commerce’) being understood as a manifestation of people’s natural selfishness. Consequently, ‘commercial’ morality would necessarily have to be false and artificial. This gave radical Christian moralists such as Fénelon and, in Naples, Doria reasons to draw attention to the moral depravity of modern market societies and argue that these anomalous outgrowths of human nature had to be cut back through political reforms. On the other hand, if modern commerce was indeed artificial and not bound by any rules or limits deriving from any truly moral propensity that was part of people’s market behaviour, political economy could also be treated as an instrument of power politics that held unlimited potential to boost the wealth of states by directing people’s unbridled natural greed. This was what modern Epicureans like Mandeville were generally thought to justify. If, however, it could be shown that modern society functioned according to its own laws and set its own moral limits to people’s actions as well as to politics, it would be possible to criticise both the moral legitimacy and the political efficacy of the latter Epicurean view, while at once correcting the former view of radical Christian moralism. That was Celestino’s objective. A requirement for establishing such an argument was to show that the progress of forms of social interaction itself went along with the creation of moral ideas. This issue of progress is central to Celestino’s manuscript. Here Celestino enters the debate on free will and necessity. In a number of pages that he kept with his unfinished manuscript about scienza morale he separately developed his views on precisely this issue. Celestino concluded that only if man determined his own actions could they be said to be free and have a moral dimension. For an action to be free [libera] it is not sufficient that it depends on my will [mia volontà] and that I do it because I want it. It is also necessary that I determine myself to want it, and that I determine myself in such a way that I could equally determine myself to not want it.33

Thus, according to Celestino, the development of society and morality had to be described, in a non-sceptical way, as a process set in motion by human intentions shaped by man himself. Furthermore, Celestino

33 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 73r.

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understood this process of moral self-determination, which directed the development of social ties, as part of a divinely orchestrated plan. Within this plan man did not experience his own moral selfdetermination as a series of deliberations about moral good and evil. Instead, the principle that governed man’s self-determination was simply pleasure (piacere). Things are only called good or bad [buone, o male] in relation to pleasure and pain [al piacere ed al dolore]. We call good everything which is capable of producing and increasing our pleasure, or which diminishes it and shortens our pain … In contrast, we call bad that which produces or increases pain, or diminishes our pleasure.34

According to Celestino, only pleasure could influence man’s actions and motivate him to change his behaviour. So pleasure had to be the motivation for virtue. Celestino set out to develop a theory of morality that fitted with these ideas about liberty and necessity. If the whole of nature operated only according to laws of necessity, ‘there can be no virtue [virtù]’.35 At the same time, the only thing that could motivate man to behave virtuously was pleasure (piacere). For Celestino, reflecting on the issue of liberty and necessity was a preliminary exercise for setting up his theory of society. In his main manuscript he attempted to integrate liberty and necessity through pleasure by way of a pair of oppositions: between nature and history, and between instinct and society. Thus, Celestino proposed a historical model for grasping the underlying logic of the development of societies. A brief comparison with Hobbes’s famous construct of the state of nature is instructive. In De Cive (first published in 1642) Hobbes had denied that society could theoretically be derived from man’s simple self-interested inclinations.36 Criticising the Aristotelian concept of koinonia, Hobbes had argued that, although people were instinctively geared towards benefiting from each other’s company, interactions in the state of nature could only lead to mere ‘meetings’ and not to society. People were just too ‘asocial’ to sustain their natural contacts.

34 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 63r. 35 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 65r. 36 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Howard Warrender, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1642]), 1.2.

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Celestino’s history of mankind opposed Hobbes’s argument that man was not capable of society. Thus, when Celestino put forward his own version of the theoretical artefact of the state of nature he modified the character of Hobbes’s analytical distinction between nature and society. Celestino insisted that modern society had an artificial component, which could not be derived directly from the innate features of human nature. He also believed that the generation of moral notions was a development that was simultaneous with the emergence of societies out of bare human nature. His idea was that the mental mechanisms in man that governed this process determined the course of history in which man’s original moral notions assumed new forms along with the development of new social configurations. Consequently, if one wanted to understand the moral foundations of modern societies, what had to be explained was the way in which history floated on the emergence and modification of moral ideas. In the first pages of his manuscript Celestino employed the concept of the state of nature in the form of a technical thought experiment. Its starting point was a completely empty man, a big baby, who wakes up after having ‘fallen from the clouds.’ Celestino’s method was to ‘observe’ this primitive man and determine the ultimate causes of his moral and social evolution. The purpose was to trace the ‘progress [progresso] of his ideas and cognitions [cognizioni] as well as of his customs and moral understanding [ne’ costumi e nella scienza morale].’37 Consequently, Celestino claimed, it would be possible to delineate the defining characteristics of morality through distinguishing its two ‘aspects’ – man’s natural capacities and his acquired behavioural features. Celestino’s immediate assertion that the distinction between these two components of morality was the essential object of his inquiry directed his audience’s attention to the question of whether the sources of sociability were reducible to natural instincts and clearly suggested that this was not the case. Celestino substantiated his suggestion by further developing his antiHobbesian version of the theoretical construct of the state of nature. Hobbes had described natural man as an active utility-seeking and honour-seeking creature who was naturally motivated to interact with his fellows, but simply incapable of it. According to Hobbes, human nature was geared towards ‘competition,’ ‘diffidence,’ and ‘glory’ by using

37 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 1r.

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reason.38 Celestino’s version of the theoretical artefact of the state of nature was more restrictive on man’s natural capacities than Hobbes’s. Celestino also rejected the idea that natural self-interested action could be taken for the basis of society. He believed that primitive man only responded to the mechanical promptings of the most fundamental selfinterested needs. In contrast with Hobbes, Celestino described natural man as psychologically isolated from other human beings and neither capable of the notion of honour nor positively inclined to utility-seeking. By concentrating exclusively on what he believed could be considered man’s natural instincts, Celestino developed a concept of selfpreservation which denied man any innate ideas.39 The protagonist of Celestino’s history initially lacks everything, even thought and selfawareness. Then he opens his eyes: ‘now he sees the sun, the earth that supports him, the trees.’40 These visual sensations are interrupted by basic physical discomfort: ‘while our man is completely astonished admiring these different new things, hunger makes itself known and afflicts him. What does he do? … We see that nature is his teacher.’ Guided by his taste, primitive man tries to fill his stomach and after having tried to put things like soil in his mouth, he finds apples, which gratify his taste. The same thing happens with thirst. Overcome by the dark at the end of that same day, he lies on the ground, where sleep surprises him and leads him to another day.41 In this way, ‘without any other guide than nature and his brief experience, his knowledge expands and he provides his self-preservation [conservarsi] by evading, as much as he can, any pain, and by procuring pleasure.’42 Self-preservation is guided by blunt mechanisms of necessity, as is every human progress at this point. After satisfying hunger and thirst, Celestino’s man experiences cold and finds himself getting out of the way when his path is crossed by a viper. Then a woman appears on the scene, having ‘freshly come down to earth.’ Man and woman are overcome by ‘that secret instinct of nature’

38 Ch. 13 of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 [1651]), 88. 39 Celestino used the language of sensation and reflection inspired by John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 40 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 2rv. 41 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 2v–3v. 42 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 4v.

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and start a family. Instinctively they recognise their baby as their own.43 On Celestino’s account this state of cohabitation gives rise to ‘the necessity of speech.’44 The faculty of language is awakened automatically by the emergence of the fully natural entity of the family. Up to this point the only good and bad that man could feel was physical. When man ate too many apples, his stomach hurt. Yet, he did not have any notion of vice (vizio) or virtue (virtù).45 It was, for example, impossible for primitive man to understand or feel the moral depravity of sleeping with more than one woman.46 People also did not have any ‘laws and any form of government’ and still lived in ‘total independence’ of each other, without institutions like ‘property of goods [proprietà de’ beni]’ or inequality.47 On the contrary, man’s life was dominated exclusively by sensations of physical good and bad. He was encased by blunt mechanisms of necessity that made up a stable and static sphere of which he himself was only a passive part. The ultimate limits of man’s natural capacities were reached with the natural family. The static character of primitive needs prevented man from developing moral notions: ‘since he did not deal with anyone else, he could not have ideas of those virtues and vices.’48 Bare nature did not provide any ideas of virtue and vice.49 The natural society of the family was not a society, it was an instinctively initiated and operated aggregation of mechanisms of need satisfaction. Primitive man had to develop more extensive societies in order psychologically to be able to develop moral notions. These elaborations on man’s ‘asocial’ nature signified Celestino’s rejection of a major strand in post-Hobbesian moral philosophy. Thinkers as diverse as the Lutheran natural lawyer, Pufendorf, French neo-Augustinians like Pierre Nicole, and the Anglo-Dutch sceptical publicist Mandeville devised theories of how natural ‘meetings’ evolved into utility-based societies. To rehabilitate the idea of a sustainable Aristotelian koinonia that existed independently from political unity, they modified Hobbes’s concept of man’s innate drive for honour into a principle of society by turning it into a force of mutual understanding,

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 5r–6r. BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 6r, 8v and 18r. BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 9rv. BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 6v. BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 7v. BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 8v. BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 6v–10r.

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rather than of explosive discord. If people naturally wanted to be admired by others, they had to be able to understand what the other approved of and act accordingly. People acted honestly, but were not driven by honest motives. From Celestino’s point of view, such ideas were opposed to any concept of the law of nature because they necessarily destroyed all possible separations of moral from natural good and bad. Every aspect of this morality could always be traced back fully to selfish considerations of personal utility.50 Celestino’s version of the state of nature represented his refusal to accept this post-Hobbesian utility-based conception of society. Thus, in the first pages of his manuscript Celestino created a setting for his own ideas of scienza morale by presupposing that the properties of man’s nature had very limited creative potential. Natural man was guided by mere instincts such as hunger and thirst, and the functioning of his basic passions alone could not explain human development beyond the level of the natural family. In other words, Celestino did not believe that society was an extrapolation of the naturally sociable family. The principle of self-preservation that was supposed to be the initial driving force behind this process was far too static and asocial to fuel such a social process. On this view of human nature, it was impossible for societies to emerge as products of continuous efforts by people to satisfy their physical needs and desires. How then did society emerge? ‘Commerce’ According to Celestino, the fact that man was not naturally sociable in any strong or immediate sense did not mean that society itself was completely artificial: ‘one cannot deny that man as he is seems made for living

50 See István Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the Four Stages Theory,’ in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. A. Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 253–76, and ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory in the Eighteenth Century: The Problem of Authority in David Hume and Adam Smith,’ in Main Trends in Cultural History, ed. W. Melching and W. Velema (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 54–94. These are two clear accounts of theories of society that were based on utility as were developed mainly in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century. See Kari Saastamoinen, The Morality of the Fallen Man: Samuel Pufendorf on Natural Law (Helsinki: Finnish Historical Society, 1995) for an interesting criticism of the interpretation of the Lutheran Pufendorf as mainly a ‘commercial society’ theorist.

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in society’; ‘from the natural faculties [facoltà naturali] of man appears absolutely that he is made for society [fatto per la società]’; ‘man is by nature a sociable animal [animale sociabile] … he is so by his natural constitution [per sua natural costituzione].’51 In the context of Celestino’s history of mankind these statements carried no specific theoretical meaning, other than that they signalled his belief that the real integrative principle of society, which moral philosophy had to discover, referred to a master plan that governed the evolution of human societies. This master plan manifested itself in reality through the development of what Celestino a few times called ‘commerce [comercio],’ which should be understood as a synonym for different forms of social interaction. Celestino believed that original human nature was to some degree predisposed to society, but that this was insufficient for forming societies. Celestino’s primitive man was capable of appreciating the benefits of instinctive interaction with other people, which led to the pre-social life form of the family. Upon feeling an increase of physical pleasure and a decrease of physical pain, primitive man readily embraced easier ways of satisfying his, and his family’s, direct needs. Celestino observed that man’s physical pleasures increased along with the development of modern civilisation. Celestino depicted a gradual improvement of the human condition from his primitive existence to modern civilisation that encompassed both the state of nature and the state of society. At any point in history, the degree of man’s happiness corresponded to the degree of interaction with other human beings. More interaction meant more happiness. Celestino used the term ‘commerce’ to denote all forms of interaction between people – from coitus to trade – that served to increase human happiness and self-preservation. He saw ‘commerce’ as the manifestation of the unity of mankind. This unity first developed instinctively and necessarily. Without any ‘commerce’ [comercio] among people, not even the one between man and woman, the human species would very soon finish. It is therefore necessary that man and woman unite to preserve the species.52

It was necessary from the way in which God has created man that man would express his sociable nature in his interaction with his fellows. All these interactions were part of ‘commerce.’

51 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 17r–18v. 52 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 16v.

Celestino Galiani: The Moral Power of Commerce 73 It is appropriate to say that such a way of behaving is connected to [man’s] being, [since] without ‘commerce’ [comercio] and society he would yield more bad than good or more pain and uneasiness than pleasure and tranquillity.53

Celestino used his concept of ‘commerce’ to further explain his own distinction between the state of nature and society. Beyond a certain point in history, man’s happiness could only increase in society. In Celestino’s view, society was superior to the state of nature because it made mankind happier. In the state of nature man’s pleasures were strictly limited to the satisfaction of physical needs. But as soon as man became social his physical pleasures increased dramatically. In fact, in society, man’s outlook on the world was entirely different from that in the state of nature. In the post-natural state man was not exclusively focused on ‘the necessities of the body and the needs of life,’ but capable of dedicating himself to discovering ‘the deeper causes of the [pleasurable] effects [of interaction with his fellows] that are clear to him.’54 Compared with his condition in the state of nature, man not only appreciated the physical pleasures of interaction but was also capable of learning about nature, understanding the causes of his pleasures and pains, and using this knowledge to improve his happiness. According to Celestino, the more arts and sciences progressed and society was modernised the more man interacted with his fellows to enhance his well-being. The increase of ‘free time [ozio]’ that resulted from improved economic efficiency stimulated the process, which also explained why primitive tribes like the Iroquois, who had not achieved the modern economic division of labour, had not developed much understanding of the causes of human happiness. But when cities are formed, property of goods [proprietà de’ beni] is introduced, and the most necessary arts for living well are discovered, one frequently finds oneself not having to consider the needs of the body; and while enjoying a tranquil free time, not a few [of the population] can apply themselves to reflection [applicarsi a riflettere] on their own ideas and give birth to the sciences.55

53 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 18r. 54 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 23v–24r. 55 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 24r.

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Celestino believed that the progress of ‘commerce,’ the division of labour, and the rise of inequality liberated humankind from the limitations of simple life, and that the whole development of man’s sociable morality benefited his happiness. Celestino’s message stood in stark contrast with Rousseau’s famous account of the emergence and growth of inequality. According to Rousseau, the process of socialisation that was initiated when man’s animal self-preservation was threatened by external factors spiralled off into a nervous over-development of man’s moral sensitivities, from which ensued a greedy, selfish need for luxury consumption that upset all orders of society. Divine Order Celestino’s academic reform programme of the 1730s triggered Doria’s attack on Celestino through a refutation of Locke’s moral philosophy and epistemology. Doria argued that market interaction perverted the moral foundations of ‘civil life [la vita civile].’ Implicit in Doria’s attack was the accusation that Locke was a hedonistic philosopher whose ideas inspired hedonists, like Celestino, to implement social and political reforms that disfigured the morality of a more natural society. Celestino, indeed, allowed his views of morality to be dominated by ideas of pleasure and pain. However, although Celestino followed the type of approach to understanding the law of nature and morality that Locke had made famous, his ideas also differed from Locke’s on a number of counts.56 Celestino accepted the standard contemporary critique of Locke that had become a general starting point in the British debate for the formulation of new moral theories. Locke had developed the idea that in the absence of innate moral reason, human nature was merely intuitively self-aware and able to demonstrate to itself the existence of God. Subsequently, on Locke’s account, our faculties of ‘sensation’ and ‘reflection’

56 Locke’s ideas also continued to form a reference point in the development of the debate on sociability in Naples. When Antonio Genovesi read Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding he did this through a parallel reading of Doria’s attack on Celestino through Locke. For the dispersion of Locke’s writings in Naples, see Nicoletta De Scisciolo, ‘Presenza lockiana a Napoli tra fine Seicento e inizio Settecento: dagli Investiganti alle eredita genovesiane’, Studi filosofici (1997), 73–111 and Paolo Amadio, ‘La diffusione del pensiero di John Locke a Napoli nell’età di Vico, contributo criticobibliografico,’ Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche (1997), 183–94.

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should ‘lead us to the knowledge of the Creator and the knowledge of our duty.’57 Man’s liberty consisted in his capacity to suspend his physical desires and, while focusing on God and the afterlife, adjust his will to purposively trade earthly pleasures for eternal ones.58 In contrast, the natural reality external to the privileged bond between man and God could become a dangerous distraction. Custom, habits, and opinion potentially corrupted man’s understanding of the world and formed a threat to man’s moral internal ascent to obedience to God.59 In Locke’s view, morality directly involved God, the ‘law-maker.’ The Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) featured a distinction between moral and physical good and bad that had a specifically legal tone.60 Good and evil, as has been shown, are nothing but pleasure or pain, or that which occasions or procures pleasure or pain to us. Morally good and evil, then, is only the conformity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law, whereby good or evil is drawn on us from the will and power of the law-maker; which good and evil, pleasure or pain, attending our observance or breach of the law by the decree of the law-maker, is that we call reward and punishment.61

The ultimate source of moral normativeness, Celestino agreed with Locke, was not man himself, but God. Celestino also adopted the Christian notion that God judges man’s behaviour in the afterlife. Man had to ‘expect and fear rewards and punishment also after his death.’62 But none of this meant that the development of man’s knowledge of morality and the law of nature directly involved God in the way Locke had construed it. Celestino distanced himself from any theory that based the development of moral knowledge on a priori knowledge of

57 See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xxi; also II.xxiii.12, 33, 35. 58 Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought,’ 149–75 gives a clear account of the changes between the first and later editions of Locke’s Essay and describes the transformations of Locke’s concept of liberty in relation to Molyneux’s comments. Darwall explains how in the second edition Locke’s theory technically came to resemble Cudworth’s more than Hobbes’s, while its hedonistic presentation was maintained. 59 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I.iii.6 and I.iii.26 60 Ibid., II.vii.3–4 and II.xx.2; see also II.xxi.42. 61 Ibid., II.xxviii.5. 62 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 23v.

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God. His adoption of the idea of the state of nature, his concept of ‘commerce,’ and his idea that natural self-interested pleasures and pains sustained society were designed to replace any moral theory that located the sources of moral knowledge in a developing bond between man’s moral personality and God’s will. Although God was the source of the law of nature, man could only know that law through nature, not through God: ‘let us forget now what others have thought about [the law of nature] and obtain it from the sources of his own nature [da’ fonti dell’istessa natura] to recover its true idea.’63 Celestino believed that moral obligation had to be explained as ultimately arising from man’s natural sensations and his reflection on them. ‘Therefore, by law of Nature [legge di Natura] we do not mean anything but a law that can be known by contemplation of human nature [contemplazione dell’umana natura].’64 The question was how Celestino could explain how man, once he lived in society, could directly feel ideas of moral good and evil that were irreducible to physical good and evil. God wants and commands that we behave in a certain way, and not in another. And he will reward [premierà] him who acts in the way ordained by him and vice versa will punish [gastigherà] those who behave otherwise. Here we should note that the rewards and punishments need to be different from those conveniences and inconveniences that are connected to our actions by their nature; because if a Ruler ordains that no one should put their hands in the fire at the cost of burning them and feeling pain for those who disobey [disubbidisce], or if he commands his subjects to drink hot chocolate with the promise that they will feel a satisfying and pleasurable sensation for those who will obey [ubbidirà], these orders [ordini], according to the common understanding of the term law, cannot be called laws [legge], because the decree or command of the superior [del superiore] in this case does not have more force inducing subjects to practise or abstain from the mentioned actions, than the one [force] that they themselves exert by their own nature. Therefore, the rewards and punishment have to be different from the pleasure and pain, or from the convenience and inconvenience that actions produce by their very nature.65

63 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 10v. 64 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 10v–11r. 65 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 12rv.

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Celestino believed that if he could show that man in society was capable of feelings of pain and pleasure that were morally laden, he would be able to overcome Locke’s unnecessarily strict distinction between moral and physical good and evil. Locke had argued that man’s acquired moral rationality enabled him to overcome his original natural make-up that was geared towards physical good and evil. This made it possible for man to dedicate himself in various ways to the obedience to different kinds of laws – God’s law, civil law, and the law of society. In contrast with Locke, Celestino argued that man’s capacity for understanding moral good and evil did not regulate his natural pleasure-seeking for the sake of increasing his eternal pleasures and pains, but improved his natural pleasure-seeking. The issue for Celestino was not how man developed a moral character that transcended natural utility-seeking, but how man’s natural pleasure-seeking could have become social and given rise to modern society. It was clear to him that man in the state of nature was absolutely incapable of obeying any law, since he had to live in society in order to be able to understand the very concept of law. Virtue properly considered does not consist in anything else than in the habit [abitudine] or ease [facilità] with which one operates in conformity with certain laws, and vice respectively [consists in operating] contrary to them. And while [primitive man] has no knowledge in that state [of nature] of any law, he can also have no idea of virtue and vice.66

Within Celestino’s system, virtue could not emerge from primitive man’s instinctive relation with nature. Primitive man in the state of nature, ‘since he did not deal with anyone else,’ could not form moral notions and attach them to actions ‘that one carries out in the commerce [comercio] and society with others.’67 While Celestino argued that commercial society reinforced morality, he had clearly denied that morality itself could be triggered by the same motives that inspired commerce – physical pleasure or natural good. The issue was how other kinds of feelings of pleasure and pain had emerged that could inspire and sustain sociable behaviour.

66 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 9v–10r. See also f. 21rv. 67 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 8v.

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Natural Religion The question Celestino tried to answer was this: how had humans first gone beyond their instinctive mechanisms and developed some sort of bond with the outside world? Primitive man had no interests beyond satisfying his physical needs and had no natural drive to satisfy higherorder desires. These only existed in society. Somehow primitive man had to break free from his instinctive drives and develop a capacity for society. According to Celestino, morality first arose when man at some point within the state of nature was ‘not distracted by the necessities of the body and the needs of life.’68 As a consequence of being fully satisfied, and while appreciating his physical good, he would naturally start to reflect on the reasons for his contentment. Out of a natural curiosity, which was awakened at that point, man opened up his self-awareness by noticing the world for the first time as a set of mechanisms that determined his condition. This primitive reflection, in Celestino’s account, did not respond to any questions arising in man about how to sustain the state of complete need satisfaction he enjoyed and that he had achieved either by fully accidental cooperation with his fellow human beings or on his own. It was logically impossible that man should have the required self-awareness that would generate such questions about his utility. Instead, man started observing and reflecting on the world around him in a very different way. Once he was fully satisfied, primitive man started ‘contemplating the things in the universe and their beautiful order [loro bell’ordine],’ through which he became ‘certain of the existence of an eternal mind [una mente eterna] who knows everything’ and who is omnipotent.69 Celestino emphasised that man’s first reflective experiences had to be of a religious nature. He described man’s first religious awareness not as a pure and perfect idea of God, but as a crude and largely undefined emotional response that silenced man’s discomfort with the experience of the greatness of nature in relation to himself. From Celestino’s account it is clear that he did not understand these images of a deity as generated by a religious principle that resided in man, but as improvised responses to the overwhelming impression that the order of

68 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 23v–24r. 69 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 11r.

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nature had on primitive man once he started to appreciate its workings. Subsequently, man could not but place all of the ideas he formed about nature in the context of this initial religious consciousness. Hence, primitive man appreciated the order of the universe in an entirely different way from how he experienced the satisfaction of his physical needs. His automatic responses to experiencing this order were new kinds of pleasures, which were man’s first moral notions. These notions inspired man to form images of the maker he believed was behind the order that gave him these new pleasurable sensations. Therefore, man’s moral notions, initially, were simply the pleasures he felt when he placed his reflective observations about nature in the context of his religious consciousness and memorised them as such. As a result, people became moral as religious beings. Their first moral ideas were composite memories of the pleasures and pains they had internalised by developing images of their relation to God. In this way religion played a crucial role in the emergence of man’s moral faculties, but rather than being itself an independent, revealed source of morality, it was inspired by man’s natural experiences. Consequently, obedience to the law of nature, in direct opposition to Locke’s views on opinion and habits, emerged as a set of behavioural rules that were opinion- and memory-based. Although man had no natural religious instinct, it was inevitable that he would become moral. Celestino saw the emergence of morality as part of the master plan of Creation. The formation of religious ideas was a matter of human freedom, because it was not dictated by natural necessity. But to form an idea of God and place reflective pleasures and pains in the context of this idea was also man’s automatic mental strategy in response to being overwhelmed by the greatness of nature, once he started to reflect on its order. Unsurprisingly, Celestino was keen to distinguish this moral theory of natural religion from the idea that man became moral through forming ‘speculative judgements [giudizi speculativi]’ on the nature of God and moral goodness. Because Christian theologians had not developed the right kind of ideas about the natural moral functions of religion, religious dogmas were often at variance with ‘the true principle of our customs [costumi].’70 One related consequence of Celestino’s conception of natural religion as the first morality was that it suggested a redefinition

70 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 63r.

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of the importance of moral theology as the study of the beginning of sociability and of the origins of modern societies. Celestino’s account of the origins of man’s first idea of God was the key to his views on how man became increasingly moral. Celestino supposed that once man’s most basic needs were fulfilled he directed his attention to the world around him and reflected on his own experiences of pleasure or pain. As an initial result of these reflections man formed an idea of God. Religious ideas opened up man’s state of isolation and created in him an interest in reality that transcended his physical passions. According to Celestino, man felt another kind of pleasure every time his reflections on the order of nature confirmed his instinctive experiences of pleasure and pain. The new pleasures and pains that he experienced upon opening himself to the world outside his basic passions paved the way for the emergence of society and moral knowledge. This knowledge initially came in the form of religious ideas that were not only the first moral notions, but also the first mode by which man learned about the causes of physical pleasure. And while man’s knowledge of the laws of nature improved, so did his understanding of the way in which God wanted him to behave. Gradually, as a result of the progress of his moral understanding, man became capable of developing and sustaining increasingly more advanced forms of society. According to Celestino, man’s self-education in matters of the improvement of the human condition was the driving force behind the progress of societies. Primitive religious sentiments were directly related to the first forms of ‘commerce’ and were the basis of the further evolution of the modes of human interaction. Within this process of the development of society the various elements reinforced each other. The more sociable man was, the more free time he had that he could apply to develop his knowledge, intensify his interactions, and increase his happiness. One of the chapters of Celestino’s manuscript on the foundations of morality was entitled ‘On Natural Religion’ (Della religione naturale). In it Celestino associated the economic division of labour with the growth of reflection and of moral knowledge. He sketched how man’s first religious experiences ultimately caused far-reaching changes over the face of the earth. Progress through Pleasure According to Celestino, primitive man’s reflection on the order of the world ‘firstly’ led to knowledge of the ‘existence of an eternal mind

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[dell’esistenza d’una mente eterna].’71 Inspired by a new kind of sensation of pleasure, man simultaneously formed the idea of God as the author of the order of nature and the idea of the law of nature. Celestino reasoned that primitive man’s appreciation of nature’s orderly mechanisms soon turned not only into an instrument for understanding the law of nature, but equally into an instrument for understanding one’s own true interest. Once the eternal mind is known, secondly, to be certain of the law of nature one has to understand, especially by contemplating human nature [colla contemplazione specialmente della natura umana], that it [human nature] cannot exist, or at least cannot preserve its happiness, unless in its actions and in its living together maximally with others [convivere massimamente cogli altri] it behaved in such a way, that one would be unhappy or not be able to preserve oneself [o non potrebbe conservarsi] if one did otherwise.72

After developing religious ideas and an interest in the external world, Celestino believed, people became interested in each other as objects of reflection. People first got pleasure from understanding the order of human nature they formed with each other as part of the whole order of nature. By understanding how human nature interacted and how people responded to each other, they unintentionally stimulated two sorts of pleasure. Besides direct pleasure, which resulted from understanding human nature, they indirectly felt more and new physical pleasure when the order of human nature became economically more efficient. Subsequently people developed the idea that physical pleasure was a function of interaction and cooperation. Cooperation between people – for example in the form of markets – that confirmed habitual moral notions became known in common parlance as moral behaviour. Similarly, people considered behaviour or ideas that were at odds with their understanding of how human nature formed an efficiently operating social order immediately as morally inferior or vicious. Celestino argued that moral obligations in society ensued directly from interactions between individual human beings. In Celestino’s account humans necessarily felt moral pain and pleasure through each other’s evaluation of their actions. These moral ideas directly shaped

71 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 11r. 72 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 11v–12r, also f. 10v, and ff. 21r–24r.

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man’s obedience to God. Celestino did not regard physical pleasure as the ultimate psychological determinant of social change. Instead he saw men’s interest in the mechanisms of human interaction itself as the true cause of increased interaction and happiness among human beings and the modification of ‘commercial’ structures throughout history. Man was designed by his maker to engage in understanding human nature and to employ this understanding in the improvement of human societies. As the projected title of one of Celestino’s unwritten essays put it, ‘God wants man to be wise [savio] and the masses to soak in it [ed i massi di pervenivassi].’73 Commercial society, in Celestino’s view, was the stage in history when man’s reflection on the order of nature and his pleasure-seeking had become fully interrelated parts of one system. This social system had strong self-sustaining properties. Commerce and luxury enhanced people’s moral sensitivity and allowed them to share each other’s ideas more easily. Commercial society was also self-correcting, since moral behaviour was seen to be essential for maintaining physical comfort. Once the material well-being of a society decreased or was threatened, people would spontaneously criticise the norms and values of the society they lived in and launch appeals for a moral resurgence. Celestino described modern commerce as governed by the providence of God’s law of nature. Its functioning maximised both people’s physical and intellectual pleasure. Celestino used the traditional antiEpicurean example of the self-defeating character of drinking to illustrate the distinctive functioning of moral obligation in society. He who transgresses the law of temperance by getting drunk, although he derives pleasure from the act of drinking, will incur the disgrace of mankind [incorrere nell’infamia degli uomini] due to his action, which is a thing that in itself hurts and deprives him of many real conveniences [comodi reali]. And besides it renders him deserving of God’s punishment of the intemperate, which means that although the act of getting drunk means some pleasure for him who is subject to that vice, nevertheless, the same action means that he remains deprived of many real conveniences that bring greater pleasures [comodi reali, che porterebbon seco piaceri maggiori] with them … than the drunk finds in drinking.74

73 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 93r. 74 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 60rv.

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Thus, the moral consequences of actions neatly correspond to the physical ones, so that ‘actions that are contrary to the laws [difformi alle leggi] are also called bad with respect to [physical] pleasure and pain.’75 Within a modern system of social interaction, people can recognise personally and directly from the responses of other people to their actions whether these are in accordance with the law of nature. If other people do not appreciate one’s behaviour, one is not just held to be acting opposed to one’s material interest, but deemed incapable of right moral judgement. Moral judgements by someone of another person’s behaviour always emerge from a desire to understand one’s own motives, just like primitive man when he felt his first intellectual pleasure in trying to understand the world around him. Other people’s negative judgement of one’s behaviour hurts directly because to be declared morally unfit affects one’s entire attitude towards the world. All in all, the social and moral mechanisms of Celestino’s conception of commercial society form a well-oiled machine that is conducive to man’s physical as well as his moral well-being. The fully developed commerce of humankind becomes a self-checking system that brings people as close to perfect obedience to the law of nature as is possible. People are capable of using an acquired moral sensitivity that enforces moral rectitude and maximises everyone’s happiness. Thus, the key to Celestino’s theory was his notion that man experienced pleasure not only when he satisfied his physical needs and desires, but also when he discerned that there was an order in the universe and that there had to be a God who had created the world as a reality that functioned in accordance with a number of definite laws. These intellectual pleasures were completely separated from the other category of ‘natural’ ones, and man’s capacity for feeling them evolved historically and as a function of the development of his social interactions. The more men interacted, the more efficiently they freed themselves from their basic physical needs and were capable of reflecting upon the order of the world. Consequently, by acting upon the natural order they discovered through reflection, they could satisfy higherorder physical desires and realise ever-higher states of commercial development. According to Celestino, going through this perennial spiral of two-sided self-improvement was man’s purpose on earth. The development of society, including modern markets and the refinement of the arts, was God’s plan for mankind.

75 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 60v.

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Self-Deceit This plan could be upset by man himself, if he developed his ‘commerce’ the wrong way. Various chapters towards the end of the manuscript were dedicated to specialist theological issues or dealt with technical philosophical questions that Celestino believed he had to answer in order to validate his theory. One of these issues was moral error, which Celestino treated as a form of self-deceit. It was possible that man had misconstrued the world and was living his life in a suboptimal way. Once man found himself within such a suboptimal mode he would be caught in a cycle of deriving imperfect intellectual pleasures from observing the world and reaching imperfect happiness from his actions. This could occur when man had a false idea of the outside world. Mankind in fact forms many arbitrary ideas. And by deceiving themselves [coll’ingannar se stessi] they also often persuade themselves [si persuadono] that there are models in nature that correspond to them [i.e. these arbitrary ideas] and then regulate their actions [regolando poi le lor operazioni] on the basis of some principle, which they often love, desire, and sometimes also adore. Or, vice versa, they fear and fly from their own dreams [i propri lor sogni], as if these exist in nature, whereas outside their brains these have no existence whatsoever [non hanno esistenza alcuna].76

This was all the more likely because, as Celestino argued, man’s earliest reflections on God did not derive from any innate faculty that was divinely implanted but were based on his individual observations of nature. Celestino’s natural religion was simply the set of ideas that man formed if he made no mistake in developing his first ideas about God and the law of nature. What made Christianity superior to other religions was that it was based not just on revealed truth, but on a more accurate understanding of the external world. The Persians, on the other hand, ‘who worshipped the sun,’ saw the world through their own, false, pagan idea of the nature of God and based their whole attitude towards life on it.77 They ‘worshipped nothing but their dream [un lor sogno],’ which was a fantasy of their mind (una fantasma della sua mente).78 According to Celestino, Spinoza’s metaphysical view that ‘God

76 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 37v, 38r; italics added. 77 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 34r [bis], see also f. 38r. 78 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 34r [bis].

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is nothing but substance in general and [that] we, other men, and all other things are modifications of this substance’ was based on equally misconstrued opinions and also led to prejudices and superstition.79 In these cases, people developed some of the right moral ideas after having experienced regular intellectual pleasures and pains, and initially also tried to derive the right moral maxims from them. However, when people put together their opinions about the world to develop moral maxims they made mistakes that generated faulty attitudes with regard to their actions towards other people. Celestino applied these ideas about the formation of false belief to the origins of modern society. According to him it was crucial that societies develop naturally and not be manipulated by politics. This natural development only took place when the evolution of people’s interaction mirrored their development of the moral ideas that supported it. Celestino held that ‘commerce’ was a moral institution, while satisfaction of need was instinctive. The two were opposed to each other. To do away with all society beyond need satisfaction meant a disastrous return to the state of nature. However, ‘commerce’ as a moral institution required that people engage in it with the right ideas about their own interest and the effects their actions had on themselves and on others. If this were not the case, according to Celestino, self-deceit would deform cultural norms and values. People could develop higher-order forms of ‘commerce’ prematurely without having the right mental dispositions on which their behaviour should be grounded. As a result they developed forms of society that were based on false ideas of how human happiness could be achieved. For instance, if modern market interaction and luxury trade and consumption appeared prematurely, a society could lose its moral basis while its commerce could become a complex of self-deceptive actions, causing the collapse of the society’s wealth and the state’s basis of power. Thus, Celestino made the connection from false ideas about God to false judgements about politics. Celestino compared antiquity with modernity and concluded that Rome’s aggression towards the primitive inhabitants of Britain and Germany strongly resembled the deformed commercial politics of modern European states towards primitive Americans.80

79 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 37r–38v and f. 14r. 80 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, f. 50rv.

86 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money If our Europeans and their greed for gold [l’avidità dell’oro] had not led them to disturb the peace of these miserable people they would perhaps have continued to live for many centuries … in that natural simplicity and brutishness, deprived of the fruits of the arts, most of which due to the wickedness of the majority of mankind foment vice and luxury [i vizi ed il lusso] more than they serve the real needs of nature.81

Before the arrival of the Europeans, the primitive inhabitants of America lived in a state of perpetual under-development. Their societies had no written culture, no dynamic, and no history, and they failed to form a proper image of God as the creator of the world. However, Celestino concluded, being locked up in this ahistorical state, as close to the state of nature as was practically thinkable, was still preferable to being occupied by an aggressive system of self-deceptive commerce. So from Celestino’s point of view, Spain and Portugal, states that had recently seen their relative power and wealth decline, were modern political systems that had been built on a set of misconstrued moral beliefs about commerce. It was always possible that modern societies could destroy their own moral foundations and the people give themselves over to unmitigated selfishness. Celestino had no more to say on the political consequences of his arguments on morality in his manuscript on scienza morale. Yet, his reasoning implied a very clear message in the direction of the Neapolitan reform debate of the 1730s and 1740s. A well-functioning modern commercial system was essential to the moral well-being of societies. The fact that the existing, already highly commercialised society created moral suffering, inequality, and social tension did not mean that modern commerce should be rejected altogether. Similarly, the fact that some societies developed misguided imperialistic and aggressive forms of modern commerce should not lead to an overall rejection of market societies. Given that Celestino’s manuscript on scienza morale was probably written in Rome in the 1710s or 1720s, how interesting may it have been to a Neapolitan audience, which could have been exposed to it through Celestino’s salon and his circle of academic acquaintances? Celestino’s moral philosophy suggested that the coincidence of moral rectitude and commercial success, both on an individual and on a political level, should be central to any construction of normative principles of

81 BSNSP, xxx.c.16, ff. 50v–51r.

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behaviour and ideas about economic governance. Here Celestino’s message was unusual, certainly in Naples, because he construed that coincidence by emphasising the moral power of commerce as a principle of political economy, rather than conceding that commerce required moral governance for political reasons. Here was also the innovative aspect of Celestino’s idea of the relation between morality and ‘commerce,’ even on a wider European scale. On the one hand, Celestino saw self-interest as non-instinctive and directly derived morality from the simultaneous development of self-interest and society that resulted from man’s reflection on his experiences of pain and pleasure. Rather than view pleasure as a selfish principle, Celestino turned pleasure into the pivotal notion of his perspective on scienza morale. He rejected any form of ‘heroic’ self-denial, as he called it, as an impossible basis from which to derive virtue. On the other hand, Celestino also avoided presenting the development of man’s social behaviour as an active process of moral selfdetermination. According to Celestino, the challenge for man to develop a moral awareness did not so much serve the purpose of obedience to God as it served the realisation of the plan of commercial development that was implicit in God’s creation. In so far as man freely developed a potential to behave morally, this potential was a precondition for ‘commerce.’ In turn, Celestino described the causal mechanisms that triggered the development of ‘commerce’ as strongly linked, almost by necessity, to the capacity of human nature to operate in endlessly evolving social configurations. Celestino also did not display much concern for the effects that markets and luxury might have on the moral quality of man’s being and on the harmony of society; instead he judged these to be, almost without qualification, of a positive nature. He treated man’s moral awareness as a corollary of commercial development and consequently showed many presumed moral issues of modern commerce to follow from misunderstandings of human history. It seems likely, although this really requires more research into his political activities, that in the 1730s Celestino’s reform programmes and policy advice notes somehow brought into practice the theory of progress of humankind that he had developed in the previous years in Rome. Moreover, Celestino’s outlook on the interrelations between commerce and morality provided a new alternative position in the Neapolitan debate on commercial politics that would be further developed by his nephew Ferdinando some twenty years after Celestino formulated his principles of morality.

3 Doria and Vico: True Utility against Pleasure

Celestino Galiani’s understanding of the sociable nature of man was only one response to the sort of moral scepticism that Bayle had put forward and which concerned early eighteenth-century scholars across Italy.1 Whereas Celestino aligned true knowledge, religion, pleasure, and social interaction in such a way that modern commercial societies could be understood as confirming the plan of Creation, there were those, in Naples as everywhere, who rejected the ‘Lockian’ approach of taking pleasure as the ultimate foundation of morality. Paolo Mattia Doria, for instance, held that the human drive to develop selfish, sinful behaviour and pursue false utility was too ardent to be cultivated into rational pleasure-seeking. He criticised his contemporary Lodovico Antonio Muratori for naïvely suggesting that man’s pleasure-seeking might be governed by reason and as such form the basis of a modern Christian society.2 Therefore Doria insisted on shifting the focus from

1 For the significance of Bayle in eighteenth-century Italy see the references to the relevant secondary literature in the previous two chapters. At the start of the second half of this chapter I will mention the works by historians who have recently explored Bayle’s scepticism as a major context for the development of Vico’s views on the nature of sociability. 2 Paolo Mattia Doria, Lettere e ragionamenti varj di Paolo Mattia Doria dedicati alli celebri e sapientissimi signori dell’Accademia etrusca (Perugia, 1741), ix–xii. Doria argued that Muratori, by not being a harsh enough critic of Locke, gave Epicureanism a chance. He criticised Muratori’s La filosofia morale esposta e proposta ai giovani (Verona, 1735), whose later main work Della pubblica felicità oggetto de’buoni principi, ed. Cesare Mozzarelli (Rome: Donzelli, 1996 [Lucca, 1749]) was based on the same principles. On Muratori’s moral philosophy in relation to his politics see Chiara Continisio, Il governo delle passioni: prudenza, giustizia e carità nel pensiero politico di Lodovico Antonio Muratori (Florence: Olschki, 1999).

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pleasure to the passion of love; as he wrote: ‘the driving force of all human actions is love.’3 Vice could only be avoided on a deeper level of love, where virtue, religion, and truth were inextricably linked. For similar reasons, Doria also rejected the possibility of unifying Christian denominations into one religion based on the minimum condition of belief in Jesus Christ as the incarnation of God. Religion was much more than a reasonable belief and came from a passion of truth burning deep within man.4 Giambattista Vico too rejected explanations of society that were based on pleasure, but from a somewhat different perspective. Pierre Bayle had argued in his Pensées diverses sur le comète that human nature was naturally inclined towards pleasure and that this drive could not be mitigated by religion, which was based on mere opinion. The only effective counter to any socially destructive effects of pleasure-seeking was human law. Yet, from Vico’s point of view, laws could never come into existence without an idea of justice or promise that referred to a divine mind. On this basis, Vico also criticised Locke, in particular in the second edition of his main work,5 which was published four years before Locke’s works were put on the Index of prohibited books in 1734. Thus, Vico and Doria had the same opponents in mind. But compared with Doria, Vico had a deeper understanding of the problems involved in answering Bayle’s moral scepticism through Epicureanism and formed a different response to it. Vico did not see religion as a direct source of truth and thereby of true utility-seeking in society, as we will see Doria did. Instead, Vico opposed Bayle, and all ‘modern Epicurean and Stoic’

3 Paolo Mattia Doria, Difesa della metafisica degli antichi filosofi contro il signor Giovanni Locke ed alcuni altri moderni autori (Venice, 1732–3), 2: 295. 4 Ibid., 2: 284–5. 5 See Vico, La scienza nuova: 1730, ed. Paolo Cristofolini (Naples: Guida, 2004), where there are three explicit references to Locke. In this edition of the Scienza nuova Vico applied his solution of overcoming Bayle’s scepticism to the issue of specifying familiar critiques of Locke as well as responding to them from his own point of view. In particular, Vico portrays Locke as an Epicurean and criticises his idea of God along lines similar to his critique of Spinoza’s. For the dispersal of Locke’s ideas in Naples, see Paolo Amadio, ‘La diffusione del pensiero di John Locke a Napoli nell’età di Vico, contributo critico-bibliografico,’ Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche (1997), 183–94 and Nicoletta De Scisciolo, ‘Presenza lockiana a Napoli tra fine Seicento e inizio Settecento: dagli Investiganti alle eredita genovesiane,’ Studi filosofici (1997), 73–111.

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philosophers, as he expressed himself, by means of a particularly intriguing explanation of the way in which religion lay at the basis of society. Both Paolo Mattia Doria and Giambattista Vico thus held views of commerce and morality that differed essentially from Celestino Galiani’s. This chapter discusses these views and shows how Doria and Vico, although both considered themselves Platonists, pursued very different strategies in reconsidering the relations between markets and moral virtue. Both Doria’s and Vico’s perspectives, like that of Celestino, contributed greatly to Ferdinando Galiani’s own understanding of commercial morality.6 Paolo Mattia Doria In his younger years as a Ligurian lesser nobleman, Paolo Mattia Doria squandered his inheritance by adopting the latest French fashions. Turning away from this lifestyle, which, he claimed, was influenced by ‘the vices that were fashionable at the time,’ he started a philosophical career and for the rest of his life staunchly defended the view that the

6 Vico’s idea of the sociable nature of man is a case in point concerning the limits of the current understanding of theories like Ferdinando Galiani’s. Whereas Hirschman famously judged that Vico anticipated Montesquieu’s argument in De l’Esprit des Lois that commercial society created the context for harnessing the passions to the interests, Mark Lilla more recently reiterated Isaiah Berlin’s view of Vico as an anti-modern, a writer who more than anything else expressed an ‘aggressive spirit of opposition to modern life.’ The sentiment of aggression, we will see, would more properly suit a description of Doria’s attitude towards modern commerce. Yet, Doria’s rejection of market societies, like Vico’s, is understood best against the background of his own views of ‘real’ commerce and in comparison with contemporary attempts to explain the moral underpinnings of such societies. Pace Lilla, who warns us that ‘readers should … in all cases rely first on Vico’s own words rather than on an external, “contextual” reading of them,’ the internal mechanisms of Vico’s theory of sociability can be revealed by presenting the contemporary Neapolitan debate as an instantiation of developments within European moral philosophy. Such an analysis sustains the focus on Vico’s key argument that man’s utility-seeking was sociable, which Lilla’s approach fails to do, and revives the original tension in Vico’s providential account of the progress of society, which Hirschman did not grasp. See Mark Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13 and 245, and Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 14 and 17.

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natural relations between man’s true utility and morality were very easily disturbed by temptations men were exposed to in eighteenth-century societies.7 This insight was also central to Doria’s political perspective and confirmed his lack of enthusiasm for the activities deployed by the Neapolitan reform movement, which he felt seriously underestimated the corrupting force of modern commerce and luxury. Unlike Celestino, Doria made his philosophical and political ideas public. He wrote two tracts, one around 1710, Massime del governo spagnolo a Napoli, the other in 1740, Del commercio del regno di Napoli, containing accounts of Neapolitan and European political history as well as policy recommendations in the fields of legal and commercial public administration. Both works were dedicated to major political figures who were leaders of the jurist reform movement. In between their publication Doria associated with members of the Collaterale and other political institutions. His first main political treatise, La vita civile, was first published in Naples in 1709, followed by an enlarged and more widespread edition in 1710. The book offered a blueprint for a modern

7 Raffaele Ajello, Arcana Juris: diritto e politica nel settecento Italiano (Naples: Jovene, 1976), 400–2. In many ways Doria’s vision of la vita civile was a design that served to protect people from their own weaknesses. For Doria’s life and career see Salvatore Rotta’s introduction to some of Doria’s writings in Politici ed economisti del primo settecento, dal Muratori al Cesarotti, La letteratura Italiana, Storia e testi, ed. R. Ajello, M. Berengo et al., vol. 5 (Naples-Milan: Ricciardi, 1978), 837–70. See also Rotta’s bibliography of works on Doria there. The most important work on Doria now is still G. Papuli, ed., P.M. Doria fra rinnovamento e tradizione (Galatina: Congedo, 1985), but see also Salvatore Rotta’s insightful ‘Idee di riforma nella Genova settecentesca e la diffusione del pensiero di Montesquieu,’ Il movimento operaio e socialista in Liguria, 7 (1961), 205–84 – in particular for Doria’s youth; Paola Zambelli, ‘Il rogo postumo di Paolo Mattia Doria,’ in Ricerche sulla cultura dell’Italia moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1973), 149–98; Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘A proposito di P.M. Doria,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 91 (1979), 261–85; Enrico Nuzzo, Verso la “Vita civile”: antropologia e politica nelle lezioni accademiche di Gregorio Caloprese e Paolo Mattia Doria (Naples: Guida, 1984); and on the same subject Vittorio Conti, ‘Paolo Mattia Doria e l’accademia di Medinacoeli,’ Il Pensiero Politico, 8[2] (1975), 203–18. On Doria’s radicalism discussed in its Neapolitan context see chapter 7 of Ajello, Arcana juris, 391–419 and Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 211–20. For his attitude towards the Neapolitan lawyer-reformers and the debate in the earliest decades of the eighteenth century see ‘Relazione dello stato politico’, the introduction by Giuseppe Galasso to Doria’s Massime del governo spagnolo a Napoli, ed. V. Conti (Naples: Guida, 1973), and Vittorio Conti, Paolo Mattia Doria: Dalla Repubblica dei togati alla Repubblica dei notabili (Florence: Olschki, 1978).

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virtuous civil society and was discussed by Jean Le Clerc, in his Bibliothèque choisie.8 This second edition of La vita civile is also arguably Doria’s most important and most influential work. Apart from his posthumous Idea di una perfetta repubblica (1753), it was the only explicitly political work he ever intended to publish. The bulk of Doria’s publications is formed by a number of philosophical treatises in which he embraced the ancient commitment to use philosophy directly as a guide for semi-military political rule, and criticised a series of modern philosophers such as Descartes and Locke. They were the main objects of two of his most important philosophical works, respectively Discorsi critici filosofici intorno alla filosofia degli’antichi, e dei moderni in particolare Descartes (1724) and Difesa della metafisica degli antichi filosofi contro il signor Giovanni Locke ed alcuni altri autori moderni (1732). His other philosophical works as well as his manuscripts on various subjects were always inspired by the same perspective with its fixed moral and political connotations.9 Doria’s writings, including his more recently published manuscripts, merit more extensive study to understand the development of his thought during his career and to form a more detailed account of his political and intellectual influence in Naples.10

8 Jean Le Clerc, ‘Review of P.M. Doria’s La vita civile,’ in Bibliothèque Choisie, vol. 5, part I (1716), 54–125. The tone of the review was predominantly sympethetic to Doria’s project, although Le Clerc clearly felt that Doria provided an overdrawn image of the destructive relations between commerce and morality and contrasted Doria’s republican views with the reality of the United Provinces (see in particular 105). 9 See note 2 above for example. 10 Paolo Mattia Doria, Manoscritti napoletani di Paolo Mattia Doria, ed. P. De Fabrizio et al, 6 vols. (Galatina: Congedo, 1981–6). Doria himself announced that he would leave his unpublished works to be consulted by people at the Biblioteca S. Angelo a Nido, later renamed Brancacciana, which is still the name of the catalogue in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples where they can be found (see E. Vidal, Il pensiero civile di P.M. Doria negli scritti inediti: con il testo del manoscritto ‘del commercio del regno di Napoli’ [Milan: Giuffrè, 1953], 45). The twelve volumes of texts (described by Vidal, 45–57) have been published in six volumes as Manoscritti napoletani di Paolo Mattia Doria (see beginning of note). Salvatore Rotta in Politici ed economisti del primo settecento (871) has criticised earlier attempts by Ajello (Arcana Juris, 391–419) and Zambelli (‘Il rogo postumo di Paolo Mattia Doria’) to use these manuscripts as sources for reconstructing Doria’s intellectual biography, including the shift from his ‘pseudo-royalist’ Vita civile of 1708 to his posthumously published – but immediately censored – radical ancient republican work.

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In the early 1730s, Doria’s life in Naples as a detached political philosopher was disturbed when Celestino Galiani started his visionary reform of the education system. It led Doria to launch his overtly ad hominem attack on Celestino’s academy, and to deride its irresponsible programme of reform of the Neapolitan educational system. By publishing his Difesa della metafisica degli antichi filosofi contro il signor Giovanni Locke ed alcuni altri autori moderni, in 1732, Doria hoped to discredit Celestino through a critique of Locke. Doria shared with Giambattista Vico the view that Locke was one of the latest in a line of philosophers who corrupted the purity of Plato’s approach to morality. They agreed that from Aristotle through to the scholastics, Descartes, Gassendi, Locke, and on to Berkeley, moral philosophy was increasingly corrupted. Celestino was part of this corruption. The ‘proper work of Academies,’ Doria claimed, was to ‘examine the inventions and new opinions of’ philosophical ‘inventors’ and to ‘refute and abandon the false and pernicious ones [i falsi, e perniciosi]’ for the sake of maintaining ‘the love of truth, of the useful and the honest [l’amore del vero, dell’utile, e dell’onesto].’ Instead, the new Neapolitan Academy replaced ‘these virtuous passions’ with ‘unmitigated ambition, competition, emulation, jealousy and also vile interest as the passions that motivate research [la sfrenata ambizione, le gare, l’emulazione, l’invidia, ed anco il vile interesse sono le passioni, le quali somministrano moto agli studi].’11 Within months of the establishment of Celestino’s Academy, the Collaterale ratified the launch of a rival institution in which the opponents of Celestino’s reform united. The Accademia degli Oziosi, founded in 1733, was led by Doria, who organised lectures that attacked the moral depravity of those Epicurean and Libertine authors of which Celestino was supposed to be a follower, such as Voltaire, Locke, and Spinoza.12 In his Difesa della metafisica degli antichi contro Locke, Doria focused on the problems that arose from Locke’s attempt in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding to derive morality and God’s law of nature through man’s feelings of pleasure and pain. Locke’s hedonism, for Doria, provided the foundation of Celestino’s moral philosophical views and his attempt to turn the Neapolitan education system into an instrument for developing the country into a modern market society.

11 Doria, Difesa della metafisica degli antichi contro Locke, 4–5. 12 On the Accademia degli Oziosi, see Vittorio Conti, Paolo Mattia Doria, 63–5.

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Doria was a self-declared Platonist. Rather than presenting moral obligation as an external command that people’s intellectual faculties could absorb and use to shape their free actions and personalities, Doria joined the views of Fénelon and his later follower, the chevalier Ramsay, in describing virtue as heroic self-subjection to the love of God. Returning to a Spartan, ascetic, and self-denying conception of virtue, Doria became an ‘ancient’ Platonist. In his political views, as well as in his theological comments, Doria tended to make his Christian ideas subservient to his own idiosyncratic Platonic views, which echoed the glorious virtues of heroic self-sacrifice in combat. Doria defended himself against the accusation of those who ‘say about me that, like Ficino, I make Plato say things he never said’ by claiming if one really concentrated on understanding Plato’s notion of happiness, it would be possible to recognise that what Doria said was, in fact, what Plato had meant.13 Doria’s own reflections on the political side of Platonism were collected in his work entitled Idea di una perfetta repubblica, which he wrote in the early 1740s. The book was printed, but burnt by the hangman in 1753, even before it was published. From the few fragments of the text that remain it is clear that the work was as radical a condemnation of modern Christianity and mundane civil culture as anything Fénelon ever launched.14 In it, more explicitly than in the rest of his oeuvre, Doria assessed whether Christianity could be reconciled with his Platonism, rather than the other way around, and reiterated his criticisms of modern culture.15

13 Vidal, Il pensiero civile di P.M. Doria negli scritti inediti: con il testo del manoscritto ‘del commercio del regno di Napoli,’ 76. 14 Two remaining fragments of the work based on contemporary reading notes are published and discussed by Salvatore Rotta in Politici ed economisti del primo settecento, 928–47. For the story of the publication and the condemnation of the work, see Zambelli, ‘Il rogo postumo di Paolo Mattia Doria.’ Doria’s politics are to be seen as related to the ‘ancient’ moralism that was still common in the early eighteenth century and gradually developed. See Patrick Riley, ‘Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 82–5. See also Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). 15 On Doria’s religious views, see the opinion held by Conti (Paolo Mattia Doria, 78–9) of Doria as a moderate Christian. The contrast drawn by Rotta (Politici ed economisti del primo settecento) between this loosely held view and the crucial function Doria attributed to religion is to the point. As such, it was adopted by Ferrone (The Intellectual Roots of the Enlightenment, 239–42). In fact, Doria subsumed his idea of religion under a dominant idea of ancient virtue. This view is also congruent with Eluggero Pii’s idea of

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Virtuous Subjection Doria’s Difesa della metafisica degli antichi contro Locke, of 1732, was meant as an attack on Celestino’s views about the morality of commercial society. Doria rejected any form of pleasure-seeking as the principle of virtue. Moral obligation, Doria thought, could not be caused by man’s interested observation of nature. Therefore, Celestino’s distinction between moral obligation ensuing from natural religious experience and that ensuing from self-deceit was groundless. From Doria’s point of view, Celestino’s argument that God designed man to obey the law of nature could only describe man’s obedience to the mechanisms of physical nature. These mechanisms had no direct link to moral knowledge. Doria argued that pleasure-seeking remained inherently selfish; at most it could lead to false virtue and cause the corruption of states. There is to my mind no enterprise more difficult than to oppose oneself to the love of pleasure [quell’amor del piacere] which is hardly less than indelible from the human heart. But it is still true that as men love the useful [amano l’utile], because they find pleasure in it, so, if they knew well what their true utility [il loro vero utile] was, and were accustomed to loving it from their first infancy, they would only act in pursuit of it. But because true utility is that which one acquired through means that are on principle displeasing to the senses, it happens that whenever people encounter difficulty in understanding the sciences and in following the virtues that are not only useful to themselves and to the state, but necessary, they dedicate all their studies to reconciling their utility with their present pleasure and have recourse to the pernicious logic of the Sophists, forming maxims of science and virtue that follow their fancy and their passions. That unfortunate property of mankind is the reason why republics and monarchies distance themselves from true science and their exercise of virtue is corrupted and decayed [si guastino, e si corrompano].16

Doria’s Machiavellianism, an issue which has attracted a specific debate in Italy that I will not discuss here (‘Republicanism and Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century Italy,’ in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 2: The Values of Republicanism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 256–7). With regard to Doria’s Christian radicalism cf. Riley, ‘Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns,’ and Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 146. 16 Doria, Difesa della metafisica degli antichi contro Locke, 1.

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Like Celestino, Doria did not deny that people’s natural instincts for self-preservation had some capacity to create ties between them.17 Yet, its integrative capacity was weak, and even damaging, unless controlled by an entirely different innate principle that made man moral. Also, like Celestino, Doria denied that self-preservation was the crucial formative principle of society and morality.18 What set Doria’s views about morality apart from Celestino’s was his insistence that man’s natural pleasures were always monitored by a separate intellectual faculty that was innate and that was effective in all of man’s actions. Man had a natural instinct for self-preservation, which Doria called ‘amor proprio.’ At the same time, man was blessed with a superior capacity that should control all forms of self-love, namely the love of knowledge. ‘In spite of the love of pleasure, the love of knowledge [l’amore verso la sapienza] is equally indelible from the human mind.’ Because ‘there are in the human mind from its first origins so strongly impressed by God the appetites of knowledge [gli appetiti di conoscenza], that these are indelible from it: therefore, which we see by our own experiences, all men have a will to knowledge.’19 Through his natural intellectual appetite, man was inclined to self-knowledge. Doria described this as a process that led man to discover a set of true intellectual ‘essences [essenze].’ These, rather than sensible objects, were the true objects of his ideas.20 Once these ‘essences’ allowed him to regulate his behaviour, man was capable of fulfilling his purpose in society and elevating himself to full moral membership of a civil community. As Doria had argued in his previous work, La vita civile, in 1709, man was endowed with a ‘natural inclination [inclinazione naturale] to the unity [unione] among people and to civil life that she [i.e. mother nature] has implanted in us.’21 Within this scheme, attaining more utility required man to abstain from his immediate pleasures; not just in the common sense of regulating selfish desires and considering the good of others, but also as a rule to completely subject pleasure-seeking to a different kind of utility. Doria’s concept of man’s intellectual appetite helped to establish an

17 Doria called the extended sociability of the family compagnia and identified it as the driving force of the system of mutual self-preservation in society that he associated with the ‘natural economy.’ 18 P.M. Doria, La vita civile, seconda edizione (Augusta, 1710), 3. 19 Doria, Difesa della metafisica degli antichi contro Locke, 16. 20 Ibid., 8, 41–2. 21 Doria, La vita civile, 21.

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essential difference between pleasure and true utility. If man did not use his intellectual appetite properly and failed to turn his back on sensual pleasure, he acted to his own detriment. Locke’s was a deliberate attempt, according to Doria, to reduce virtue to selfish utility by describing man’s ideas about justice and virtue as mere opinions. Doria echoed Shaftesbury’s judgement that Locke deprived ‘the human mind of those ideas of justice and honesty which God endowed it with, and instead he teaches like Hobbes and Machiavelli that virtue is generally approved, not because the idea of it is innate to the mind, but only because it is useful.’22 Doria instead took the extreme, Platonically inspired, view that justice and morality were ‘essences’ of which man had innate ideas that he perfected by contemplating God.23 In his earlier La vita civile Doria described man’s instinct for self-preservation [amor proprio] as ‘the universal source of all evil [universal fonte di tutti i mali].’24 If man’s instinctive pleasure-seeking was not balanced by the operations of his intellectual faculty, he was bound to act against his true interest. It might seem as though this self-defeating behaviour was inspired by man’s passion for pleasure itself; as if ‘a love [l’amore] that all men have for satisfying their desires and to lose themselves to the pleasures of the senses [al piacere de’ sensi]’ took over their will.25 But the ends [i.e. pleasure] that are prompted by the passions are not yet, as many believe, the most powerful causes that move people to follow the sects of the Epicureans, the Sceptics and Sophists … The true and most intrinsic cause … is the desire to align the laziness of the mind [pigrizia della mente] with the conceit of knowing [la vanità del sapere].26

22 Doria, Difesa della metafisica degli antichi contro Locke, 61–2; see also 63, 65. Shaftesbury had judged that ‘it was Mr. Locke that struck the home blow: for Mr. Hobbes’s character and base slavish principles in government took off the point of his philosophy. ’Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God) unnatural, and without foundations in our minds.’ Quoted by Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 177. 23 Doria attacked Locke’s proof of God, arguing that the presupposition that if justice is not essentially in God then God is not intelligent undermines Locke’s argument (Doria, Difesa della metafisica degli antichi contro Locke, book 4. chapter 10. 24 Doria, La vita civile, 5. 25 Doria, Difesa della metafisica degli antichi contro Locke, 16. 26 Ibid.

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The true cause of false morality in society and the popularity of false moral systems was man’s intellectual laziness. People were eager to satisfy their intellectual appetite by persuading themselves that pleasureseeking was morally sound. Likewise, as Christians, they relieved their fear of God’s punishment of their sins in the afterlife by believing those philosophers who told them that virtue was reducible to self-interest. Philosophers loved ‘to propagate among people these false and fake sciences [false, ed apparenti]’ which ‘gratified the pleasure that men feel in appearing wise … while saving themselves the effort that was needed for acquiring true knowledge and real virtue.’27 In an earlier work Doria had already emphasised that people’s inclination to repress their intellectual appetite was a perennial source of moral decay.28 His general message was that, whereas ancient philosophers constantly stressed the social and political importance of the moral quality of people’s actions, their modern counterparts turned moral philosophy into an art of selfdeceit. Doria further commented, with bitter sarcasm, that it might be concluded from reading modern philosophical works that the Calvinist claim about man’s sinful nature was true, but this was so only because modern philosophers made man more sinful than he really was.29 Doria strongly believed that God had created man to become wise and happy. His whole moral philosophy echoed Fénelon’s, whose later follower, the Chevalier Ramsay, also engaged in the same fundamental reworking of the relation between pleasure and virtue. These Platonists argued that all empirically acquired knowledge of the worldly order should be radically reinterpreted through the intellectual love of God that was divinely impressed in man. Man’s improved awareness enabled him to understand that other-regarding feelings were not pleasurable in themselves but that the pleasure of self-denial was God’s movement in man that should motivate him to willingly subject his earthly existence to the pure love of God. Fénelon argued that self-love was a case in point. He saw self-love itself as a mistaken response to the pleasure people naturally felt from self-denial. It arose when man erroneously interpreted the pleasure he felt as his own, and developed the idea that his pleasure would increase if he tried to enhance his physical convenience.

27 Ibid., 2 (n.p.). 28 See Paolo Mattia Doria, Discorsi critici filosofici intorno alla filosofia degl’antichi, e dei moderni in particolare Descartes (Venice, 1724). 29 Ibid., 212.

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In this way man failed to understand that God was the source of all of his pleasures. Consequently he acted contrary to what he was supposed to do and wherein lay his true interest: to renounce his self. Human nature was generally inclined to take this perverse course of action that led to societies in which people were completely confused about the relations between their true interests and cultural norms and had developed highly artificial forms of behaviour to align the two. In these confused societies people were led by their own self-love, but tried to disguise this by appearing disinterested and virtuous to others in all the selfish actions they performed.30 Thus, Doria explained the selfdeceptive feature within Fénelon’s outlook on social behaviour as the effect of man’s tendency to laziness. Unlike Rousseau, Doria did not distinguish between care for one’s selfpreservation, amour de nous mêmes or amour de soi, and selfish love, amour propre.31 Within Doria’s scheme, amor proprio should be absorbed by the intellectual love of God. Any form of self-love was self-deceptive, and any attempt to distinguish between various forms of self-love was therefore misleading. Doria’s Fénelonian Platonism rejected self-preservation as the basis of sociability. ‘Abstract Commerce’ At the beginning of La vita civile, Doria argued that man naturally had three powers that moved him to action. Besides ‘the innate will [l’innata volontà], which everyone has, to preserve himself [di conservar se stesso],’ his family, and all children, he had ‘the will to know himself [di conoscersi], which is to say the appetite that the soul has for knowledge of the truth.’ Lastly, man wanted ‘to improve himself [di emendarsi] and search for remedies for his pains [a propri mali],’ which was the will to convert his insights into legal and civil institutions.32 Without these powers humankind would be a mere ‘multitude of people, who, guided by their blind passions, clashed with each other and moved themselves forward by pushing back someone else.’ However, ‘inspired by the innate idea

30 Quoted in Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence, 147. 31 See Nannerl Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), for an account of the evolution of these concepts in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French political thought. 32 Doria, La vita civile, 22.

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that always remains in them, albeit confused, of the true and the honest,’ people created political societies by asking for a ruler and laws.33 Doria’s view of the creation of states mirrored his philosophy of the subjection of self-love to a superior pure love. People combined these three basic powers which prompted them to submit themselves to the rule of a superior. Doria viewed the ruler as a modern Philosopher King who understood the Platonic ‘essences’ of civil life and who managed to direct people’s passions towards virtue and happiness. The key to his political success, from Doria’s point of view, was the regulation of people’s amor proprio through the encouragement of intellectual appetite. Since the political superior was in charge of people’s well-being and since people had more or less signed away their economic liberty, markets were a direct object of politics. In a later work Doria defined commerce as ‘an art of making people unite in civil society by coming to each other’s assistance.’34 Doria discussed the way in which market interaction contributed to man’s virtue and happiness in his account of three types of political societies.35 He distinguished between ‘the purely military one [la pura militare], when a people unites itself under a captain, [secondly] the civil economic one [la civile economica] … when one unites under the civil law, but with a frugal and moderate lifestyle, and [thirdly] the civil pompous [la civile pomposa], which is when one lives in a more cultured [colta] and artificial manner.’36 This distinction between different types of societies mirrored Fénelon’s distinction in the Télémaque, between a simple premodern society, a corrupted luxurious society, and a well-reformed modern monarchy. Doria’s last type of state was the corrupted version of his second type of state, which itself was not a reformed, but a precorrupt state. Doria associated his types of society with different styles of political leadership, each of which had different consequences for people’s individual moral households. The type of society Doria called ‘civil economic [la civile economica],’ the modern state before corruption,

33 Ibid., 34–5. Cf. Riley, ‘Rousseau, Fénelon, and the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns,’ 84. In Fénelon’s view the Platonic ruler would reach a higher place in heaven than ordinary subjects and obtain greater happiness in the afterlife. 34 Vidal, Il pensiero civile di P.M. Doria, con il manoscritto ‘del commercio del regno di Napoli,’ 162. 35 Doria, La vita civile, 319–37 analyses the nature of markets. On 117–29 the three types of political societies are analysed. 36 Ibid., 116.

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presented a combination of ancient military politics and modern economic life. Here, amor proprio was absorbed by a higher level of love that made men extend the aim of their economic activities to include the care of others in society. This type of society served the public good and functioned in accordance with the essence of human nature. Doria understood very well that having a modern society and maintaining some of the true virtues of self-denial and patriotism that existed in antiquity presented great theoretical as well as political difficulties. Doria was thus of two minds about the introduction of money into basic barter economies. He believed that the value of money was imaginary and spoke of money as a pure invention: ‘by an ingenious artifice [con ingegnoso artificio] men have invented a sign [inventato un segno], to which by common consent [comune consentimento] they have given an imaginary [immaginario] but fixed value, and made it serve as a norm and measure of the price of things.’37 This invention of money took place in ‘all civil and cultured countries’ and increased the efficiency of the structures by which people took care of each other’s self-preservation. However, the invention of money marked the beginning of an ‘abstract economy,’ which was altogether different from the earlier ‘natural economy’ that had existed between people until that point.38 Money complicated the political regulation of markets. Its very nature made it easy for people to confuse the imaginary value of money with true utility. Money easily corrupted man’s moral knowledge and altered his amor proprio: ‘because of the growth of wealth in cities, and by conquests and commerce, people’s ideas extend themselves; from simple conveniences they move on to splendour … The mind in sum becomes not only interested in self-preservation and honour, but in our conveniences and enjoyments.’ The invention of money prevented people from directing their amor proprio towards a superior object. People’s amor proprio thus became what Rousseau and others had called amour propre. Because of money, markets became virtually uncontrollable systems of unmitigated lust, luxury, and divisive jealousy and greed. This process was encouraged by popular philosophers who replaced knowledge of truth and honesty with ‘the excessive love of commerce [il soverchio amore di commercio], which turns the mind to love of wealth and alienates [aliena] men from love of virtue, pushing them into the pernicious vices of avarice and rapacity. Men become fond of

37 Ibid., 114. 38 Ibid., 321–2.

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ridiculing true virtue and become envious, arrogant, insidious, and oppressors of fellow human beings.’39 Given the existence of money and of modern market interaction, Doria accepted that the clock could not be turned back. At this point, Doria argued, monarchies were a better form of government than republics for containing the consequences of the introduction of money. Republics required ‘virtues that were more true than those required by monarchical states’ and were ‘more vulnerable to turbulences and revolts when the virtue of the citizens corrupted and degenerated into vicious ambition.’ The problem of a mixed system of government was that the aristocracy was often inclined to ‘tyrannise their own monarch’ and destabilise the political system. Even in absolute monarchies, money remained a political danger. Once the spiral movement of people’s ever-extending desires escaped the political control of the ruler and the state crumbled, people had to defend themselves and their property by arms. The only way in which they could escape this violent condition that necessitated subjection to military government was by instating the rule of a wise Platonic Philosopher King. Such a king would develop those sectors of the economy that were directly related to the satisfaction of people’s basic needs, rather than engage in luxury trade and balance of trade politics.40

39 Quoted by Ajello, Arcana Juris, 406. 40 It is often claimed that Doria’s distinction between different types of government by their principles and his discussion of true and false virtue were an influence on Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois, but it should at least be recognised that Doria’s message was rather the opposite of Montesquieu’s. Montesquieu’s concept of the moral foundations of modern commerce was diametrically opposed to Doria’s. Whereas Doria saw money and luxury themselves as a danger, Montesquieu believed that they lay at the roots of the increased happiness of modern societies compared with earlier ones. Montesquieu’s message was expressed very clearly in the Persian Letters, through a critique on Fénelon’s reform proposals in the form of a parody on Fénelon’s Boetica and the reform of Salentum. Doria’s critique of the aristocracy was typical and rehearsed the criticisms of the nobility’s expensive fashions, extravagance, and obstructions of the interest of the people. It preceded the critical reception of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois in Naples (see Enrico De Mas, Montesquieu, Genovesi e la edizione del spirito delle leggi [Florence: Le Monnier, 1971]). In that sense certainly, Doria’s analysis of the sources of moral corruption and its political consequences is more accurately seen as a proto-Rousseauian cultural critique of modern society. It is also possible that Rousseau knew Doria’s La vita civile. Jean LeClerc’s review in 1716 commented on Doria’s way of turning his rejection of luxury into an argument that demanded its correction through a system of political absolutism.

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Heroism and the Reform of Naples During the 1740s Doria worked on a series of manuscripts from which he extracted a text entitled Del commercio del regno di Napoli, written for Francesco Ventura, one of Naples’s leading jurist-reformers who held important political positions.41 Here Doria’s attention shifted away from his earlier radical critique of ‘abstract commerce.’ He now set out to show that European states actively undermined their own interest by acting in what they mistakenly believed was their own interest. Doria provided a disconcerting critique of modern political economy. He described the reality of modern trade as a disease; European politicians, he stated, had adopted the behaviour of greedy merchants and suffered from a ‘furious inclination’ to abstract ‘mercantile commerce [il commercio mercantile].’42 This was not merely a moralistic critique of the excesses of Colbert’s economic policies under Louis XIV. Doria argued that the false virtues that swayed modern commerce were ineffective means for the acquisition of true wealth. He agreed with Jean-François Melon that conquest and commerce excluded each other in principle. Territorial ambitions required warfare, which obstructed economic growth. Combining trade with imperialism was a self-defeating strategy. Doria himself had already argued in La vita civile that the politics of conquest in modern times had impoverished Spain and Portugal.43 But the fact that warfare and commerce excluded each other did not mean, Doria reasoned, that commerce did not require ancient virtue. Trade required not only peace, but also a dedication of those who engaged in it to suspend their present pleasure and act in the service of the common good. When war turned into peace, sailors turned to trade and risked their lives to travel

41 See Vidal, Il pensiero civile di P.M. Doria, con il manoscritto ‘del commercio del regno di Napoli’ for a description of those manuscripts, which are conserved at the BNN (45–57). The work that is mentioned, Del commercio del regno di Napoli, is published by Vidal (153–229, with a large set of notes, 231–80). Throughout the text Doria refers to legendary Neapolitan jurists (D’Andrea, Argento) to please Ventura and to suggest that the ideas he put forward accorded with the thinking of the local jurist reformer tradition. 42 P.M. Doria, ‘Il commercio mercantile,’ BNN, vol. viii, ms. 23, f. 229. Quoted by Ajello, Arcana Juris, 405–6. 43 Doria, La vita civile, 359–61. Doria repeated himself, arguing that Philip II of Spain, whose malicious politics destroyed virtue for the sake of conquest, also destroyed the income of the country, died bankrupt, and ruined the monarchy.

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the seas and carry goods from one place to another. It was only when the commerce of trade republics came under the control of bankers, Doria argued, that the rot set in. This and the increase of inequality and luxury consumption it caused led to the decay of trading nations like the Dutch and the English.44 Machiavelli, Doria stated, was right, as ‘the events of our time confirm that without the foundation of true virtue, no particular order can remain stable, nor be useful to Republics or other states.’45 Modern economic policies that were geared towards sustaining trade without recognising the importance of virtue were selfcontradictory, since real commerce, as opposed to ‘mercantile commerce,’ required virtue. Doria argued that the French, under Louis XIV and Colbert, had been the first to attempt to replace ancient virtue with greed and luxury and engage in a politics of conquest through mercantile commerce. The objective was to establish French hegemony in the international arena in the form of a universal monarchy.46 After Louis XIV, Doria claimed, French politics maintained its desire for universal monarchy while it became more afraid of war. France turned to chimerical financial politics to re-establish its power in Europe and was followed by other states. Doria observed that rulers ‘now attempt to make conquests by means of artificial treaties and cabals and obtain their glory only in those conquests made by means of treaties, laws and other artificial means that promoted their designs.’47 By the 1740s, Doria concluded, most European states had adopted this garbled version of the political strategy that Colbert had devised at the end of the seventeenth century. One of Doria’s unpublished manuscripts of the 1740s in which he addressed this situation was called ‘the politics by which the various republics and monarchies of Europe are governed have made Europe in fact completely barbaric and dressed it up in fake and false civilisation.’48 The political economy that carried the day ‘made all states poor’ because it did not deal with real commerce but an artificial commerce that was

44 45 46 47 48

Doria, Manoscritti napoletani di Paolo Mattia Doria, 6:344. Vidal, Il pensiero civile di P.M. Doria, con il manoscritto ‘del commercio del regno di Napoli,’ 229. Ibid., 228–9 ; Ajello, Arcana Juris, 411, 416. Vidal, Il pensiero civile di P.M. Doria, con il manoscritto ‘del commercio del regno di Napoli,’ 229. BNN, vol. viii, ms. 23, f. 229.

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only held up by self-deceit.49 Rather than control markets and protect the virtue and happiness of their subjects, politicians destroyed them and promoted a ‘universal tyranny [tirannia universale]’ that held Europe in its power.50 Most rulers followed contradictory political economic strategies, which Doria called ‘imperfect mercantile politics,’ as a result of which commercial politics became as cruel and chaotic and horrific as ancient bloodshed.51 While all that was needed, in Doria’s opinion, was to heed a political writer such as himself, all European rulers, except perhaps for those of Naples, were lost on the wrong track of shortsighted political superstition. ‘If a political philosopher offered a Prince to develop in the space of twenty years a state which would be admired and feared by the whole of Europe, [that Prince,] hearing there was talk of twenty years, would reject the proposal and laugh about the glory of the founder of the state, whereas, if a merchant who belonged to the art of commerce and finance were to present himself with the offer of making the proceeds of the treasury increase in a very short time, he would be put at the helm of government and the political philosopher would be banished from the Court.’52 Doria suggested that Naples, in spite of its economic and infrastructural underdevelopment, presented the best chance to realise reforms and to see the development of ‘real commerce.’ Doria believed that Naples could defeat the strategies of other European states and become admired and feared by them in the space of twenty years by consistently applying sound Platonic reason-of-state politics. To support his basic proposal, Doria suggested a number of practical reforms, which, he said, referring back to La vita civile, all confirmed the essence of civil society. Agriculture should be promoted, domestic trade had to be liberalised, and the ports of Taranto, Naples, and Brindisi had to be restructured and modernised and become commercial centres from which foreign trade could be regulated. The juridical system had to be streamlined and arbitrary elements removed from the tax system. Doria advocated

49 50 51 52

Vidal, Il pensiero civile di P.M. Doria, con il manoscritto ‘del commercio del regno di Napoli,’ 229. Quoted by Ajello, Arcana Juris, 406. Vidal, Il pensiero civile di P.M. Doria, con il manoscritto ‘del commercio del regno di Napoli,’ 121. Ibid., 98–9. The quotation comes from a manuscript from the same period as the text written for Ventura.

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reforms, too, that limited the growth of inequality and stimulated the regeneration of the countryside, while luxury consumption in the capital of Naples was to be thwarted.53 ‘In the end, the Kingdom of Naples, by directing its real and effective commerce well [ben dirigendo il suo commercio reale ed effettivo], could attract a greater abundance of money than the English and Dutch with their ideal [ideali] companies.’54 Doria’s plan for the reform of Naples was a reinvention of Fénelon’s model for the reform of Salentum in his Télémaque. The advantage of Naples was that it had not developed the level of democratic luxury consumption and corruption that France had. Naples was too underdeveloped to be corrupted, so the vices of modernity did not have to be corrected so much. The reform of Naples, then, was not a matter of a painful return to some ancient virtue, but rather of a prudent development of its liberty, its amor proprio, so to speak, in the right direction. Giambattista Vico Between 1699 and 1741 Giambattista Vico was a professor in rhetoric at the University of Naples. Much to his own disappointment, which is documented in his autobiography (Vita di Giambattista Vico, scritta da se medesimo, published in two parts in 1725 and 1731), he never managed to rise to a more prestigious chair during his career.55 His first writings, a series of public lectures from between 1699 and 1706,56 his early metaphysics De antiquissima italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710),57 and his methodological work De nostri temporis studiorum

53 Ibid., 95–8. 54 Ibid., 165. 55 Giambattista Vico, L’autobiografia, il carteggio e le poesie varie, ed. Benedetto Croce (Bari: Laterza, 1911); in English, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, ed. Max H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). References below are to this English edition, from which quotations are taken, with Italian terms added. 56 Giambattista Vico, Le Orazioni Inaugurali, Il de Italorum Sapientia e le polemiche, ed. G. Gentile and F. Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1914); in English, On Humanistic Education: Six Inaugural Orations, 1699–1707, ed. Gian Galeazzo Visconti, trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee, intro. Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 57 Giambattista Vico, Selected Writings, ed. Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 47–78: ‘On the ancient wisdom of the Italians taken from the origins of the Latin language [De antiquissima italorum sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda].’

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ratione (1709)58 were written in this capacity. Between 1720 and 1722 Vico published his tracts on natural law, De universi juris principio et fine uno liber unus and De constantia jurisprudentis liber alter, in which he articulated for the first time his perspective on the problem of explaining the sociable nature of man.59 This perspective he further developed for the rest of his life, by means of a famously innovative approach to the history of humankind, in the three editions (1725, 1730, 1744) of his Scienza nuova.60 Contrary to what has been a dominant myth for a long time with regard to Vico’s intellectual context, he was not, as he himself suggested in his autobiography, a stranger in his own town. The best studies of Vico’s ideas on morality and his political thought have by now firmly established that, like many of his contemporaries, he confronted the challenge of avoiding Epicureanism by focusing on answering Bayle’s moral scepticism.61 In this regard the emphasis of Vico’s project differed from Doria’s.

58 Giambattista Vico, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione di Giambattista Vico, ed. Marco Veneziani (Florence: Olschki, 2000); in English, On the Study Methods of Our Time, ed. E. Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 59 See Giambattista Vico, Opere Giuridiche, eds. Nicola Badaloni and Paolo Cristofolini (Florence: Sansoni, 1974); in English, Universal Right, trans. Giorgio Pinton and Margaret Diehl (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 60 Giambattista Vico, the first edition of 1725, Scienza Nuova Prima, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1931); in English, The First New Science, ed. Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). The third edition, Principj di Scienza Nuova d’Intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni, is in Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini, 2 vols. (Milan: Mondadari, I Meridiani, 1990), 1: 411–971; in English, The New Science of Giambattista Vico,Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the Addition of ‘Practic of the New Science,’ ed. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986 [1968]). (Henceforth references are to Scienza nuova and to the paragraph numbering that is used both in the widespread English edition and in the Battistini critical edition of 1990. I have modified a few English translations to improve the readability and occasionally original Italian terms are given for important notions.) 61 After earlier efforts by Croce and Nicolini in the first half of the twentieth century, in Italy new Vico research is led by the Centro di Studi Vichiani, which since 1971 has published its Bollettino under the direction of Pietro Piovani, Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Fulvio Tessitore, and more recently Giuseppe Cacciatore. Since 1969 the centre has published specialised volumes in a series of Guida Editore, in which (apart from two volumes published by Bibliopolis) appear regularly updated bibliographies of secondary works on Vico. In response to Paolo Rossi’s ‘Chi sono i contemporanei di Vico?’ Rivista di Filosofia (1981), 51–82, the most convincing answers in Italian are Lorenzo Bianchi, ‘“E contro la politica de’Governi di Baile, che vorrebbe senza Religioni poter

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Vico was a friend of Doria. In 1710 Vico dedicated his early work on metaphysics to him. Vico’s orations as a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples during the first decade of the century also echoed the themes of ancient moral virtue, patriotism, and material simplicity that

reggere le Nazioni”: note su Bayle nella corrispondenza di Vico,’ Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani (2000), 17–30, on the correspondence of Vico between 1724 and 1726 where Vico mentions Bayle in a number of important ways; Gustavo Costa, ‘Bayle e l’arcana mundi,’ in Pierre Bayle e l’Italia, ed. L. Bianchi (Naples: Liguori, 1996), 107–22; Enrico Nuzzo, ‘Vico e Bayle, ancora una messa a punto,’ ibid., 123–202; Carlo Borghero, ‘L’Italia in Bayle, Bayle in l’Italia,’ ibid., 3–33; and Maria Rascaglia, ‘Gli interlocutori di Vico nei manoscritti della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli,’ Bollettino del centro di studi vichiani (2000), 109–24. The emphasis on Bayle as the determining figure in Vico’s intellectual context replaced the wider contextual reading by Nicola Badaloni. See his Introduzione a G.B. Vico and his introductions to Vico’s Opere Filosofiche (Florence: Sansoni, 1971) and Opere Giuridiche (Florence: Sansoni, 1974). In English Peter Burke already singled out Bayle as a contemporary; see Vico (Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 77. John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) expands upon this idea in a major way. Thus is questioned the interpretation by Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1976), followed by Mark Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Besides, it renders less interesting Leon Pompa’s philosophical attempt to come to terms with the complexity of Vico’s ideas (Vico: A Study of the New Science [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], and his introduction to Giambattista Vico: The First New Science [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]) as well as the articles in the journal New Vico Studies and the volumes inspired by Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene, Vico: Past and Present (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981); Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969). Taking Bayle as central to the intellectual challenge of Vico’s Scienza nuova might prove consistent with the promising approach taken by Ajello and Ascione of placing Vico in the context of a struggle between the two Neapolitan factions of the aristocracy and the ceto civile, where Vico comes out as an opponent of most reformers (see for example, Ajello, Arcana Juris, 149–225 as well as most other works by him and Ascione referred to in the bibliography). Ajello himself questioned the thesis of Vico’s isolation in his ‘Cartesianismo e cultura oltremontana,’ in Pietro Giannone ed il suo tempo, ed. Ajello (Naples: Jovene, 1980), 148–57. In the context of this claim, Vico’s La congiura dei principi napoletani 1701 (prima e seconda stesura), ed. Claudia Pandolfi (Naples: Morano/Centro di Studi Vichiani, 1992) ought to be studied in depth. More complete bibliographical information can be found in the specialised Vico literature. Placing Vico’s moral philosophy in its Neapolitan context and comparing it with Doria’s and Celestino Galiani’s has only been done to some degree in Ferrone’s The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, which had a different focus from this study.

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had such a central place in Doria’s works. Vico agreed with Doria’s criticisms of the excesses of modern commercial civilisation and its politics. He also shared Doria’s critical views of contemporary philosophers as well as of those Christian thinkers who tried to base the idea of human benevolence on man’s natural instincts or observation of nature. Thus, Vico and Doria entertained similar critiques of the world of eighteenthcentury commercial society and published their works in the same period in Naples. They were also allies in their resistance to the subsequent developments of Neapolitan intellectual culture in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The basic frame of reference for both in the development of their moral philosophy was the Cartesian academic intellectual culture that until the early eighteenth century was a dominant factor in Neapolitan intellectual life.62 Around the turn of the century, Doria as well as Vico rejected Cartesianism, and both men became self-declared Platonists. However, unlike Doria, Vico did not advocate a return to ‘ancient’ virtue or see self-abnegation as the moral philosophical and political answer to the key problems of modern society. The question Vico, like the majority of contemporary European political thinkers, tried to answer was how to explain why man was naturally obliged to non-selfinterested action. Vico saw this question as tantamount to explaining how society emerged while avoiding any suggestion that its principles were reducible to a pre-established functioning of ‘Epicurean’ chance (caso) or ‘Stoic’ fate (fato).63 Compared with Doria, Vico developed an entirely different outlook on the causes of morality and the origins of society. His main work, originally entitled Principi di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni per la quale si ritruovano i principi di altro sistema del diritto naturale delle genti (1725),64 presented a distinctive account of sociability which he used as the basis of a powerful critique of modern culture. His perspective on human history in the book resembled Doria’s cyclical sequence of types of societies. The foundations of

62 See Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, in particular the first three chapters; Claudio Manzoni, I cartesiani italiani (1660–1760) (Udine: La nuova base, 1984); and Brendan Dooley, ‘Veritas Filia Temporis: Experience and Belief in Early Modern Culture,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 60[3] (1999), 498–501. 63 Giambattista Vico, Scienza nuova, § 5, 179, 335, 342, 387, 585. See also Vico, Autobiography, 122. 64 The most famous edition is the third and last, which Vico considered the most complete version of his ideas and is the one I have mainly used.

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his critique, however, were new and entailed an innovative conception of the emergence of sociability. Against the Sceptics Vico described the process of his intellectual development in his Vita di Giambatista Vico, in which he spoke about himself in the third person. He explained how he developed his thinking about the nature of sociability in the context of a reconsideration of the origin and historical development of laws, especially of Roman civil law. Vico wrote that he admired the scholastic efforts to ‘abstract into general maxims of justice the particular considerations of equity’ as well as the humanists whom he saw as ‘pure historians of Roman civil law.’ Vico later considered ‘each of these pleasures … a sign.’65 However, he soon concluded that there was a conspicuous mismatch between the philosophy of law and the actual history of law. The ‘science of justice [la scienza del giusto] taught by moral philosophers [i morali filosofi][like Aristotle] proceeded from a few eternal truths dictated in metaphysics by an ideal justice [una giustizia ideale]’ while ‘Roman jurisprudence was an art of equity conveyed by innumerable specific precepts of the laws and the intentions of legislators.’66 There was a glaring discrepancy between the Aristotelian explanation of the origins of justice and the way in which laws actually developed. Vico wondered if he could reconcile the contingent reality of civil institutions in history with an overarching ideal justice and resumed his study of metaphysics, at which point he became a Platonist: Hence, he was again brought round to the study of metaphysics, but since in this connection that of Aristotle, which he had learned from Suárez, was of no help to him, nor could he see the reason why, he proceeded to study that of Plato, guided only by his fame as the prince of divine philosophers.67

Vico concluded that compared with ‘the metaphysics of Aristotle [that] leads to a physical principle [un principio fisico], which is matter … the

65 Vico wrote that on the one hand he engaged in ‘investigating the principles of universal law,’ while on the other he focused on the actual ‘usages of Roman jurisprudence,’ Vico, Autobiography, 116. 66 Ibid., 116, 117, 120–1. 67 Ibid., 121.

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metaphysics of Plato leads to a metaphysical principle [and a] moral philosophy [founded] on an ideal or architectonic virtue or justice [una virtù o giustizia ideale o sia architetta].’68 Preserving the idea of a metaphysical principle, Vico reasoned, was crucial not only for reconciling history and philosophy in the study of jurisprudence, but more generally for being able to understand all particular phenomena in any society in the light of the universal essence of society.69 This same insight, he realised, drove Plato to devote ‘himself to meditating an ideal commonwealth [repubblica ideale], to which he gave his laws and thereby an equally ideal justice.’70 From that moment, Vico commented on his own intellectual development, ‘there began to dawn on him, without his being aware of it, the thought of meditating an ideal eternal law [un diritto ideale eterno] that should be observed in a universal city after the idea or design of providence [provvedenza], upon which idea have since been founded all the commonwealths of all times and all nations.’71 Vico addressed exactly this problem in his Scienza nuova. The central issue of the work, he declared, was ‘whether man is naturally sociable [se l’umana natura sia socievole].’72 Vico was convinced that no available notion of sociability accorded with the facts of history. Philosophers tended to portray individuals as naturally endowed with various intellectual or instinctive faculties that enabled them to cooperate, form political entities, and behave morally. The facts of man’s earliest history, however, showed him to be an ignorant wandering beast whose mental state involved no sociable capacities. In a way the issue was just an extension of Vico’s wondering about the history of Roman law, where the facts did not match the principles. According to Vico the main question

68 Ibid. 69 Fassò has argued convincingly that the problem of Roman law was what drove Vico’s intellectual development towards his Scienza nuova. In a similar vein Faucci considered the Scienza nuova to be inspired by Grotius’s ambition to become the ‘jurisconsult of mankind.’ Guido Fassò, ‘The Problem of Law and the Historical Origin of the New Science,’ in Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene, eds., Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 3–14; Dario Faucci, ‘Vico and Grotius, Jurisconsults of Mankind,’ in Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White, eds., Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 61–76. 70 Vico, Autobiography, 121. 71 Ibid., 122. 72 Vico, Scienza nuova, § 135.

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here was ‘whether law resides in nature or in the opinion of men.’73 This, he claimed was a ‘great dispute still waged by the best philosophers and moral theologians against Carneades the sceptic and Epicurus.’74 The objective of the Scienza nuova was to end this dispute, which was central to the entire field of moral philosophy and indirectly to the most pressing political issues of the time as well. This explains why the figure of Pierre Bayle became as crucial to Vico as he had been to Celestino. Bayle had reduced religion to opinion, morality to human law, and any regularity that was present in social interaction to pleasureseeking. This had made him the most severe critic of Christian moral philosophy. In his Scienza nuova Vico tried to push Bayle’s critique of natural sociability even further. History showed, according to Vico, that any available notion of sociability was untenable, not just the idea that man had a natural desire to enter society for its own sake, but also the idea that society originated from man’s original weakness. This latter position had been the one of Epicurean and Augustinian authors like Mandeville or the French Jansenists, who both derived morality from man’s initial weakness, which was complemented by a mental drive of honour or pride in oneself. This position was attacked by Doria, who also saw self-preservation by itself as an impotent integrative force, but who argued that the subsequent reflective intellectual urge led to false morality only if people misunderstood their own sensations. Vico’s critique of all explanations of sociability took on a different form from the start. Vico argued that the primitive state of human nature at the beginning of history made all available ideas psychologically problematic. The facts of man’s bestial existence showed that primitive man did not have any of the faculties he needed to become sociable. Like Rousseau later on, Vico held that philosophers tended to imagine primitive man to be far more similar to modern man than was the case. He mentioned that philosophers shared with everyone the general human feature of ‘making himself the measure of all things,’ which made them inclined to overlook the differences between primitive human nature and the modified modern version of it that characterised their own selfawareness.75 In taking this approach to explaining why philosophers had

73 Ibid., § 309. 74 Ibid., § 135. 75 Ibid., § 120, 122, 236, 137. Also discussed by Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an AntiModern, 119, 133.

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so far failed to understand the true causes of sociability, Vico’s thinking resembled Doria’s ideas about self-deceit, which served to explain both the corruption of man’s capacity for virtue and the philosophical errors that sustained and even encouraged moral corruption. In contrast to Doria, however, Vico did not understand the first emergence of good, uncorrupted societies as the mirror image of the emergence of morally corrupt societies. Vico separated his theory of the emergence of society from his account of the nature of moral corruption. Precisely because, according to Vico, natural man was so mentally deprived that he could not by himself become sociable, Doria’s idea of sociability was unacceptable. At the core of Doria’s view of the emergence of good societies lay an element of struggle within man between following his own inclinations and heeding God. Doria always saw this moral struggle from a philosophical perspective and directly related the corruption of man’s natural self-love to the depravity of modern philosophy. Thus, Doria attributed the weakness of philosophical accounts of the emergence of society to the fact that all philosophers shared in the general human traits of laziness and a self-deceptive inclination to turn a natural appreciation of virtue into selfish behaviour. According to Doria, failure to understand or accept that society required the subjection of self to a larger unity made philosophers justify and encourage the mistakes that ordinary people were prone to make. Vico rejected Doria’s association of the emergence of society with a self-aware moral struggle. In fact, replacing Doria’s idea that the first emergence of society could be seen as a moral struggle by self-aware human beings was, for Vico, the key to developing an explanation of sociability superior to all those available. For Vico, this move was crucial. His attempt to take full account of the characteristics of man’s natural primitive existence and explain how man became sociable required a new approach. Natural law thinkers like Grotius, Selden, and Pufendorf, and modern philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Bayle, all had failed to properly integrate human freedom and divine pre-established harmony. This harmony and its historical manifestations Vico called ‘constancy [constantia]’.76 The issue was how the regularity of the development of human customs in history could be aligned with an idea of moral freedom. Vico argued that all of his opponents either reduced morality simply to pleasure and justice to utility,

76 Also discussed by Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, 70–1.

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which he associated with the Epicurean notion of fate, or directly reduced human freedom to divine control over man’s moral economy, which he related to Stoic necessity. The same was true of the most sophisticated Christian arguments about sociability. Two of the main Christian philosophers of the time whose works Vico studied, Malebranche and Leibniz, had both argued that there was an element of God in man which people discovered through natural experiences, after which they could behave morally and socially. In contrast to Leibniz, who had argued that man through the active ‘contemplation of nature’ could reach the stage of perfect wisdom and love for God, Vico rejected any view, including Celestino’s, that imagined man as capable at any point of spontaneously opening up his self-interested horizon and gradually discerning God through nature.77 From Vico’s standpoint, such views were unsatisfactory because they reduced virtue to necessity. Vico’s criticism of Epicureanism would apply to Celestino, who supposed that man had specifically moral sentiments, which were pleasurable. Early in life, Vico wrote in his autobiography, he was struck by an argument that convinced him that Augustine’s Platonism was in fact midway between Calvin and Pelagius on the matter of grace.78 Subsequently, this view evolved into a particular notion about man’s moral status. Man, Vico argued, was fallen and incapable of moral purity. He thus effectively rejected Doria’s outlook on virtue. Yet, according to Vico, man, even though his religious state had been relegated to idolatry, had not been entirely abandoned by God. Cupidity arises out of the finite things of the body. These are the utilitates of the body. Therefore, because of the original sin contracted from the fall of our first father Adam, mankind was delivered over from contemplation of eternal truth with a pure mind to regarding things in flux out of a false judgement of the senses. And, corrupted by a confused whirlwind of emotions, mankind was delivered over from piety toward God with a pure mind, to loving the idols of the senses. Thus there was a turning away from following honestas of mind to following corporeal utilitates.

77 For Celestino this was part of his ‘naturalistic’ argument, whereas Leibniz, for example, saw man’s ascent to God in terms of peculiar grace; see Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence, 118–24. 78 Vico, Autobiography, 119. Cf. Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence, 118–24 on Leibniz’s similar view.

Doria and Vico: True Utility against Pleasure 115 Thus the principles of sacred history are confirmed: Adam was created by God, was originally whole, and then fell through his sin.79

Thus, Vico agreed with Celestino’s idea that needs were not an integrative principle. He did not see man’s physical needs as the ‘occasion’ for sociability, but as a sign of man’s fallen nature. Vico also believed the distance between people’s primitiveness in the state of nature and the reflective capacities that created a basis for independent moral selfregulation was immense and could not be closed in any way as easily as was commonly supposed. This, he argued, was why modern moral philosophers tended to repeat the errors that had been made by ancient Stoics or Epicureans. Instead, the route Vico proposed for reacquiring whatever could be regained of man’s antediluvian status was more indirect. Like Doria, Vico understood man in the state of nature as having only sensations of God. This, however, did not mean that man had to respond to these feelings by subjecting himself to God. Instead, he was guided by providence in the course of the progress of mankind. ‘Seeing God’ was not a moral challenge, but a guiding force towards the establishment of society. In his early work on metaphysics, which he dedicated to Doria, Vico showed that primitive man’s sensations were not passively received impressions, as passions were commonly described, but creations of the soul that God had given man and that connected and obligated man to his Author. Every sensation, even if it was erroneous, false, or self-deceptive, was always an experience of God.80 Even while we err, we cannot lose sight of God; in fact, we comprehend the false under the aspect of the true, evil under the appearance of good; we see finitude, we feel ourselves to be finite, but this means that we think the infinite. It seems to us that we are seeing movements excited [eccitarsi] and communicated [comunicarsi] by bodies, but these same excitations, these same communications, assert and confirm God, the mind-God who is author of movement; we see wrong as right, many as one, otherness as sameness, things in motion as being at rest; but, since there is in nature neither rectitude, nor unity, nor sameness, nor rest, self-deception [l’ingannarsi] in these matters means only that, even if man is ignorant or deceived

79 Quoted by Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, 74. 80 Quoted by Nicola Badaloni, ‘Ideality and Factuality in Vico’s Thought,’ in Tagliacozzo White eds., Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, 396.

116 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money about finite things, he perceives in these representations themselves the best and greatest God.81

Seeing God enabled man to rescue and to expand his narrow postdiluvian existence. His sensations of God awakened him from his inwardly oriented state in which his feelings were dominated by the blunt passions that caused him to respond to the needs of self-preservation. Yet, man’s opening up to the world, in Vico’s account, did not turn his utility-seeking into a moral struggle. Vico did not argue that man was supposed deliberately to correct his primitive behaviour himself through his new insights. He believed instead that the process of man’s emancipation from divine guidance was much more gradual and dynamic than was commonly supposed. According to Vico, man remained under the guidance of providence as long as he himself searched not to improve the moral side of his actions but only his own utility. Within that process the whole struggle between man’s fallen utility-seeking nature and the need for him to be sociable and understand God’s law of nature was absorbed by providence.82 The moral philosophy that Vico expressed through his own account of the history of mankind corrected, he believed, the faults of all other moral philosophers before him. ‘Sympathetic Nature’ The human condition after the Fall, according to Vico, was ‘one not of negation [niegazione] but of privation [privazione] of good works, and hence of a potentiality for them which is ineffectual [una potenza inefficace].’83 Vico’s history of mankind described how man’s potential for society and morality was made effective by ‘free choice [arbitrio libero], which God aids by His providence.’84 Primitive people were ‘stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts’ whose ‘sole way of knowing things’ was via the senses. In accordance with the Christian idea that Adam’s curiosity was man’s first sin, Vico depicted man as ordained by God to live by his sense of wonder and be plagued by basic physical needs. In this state

81 Quoted by Badaloni, ‘Ideality and Factuality in Vico,’ 393; slightly modified translation and terms in italics added. 82 Here I disagree crucially with Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, 79–82. 83 Vico, Scienza nuova, § 310. 84 Ibid., § 310.

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of nature, in which people were isolated from each other and only concerned with their instinctive self-preservation, divine providence guided man towards his first religious sentiment. Vico believed that religious sentiment was the crucial integrative principle that brought people together. Providence was the foundation from which Vico responded to Pierre Bayle’s statements about atheist societies. In Vico’s terms, providence ‘authorised’ people’s wills to develop ‘certain’ and ‘universal customs’ that united mankind. He explained how primitive man’s religious sentiments were triggered by the sound of thunder, a brute natural force. People’s animal reflex to thunder was to consider it a threat to their own self-preservation. Furthermore, according to Vico, this universal response to the brute forces of nature made men hide together in caves and communicate to each other their natural sensations of the presence of divine beings. Thus, man’s fear of the sound of thunder, rather than fear of other people as in Hobbes’s state of nature, lay at the roots of societies; as Vico quoted, ‘primos in orbe deos fecit timor.’85 Although the first primitive forms of society emerged out of man’s universal intuitive reflex actions, man’s idea to automatically consider his relation with nature to be a relation with the supernatural was correct. According to Vico, when primitive man confused natural phenomena with divine actions, this error put him on the right track to becoming sociable. Falsehood was key to the providential path of human progress. Vico explained how primitive man’s religious sentiment and sharing one’s religious ideas with other people activated man’s potential for good works, which after the Fall had become ineffectual. He argued that independent of man’s instinctive self-preservation, the universality of his natural religious sensations gave rise to concomitant pleasures. Thus, religious customs were resilient institutions because ‘there is nothing more pleasant than following [these] natural customs.’86 Following their first unification by means of religion, people started to impose meanings onto all sorts of natural phenomena. This way they simultaneously explained the whole of nature in terms of their own relations with nature and intensified the habitual bonds among each other. So by ‘naturally interpret[ing] whatever appears to men … according to

85 Ibid., § 191, see also § 178, 376, 503–4. 86 Ibid., § 309.

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their own … passions and customs’ they built, through their social interactions, a whole mental scenery for their pagan friendship with ‘“sympathetic nature” [“Natura simpatetica”]’onto their initial shared religious sentiments.87 This explained the popularity of fables that people told each other in order to point out similarities between different things, which was the origin of religion as a proto-political institution.88 In this fashion the first theological poets [i primi poeti teologi] invented [si finsero] the first divine fable, the greatest they ever created: that of Jove, king and father of men and gods, in the act of hurling the lightning bolt; an image so popular, disturbing, and instructive that its creators themselves believed in it, and feared, revered, and worshipped it in frightful religions. And by that trait of the human mind noticed by Tacitus, whatever these men saw, imagined, or even made or did themselves they believed to be Jove.89

Although it was ‘self-deceit to fear the false divinity of Jove [inganno di temere la falsa divinità di Giove],’ it was ‘permitted [permise] by divine providence [la provvedenza divina].’90 According to Vico, it was logically impossible for man in his primitive state to establish any form of political authority. The societies that emerged from shared religious sentiment were not conceived as structures of order imposed by human beings onto each other, but referred exclusively to God’s power. Yet, within these first religious societies that characterised human existence in the so-called ‘age of the gods [l’età degli dèi],’ a creative interest developed from the connections between people’s sensations and the religious customs they enjoyed sustaining. ‘Wonder wakens our mind [and] has the habit wherever it sees some extraordinary phenomenon of nature, a comet for example … of asking straightaway what it means.’91 These meanings were formed on the basis of existing customs and themselves inspired new religious customs. This way, according to Vico, primitive societies developed shared religious world views that revolved around their own relation towards nature. Thus, Vico thought that providence [provvedenza] created a process in

87 88 89 90 91

Ibid., § 220, 378. Vico, Selected Writings, 82, 104–5; Vico, Scienza nuova, § 1107, 309, 201, 204–5. Vico, Scienza nuova, § 379. Ibid., § 385. Ibid., § 189.

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which man’s narrow self-interest was forced to create a bond of ‘sympathy [simpatia]’ with nature and other human beings.92 Vico claimed that in modern times ‘we can scarcely understand, still less imagine, how those first men thought who founded gentile humanity [l’umanita gentilesca].’93 Especially because eighteenth-century man’s own mindset derived from these first processes of civilisation and was still dominated by falsehood, he could not understand his own history. Moreover, he had lost the power of fantasy that primitive man had. It was impossible for people in modern times to form ideas similar to the one of a ‘sympathetic nature.’ Men shape the phrase with their lips but have nothing in their minds; for what they have in mind is falsehood [il falso], which is nothing, and they are no longer aided by fantasy [fantasia] in forming a vast image that is coloured by falsehood [una falsa vastissima immagine].94

It should be noted that in Vico’s account, primitive people could not but believe that their whole relation to the world and to each other was purely a matter of self-preservation. They internalised nature, their shared religious customs, and the intellectual pleasures they derived from their customs only in terms of physical utility. Utility, Vico kept on emphasising, was the means by which providence improved man’s existence and the moral quality of his behaviour. ‘For private utility [private utilità] they would live alone like wild beasts,’ if it were not for providence, by which they ‘have been led by this same utility … to live like men in justice and to keep themselves in society and thus to observe their social nature.’95 Because their pagan minds did not understand providence and morality, people saw their customs as protection of their self-preservation. Their purpose was to befriend nature because they only felt, but could not understand, the true moral character of friendship. According to Vico, this is what moral sceptics and Epicureans still did.

92 See Gustavo Costa, ‘G.B. Vico e la natura simpatetica,’ Giornale critico della filosofia italiana (1968), 401–18, for a strangely misconceived interpretation of Vico’s notion of la natura simpatetica as part of a general critique of any view in which ‘falsity’ could lie at the basis of knowledge and sociability. 93 Ibid., § 378. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., § 2.

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They failed to see the providential design behind man’s sensations and explained human society as a composite of interactions determined exclusively by self-interest.96 Vico devised his history of mankind as proof of a ‘superhuman wisdom [una sovraumana sapienza]’ which ruled ‘without force of laws [by] making use of the very customs of men.’97 In fact, laws themselves were the product of man’s religious customs. Societies and their legal structures, Vico believed, were not essentially political unities that had started by ‘fraud or force’ as moral sceptics claimed.98 Vico, famously, wrote that it was a ‘truth beyond all question’ that ‘the world of civil society [questo mondo civile] has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human minds.’99 He meant that man, inspired by his beliefs, acted freely and thereby simultaneously produced social ties and mental habits that were beyond man’s design. While man was still only concerned with his self-preservation, the providential ‘divine legislative mind [divina mente legislatrice]’ transformed man’s behaviour in spite of himself. Legislation considers man as he is in order to turn him to good uses in human society. Out of ferocity, avarice, and ambition, the three vices which lead all mankind astray, it creates national defence, commerce, and politics, and thereby causes the strength, the wealth, and the wisdom of the republics; out of these three great vices which would certainly destroy man on earth, society thus causes civil happiness [civile felicità] to emerge. This principle proves the existence of divine providence: through its intelligent laws the passions of men who are entirely occupied by the pursuit of their private utility are transformed into a civil order which permits men to live in human society.100

96 Ibid., § 499. 97 Ibid., § 1107. 98 Vico, Autobiography, 171. The idea that morality was a political invention, such as Mandeville had argued, designed to create inequality on purpose was logically impossible according to Vico. In early societies man led his ‘life content with the spontaneous fruits of nature, satisfied to drink the water of the springs and to sleep in the caves. In the natural equality of a state in which each of the fathers was sovereign in his own family, one cannot conceive of either fraud or violence by which one man could subject all the others to a civil monarchy’ (Vico, Scienza nuova, § 522). 99 Ibid., § 331. 100 Ibid., § 132–3.

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People were ‘intending almost always to do something quite different and often quite the contrary’ to what providence made them do. While they could only deliberately pursue their ‘private utility,’ providence guided mankind towards society. Throughout history, people’s ‘institutions’ were unintended consequences of their actions ‘and sometimes quite contrary to the proposals of men.’101 Vico’s account of the relation between man’s utility-seeking and the sociable outcomes of his actions due to the conditioning of man’s mind by providence was a direct attack on the traditional Christian emphasis on self-denial. For the Christians, human freedom required that man consciously gave up some of his self-love in order to regain as much of his antediluvian status as possible and to confirm the bond between man and God that had survived the Fall. Vico’s history of humankind was completely devoid of the very idea of such an internal mental struggle. Human institutions, religious beliefs, and laws arose spontaneously, forming a harmonious picture, in spite of the bestial nature of man himself. According to Vico, a providential history of humankind was the only way to explain the emergence of universal laws: ‘uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth,’ namely, ‘divine providence.’102 The facts of human history, from the emergence of the first religion and laws to their conquest by sin, only made sense, Vico believed, by the supposition of a providential bond between God and man that educated man’s utility-seeking. Men, because of their corrupted nature, are under the tyranny of self-love [tiranneggiati dall’amor proprio], which compels them to make utility their chief guide … Man in the bestial state desires only his own welfare; having taken wife and begotten children, he desires his own welfare along with that of the family; having entered upon civil life, he desires his own welfare along with that of his city; when its rule is extended over several peoples, he desires his own welfare along with that of the entire human race. In all these circumstances man desires principally his own utility. Therefore it is only by divine providence that he can be held within these institutions to practise justice as a member of the society of the family, of the city, and finally of mankind. Unable to attain all the utilities he wishes, he is constrained by these institutions to seek those which are his due, and this is called just.

101 Ibid., § 344, also §136, 310, 1110. 102 Ibid., § 144, 145.

122 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money That which regulates all human justice is therefore divine justice, which is administered by divine providence to preserve human society.103

Like Doria, but on the basis of a very different philosophical history of humankind, Vico concluded that man’s behaviour transcended individual self-preservation and turned towards the preservation of mankind. It did so without developing new needs and desires, such as a lust for luxury consumption, as, for example, Celestino supposed. On the basis of his innovative outlook on the origins of society, Vico returned to the political ideas that Doria, as a follower of Fénelon, had already put forward. ‘Excessive Reflection’ Within Vico’s concept of man’s natural sociability, people’s moral behaviour was separated from moral knowledge and purposive moral behaviour. Providence made man behave morally before man acquired any moral knowledge or good intentions. The manner in which people naturally developed imaginary relations with nature and their fellow human beings bent postdiluvian man’s free choice to behavioural patterns that satisfied his needs along with the needs of human society. Yet man did not choose to be moral.104 Instead, he still viewed his social customs and religious practices as serving his own self-preservation. Man’s divinely inspired sensation of fear had been his first relation to God.105 His universal religious response to that natural fear of nature triggered his natural sociability. Further guided by providential sensations, man, in spite of himself, developed bonds with his fellows and neutralised his own selfish passions through building up mental relations with ‘sympathetic nature.’ Meanwhile, however, he had acquired a separate pleasure of sustaining shared opinions. Out of man’s pleasure of sharing customs he developed a capacity for reflection that increasingly allowed him to consider his own condition from the point of view of his fellows. Applying

103 Ibid., § 341. Paragraph § 1410 (originally the last paragraph of ‘Pratica della scienza nuova,’ an addition to the 1731 version of the work; see Vico, ‘Pratica della scienza nuova,’ in Principj di Scienza Nuova d’Intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni, ed. Fausto Nicolini [Bari: Laterza, 1928]); 270–1 gives a neat statement of unintended providential mechanisms. 104 Vico, Scienza nuova, § 1406, 347, 141, 241, 217, 520, 522, 342 (Vico, ‘Pratica della scienza nuova,’ 268; 123, 141, 94, 90, 223, 224, 121). 105 Vico, Scienza nuova, § 374, 363.

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his reflection to his own behaviour, man could freely approve or modify his actions. In this way, Vico argued that deliberative authority, moral obligation, and self-regulation did not come directly from nature, whether from man’s innate knowledge or instinctive drives, but ensued from an acquired faculty that emerged due to divine guidance. However, man’s relation to his experiences in God had changed with the emergence of his capacity for rational thinking. His newly acquired self-awareness meant, according to Vico, that man was confronted with the challenge to align his own thoughts with his divinely induced social behaviour. It was still true that all of his experiences were experiences in God, but man was now challenged to acknowledge this relation to God and develop a moral conscience, and piety, and to act in accordance with the way God had formed him. The main danger was that man would deceive himself by misdirecting his free choice, confuse his divine sensations with pleasure-seeking passions, and turn his social behaviour to selfish materialism and luxury, rather than to the self-preservation of humankind. The highest moral standard of reflection was the pious acknowledgement that one’s sensations were God’s creations, rather than one’s own.106 Christianity, Vico insisted, supported man’s proper direction of his self-awareness and his actions and stabilised the wellbeing of societies. If, on the contrary, a whole society sustained customs built on ‘errors in God’ and was guided exclusively by misdirected reflection, its moral institutional basis, which Vico called the ‘economy,’ was doomed to collapse. Echoing Plato’s conception of love in the Symposium, Vico regarded ‘errors in God’ as signs of confusion and of the absence of a fully balanced and consistent attitude towards the supernatural essence of the world. Ultimately, Vico accepted Doria’s view of modern politics and commerce and the destructive role that philosophical notions of self-interested sociability played in it. Vico’s history of mankind described how man’s emancipation from the guidance of providence by the growth of his reflective capacities led to the establishment of the first political societies. The laws of these political societies were established by providence. Man now had the potential to change them himself. Vico argued that societies first strayed

106 This was a return to Fénelon’s idea of ‘pure love’, the recognition of the fact that everything one sensed and thought had its origin in God and should turn into a subjection to God.

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from the moral character that providence imposed upon mankind when the rulers of these primitive societies themselves violated these laws. Consequently, the rulers faced a popular revolt, and as the outcome of a series of social disturbances new artificial laws emerged. Through these laws people agreed on a social division of ranks and on a system of payments that went along with this state of political inequality. According to Vico, this political agreement was the beginning of ‘commerce [commerzio].’ Thus, Vico saw ‘commerce’ as opposed to the harmonious ‘economy [iconomica]’ of humankind, as an artificial creation born of divisive sentiments. Vico also associated the origin of money with these ancient ‘feudal’ politics.107 Payments were first made in grain, which was called ‘gold,’ while the mineral gold did not yet have any value. Money arose by agreement, when those who wanted to extend their possessions agreed to accept pure signs of goods in exchange for real goods.108 From that moment onwards it was easy for man to confuse money with the real gold (grain) and subsequently to confuse artificial higher-order desires with real natural needs. Money had the capacity to distort people’s concern for both their own and their fellows’ selfpreservation. It transformed mechanisms of natural need-satisfaction into artificial systems of commercial competition in which people tried to distinguish themselves from each other by ‘pomp and luxury [lusso],’ rather than to identify their own interest with the common good. This development was made possible by the emergence of man’s reflection out of barbarism that in turn led to a new barbarism of overdeveloped reflection. Rather than stabilising their ‘economic’ relations, people intensified their ‘commercial’ interactions. This brought into being a culture of nervous selfishness and of ‘excessive reflection’ on each other’s commercial competency. The development of ‘commerce’ did not unite humankind, but caused its disintegration and the collapse of its social infrastructure. Vico’s depiction of how man manipulated his own acquired intellectual pleasure and capacity for reflection is quite similar to Doria’s cyclical history. Once societies reached a critical stage of moral corruption, they turned into despotic states, or immediately returned to the stage of primitive barbarism.109

107 Vico, Scienza nuova, § 26, 40, 606. 108 Ibid., § 483, 544, 3, 433, 487, 28; Vico, Autobiography, 168. 109 Vico, Scienza nuova, § 1105, 1106, 1409 (Vico, ‘Pratica della scienza nuova,’ 270).

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Vico linked the corruption of societies and their possible return to barbarism to the rise of sceptical philosophy.110 Once reflection emerged, ‘virtuous actions were no longer prompted by religious sentiments.’ It became the task of philosophy to ‘raise and direct fallen man, not tear up his nature or abandon him in his corruption.’111 Philosophy had to explain to people the true foundations of their happiness and sustain Christian beliefs. Once religion was ‘lost among the peoples, they have nothing left to enable them to live in society: no shield of defence, nor means of counsel, nor basis of support, nor even a form by which they may exist in the world at all.’112 In the last sentence of the Scienza nuova, Vico stated that it depended on philosophical education whether people chose ‘pleasure, with baseness, scorn, and slavery for them and for their nations, or the road of virtue, with honour, glory, and happiness.’113 Vico believed that societies corrupted their philosophical and legal foundations once they denied providence. He argued, as the solution to the problem that started his whole project, that ‘the Roman jurisconsults define[d] the natural law of the gentes as having been instituted by divine providence.’114 The eventual decay and fall of Rome were due to the growth of a self-deceptive philosophical attitude towards its own original constitution. Vico challenged later Roman as well as contemporary ideas that reduced the nature of Roman law to the philosophical Stoicism and Epicureanism that Vico regarded as contrary to civilisation in general.115 Moreover, Rome’s problem was the problem of modern society. In modern society, as in the later stages of Roman history, popular moral sceptics reiterated Stoic and Epicurean ideas and promoted the scholarly self-deceit that all laws were deliberate human creations. Similarly, Vico observed that, along with the growth of ‘commerce,’ each society turned to the self-deceptive idea that one’s own nation was the founder of a superior society rather than, like any other

110 111 112 113 114

Vico, Scienza nuova, § 1102. Ibid., § 1407, 129 (Vico, ‘Pratica della scienza nuova,’ 269; 74). Vico, Scienza nuova, § 426; see also § 1112, 1407 (Vico, ‘Pratica della scienza nuova,’ 269). Ibid., § 1411; see also § 1410 (Vico, ‘Pratica della scienza nuova,’ 270–1). Vico, Scienza nuova, § 310; see also § 335, 342, 584, 979, 1109, and moreover, Vico, Selected Writings, 84, 85, 88, 105. Vico suggested that the proper teaching of Roman jurisprudence and its history would be a remedy in the modern world that might prevent moral corruption and scepticism (Vico, Scienza nuova, § 3, 1411 [Vico, ‘Pratica della scienza nuova,’ 271]). 115 Vico, Autobiography, 172–3; Vico, Scienza nuova, § 335, 979.

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society, a providential creation. This ‘vanity of nations [boria delle nazioni]’ obstructed their natural unity. ‘Christian Europe’ was still ‘everywhere radiant with such humanity that it abound[ed] in all the good things that make for the happiness of human life, ministering to the comforts of the body as well as to the pleasures of mind and spirit.’116 However, Vico warned that Europe’s happiness was delicately balanced and required careful monitoring against the threats of self-deceit. If we see Vico’s enterprise as a contribution to the major European debate on moral philosophy at the time, the strangeness of his Scienza nuova disappears. Vico tried to find a way out of the constraints that existed for eighteenth-century philosophers who attempted to explain the origin of society. Surprisingly, Vico’s response to moral scepticism and the way he confronted Epicureanism and Stoicism by portraying society as a product of self-deception anticipated Ferdinando Galiani’s project of understanding commercial morality.

116 Ibid., § 1094.

4 Galiani’s Moral Philosophy: ‘Love’ as the Principle of Society

‘Love drives and gives life to the commerce of mankind [commercio umano]’: thus, the just seventeen-year-old Ferdinando Galiani presented his project to understand the sociable nature of man in a letter written in 1745. As Galiani explained himself to his correspondent, an Englishspeaking gentleman presumed to be a Scottish Jacobite:1 ‘it is my usual habit with regard to all matters, however marginal, to examine them metaphysically. And if there is one thing that deserves to be examined metaphysically it is love, that admirable resource.’2 One year later, the young man lectured before the Accademia degli Emuli on lust and 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. In the interchange of desire and attractiveness in both love and commerce, Galiani saw similar processes at work. Hence, just as ‘love drives and gives life to the commerce of mankind,’ ‘the order of the universe is completely maintained by money.’3 1 According to Nicolini the addressee of Galiani’s letter was a follower of the Chevalier Ramsay, a disciple of Fénelon whose ‘pure love [pur amour]’ theories were very similar to Doria’s. Fausto Nicolini, ‘I manoscritti di Ferdinando Galiani,’ Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 33 (1908), 171–97. 2 BSNSP, xxxi.c.19, ff. 94–99; f. 94r. 3 Ferdinando Galiani, Della moneta e scritti inediti, ed. Alberto Caracciolo and Alberto Merola (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963 [1751]), 79–80. Translations of quotations are taken from Galiani, On Money: A Translation of Della Moneta by Ferdinando Galiani, trans. Peter R. Toscano (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1977), but often with considerable modifications to improve the readability and to correct errors. Italian original terms are occasionally added in brackets.

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Galiani’s identification of love and money set him apart from his Neapolitan contemporaries. His uncle Celestino, as well as Doria and Vico, as we saw, had responded to the challenges of moral scepticism and Epicureanism by restoring the idea that man was geared towards virtue by a sociable mechanism in his nature, or, in the case of Vico, in the general history of humankind. Instead, Ferdinando Galiani’s idea of love served not to frame any moral counterbalance to man’s selfishness, but cut deeper. Through devising a notion of love that resembled neither selffocused Eros nor self-denying Agape, Galiani questioned predominant philosophical ideas about the dynamic between individuals and society that contradicted his observations regarding shared social beliefs about (monetary) value and attractiveness. Yet, although Galiani was at least as critical as his predecessors of Epicureanism as a response to moral scepticism, he pursued his anti-Epicureanism by embracing a form of extreme scepticism through the idea of self-deceit. Referring to a host of literary sources, Galiani demonstrated the social powers of what others called Platonic love, but what Galiani described as a socially constructive form of self-delusion. In fact, that which Vico called providence and explained as man forming an idea of ‘sympathetic nature’ by false seeing in God, Galiani simply called human self-deceit and showed how it created and sustained society.4 This chapter aims to reconstruct Galiani’s moral philosophy of the late 1740s, conceived just before he embarked on writing Della moneta. From a number of manuscripts of his lectures it is possible to retrieve the fundamental principles of his outlook on the nature of society, which formed the basis of his politics. All these lectures were related to Galiani’s projected Dell’arte del governo, his history of morality and civilisation, which he abandoned to write Della moneta.5

4 In the past, writers have argued that Galiani was influenced by Vico, yet not by focusing on the conceptual similarities that are central in this study. See Giorgio Tagliacozzo, ‘Economic Vicheanism: Vico, Galiani, Croce – Economics, Economic Liberalism,’ in Tagliacozzo and Hayden White eds., Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 349–68 and Fausto Nicolini, Giambattista Vico e Ferdinando Galiani, Ricerca Storica,’ Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 71[2–3], (1918), 137–207. 5 Galiani’s Neapolitan manuscripts have been subject to a number of specific studies. See Nicolini, ‘I manoscritti di Ferdinando Galiani,’ 171–97; Giuseppe Galasso, ‘I manoscritti napoletani dell’abate Galiani,’ in La filosofia in soccorso de’ governi: la cultura napoletana del Settecento (Naples: Guida, 1989), 353–68; and specifically on Galiani’s correspondence, Luciano Guerci, ‘Aspetti e problemi dell’epistolario di Ferdinando Galiani,’

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Two lectures that I discuss dealt with the subject of love. In the first, Galiani reworked Descartes’s theory of the passions. In the second, entitled Dell’amor platonico, Galiani demonstrated the social powers of love.6 In another of his neglected manuscripts from the late 1740s, entitled Dell’idea di dio, he argued that investigations into the nature of morality could not be based on theology. A further two lectures, Delle streghe and Della superstizione, dealt with the development of man’s religious beliefs in order to illustrate the ways in which people’s loves assumed social forms. Lastly, in his paper Sullo stato della moneta ai tempi della guerra trojana Galiani showed that money, too, emerged from such religious beliefs and cultural forms. Through these lectures it is possible to reconstruct the core of the idea of sociability on which Galiani’s Dell’arte del governo was to be founded. ‘Amour propre’ Rejected Galiani’s early conception of morality is summed up in his correspondence, in French, of 1748 about the nature of sociability with the Count Punghino of Messina on the island of Sicily, who was a page at the court of Charles of Bourbon.7 Unfortunately, Galiani’s letters to Punghino

Rivista Storica Italiana, 84 (1972), 80–110. These studies reconstruct the ownership of Galiani’s papers since his death and correct each other on the impressions they give of the overall subject matter of Galiani’s unpublished writings. 6 These two lectures by Galiani are mentioned in the early biography by Luigi Diodati, Vita dell’abate Ferdinando Galiani (Naples, 1788), 5, and were among the manuscripts left by Galiani to his nephew Francesco Paolo Azzariti. On the same page Diodati refers to Galiani’s performance on New Year’s Eve of the year 1759, when he gave an entertaining lecture on the subject of cicisbeismo, which soon after Galiani’s death would be published in several editions (see In occasione di tirare a sorte i cicisbei e le cicisbee nel capo d’anno 1759 [Naples, 1842]). 7 The letters are in BSNSP, xxxi.c.12, ff. 1–162. Count Punghino’s correspondence with Galiani ran from 1748 until 1753. Punghino’s full name was Toccolino de’ Lapi Toccoli. The letters touched on various subjects, such as love, the nature of morality, and the Antichrist (in relation to the idea of religion as the ‘conquest of opinion,’ as Galiani called it). Not much is known about Punghino, except that he had been a page at the court of Charles of Bourbon and that Galiani asked permission from Giovanni Bottari on his behalf to read books that had been put on the Index. See Guerci, ‘Aspetti e problemi dell’epistolario di Ferdinando Galiani,’ 85–6.

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(apart from two)8 are missing and only a small number of Punghino’s letters to Galiani remain. Nevertheless, it is possible to glean from them the outlines of Galiani’s project. Punghino agreed with Galiani that the task of moral philosophy was to ‘explain this question of Mr. Hobbes’ whether ‘men are born naturally as enemies of one another.’9 Apparently, it was Galiani who adopted Hobbes as an instrumental reference point for developing his own idea of morality. The letters between Galiani and Punghino considered Galiani’s alternative principle of sociability, amending Hobbes’s position by looking for a balance between love and fear, instead of relying on the principle of fear alone. It seems that Punghino defended neo-Hobbesianism against Galiani. Punghino claimed that the master principle of morality, ‘that which regulates love and hate,’ was ‘amour propre’: You [i.e. Galiani] cite Hobbes … but it is certain, or I am mistaken, that to resolve his difficulty, and others that resemble this one, one always has to return to your two principles or to my single one. With this one here [i.e. amour propre] it seems to me that we can more easily explain this question of Mr Hobbes, the ones of your corollary and in the end all questions that belong to the metaphysics of morality [de la metaphisique morale].10

Punghino insisted that morality had to be based on a monistic principle of amour propre because he believed that otherwise morality would appear the outcome of a Manichaean struggle between good and evil. In order to refute Hobbes, moral philosophy needed to show that human beings could overcome their fallen nature by dedicating themselves to God or, secularly, by developing their natural goodness. According to Punghino, Christian arguments that constructed virtue as self-denial or

8 Nicolini (‘I manoscritti dell’abate Galiani,’ 185) already identified one of them in xxxi.c.12, f. 97–100. But there is also a hitherto unidentified letter in the library of the Società di Storia Patria in Naples, which I believe is written by Galiani to Punghino, showing how the correspondence starts (BSNSP, xxxi.a.10, ff. 57r–9v). Galiani writes, ‘who would have thought, my dearest Count, that from congratulating you on your good fortune and wishing you the best with your new marriage I would have found myself moving on to discussing the most profound metaphysical issues and the most interesting disputes on morality and public law. And still that is what happened. What miserable condition, we who call ourselves philosophers, are in. While you are getting married, we discuss what love actually is’ (BSNSP, xxxi.a.10, f. 57r). 9 BSNSP, xxxi.c.12, f. 157r. 10 BSNSP, xxxi.c.12, f. 157r.

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the love of others failed to understand either morality or human nature. Such arguments failed to accept that morality was nothing but mitigated self-interest grounded in people’s desire for self-preservation. As Punghino explained, these notions of morality were unnecessary. They went further than required to explain social interaction. In contrast to Punghino Galiani put 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].’11 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.12

Punghino believed that amour propre was sufficient to serve as the foundation of morality. It seems that Galiani was highly critical of the idea that sociability could be derived from amour propre. Amour propre, Galiani argued, was merely aimed at individual ‘conservation [conservation]’ and based on instinct.13 It was impossible from amour propre alone to explain society. As Galiani commented on the same issue in his last work in 1782, the task was always to explain the way in which man was naturally sociable. Without such an assumption the concepts of morality and society would be reduced to a mere ‘economic tautology.’14 Galiani did not mean by this that man was instinctively benevolent or had a true love of his fellows. He did not return to the Christian arguments that Punghino objected to. Rather, he simply stated that Punghino’s solution could not work, since for understanding morality one

11 12 13 14

BSNSP, xxxi.c.12, f. 9v. BSNSP, xxxi.c.12, ff. 27v–28r. BSNSP, xxxi.c.12, ff. 19v–20v. Ferdinando Galiani, Dei doveri dei principi neutrali verso i principi guerreggianti, e di questo verso i neutrali, libri due, ed. G.M. Monti (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1942 [1782]), 227. Galiani argued that the physiocrats, or économistes, who proposed the liberalisation of the grain trade, based their plan on a system that was ‘a tormentous tautology and a vicious circle of words and ideas [una tormentosa tautologia ed un circolo vizioso di parole e d’idee].’

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had to consider more than the issue of natural pleasures. Theories that derived sociability from a given self-interest were already too restrictive and necessarily failed to take into account how individual personalities functioned and developed. If men were essentially selfish they could not arrive at a concept of justice and could have no powerful enough motive to adjust their behaviour to the requirements of society. From Galiani’s point of view neither self-interest nor the Christian notion of self-denial could explain the origins of morality. Galiani’s dualistic view of two loves was his answer to this dilemma and the core of all of his later political thought. Galiani wished, as Punghino put it, ‘to concentrate on the difference between natural and supernatural love [l’amour naturel, et l’amour surnaturel] … and construe a different system [un sistême] out of it.’15 Natural love was geared towards self-preservation as less than conscious interest in the protection of one’s own body. In contrast, supernatural love was the equivalent of the Christian love of God and the origin of benevolence. Galiani called supernatural love ‘Platonic love [l’amour Platonique].’ Punghino objected to this latter concept: ‘your discourse touching upon Platonic love,’ he wrote to Galiani, ‘is very right and wise, but I doubt very much the existence of this love.’16 Galiani had derived Platonic love from the human urge to cope with the feeling of sinfulness and restore wholeness. This baffled Punghino: ‘you owe me an explanation of what you mean by the word sin [le peché], because I find the idea I get of it too abhorrent to persuade me that it is capable of producing a love [produire un amour].’17 Punghino was baffled because he saw Galiani’s ‘Platonism’ as a strange departure from orthodox Christian doctrine. It is so true that sin [le peché] is a persuasion [une persuasion] etc., that if a man under that persuasion makes the greatest, the noblest, the holiest action that one can make, he will be accountable by nothing but the tribunal of his conscience [au tribunal de sa conscience], and by the sentiment of everyone [au sentiment de tout le monde]. But, my God! What rule will we still have to see whether our persuasions are false [fausse]? Given that we find certainty in the foundation of our religion, the rest of the earth is lost in

15 BSNSP, xxxi.c.12, f. 8v. 16 BSNSP, xxxi.c.12, f. 29r. 17 BSNSP, xxxi.c.12, f. 8v.

Galiani’s Moral Philosophy: ‘Love’ as the Principle of Society 133 complete ignorance [une totale ignorance] of the truth of our dogmas [de la verité de nos dogmes]; how can they regulate their persuasion? … Allow me to say that your definition does not so much concern sin in itself, as its relation to those who make themselves culpable [coupable] … I would define sin as an action against the will of a superior being [la volonté d’un ent superieur] and I would leave out the word persuasion, which properly belongs to man, instead of to sin considered in itself.18

Punghino understood that Galiani’s position implied that good and evil only existed in the minds of people and hence it was their personal judgement that determined right and wrong. Galiani’s aim, it appears, was to reject morality as based upon any eternal prescriptive standard, on God’s will or the law of nature. This did not mean that Galiani entirely divorced morality from religious experience. He affirmed, as did Vico and Celestino, that people believed there was a God who judged their actions. But he emphasised the fact that people’s belief in the existence of a God did not prove that there was one. Religion, like morality, was simply a system of human opinion. This interpretation of the nature of religion played an important part in Galiani’s moral philosophy. Religion, he would argue, was derived from the human passion called ‘love.’ It was this idea, the derivation of religion from the human propensity to ‘love,’ that provided the backbone of Galiani’s view of morality. ‘Love Drives the Commerce of Mankind’ In the late 1740s, Galiani’s earliest years of scholarly activity, he gave two lectures to a circle of academic friends, who called themselves the Academy of Emulators [Accademia degli Emuli], on the nature of these two loves and their relation to each other. As Galiani had explained to Punghino, he saw natural love and the other principle of love not as involved in a perpetual Manichaean struggle, like that between love and hate. Rather, they orchestrated man’s moral household jointly. The most innovative part of Galiani’s views was in his idea of supernatural love. But it rested on a recognition of a more basic form of natural love. To set up this argument properly Galiani had to reconsider the very nature of the passion ‘love.’ This was the subject of his first lecture on love, in

18 BSNSP, xxxi.c.12, f. 154rv.

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which he dealt with cicisbeismo, the highly controversial art of gallantry that intrigued foreign visitors and was the subject of many satirical literary works at the time.19 Galiani confronted the question ‘whether it befits a well-born mind to be taken by the passion that is love.’20 He did so using moralising ideas about cicisbeismo as a benchmark against which to specify the philosophical nature of love.21

19 Cicisbeismo was the subject of many Italian theatre pieces and operettas, in particular in the middle of the eighteenth century. Usually, these works would be critical in a political way of the aristocracy and their slothfulness (ozio). The most famous writers in this genre were Carlo Goldoni, Giuseppe Parini and (to a lesser degree) Carlo Gozzi. See Giovanni Ziccardi, Forme di vita e d’arte nel settecento. Saggi su C. Goldoni, C. Gozzi, G. Parini (Florence: Le Monnier, 1931). Gozzi’s brother Gaspare edited the Venetian journal L’Osservatore, which was modelled on Addison and Steele’s Spectator. The Osservatore featured frequent discussions of the moral depravity of cicisbeismo. Galiani himself delivered a lecture on New Year’s Eve 1759 on the subject, in which he justified cicisbeismo and gave an account of its origins (In occasione di tirare a sorte i cicisbei e le cicisbee nel capo d’anno 1759 [Naples, 1842]). See the introduction by the editor and the comments on p. 5 of Diodati, Vita dell’abate Galiani. In the early twentieth century, various secondary works and re-editions of writings on cicisbeismo were published. Recently, attention to the subject has been revived, under the influence of the rise of feminism. See Roberto Bizzocchi, ‘Cicisbei: La morale italiana,’ Storica 3 (1997), 63–90, and in English, Silvana Patriarca, ‘Indolence and Regeneration: Tropes and Tensions of Risorgimento Patriotism,’ American Historical Review 110[2] (2005), 380–408. 20 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, ed. Furio Diaz and Luciano Guerci, Illuministi Italiani, vol. 6 (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1975) 689–700; the quotation appears on p. 689. 21 Galiani’s popular discussion of the philosophical aspects of love, besides bearing connotations of traditional Christian and humanist discourses of love and passions, harks back to the mid-seventeenth-century French salon culture in which imaginary geographical maps were drawn up of all the affections in relation to each other (for the context of these cartes du tendre, see Benedetta Craveri, La civiltà della conversazione [Milan: Adelphi, 2001]). In this way philosophical notions, put forward by Cartesian writers among others, were absorbed into popular culture, where they also generated new ideas about the nature of love. Similarly, Louis XIV’s court painter Charles Le Brun used Descartes’s Les passions de l’âme (‘The Passions of the Soul,’ in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 325–404) and Marin Cureau de la Chambre’s Les charactères des passions (Amsterdam, 1658) as inspiration for his works. Both for the philosophical content of French seventeenth-century philosophy and for its impact on various artistic genres, see Lucie Desjardins, Le corps parlant: savoirs et représentation des passions au XVIIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), and in English, Susan James, Passion and Action: the Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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At the beginning of this lecture Galiani rejected Descartes’s physiological approach to explaining the passions in his Les passions de l’âme (1649). 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).22 Galiani stated that it was impossible to make metaphysical judgements about the status of love in relation to the body. Referring to Descartes’s metaphysics of the passions, he agreed it was true that ‘perception, imagination, and memory, if not completely, at least almost exclusively’ depended ‘on the brain, which produces certain motions of fibres or motions of spirits of the soul as the product of external bodies that excite ideas in us (whether it is the pineal gland or the ventricles in the brain, or the corpus callosum, or the cerebellum, is a thing that is still obscure and dubious).’ But the science of the nature of the functions of the body was too far removed from a sufficient understanding of ‘the constitution of the human mind’ to be connected to an idea of love and its various functions. Rather, ‘because we do not know the causes’ of love, Galiani argued, we need to study ‘the phenomena that experience teaches in us are always excited in us’ in our interaction with the external world.23

22 See Claudio Manzoni, I cartesiani italiani (1660–1760) (Udine: La nuova base, 1984), and in English, Brendan Dooley, ‘Veritas Filia Temporis: Experience and Belief in Early Modern Culture,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 60[3] (1999), 498–501. Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995) 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 Mount Vesuvius can be seen. On Spinelli, see Franco Venturi, ‘Tre note su Carlantonio Broggia,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 80[4] (1986), 830–53, 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 1748, see Rosario Patalano, ‘La scienza della moneta more geometrico demostrata: le Riflessioni politiche di Troiano Spinelli,’ Il Pensiero Economicio Italiano, 10[2] (2002), 7–42 (see also the following chapter). To my knowledge there is a conspicuous lack of studies on Spinelli’s moral philosophy as well as on 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. 23 Galiani, Opere, 692.

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Galiani approached ‘love’ empirically. He started from the presupposition that human nature had no innate mental picture of any part of the world, including one’s own body and one’s own good. Without love, man was completely inert. Only through sense impressions could man be interested in the world and in himself. Loves were residues of impressions that the outside world made on man’s mind. Man played no active role in this process of personality development, but was completely subject to the way in which his loves were formed. According to Galiani, natural love did 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].’24 Thus, initially, ‘love’ structured man’s existence in an entirely naïve and un-self-reflective way. For Galiani, ‘love’ was not unlike Locke’s ‘simple ideas,’ that is, ideas that could not be traced back to any previous causes. Galiani described loves as man’s primary mental relations to the world surrounding him. Through ‘a capacity’ in the brain ‘to connect separate and distinct ideas,’ loves evolved into attitudes towards the world that governed man’s perception of it.25 Man naturally could not but see his experiences of pleasure and pain through the ideas he had formed about the world through his loves. In that way loves determined man’s desires. This was still the case in society, which emerged when loves had fully developed into personal attitudes towards one’s interests and had often been reshaped through the emergence of artificial Platonic loves which turned man into a social being. Thus, not only before societies came into being, but also afterwards, it was the case, for example, that no man ‘upon seeing a woman’ could decide to ‘want to fall in love with her’ and then subsequently ‘fall in love with her.’26 Man could never manipulate love; ‘one cannot buy off the heart at any price.’ One who failed to ‘produce pleasure [piacere] in the object of his love’27 was doomed to feel pain. For Galiani love was the basic form of man’s experience: I define love in this way: love is that affection of the mind [quell’affezione dell’animo] that makes one think of a person or of a thing … According to the definition of the word love, everything can produce love in us. One can

24 25 26 27

Ibid., 694. Ibid., 691–2. Ibid., 698. Ibid.

Galiani’s Moral Philosophy: ‘Love’ as the Principle of Society 137 love money, literature, poetry, music, gambling, men, women, relatives, animals, and everything that flourishes … All these expressions do not mean anything other than that it is possible to often think about money, literature, music, dogs, hunting, etc.28

The psychological mechanism, Galiani maintained, was always the same, irrespective of the objects it was directed towards. One has to understand that love only varies depending on the diversity of objects, while the affection of the mind is always the same. If one were to consistently substitute the word woman, in a treatise of love for a woman, 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 ‘par excellence’ [χατ ’εξοχην]. But all these different names for these passions denote only one thing.29

Love was thus a universal phenomenon of the human mind, although each and every person experienced it in different ways. Descartes had argued in Les passions de l’âme that passions resulted from the fact that ‘our soul and body are so linked that once we have joined some bodily action with a certain thought, the one does not occur afterwards without the other occurring too.’30 Similarly, Galiani held that having a love relation with an object in the world meant one had developed a necessary association that structured one’s behaviour. Man developed a sensitivity to the world based on his past experience that made him predisposed, once an object appeared to the senses, to respond to it with actions based on his memories. In contrast to Descartes, who restricted love to thoughts concerning ‘objects that appear agreeable [convenable],’31 Galiani conceived love in a more general way. Love was the vehicle by which man shaped an awareness of the effects of objects in the world on his condition: ‘our thoughts are made up of fears, hopes, enjoyments, or of the loss of present enjoyments, or of troubles of the past.’32 Love caused thoughts that were ‘a composite of all these 28 29 30 31 32

Ibid., 690. Ibid., 691. Descartes, ‘The Passions of the Soul,’ section 136, 1.375; AT XI.429. Ibid., section 79, 1.356; AT XI.387. Galiani, Opere, 690.

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pleasurable or painful thoughts.’33 After man had become social, ‘jealousy’ became ‘a major part’ of the thoughts inspired by love.34 Further, love was fundamentally different from mere instinctive drives. It was a complex passion that was ‘completely distinct and different’ and even opposed in some ways to the appetitive and ‘purely mechanical [puramente meccanica]’ passions that man had ‘in common with animals.’35 Whereas man’s direct instinctive relations with the world formed a set of mechanical rules, love functioned differently. Hunger, thirst, and lust were ‘given to us by the Author of nature to preserve the species,’ as they had been given to animals.36 ‘Lust [la lussuria],’ for example, was simply an animalistic ‘hunger for the preservation of the self’ that did not ‘produce thoughts, jealousy, hopes, affection’ and had virtually no mental status.37 Human beings, however, were capable of feeling love and thereby emotions such as fear. Fear was man’s response when he felt his loves were threatened. As man gradually developed a sense of self-awareness, his various loves turned into a self-interest. This process structured his original naïve perceptions of the world. People perceived the world through their loves, which triggered specific emotions and moved them to perform actions. They internalised the world by projecting their loves onto reality. Human ‘love’ became pathological, an obsession. Passions thus took possession of human perception of the world. ‘People who are completely in love with something are so possessed by it that everything makes them think of it.’38 Galiani’s intention was to detach Descartes’s notion of love in Les passions de l’âme from the idea of goodness and redraw the Cartesian relation between love and hatred and its association with good and evil. Descartes wrote: ‘when we think of something as good with regard to us, i.e., as beneficial to us, this makes us have love for it.’39 Descartes aligned love as a bodily passion with his concept of the intellectual or rational love of the soul. ‘Love is an emotion of the soul caused by a movement of the spirits,

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 690. Ibid., 693. Ibid., 695, 696, 699. Ibid., 695. Ibid., 695, 699. Ibid., 692. Descartes, ‘The Passions of the Soul,’ section 56, 1.350; AT XI.372.

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which impel the soul to join itself willingly to objects that appear agreeable [convenable] to it.’40 For him, love, whether a passion of the soul or of the body, was joined to the expectation of benefit. Love as a passion of the soul resulted ‘from knowledge’ about the good and was able, to some extent, ‘when this knowledge is true,’ to correct bodily love and ‘produce joy.’41 Through a virtuous ‘assent by which we consider ourselves henceforth as joined with what we love in such a manner that we imagine a whole, of which we take ourselves to be only one part,’ man could purify himself to a considerable degree.42 Usually, however, ‘while our soul is joined to the body, this rational love is commonly accompanied by the other kind of love, which can be called sensual or sensuous. This … is nothing but a confused thought, aroused in the soul by some motion of the nerves, which makes it disposed to have the other, clearer, thought which constitutes rational love.’43 In contrast to Descartes, Galiani’s concept of love denied that man had any innate faculties that made possible this dialectic process whereby passions of the soul and the body together moved man to greater goodness. His idea of loves as spontaneously developed dispositions, based on sense impressions, that directed man’s thoughts, left no room for any statements about good and evil. The reason was that man’s pleasure-seeking that resulted from his loves had not as yet assumed any social or moral properties. That was why Galiani’s view of natural love was followed by an idea of artificial love explaining how this evolution took place. The most famous rejection of Descartes’s position on innate ideas of the mind was that of John Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke is the other author who figures prominently in the background to the construction of Galiani’s epistemology. ‘Love’ played no fundamental role in Locke’s epistemology. For Locke, love was intrinsically related to pleasure, as hate was related to pain. ‘Anyone reflecting

40 Ibid., section 79, 1.356; AT XI.387. Cf. Spinelli, Degli affetti umani, 93–4, where Spinelli criticises Descartes’s manner of seeing something as naturally ‘convenable’ in relation to its being worthy of joining so that subject and object unite as part of a larger whole. 41 Descartes, ‘The Passions of the Soul,’ section 139, 1.377; AT XI.432. 42 Ibid., section 80, 1.356; AT XI.387. Cf. Spinelli’s critique of Descartes, Degli affetti umani, 93–5, 100–1. 43 Quoted in Patrick R. Frierson, ‘Learning to Love: From Egoism to Generosity in Descartes,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy, 40[3] (2002), 318; Descartes, ‘The Passions of the Soul,’ section 111.306; AT IV.601–3.

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upon the thought he has of the delight which any present or absent thing is apt to produce in him has the idea we call love.’44 Love and hate were simply ideas people had about their own interest. ‘Our ideas of love and hatred are but the dispositions of the mind in respect of pleasure and pain in general.’45 Locke associated love with a mental state involving the conscious recognition of self-interested pleasure.46 Galiani’s design was to establish the idea of self-interest on a footing different from that set by either Descartes or Locke. Locke’s epistemology explained how man could discover both God’s will and his own obligations to the law of nature by following the simple markers of natural pain and pleasure. For Locke, love was a less primary mental category than pleasure. Celestino Galiani reconsidered the notion of pleasure in Locke’s epistemology. Following his uncle, the younger Galiani also rejected Locke’s perspective. He emphasised that love was the agency that governed the sensations of pain as well as pleasure, rather than the other way around. The love-hate couple as a functional duality disappeared in Galiani’s thought. By dismissing the primacy of the pleasurepain duality and concentrating on the category of love, Galiani could formulate a new notion of the origins of morality. It is good to observe here that love is not in itself a pleasure or a pain, but can be either. Because our thoughts can be agreeable as well as disturbing, thinking often of a thing can give us joy or pain. And so a father can love his dying son, by having frequent thoughts about him, and at the same time feel grave pain.47

The love-hate dualism, aping the dualism of pain and pleasure, was a mistake. For Galiani, ‘the opposite of love is not hate, but not to love [l’opposto dell’amore non è gia l’odio, ma il non amare].’48 Further, Galiani 44 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), II.xx.4. 45 Ibid., II.xx.5. 46 Cf. Spinelli’s critique of Locke, Degli affetti umani, 15–16, where Spinelli associates Locke with Augustine and argues that Locke’s ideas leave no space for true moral feelings, but have absorbed the human experience of moral sensations into an abstract account of animal mechanisms of pleasure and pain. 47 Galiani, Opere, 693. The example of the father and his relation to his son came from Descartes’s Les passions de l’âme. Galiani used this example to show how his theory of hate and love worked in contradistinction to Descartes’s. 48 Ibid.

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dissociated love and hate from their Christian moral connotations of good and evil, stating that ‘love does not imply the will or the desire to do good [non importa seco il volere o desiderar bene], nor does hate imply wanting to do evil [né l’odio il voler male], because someone who loves hunting, or who loves hating, does not so much want to do good or evil. Similarly, the other way around, it is the case that to want the good or evil does not always imply in itself love or hate.’49 Following Trojano Spinelli’s ideas to a large extent, Galiani called hate ‘a branch of love [un ramo di amore]’50 and explained that although one might ‘not desire evil, and sometimes also love a person, one can hate the person’s voice, his gesticulations, his way of holding conversations or another thing.’51 Thus, Galiani associated hate with pain, just as Locke had, and defined hate ‘as the pain one has from having an idea on one’s mind.’ However, its status relative to love differed from Locke’s views. 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.’52 The problem of man’s existence was that it was ‘not difficult to go from love to hate, as one can continue to think of a thing while feeling pain, that one previously thought of while feeling pleasure.’ Man’s love had

49 Ibid. 50 Sentence crossed out in manuscript, BSNSP, xxxi.a.9, f. 96: ‘In short one could say that hate is a branch [ramo] of love, which even though it seems a paradox at first glance, in fact is no paradox.’ Cf. Spinelli, Degli affetti umani, 95: ‘but hate defined this way, although it seems different from love and actually nothing but its complete opposite, if one considers it well is not any different; since the non-existence, or the destruction, of any object, too, both as a thing and as an object, can in abstracto be seen as a thing sought for by the soul. And in this sense hate is nothing but a sort of love [una specie d’amore].’ 51 Galiani, Opere, 693. 52 Ibid., 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 Giambattista Vico, On Humanistic Education: Six Inaugural Orations, 1699–1707, ed. Gian Galeazzo Visconti, trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee, intro. Donald Phillip Verene (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 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.

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the potential to turn against him as it was ‘much more difficult to go from thinking of to not thinking of and forgetting’ and to deny one’s own personality.53 To see love and hate and all of man’s natural mental attachments to the world as based on the opposition between pleasure and pain and good and evil, Galiani suggested, was a Christian deformation of moral philosophy. Locke was just such a Christian philosopher of human nature, society, and morality. The task of true moral philosophy was not to explain how experiences of pleasure and pain that were instantly presumed to be self-interested could turn into morality. This was a misguided enterprise. What needed explanation was ‘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.’54 Galiani’s idea of love resembled Vico’s account of the early evolution of man’s self-awareness. Both authors presented early forms of self-interest as socially naïve products of the senses that by themselves were incapable of producing society. They both believed, unlike Celestino, that starting from this type of basic unconscious self-interest they could explain the emergence of non-selfish behaviour in society. In Vico’s terms, Galiani’s love was the equivalent agency of the one that created ‘sympathetic nature,’ i.e. providence. Vico had argued that people’s desires were determined by their images of outside reality and that these residues of man’s experiences modified man’s mind and behaviour. However, whereas Vico used providence to describe the transformation of man’s natural interest in selfpreservation into sociable behaviour, Galiani’s idea of love did not assume that man had any natural selfish interest, not even in his own body, or any innate motives for action at all. Galiani’s new idea of love was based on sense impressions, and separated from instincts in order to block any possible derivation of society from primitive self-interest. Love was a morally neutral passion that was unrelated by itself to any form of self-interest. It was the principle that first shaped man’s emotional landscape and consequently his very existence. As a result, society, for Galiani, was not the product of man’s primitive animal selfishness such as was present in man’s original nature.

53 Galiani, Opere, 693. 54 Ibid., 691.

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Self-Deceit and Society In his second lecture, entitled, Dell’amor platonico,55 Galiani further developed his idea of sociability. Here, his notion of love enabled him to avoid opposing true and false virtue and instead present self-deceit as a positive key to understanding morality. 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, falsità, 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. In using these terms, as well as in shaping his ideas about sociability, Galiani’s was inspired by literary, rather than philosophical sources. An Italian writer who used almost exactly the same sources as Galiani, but held rather different views of self-deception, was Lodovico Antonio Muratori.56 Yet, both authors used these sources to move away from the traditional moralising ideas of selfdeceit put forward by Christian puritans and Platonists.57 Galiani was sceptical of any argument that placed self-interest at the foundation of society. For Galiani, man was not naturally selfish and morality was not disguised self-interest, as modern Epicureans like Mandeville believed. Nor did he believe that man could turn his fallen nature into obedience to God’s law and thus behave socially, as Christian moral philosophers argued. Galiani refused to follow Celestino’s view of the emergence of morality as enlightened self-interest, which was essentially a version of Christian moral philosophy. Instead, Galiani argued that self-interest was itself caused by the passion of love. In Dell’amor platonico, he advanced the argument that the primacy of love over self-awareness developed into a posture of self-deceit. This, rather than true knowledge of God’s moral command, was the key to morality.

55 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., ff. 57–66. The text was interpreted by Diaz and Guerci in their introduction to Galiani’s Opere (xvi) as part of the ‘studies in the context of the classical apprentisage of the young abbot, according to the canons of the culture of the period.’ Although recognising that the text certainly does not ‘lack the vivacity of mind that would make Galiani famous,’ Diaz and Guerci completely overlooked its significance in its own right. 56 Chiara Continisio, Il governo delle passioni: Prudenza, giustizia e carità nel pensiero politico di Lodovico Antonio Muratori (Florence: Olschki, 1999), 45, 83, 116. 57 See, for example, Daniel Dyke, The mystery of selfe-deceiving: or, A discourse and discovery of the deceitfulnesse of mans heart (London, 1642).

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It arose because people’s concern to satisfy their loves at all cost distorted their valuation of sensory data concerning the outside world. Since self-interest was an expression of this subjective desire-led false world view of individuals, its configuration changed along with people’s self-deceit. At the end of his first lecture on love, Galiani indicated that love could be disciplined by legislative means. Laws could give human behaviour a new artificial shape. Under such disciplinary pressure love could turn into hate. However, in response to such pressure man was capable of redirecting his loves and thereby preventing frustration and hate. Galiani used the example of sexual desire as the cause of pious devotion to illustrate his point. And so when men and women reach a certain age and certain mechanical laws produce desires of mutual love, if they cannot satisfy them men’s desires turn mostly into love for other men, while women further develop a love for celestial things. Therefore, while the passions often have different names, love is always the same thing. And it is noticeable that these women, who would otherwise have immense love for mundane bodies, withdraw themselves from this world and turn to spiritual and saintly loves. And during their widow nights they reminisce about some idealised mystical wedding and console themselves with the glory of that wedding. And thereby they mitigate those impulses of their ‘machinery [macchina]’ that the law renders guilty, but which nature innocently produces.58

Human nature was capable of adjustment in adverse circumstances. Man could comply with the legal restrictions imposed by society and modify the directionality of his loves in order to circumvent the danger of punishment. Although Galiani considered love itself to be completely ‘unfree,’ that is, involuntary, and as such necessarily independent of and insusceptible to political guidance, he believed man was capable of regulating his actions in the light of the law. Whereas man’s inclinations were not within his control, ‘it does depend on us whether we foment or extinguish [il fomentare e l’estinguere] that nascent involuntary passion [questa nascente involontaria passione], as it is in our will to satisfy our hunger or tolerate it.’59 Galiani’s lecture Dell’amor platonico explained the

58 Galiani, Opere, 691. 59 Ibid., 694.

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mechanisms of this capacity for self-development of human nature in greater detail. The lecture was an imagined defence of Platonic philosophers. Galiani spoke up for them because ‘the majority of followers’ of ‘Platonic love’ in Naples were ‘losing their power and influence.’60 Taking up the Platonic case, Galiani turned his attention to the issue of unreciprocated love for a woman. Such love could become Platonic when the male sublimated his frustration and bitterness and elevated his feelings into eternal verities and spiritual notions of the supernatural. The Platonists explained the whole universe in terms of obscure notions, Galiani argued, just to dissolve their own frustrations. Platonic lovers were frustrated persons who redirected their unrequited loves to new emotional targets. Having been rejected by a woman who was the object of his love, the Platonist believed that she loved him, even if the love was never consummated. For a Platonist it was enough to experience the feeling of being loved by a woman, Galiani claimed, even if the philosopher could never enjoy her actual or physical response: 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 his heart does not need more than to be told that she loves him … 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 … Thus, the real Platonist … hands himself over to the illusion that he has certain intervals of light and of truth.61

60 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 57r. 61 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 Fénelon’s concept of virtue as self-denial by the will of the will. Fénelon 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. Patrick Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 147.

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When the pain that resulted from the Platonist’s original love became too much, he neutralised the pain by inventing a new kind of love. ‘The Platonists’ driven by ‘the spirit of their hate … make themselves immune for the fire of their innocent love … naturally’ in response to having proved ‘unfortunate in love.’62 Like the men who turned their love for women into love for men and the women who in their widow nights cultivated a love for celestial bodies (the examples given in the earlier lecture on love), so the Platonists managed to redirect their unrequited loves into an obsession with mystical ways of explaining the world. However false, artificial, and self-deceptive these new loves might be, Galiani wrote, they were not disgraceful and immoral: I do not want, and even if I wanted to I could not engage in sustaining and defending Platonic love and the strange fantasies that accompany it as if it were true. I will avow again its falsity and its chimerical ridiculousness [il falso, ed il chimerico ridicolo] that I know … But nonetheless I think that the Platonists do well when they prudently mix their castles in the air, as our academic graciously calls them, with their loves. And I would like to consider them praiseworthy instead of deserving to be ridiculed … The final end of man is happiness [la felicità], which he finds in pleasure [nel piacere], and that he finds through deceit [nell’inganno]. He who serves himself of an agreeable deceit [d’un grato inganno] to be happy operates prudently and acts directly aimed at his end. If this is what the Platonic lovers do, which is certainly what they do, they are not to be reprimanded for it but to be commended by everyone.63

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 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.

62 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 64v. 63 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., ff. 59r, 63r.

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These tricks that people played on their passions, according to Galiani, caused an actual change of people’s self-awareness: The affection through which men, according to Metastasio … ‘do not know themselves’ [‘non conoscon se stessi’] … I call Platonic love … Through that perturbation of reason one attempts to understand a mechanical affection of the body as a free operation of the soul. From this definition appears the degree of impropriety involved in calling this illness [affezione], which is what it is, a love.64

Once their loves could not be gratified, people mistakenly regarded them as the products of their own free choice. Yet, the only loves people created themselves were precisely those that served to manipulate and silence their primitive affections. As Galiani explained, the metaphysical error behind denunciations of Platonic love lay in a failure to recognise this. Twenty years after his early lectures Galiani commented on the prevalence of exactly this mistake in Enlightenment discourse: One could define man as an animal that thinks himself free [un animal que se croit libre] and that would be a complete definition. It is absolutely impossible for man to … renounce the persuasion [la persuasion] he has that he is free … The conviction [la conviction] of liberty suffices to establish conscience, remorse, justice, rewards, and punishments [une conscience, un remords, une justice, des récompenses et des peines].65

This idea was not Galiani’s invention. Over half a century earlier Spinoza had put forward a very similar notion concerning man’s mistaken consciousness of his free will.66 Leibniz too declared that ‘we

64 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 58r. 65 Letter from Galiani to Mme d’Épinay, 23 November 1771. Ferdinando Galiani, Correspondance avec Mme d’Epinay, Mme Necker, Mme Geoffrin, &c. Diderot, Grimm, d’Alembert, De Sartine, d’Holbach, &c, eds. Lucien Perey and Gaston Maugras, 2 vols. (Paris, 1881), 1: 483–5. 66 ‘Men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their own volitions and their appetite, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant of those causes.’ Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. Edwin Curley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), I, Ap.10.

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imagine ourselves to have a power to believe and to will what we want.’67 Yet, it is interesting that Galiani linked the problem of free will to the notion of Platonic love. In doing so, he developed an idea of morality in which pleasure, the gratification of love, played an important part. Galiani had a consuming interest in redefining the causes of human happiness. He claimed that philosophers in the past tended to regard attainment of pleasure as its only true criterion. True pleasure [il vero piacere] is the ultimate end of every human operation and the sum of the maximal pleasures and the minimal pains that man can have.68 I say true pleasure to express the idea that everything in this world produces some pleasure and some inconvenience at the moment the action is performed and that the two are inextricably bound up. I call false [falso] the pleasure that is joined with a pain that is greater in extension and intensity, and true pleasure the one that is accompanied by a pain that is altogether less. Thus pleasure is the end of all our actions and this is what not only the Epicureans but the Stoics and all philosophers agree on. So these ancient philosophers disputed a thing only through ordinary words. The Stoics believed that what the Epicureans believed was pleasure, was in fact false pleasure. And to distance themselves from [the Epicureans] they said that the ultimate human end had to be honesty and virtue [l’onesto, e il virtuoso], by which words they meant nothing else but true pleasure. Thus they said the same thing with different words. Man always pursues pleasure, the possession of which is called happiness [felicità].69

The issue, Galiani claimed, was not whether man was a pleasure-seeking animal or not, but to explain what pleasure really was and to incorporate the true idea of pleasure into an explanation of the origins of society. In this task, both the Stoics and the Epicureans had failed. What they both lacked, thereby causing a perennial dispute between their

67 However, Leibniz added, ‘we do not at all choose our wills, because that would be by other wills, and that [moving to ever-higher wills] to infinity.’ The will ‘has its causes, but since we are ignorant of them … we believe ourselves independent.’ Within Leibniz’s thought this ‘chimera of an imaginary independence’ clashed with the idea that ‘we are the masters of our actions [and] choose what we will’ (Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence, 77). 68 Crossed out in the manuscript, BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 60r: ‘true pleasure is not different from happiness.’ 69 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 60r.

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followers, was a notion of self-interest that accurately reflected the causes of human pleasure. In Galiani’s view people started off being slaves to their single natural loves. Such archetypal loves determined their personality, their selfawareness, and even their interests. Pleasure, consummated love, led a person to maintain this drive, while unsuccessful loves were disowned. Therefore, as Galiani argued in his first lecture on love, pleasure was ‘to believe in one’s loves.’70 Galiani argued that happiness was necessarily related to self-deception because of people’s need to believe that what they pursued as the object of their love was actually capable of providing them with pleasure. ‘Pleasures,’ he wrote, ‘bring with themselves manifest deceit [contengono seco manifesto inganno].’71 Rational scepticism about external reality affected man’s pleasure and his self-esteem directly: ‘as deceit is pleasurable, so disillusion is painful [come l’inganno è piacevole, cosí il disinganno e tanto molesto].’72 Thus, man had no choice but to sustain, against reason, a false belief in the senses. Deceit is nothing else but believing that outside of us is something that is similar to the ideas we have, while in reality there is not. In this way the fool believes that the ghosts he sees around him are really there. The idea is true but the belief is false. And this is called deceit. It is acknowledged by all of us that we do not have physical certainty that outside of us there are in reality things similar to our ideas. And it is not impossible that everything outside of us is different from our ideas. That is why all our enjoyments, every object, life itself, and everything in the end, apart from our own existence, could be deceit. But I do not want to advance any scepticism and it will suffice to restrain myself to saying that the senses are the sources of all pleasures … Who does not know that the senses are the sources of human self-deceit? But what I say was ultimately demonstrated by Locke; that sounds, colours, tastes, smells, pain, and in the end all sensations outside our experience consist only of form and movement. Since everyone still believes that outside of us there are sounds and colours and tastes and everything else we perceive, we have proof that we live in a perpetual state of felicitous self-deceit.73

70 71 72 73

Galiani, Opere, 692. BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 62r. BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 62r. BSNSP, xxx.c.6., ff. 61v–62r.

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Galiani concluded that ‘falsity [la falsità]’ was ‘a good and wellconducted deceit’ and ‘many pleasures of our life would cease to exist completely and others would perish if every deceit were to be ended.’74 He argued against the Platonists that the human condition was always and inevitably like Plato’s cave: ‘this world is a big theatre’ that would ‘look very ugly to us if one went behind the scenes [dietro alle scene].’75 It was no good to declare ‘that all our pleasures are vanity, illusion, selfdeceit [vanità, e allusione, e inganno].’76 There was no overwhelming need to unmask self-deceit by ‘going behind the scenes.’77 Self-deceit was functionally useful. It enabled the human race to survive. In his remarks against the need for unmasking self-deceit and in favour of the compulsive manner in which people created society, Galiani referred to a host of literary, rather than philosophical, sources. Apparently, Galiani saw his own views as in contradiction with philosophical approaches to explaining society and felt his ideas were closer to those held by non-philosophers. Thus, he approved of Jonathan Swift’s definition in A Tale of a Tub of happiness as ‘a perpetual possession of being well deceived.’78 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 is king.79 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.’80 Other than these English-language sources, Galiani referred, in his earlier lecture on love, to the Italian poet and librettist Paolo Rolli, who was also the translator of Milton’s Paradise Lost.81

74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81

BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 63r. BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 63r. BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 60v. On the language of ‘unmasking’ see Henry C. Clark, La Rochefoucauld and the Language of Unmasking in Seventeenth-Century France (Genève: Droz, 1994). Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub: With Other Early Works, 1696–1707, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 108. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), no. 487, Thursday, 18 September 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. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Fred E. Bumby (London: Harrap and Co, 1909), 3. Paolo Rolli, Rime (London, 1717), 156. Rolli’s translation of Paradise Lost first appeared in 1730 in Verona and had a number of reprints.

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Galiani’s favourite source for quotations in both his lectures on love was the poet Pietro Metastasio, whose Asilo dell’Amore seems to have been a genuine source for Galiani’s views on the social dimensions of love.82 In particular, these literary sources represented a clear understanding of how the products of love sustained interactions between people. The obvious problem with fake loves, such as Platonic 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, according to Galiani, emerged as a Platonic love that served people’s common need to see the world through the optics of self-deceit. Religion was the vehicle by which men silenced their fears. Such shared beliefs about the supernatural causes of human sense impressions were the cause of the origin of society. In Galiani’s eyes, society was a tool and reinforcement of collective self-deceit. Galiani told his audience that, although ‘we are not made to know the things as they are, our senses are completely subordinate to our preservation and our pleasure.’83 The fact that people were designed ‘to hold ideas that differ from reality’ was ‘for our own common good.’84 The self-deceit of society enhanced the happiness of human nature. Within society, people continued to turn the loves they no longer believed in into new social configurations that intensified the ‘sweetness of the deceit [la dolcezza del inganno].’85 There was no external moral law that limited this process, nor was there any principle in the mind that governed the process. The only rules Galiani gave were that ‘everything that is useful pleases’ and ‘what in life is agreeable is useful.’86 Galiani believed that their derivation from his two principles of love sufficed for making sure his idea of sociability would not collapse. Falsity and deceit [la falsità e l’inganno] are as appropriate [omogenei] to human nature as truth and disillusionment [la verità, e il disinganno] are contrary and detrimental [contrari e molesti] to it. Therefore it has been observed constantly and in every epoch that falsity and delusion are praiseworthy in

82 Pietro Metastasio, ‘Asilo d’Amore,’ in Opere, ed. Mario Fubini (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1968 [1732]). 83 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 65v. 84 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 65v. 85 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 63r. 86 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., ff. 62v–63r.

152 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money the way they present themselves to men; the truth, on the contrary, neither is able, nor dares, to appear to them if not under the cover of a lie. The ancient world of fables and epics shows to what extent falsity is agreeable and how detestable and disagreeable truth is. Throughout history, fables have created and create enjoyment for the greatest part of mankind, who, after having introduced them in every part of life, eventually turned them into religion. From this follows that God completely serves human pleasure and this is explained by the light of the Gospel. It is also understood if one considers the human belief in Redemption in relation to the opinions held by people in all centuries: it has never been other than a matter of mixing the truth with the most extraordinary fables as possible; and in spite of a great many heretics, who like branches of evil that infected faith have frequently arisen, God sustained the people’s Catholic faith only by means of a few innocent fables. This is how great the homogeneity of delusion [della menzogna] is to the human heart that neither the light of truth itself, nor the most efficacious remedies, nor the care of vigilant herdsmen have ever managed to completely unroot its well-planted roots.87

Galiani saw people as credulous addicts to their self-created 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.88 Galiani’s description of the origin of religion was somewhat similar to that in Vico’s celebration of fables and primitive religions as the means whereby providence brought men together and made them moral in spite of themselves. For Vico, however, fables and religion were not instances of self-deceit but parts of the necessary development of mankind. Religion and Sociability In his short manuscript Dell’idea di dio,89 Galiani exposed religious ideas of morality. He argued that moral theology in general was logically

87 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 59rv. 88 BSNSP, xxx.c.6., f. 66r. 89 Fausto Nicolini and Franco Venturi, ‘Inedito dell’abate Galiani,’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana (1956), 67–73. In the manuscript (preserved by the British Library, ms. Eg. 21) Galiani addresses his audience as an actual audience, as in a lecture. He later wrote ‘chapter 3’ on top of the page, indicating that the text was destined to be part of Dell’arte del governo.

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impossible and always self-contradictory. He claimed it was only possible to ‘assume the existence of God … by axiom.’90 Any group of people that developed ideas of Gods always reverted to explaining their supernatural moral qualities in terms of human experience of pleasure and pain. Both Vico and Celestino had argued that religious sentiment was the initial manifestation of man’s natural sociability. Galiani followed their lead, but turned their arguments on the universality of religion into a weapon for defeating alternative moral philosophical models. In Dell’idea di dio Galiani considered the whole spectrum of human ideas of divine beings. He distinguished between the ‘Christian’ idea of God as a creator of ‘things out of nothing’ and the view that the world ‘does not have a Creator, but is eternal.’ The latter – pre-Christian – opinion was tantamount ‘to avoid[ing] saying overtly that one does not suppose a God.’ According to Galiani, this latter effectively atheist idea of God went back to ‘the Stoics, who are followed by the Spinozists and many other philosophers.’ Here Galiani echoed Vico’s critique of Spinoza, which is contained in all three editions of the Scienza nuova. Further following Vico’s strategy for refuting moral scepticism, Galiani added that ‘the opinion of the Epicureans’ was in fact ‘the same as the Stoic one.’91 As in Dell’amor platonico, Galiani jettisoned the opposition between the two systems. ‘Epicureanism misunderstood,’ Galiani wrote, was ‘a contradiction in terms,’ whereas ‘well-understood, it becomes the same thing as Stoicism.’92 The traditional opposition between Epicureans and Stoics still served as the demarcation line in moral philosophy between theories that saw man as primarily self-interested and those that saw him as capable of virtue. Here Galiani indicated that neither system could explain religion, just as in Dell’amor platonico he had suggested that both were equally unsuitable for forming a concept of sociable selfinterest. Galiani had a clear awareness, like Vico and Celestino, that explaining why man developed supernatural sentiments was the philosophical key to explaining society. Unlike them, he developed a sceptical idea of religion and derived the progressive contribution of religion to human history from compulsive self-deceit, rather than from any improvement of man’s intellectual condition.

90 Nicolini and Venturi, ‘Inedito dell’abate Galiani,’ 69. 91 Ibid., 70. 92 Ibid.

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Continuing his analysis of the spectrum of religious ideas, Galiani distinguished between those formed by ordinary Christians, whom he called ‘Manichaeans,’ and those formed by philosophers and theologians, whom he called ‘Christian Platonists.’ The latter were commonly supposed to be above the ‘religion of the vulgar Christians,’ who simply saw the world as controlled by ‘Manichaean’ good and bad forces. Christian thinkers attempted ‘by demonstrating a lot of things, to find the true and legitimate idea of God, [which] is impossible.’93 The result, Galiani suggested, was that theological argument tended to slip back into a primitive ‘Manichaean’ form of itself. The ideas all philosophers (including Christian theologians) have of the Creator, although they appear to be right, are as ridiculous as the ones of the most stupid vulgar people. Both embrace the great paralogism of attributing things and ideas to God that belong to man. The ones of the vulgar are more obvious, while the ones of the wise are more abstruse and more difficult to uncover. The Roman farmer makes Jove eat nectar, while the Christian theologian makes him just. Both say a stupid thing. The paralogism of the first is clear: by wanting to give God every pleasure that is a pleasure to himself and by making him eat, he turns him into a man. And the second, although the error is concealed by a term with a very obscure meaning, is not less ridiculous, since, by wanting to give him every perfection, he gives him the justice that if he had it would make him perfect. But once that true justice [la vera giustizia] is defined, one sees that without being man, and without being obedient to a superior law [legge superiore], one cannot be just [giusto].94

Put as crudely as Galiani himself presented his argument, theology was the mistake of attributing to a supernatural being the products of man’s own anxieties and compulsive obsession with his loves. The more Christian philosophers refined theological argument, the more they revealed the naked truth that religion and society were designed to conceal. Galiani saw the origin of religion through his notions of love and Platonic love. Religious ideas were shared responses to individual anxieties that had created a need for society. According to Galiani, religion was a universal early appearance of sociability. It established

93 Ibid., 69. 94 Ibid., 72.

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social rules by imagining that a God-figure watched over a group of people as its legislator. This sceptical argument was the one that Galiani himself explored in the late 1740s, when he derived religion from love and self-interest. In those years too, Galiani considered anti-Epicurean arguments that, like Vico’s, opposed proper self-interest founded on religious beliefs to the depraved societies that emerged when religion was corrupted. As soon as it was published, Galiani studied Melchior de Polignac’s Anti-Lucretius (1747), a popular French philosophical poem, of which he translated (from Latin into Italian) the first of nine books.95 Polignac’s argument earned a reputation as a successful refutation of Epicureanism, as the Encyclopédie mentioned.96 Like Vico, who had been adamant that the famous dictum primos in orbe deos fecit timor meant that man’s religious fear caused society, Polignac saw religion as central to the societies that God had intended man to form.97 It was not true that societies emerged with the human imposition of any moral code or political authority, such as moral sceptics like Hobbes or Mandeville argued. Polignac held that primitive religion first structured man’s behaviour and became his guide to happiness. He depicted the societies based on a religious ‘conscience of laws’ as morally sound entities that were capable of providing their members with everything they truly needed. According to Polignac, the rot had set in later when people attempted to formalise their religious ‘conscience of laws’ into rational rules derived from man’s own understanding of his behaviour and the physical laws of nature. Polignac’s was not so much an anti-scientific work; it was aimed at the scepticism that was fuelled by the emergence of ‘human laws.’ Polignac wrote that instead of being governed by ‘internal

95 Melchior de Polignac, Anti-Lucretius of God and nature: a poem (London (1757 [1747]). The inspiration for Polignac’s book was an outright personal provocation by Bayle. See P.M.M. Geurts, Anti-Lucretius, of Over God en de Natuur, ed. and trans. P.M.M. Geurts (Assen: van Gorctm, 1968). Galiani’s translation of Book I is held by the BSNSP, xxxi.c.19, ff. 158–197, and was published by F. De Gregorio, La traduzione del I libro dell’ ‘Anti-Lucrezio’ di Polignac (Rome: Edizioni dell’Urbe, 1988). An Italian translation, by Bishop de’ Ricci, was first published in 1751, in Verona, and was reviewed in a number of Italian journals in the following years (De Gregorio, La traduzione dell’ ‘Anti-Lucrezio,’ 6). 96 See Geurts, Anti-Lucretius, 193–378; C.A. Fusil, L’Anti-Lucrèce du Cardinal de Polignac (Paris: Editions Scientifica, 1918); Édouard Patry, L’Anti-Lucrèce du Cardinal de Polignac (Auch: Imprimerie de F.A. Cocharaux, 1872). 97 Polignac, Anti-Lucretius, 26.

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awe’ for ‘Heaven’s rule’ through their ‘inward light,’ men became ‘mad with freedom.’ Their inward receptivity to God’s will was replaced with secular structures of political obligation. Polignac had Hobbes and Spinoza in mind as his main targets. They had reduced laws to effects of man’s self-preservation and utility-seeking.98 Galiani’s anti-Epicureanism differed completely from Polignac’s. In two manuscripts from the late 1740s, Della superstizione and Delle streghe,99 Galiani opposed well-balanced and depraved societies through discussing the cultural impact of different religious customs in history. He stated that within the order of God’s infinite universe, ‘finite’ man lived in a ‘tough condition [dura condizione].’100 Overpowered by experiences that frightened him, he developed religious beliefs to ‘relieve the mind of fear.’ In this way he imagined a ‘great familiarity with the gods,’ who became the object of his ‘care and jokes and sometimes also abuse and threats.’ This created a state of ‘interested servitude.’101 Man subjected himself to his gods and entrusted them with the responsibility over his well-being. Depending on the specific cultural characteristics of the theocracies man formed, this could result in the formation of various spirits that would rule these societies. Galiani argued that people ‘were originally born equals and friends [eguali ed amici].’ Their challenge was to ‘perpetuate’ themselves through sustaining the right shared beliefs about their existence and duties to their gods and to each other. The main threat was that people adopted dysfunctional opinions that upset their societies and turned them ‘into unequals and enemies [diseguali e nemici].’102 Galiani believed the human condition was threatened most directly when spiritual leaders manipulated the psyche of a society. People were naturally ‘infatuated with the power of supernatural things.’ Their leaders could use that infatuation to lead the society into warfare. As Galiani commented: ‘the experience of all centuries has demonstrated that there is no more powerful means than religion to incite combatants and make them bloodthirsty.’ He

98 Ibid., book I. 99 BSNSP, xxx.a.10, ff. 124–5, Della superstizione. BSNSP, xxxi.c.14, ff. 146–8, Delle streghe. The latter manuscript was published in Galiani, Opere, 817–19, as part of a letter by Galiani to Intieri. Put together, the two manuscripts form three large paragraphs, which overlap in the second paragraph. 100 Galiani, Opere, 817. 101 BSNSP, xxx.a.10, f. 124r. 102 Galiani, Opere, 817.

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argued that polytheistic religions lend themselves to fuel ‘envy and miserable jealousy’ and deform man’s behaviour. Similarly, the ‘religion of the Romans served just to inflame the soldiers with the highest anger and fury.’103 Such violent manipulations of human nature did not appear in cultures which had monotheistic religions. According to Galiani, ‘the military ferociousness of the Europeans was greatly diminished’ by Christianity, which civilised man’s beliefs.104 ‘Utility’ Galiani’s views about the development out of religion of inequality, luxury, laws, etc. – the institutions of modern societies – were underpinned by his idea of the transition of primitive loves into new, social configurations. It was from this perspective that, as a prelude to the core of the book, he described the early forms of money in ancient societies and their evolution in the first chapter of Della moneta. In the next chapter, Galiani presented his theory of the value of money and argued that people’s utility judgement, which lay at the root of the emergence of money and the development of luxury (or rather, the evolution of artificial loves that caused the progress of the well-being of mankind), comprised a sense of beauty. Galiani saw man’s aesthetic judgement not as deriving from an innate source, but as completely the product of society, just as utilitarian judgement was. By mentioning beauty, Galiani touched upon a major debate within eighteenth-century moral philosophy that he did not let himself go into. His intention in presenting utilitarian and aesthetic judgement as equally products of the same development of man’s loves into artificial configurations was to suggest that his idea of sociability in Della moneta transcended the Stoic and Epicurean views about pleasure and morality. In the first chapter of Della moneta, Galiani presented a pseudo-historical account of the origin of money. He attributed the discovery of gold and silver to ‘wonder, the mother of experience and curious inquiry.’105

103 BSNSP, xxx.a.10, f. 124v. This quotation echoes chapter 10 of Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, of 1734, where it was argued that the Romans ‘mêloient quelque sentiment religieux à l’amour qu’ils avoient pour leur patrie.’ Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, ed. Françoise Weil and Catherine Larrère, vol. 2 (Naples-Oxford: Liguori-The Voltaire Foundation, 2000), 161. 104 BSNSP, xxx.a.10, f. 125r. 105 Galiani, Della moneta, 21.

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Galiani followed Descartes, who defined ‘wonder’ in Les passions de l’âme as ‘a sudden surprise of the soul’ caused by an impression in the brain by an unfamiliar object, which was immediately followed by a judgement of its ‘value or insignificance.’106 Thus for Galiani, Descartes’s wonder was a particularly strong cause of ‘love.’ Galiani mentioned that upon their discovery gold and silver were universally ‘esteemed over all other things’ and immediately assumed religious and political functions. They were ‘venerated as sacred and divine things [come cosa sacra e divina venerati].’107 This was still the case, Galiani mentioned, in the cultures of savages and Indians.108 Because they were immediately given religious meanings, apparently, gold and silver were only discovered once man had developed shared beliefs that were the basis of society. Thus, when gold and silver sparked man’s wonder, they triggered a feeling of ‘surprise,’ which in the light of his religious mindset ‘rendered them agreeable’ to him.109 Galiani argued that in pre-modern societies gold and silver were only used by people ‘in the cult of their divinities and the adornment of the ruler and the aristocracy.’110 In modern times, Galiani continued, gold and silver served to adorn people in general, who decorated and surrounded themselves with luxury goods, believing that they looked more desirable than they would otherwise.111 Precious metals mainly served these uses, which directly supported the institutions of inequality and civil ranks and sustained the stability of the orders that characterised modern societies. Galiani used Homer’s verses to explain how this ornamental utility of gold and silver money arose. In Della moneta Galiani repeated a few passages from his lecture entitled Sullo stato della moneta ai tempi della guerra trojana.112 In this lecture he attacked the common belief among classicists that money did not exist in ancient Greece. Such views were derived from Paulus, Justinianus, and other Roman jurisconsults,113 who failed to recognise that exchange relationships involving early forms of money already existed in

106 Descartes, ‘Passions of the Soul,’ section 53, 1.350; AT XI.373, section 54, 1.350; AT XI.374, section 70, 1.353; AT XI.380. 107 Galiani, Della moneta, 22. 108 Ibid., 22. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid., 42–3. 112 Ibid., 351–79 (the text was published together with Della moneta in 1963). 113 Ibid., 351–3.

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earlier antiquity. This was due to the fact that they did not understand the ‘metaphysics of commerce [la metafisica del commercio].’114 Following Roman lawyers and clerical historians, modern scholars understood money as having come into being by agreement, at which point it was given the name ‘money.’ In contrast to them, Galiani argued that the origins of money had to be recognised even in a world whose customs, laws, and politics were entirely different from modern times. He showed that in early antiquity measurements of gold and silver replaced complicated gift relationships that were loaded with more primitive religious and political meanings. Rulers in antiquity exchanged gold and silver with each other on their travels, but attributed different meanings to these gifts. After first measuring the ‘value’ of gold and silver in terms of their own beliefs, once interaction networks became denser they started to measure their value in more standardised terms of their volume and weight.115 With the change of societies over time, the use of gold and silver turned completely secular and was detached from exclusive ownership of the people who held political power; at this point gold and silver became the luxury goods they still were in modern times.116 Having, in the first chapter of Della moneta, grounded the value of money in historical terms on social beliefs and treated it as the outcome of the development of religious meanings into secular forms, in the second chapter Galiani set out to provide a corresponding idea of the value of money. He did so by focusing on the true nature of man’s utilitarian judgement. First, he defined utility as simply ‘the capacity of a thing to promote a person’s happiness [l’attitudine che ha una cosa a procurarci la felicità]. Man is a mixture of various passions that move him with varying force. Pleasure [piacere] consists of the gratification [il soddisfarle] of these passions; and happiness is the acquisition of pleasure.’117 These definitions could easily be interpreted as Epicurean. Man’s behaviour as a pleasure-seeking being was tied to self-interested passions that seemed

114 Ibid. 115 Ibid., 23. Galiani argued that coined money first emerged when the Phoenicians and Tyrrhenians, the ancient ‘trade republics’ that were near the Egyptian ‘monarchy,’ started trading in standardised pieces of gold and silver. 116 Ibid., 351–79. 117 Ibid., 39. Here Galiani almost literally copied his own formulas from his lecture Dell’amor platonico as well as from the manuscript of Dell’arte del governo: ‘L’uomo è un composto di passione; il soddisfacimento di esse è il piacere, il possesso del piacere è la felicità’ ibid., 391.

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fully innate. To correct this impression, Galiani rephrased his statement concerning pleasure in Della moneta as follows: With regard to this, because I am not an Epicurean and do not wish to appear to be one, allow me to explain myself a bit and qualify the start of my argument. It needs to be said that the gratification of a passion which triggers and bothers another passion is not an orderly pleasure [non è compito piacere]. Indeed, if the trouble caused by it is greater than the pleasure itself, then the pleasure should be abhorred as a true pain and evil. If the pain is less than the pleasure, however, it is a benefit, though reduced in intensity and duration. This view, therefore, considers the pleasures of this life without reference to the other eternal life, as though one and the other could possibly be considered with the same admiration. It is obvious to us, thanks to providence [grazie alla provvidenza], that after this life we shall live another, the pleasures and pains of which are closely connected with our behaviour in our present life. Now, without altering anything I have just said, note that true and perfect pleasures are pleasures that produce no pain in that life. Those pleasures which produce pain in that life are always false and deceitful pleasures, since the difference between the pleasures and pains of this life and that is infinite, however large the enjoyment of this and small the pain of that might be. Had this assertion been made by all concerned, the ancient dispute between Epicureans and Stoics, that is, between pleasure and virtue, could not have arisen. Either the Stoics would have been totally incorrect in their view or it would have been clear that the differences between the two are simply verbal differences.118

Galiani denied Epicureanism, but his definitions, which echoed Gassendi’s neo-Epicurean statements concerning the objects of the passions in his Syntagma Philosophicum (1649), did not justify this claim, according to many of his readers.119 What Galiani presumably had in mind when

118 Ibid., 39–40. 119 Fred Michael and Emily Michael, ‘Gassendi’s Modified Epicureanism and British Moral Philosophy,’ History of European Ideas, 21[6] (1995), 743–61. Page 744 gives a translation of Syntagma Philosophicum, 3.856: Canon I: That pleasure, which has no pain joined with it, is to be embraced. Canon II: That pain, which has no pleasure joined with it, is to be avoided. Canon III: That pleasure, which either prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain, is to be avoided. Canon IV: That pain, which either prevents a greater pain, or creates a greater pleasure, is to be embraced.

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he wrote Della moneta was that his non-Epicureanism was based on a better understanding of the nature of pleasure than followers of either ancient sect were capable of developing. This is supported by the fact that he repeated almost literally his phrases about Stoicism and Epicureanism from his lecture Dell’amor platonico. As in Dell’idea di dio and Dell’amor platonico, Galiani dismissed Stoicism directly and judged that Epicureanism was not essentially different. From the point of view of Galiani’s epistemology, Gassendi’s attempt to integrate Epicureanism and Christianity misconstrued the nature of sociability. Gassendi claimed that there was ‘something within’ virtue that ‘naturally affords pleasure and delight,’ which made virtue a ‘means’ for obtaining happiness.120 Gassendi presented virtue as motivated by pleasure. In this sense, Gassendi’s argument was not even so different from Locke’s, who argued that ‘good and evil are nothing but pleasure or pain’ and defined ‘moral rectitude’ purely in terms of the ‘pleasure and pain’ that were ‘a consequence of’ one’s actions.121 According to Locke, ‘it has pleased our wise creator to annex to several objects and the ideas which we receive from them, as also to several of our thoughts, a concomitant pleasure’ in order that they ‘might not remain wholly idle and unemployed by us.’122 In contrast, Galiani’s idea of sociability did not presuppose any providential capacity of virtue to cause pleasure. It only presupposed that people’s loves had to come under pressure as a response to which they created religion and society. But he did not explain his views in Della moneta, and so his denial of Epicureanism remained an unresolved issue. After using his concept of utility to explain how commercial sociability functioned, which I will discuss in the next chapter, Galiani associated man’s utilitarian judgement with his sense of beauty. He explained that ‘there were two categories of beauty [due classe ha il bello].’ On the one hand, people judged beauty based on foundations that were proper to the development of human nature. This, he argued, was the judgement that informed people when they developed luxury. On the other hand, beauty related to fashion concerned only an ‘addiction [assuefazione] of the senses that made things appear [parere] as beautiful’ while

120 Ibid., 746; see also 745–51. 121 John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 321, the note ‘Voluntas.’ See also other notes from that year in which Locke seems to have attempted again to reconcile his hedonism with his views on true morality. 122 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.vii.3.

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they were not really in one’s interest.123 Galiani declared that his principles of value could make sense of all of man’s behaviour, with this ‘one exception,’ which was ‘fashion [la moda].’124 Fashions were ‘afflictions of the human mind [una malattia dell’animo]’ that were imported from Europe’s dominant countries, mainly France.125 In sharp contrast to luxury, Galiani could not see fashion having any proper function in modern society. The ‘empire of fashion’ rested ‘not at all on utility’: ‘if there is anything in a fashion that is in the least useful, I call it not fashion,’ wrote Galiani, ‘but improvement of the arts or of the convenience of life.’126 By the time Galiani wrote Della moneta, the latter terms had become synonyms for luxury that did not have the connotations of moral depravity that luxury itself had.127 Following the moral philosophy underlying Dell’arte del governo, luxury belonged to modern societies and was related to the process of the ongoing formation of new artificial loves around which societies revolved. Fashions, on the other hand, were, according to Galiani, simply a damaging engagement in selfdelusion that distorted the progress of humankind. Galiani concluded his short explanation of the two categories of beauty in Della moneta by mentioning that ‘the beauty of some minerals, like gold and silver,’ was recognised by people’s natural aesthetic sense and was ‘universally established on the constitution of the human mind and had never been subjected to fashion.’128 Unfortunately, in spite of touching upon the subject of beauty, which was one of the main issues within eighteenth-century moral philosophy, Galiani pursued the topic no further. However, his brother Berardo later wrote a manuscript entitled Del bello (1765),129 which contains

123 124 125 126 127

Galiani, Della moneta, 52. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 51–2. Ibid., 52. David Hume, for example, used these terms in this way. See István Hont, ‘Luxury and Commerce,’ in Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. M. Goldie and R. Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 379–418. 128 Galiani, Della moneta, 52. 129 BNN XII D 94, ff. 1–27, 1–125, Del bello: dissertazione metafisica, del M(archese).B(erardo).G(aliani). Nap(oli). MDCCLXV. Con licenza de’ superiori; the main reference point for Berardo Galiani was Diderot’s article Beau in the Encyclopédie. Berardo set out to discuss dimensions and measures that were used in architecture (he also translated Vitruvius,’s De Architettura into Italian in 1758) in the context of a general theory of natural and artificial beauty and aesthetic judgement.

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analytical structures that appear to be similar to Ferdinando’s philosophy of love and Platonic love and seems to have been complementary to Ferdinando’s idea of morality. A comparison between Berardo’s argument about beauty and Ferdinando’s philosophy might be useful for further clarifying Ferdinando Galiani’s position on beauty. To conclude, Galiani’s notion of love was a sustained effort to dissociate this passion from any innate principle of self-interest. He did so by reconsidering Descartes’s notion of love in his Les passions de l’âme (1649). The other epistemological treatise that influenced Galiani’s views was Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). In his own work, Galiani based self-interest fully on the development of an individual’s loves into structures of pleasure-seeking. Compared with Descartes’s and Locke’s epistemologies, which served as comparative frameworks for the development of Galiani’s concept of self-interest, he completely stripped any form of self-interest or moral propensity from his idea of the initial primitive passion of love. Galiani’s love was a more basic category of human nature than either Locke or Descartes assumed. It entirely preceded any form of self-interest. Galiani believed that this was the only way to avoid circularity in explaining the origin of moral motives. The purpose of grounding self-interest in fully person-neutral and interest-free perception was to be able eventually to collapse the moral philosophical opposition of self-interest and virtue. In his lectures, as well as in Della moneta, Galiani claimed that his idea of sociability transcended the debate between Stoics and Epicureans and their followers. He suggested that utilitarian and aesthetic judgements were not alternative approaches to explaining society, but that both were the outcome of the development of primitive passions of love into new artificial forms. Galiani’s thesis in his lectures was that society itself was the product of the passions. What needed explaining was the transformation of love through the rise of human beings capable of selfreflection and reflection about the natural environment around them. The characteristics of this project were much closer to Vico’s Scienza nuova, which had been published in its final form in 1744, than to Celestino’s history of mankind. Unfortunately, in Della moneta Galiani hardly explained his moral philosophy and his outlook on human history, as a result of which it was easily mistaken for a work based on Epicurean moral principles. In developing his early moral philosophy, Galiani built on the efforts of Celestino and Doria and Vico, who all sought to frame a concept of

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sociability that could replace natural self-interest as the key to the origin of morality. The dividing line between Celestino and Doria and Vico was determined by beliefs about whether or not it was possible to defend commercial society on moral grounds. Could its mechanisms be explained on the basis of non-Epicurean principles of interaction or not? Galiani responded to the projects of his predecessors and their disagreements by developing a new idea of sociability. This implied a rejection of need-based explanations of society, as developed by Pufendorf, the French Jansenists, and Mandeville, and scorned the pessimistic Augustinian interpretation of the Fall that led to neo-Hobbesian theories of false morality. The pivotal concept of Galiani’s idea of morality was the one of selfdeceit. Out of his radical epistemological scepticism Galiani developed a morality that revolved around utility. This morality, which was central to Della moneta, closed the gap between Epicureanism and Christian virtue; although it resembled neo-Hobbesian false morality it was in fact genuine.

5 Della moneta: Commercial Sociability and Monetary Politics

Money and ‘the Moral Order’ Galiani’s concept of utility was undoubtedly the principle behind the idea of commercial sociability in Della moneta. The book was written to criticise the economic reform proposals of Neapolitan jurists who were internal critics of the government, the anti-modern sentiments of Galiani’s Neapolitan contemporary Carlantonio Broggia, and the dominant views of the time about money and commercial reforms among Italian authors. The political views of all his opponents, Galiani believed, derived from a faulty and superficial understanding of the nature of commerce: ‘he who would know a lot more about human behaviour [operazioni umane], when the conduct of entire nations is considered, would take less for granted and be a good deal slower to propose corrections [emendare].’1 Della moneta was also directly a product of Galiani’s reflections on the debate of the 1730s and 1740s in France on state intervention in the monetary system in order to minimise the public debt and boost economic growth. The objective of the book was to launch a defence of the notion of commercial society and simultaneously to develop the ideal strategy for the economic development of Naples.

1 Ferdinando Galiani, Della moneta e scritti inediti, ed. Alberto Caracciolo and Alberto Merola (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963 [1751]), 32. Translations of quotations are taken from Ferdinando Galiani, On Money: A Translation of Della Moneta by Ferdinando Galian, trans. Peter R. Toscano (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1977), but often with considerable modifications to improve the readability and to correct errors. Italian original terms are occasionally added in brackets.

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The notion of value that was central to Della moneta was built on Galiani’s sceptical epistemological notion of self-deceit, which he had developed in his slightly earlier lectures. As he declared in the preface to the book, he set out to ground politics, particularly with regard to commerce, on new philosophical principles.2 His notion of self-deceit enabled him to understand how modern societies came to revolve around commercial relations. People had turned their isolated individual states into extremely useful fictional beliefs that kept them together in society. The historical modifications of the human mind eventually produced a type of morality that lay between a false Epicurean morality based purely on selfishness and a Christian morality of self-denial. This morality, which brought together self-interest and genuine otherregarding concerns, went along perfectly well with the utility-seeking that defined modern commercial societies. Without having to presuppose that people were naturally sociable or that society relied on politics and was the product of a social contract, Galiani could paraphrase one of the most famous sentences of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748) by saying that these were societies in which ‘everyone thinks of and labours for all [in cui ognuna pensa per tutti e fatica].’3 Galiani identified money as the pivotal institution of this type of society. Hence, moving from his ideas of love and self-deceit to the domain of money and economic policy, Galiani declared that ‘the good moral order of the universe is completely maintained by money.’4 However, Galiani’s concept of utility in Della moneta was understood at the time as Epicurean, in spite of the author’s denial. Indeed, Galiani explained market behaviour as ruled by amor proprio and primarily geared towards ‘the desire to distinguish oneself.’5 This view resembled Hobbesian morality and the sociability described by French moralists, that is, apparently moral actions without the presence of true moral intentions. Moreover, Galiani’s true view was difficult to discern. Della moneta presented only a severely truncated version of Galiani’s sophisticated view of the relation between self-interest and its causes, which he previously started to develop in his early lectures. In Della moneta his

2 See chapter 1. 3 Galiani, Della moneta, 90; see also 46. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. A.M. Cohler, B.C. Miller, and H.S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1748]), Part I, book 3, chapter 7, p. 27. 4 Galiani, Della moneta, 79–80. 5 Ibid., 41.

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thoughts on love and Platonic love were not at the forefront. But this did not mean that the underlying outlook on society was different from the one of his lectures. The emphasis on market behaviour in Della moneta was appropriate to its subject matter. While Galiani dealt with issues of devaluation and other monetary issues, it was not always necessary for him to justify markets from a moral point of view. However, because Della moneta argued vehemently that societies that were ruled by money were less corruptible by politics than earlier forms of society and Galiani discussed man’s well-being, rather than the moral foundations of markets, the book gave its readers the impression of an Epicurean treatise. Nevertheless, in Della moneta there were still signs of Galiani’s underlying moral philosophy and history of mankind showing in his discussion of commercial sociability and his account of people as economic agents. Galiani argued that 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 theirs. He claimed that each person’s actions in a market context derived from what he or she believed was virtuous behaviour. Galiani argued that commerce was beneficial for mankind precisely because self-denial and 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 from collapsing into a ‘miserable state of nature [lo stato infelicissimo di natura].’6 Crucially, for understanding the message of Della moneta, Galiani did not just describe commercial morality as a set of rules that were both easier to reconcile with man’s natural drives and better geared to promoting human happiness than traditional, Christian, notions of virtue; he also understood these practical advantages in a wider context. Rather than contrast earlier conceptions of moral goodness with the actual conditions of eighteenth-century societies, he 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. Galiani used the term providence to reconcile the historical dynamic of commercial progress with a set of fixed moral rules that lay at the core

6 Ibid., 85.

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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, and in the rise and fall of states in both antiquity and modernity, and they regulated the development of cultural characteristics of the dominant societies in the course of time. Throughout history man constantly reshaped his fictional moral beliefs, thereby creating the mental preconditions for commercial society.7 Before Galiani embarked on Della moneta, he attempted to describe the accompanying processes of the evolution of human institutions in a series of studies for his project Dell’arte del governo. Galiani’s text Sullo stato della moneta ai tempi della guerra Trojana was such a study in the relation between the development of cultural institutions and the emergence of new commercial structures. In other words, Galiani used his epistemological scepticism to reject traditional notions of moral goodness; yet, instead of reverting to a general moral relativism, he argued that commerce had its own normativeness, which could not actually be captured by a notion of moral goodness that imposed restrictions on the dynamic of commerce. It was for this reason that Galiani described ‘moral philosophy [filosofia morale]’ in his sketch Dell’arte del governo as a discipline that tries to put moralistic ideas of goodness at the centre of politics and confuses true political reasoning by teaching a ‘disdain for the possession and acquisition of wealth [insegni a disprezzarle (il possesso delle ricchezze, e l’acquisto di esse)].’8 When Galiani declared in Della moneta that ‘wherever there is peace, salubrity, true virtue and freedom [pace, salubrità, virtú vera, e libertà] there have to be wealth and happiness [le ricchezze e la felicità],’ he was then also not stating the trivial, but emphasising the point that the quality of a state’s economic performance is governed by the degree to which the citizens’ beliefs about utility (i.e. their truly moral insights) correspond to the behavioural standards of commercial interaction.9 Galiani’s approach to politics in Della moneta derived directly from his perspective on the inherent normativeness of commercial sociability. In the core chapter of the book he explained that the value of money at any point in time ultimately derived from principles that were part of

7 Ibid., 26–7. 8 Ibid., 390. 9 Ibid., 260.

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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, according to Galiani, commerce could never have become central to modern societies. Equally, money was still central to these societies in spite of all attempts by moralists throughout history to block man’s love of gold and silver. However, Galiani declared that the nature of money was still not understood, and, as long as the true nature of money was not demonstrated by any political writer, political interventions into what Galiani described as the providential ‘laws of commerce [le leggi di commercio]’ were likely to continue to occur.10 Such interfering policies would necessarily backfire. According to Galiani, the danger was most acute in the case of attempts, based on philosophical views, to compensate for a suspected moral damage on society caused by commerce. Galiani accused moralists who denied that ‘the value of precious stones and rare things is grounded on human nature’ of trying to change human nature out of a desire to deny the true nature of earthly life.11 But I would like to see the good philosopher, who rid himself of earthly deceptions [da’ terreno inganni] and virtually dehumanised himself [disumananandosi] and raised himself above the others, which enabled him to amuse himself by laughing at us poor mortals, separate himself from these ideas and return down here to mix in society. I say I would like him to return as a common man and not as a philosopher. This will of course force the needs of life upon him. Then, that smile, which healed his soul while he was philosophising, now that he has to work would disturb himself as well as others. Those ideas had better remain locked in his mind, for as he struggles and complains along with his fellows about the fact that man is not altogether much superior to brutes, which I concede, he will by attempting to improve them only make them worse. This would be impossible for him. Given that our divine religion guides men to perfect virtue, our teachers’

10 Ibid., 55. 11 Ibid., 45. Here Galiani echoed his account of the emergence of Platonic love in the case of the actual Platonists in his lecture Dell’amor platonico.

170 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money powers rely on the supernatural and divine. If among us we see examples of things that display the highest degree of perfection this is the work of heavenly grace, not due to the efforts of man. Only he who is equipped accordingly can perfect us, and he could. But philosophy is not capable of this. We have seen Stoics who wished to render man perfectly virtuous and instead made man fiercely proud. Others have tried to make man taciturn and contemplative, but they created gluttons. Those who wanted to make man poor, created atheists. And Diogenes, who wanted to cure man’s prejudices, created an infamous race of dogs. Now let us finally live in peace. And let those stones and all metals have whatever value is theirs.12

Philosophical wisdom that ‘healed the soul’ of the philosopher and suggested mankind should somehow recover elements of its pre-commercial state was dangerous in politics. Moral considerations in general, Galiani believed, led to bad political advice. Instead, politics was only bound to a concept of justice that valued population increase, which meant, according to Galiani, increase of the country’s real wealth.13 However, here too, 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. Galiani 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. From his point of view all of his opponents in Della moneta, the anti-Epicurean Broggia, the Neapolitan jurist reformers, and his Italian contemporaries who wrote about monetary politics, did not rightly understand the nature of money. Therefore they could propose dysfunctional reforms. They did not recognise the impossibility of inserting any additional moral notions

12 Ibid., 45. 13 Franco Venturi, ‘Il dibattito sulle monete,’ in Settecento riformatore, Da Muratori a Beccaria, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 494–502, suggests that Galiani was, among the 1750s Italian authors, the only one who achieved a truly political analysis of money, rather than a more traditional moral one.

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into the functioning of commerce and failed to see that a viable foreign trade could not be set up politically if the commercial potential for it had not developed naturally. Thus, Galiani’s political economy followed directly in the footsteps of the project of his uncle Celestino and Intieri of the late 1730s. Celestino’s earlier view of morality explained that progress of moral knowledge and the development of commercial interaction were naturally connected. Celestino presumed that stable commercial development was naturally linked to continuous epistemic progress. In order to increase human happiness every new form of interaction in the history of mankind had to be built on an improvement of man’s ideas. Together with Celestino, Intieri turned this view of commerce as a progressive historical agency into a set of political ideas about the development of the Neapolitan economy. Ferdinando Galiani in turn worked out their conclusions about the nature of morality and developed their project into his own political and economic vision of the progress of mankind towards commercial society. The order of the argument of Della moneta was devised to bring out all of these ideas by focusing on the subject of money. In Book I Galiani discussed the value of gold and silver in historical and then, in the most famous part of the book, in theoretical terms. Both the historical part and his theory of value, including his concept of utility, revolved around the claim that it was necessary completely to reject Aristotle’s derivation of the institution of money from a social contract of mankind. In Book II he showed what the role of money was in modern societies and how money had improved man’s existence. The rest of Della moneta, Books III, IV, and V, consisted of discussions on topics in political economy that involved money. In these parts of the work Galiani applied his ideas; as he announced in Book I, chapter 2, after claiming that the value of money was entirely ‘natural’: Before the reader will realise on his own how consequential the establishment of this truth is, he will learn it, by recognising that at every stage of the discussion of extrinsic value, devaluation, interest, exchange rates, and the proportions between different coins, it will refer to a certain intrinsic and natural value [valore intrinseco e naturale].14

14 Galiani, Della moneta, 37.

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Among all the topics Galiani discussed, the one that attracted most attention was the one of devaluation policies. Almost the whole of Book III was devoted to an analysis of the effects of such policies. Galiani set out to correct the mistaken judgements of a variety of European writers who in recent years had argued both for and against the use of devaluations by governments. Set in motion by Melon and his critics, the debate on devaluation, as a means by which governments could influence debt payment within their states and thereby maybe boost their economies, had spread across Europe. Galiani’s contribution, which puzzled his contemporaries, was not only to assert that a devaluation involved only a change of the nominal value of the currency, which had no direct adverse effects on the balance of trade, but also to point out that many of the mistaken judgements derived from looking at the issue from a moralistic point of view. Broggia Virtually all of the ideas in Della moneta and their underlying principles were opposed to those of Carlantonio Broggia, one of Galiani’s Neapolitan contemporaries, who was a follower of Doria and Vico and had published a book on taxes and money in 1743.15 In the preface to the second edition of Della moneta, Galiani explained that he refuted many of Broggia’s ideas. He had avoided naming Broggia when he originally published the book because he did not want to be disrespectful to an ‘author who was still alive.’16 Immediately after

15 Broggia’s book referred to is Trattato dei tributi, delle monete e del governo politico della sanità, 2 vols. (Milan 1803, [1743]). On Broggia see Franco Venturi, ‘Broggia e Vico,’ in The Age of the Enlightenment: Studies Presented to Theodore Besterman, ed. W.H. Barber et al. (Edinburgh-London: Oliver and Boyd, 1967), 298–307; ‘Tre note su Carlantonio Broggia,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 80[4] (1986), 830–53; Settecento riformatore, Da Muratori a Beccaria, 483–8, 517–22. For a biography of Broggia see the introduction by Raffaele Ajello to a number of Broggia’s writings in Politici ed economisti del primo settecento, dal Muratori al Cesarotti, La letteratura Italiana, Storia e testi, ed. R. Ajello, M. Berengo, et al., vol. 5 (Naples-Milan: Ricciardi, 1978), 971–1034. An important previously unpublished work by Broggia is his manuscript on luxury, a direct response to the publication of Jean-François Melon’s Essai politique sur le commerce: see Broggia, Il banco e il monte de’ pegni. Del lusso, intro. Luigi De Rosa and Augusto Graziani, ed. Rosario Patalano (Naples: La città del sole, 2004). 16 Galiani, Della moneta, 8.

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Della moneta appeared, Broggia drafted an elaborate critique of it that remained unpublished. 17 Between the late 1730s and the early 1760s Broggia restated many of Doria’s and Vico’s positions on the nature of commerce and launched various reform projects for Naples.18 His political ideas first gestated as reflections on his experience as a merchant in Venice. Comparing the heyday of Venetian republican glory and wealth with the moral and economic decay he witnessed, he concluded Venice had been distracted from its wealth by luxury.19 Here, his views returned to Renaissance republican theory. The opening lines of the preface of Broggia’s first main work, his Trattato dei tributi, delle monete e del governo politico della sanità (1743), declared that Machiavelli’s ‘poisonous teachings’ might be separated from his basic political views. Machiavelli had recognised, and Broggia quoted a passage from the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio to this effect, that within corrupt states citizens deceived themselves and confused their true happiness with false utility. In such states ‘civil economic life [la vita civil economica]’ – the term was a paraphrase of Doria’s main work La vita civile – had been ‘neglected’ and turned into ‘excessive culture and reflection [cólta di soverchio e riflessiva]’ – which idea echoed Vico’s understanding of the evils of modern society.20 The result was the ‘decadence [decadenza]’ and ‘ruin [ruina]’ of any nation that disparaged ‘things truly necessary and concrete [cose veramente necessarie e concrete].’21 In Naples, Broggia’s encounter with Bartolomeo Intieri would be decisive for the rest of his career. At first a follower of Intieri, some of whose initiatives he would continue to think of as ‘causing a true, solid

17 Carlantonio Broggia, Del pubblico interesse economico, politico, morale di stato e di commercio. Sostenuto e difeso contro gli errori e le insidie de’ falsi dotti. Dissertazioni varie, del tutto utili e necessarie per le civile scienze di C.A. Broggia prodotte in occasione di farsi l’esame le risposte e le nostre critiche su di un opera intitolata Della Moneta Libri Cinque, impressa a Napoli nel 1750 di autore anonimo, Goldsmiths’-Kress Library Manuscript Collection of Economic Literature, no. 8477.1, n.d., probably 1751). 18 Ajello suggests that Broggia was also influenced by Fleury and Fénelon. C.A. Broggia, ‘Dalla “Memoria ad oggetto di varie politiche ed economiche ragioni”’ and ‘Nota Introduttiva,’ in Politici ed economisti del primo settecento, 5: 985, 990–2. 19 Ibid., 1007–9. For Broggia’s biography see Ajello’s introduction, ibid., 971–1034. 20 Broggia, Trattato dei tributi, 1: 315. On 1: 309 Broggia echoes Vico in speaking about ‘due opposti estremi della barbarie naturale o delle colta.’ 21 Ibid., 1: 17. See also 1: 315 and 1: 317, where Broggia distinguishes between ‘concrete [concreto]’ and perverted, ‘abstract [astratto]’ commerce.

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good to civil society,’ Broggia published views that became the antitheses of Intieri’s. His response to Della moneta itself was an attack on Intieri. Broggia believed for a long time that Intieri was the author and that Galiani at most executed parts of the writing.22 Broggia put forward a series of reform projects for which he tried to gather support with his publications. His work from 1743 on taxes and financial politics had been dedicated to Montealegre, Naples’s first minister at the time, and was received with some interest. Afterwards, Broggia found himself increasingly less welcomed by any of the parties whose support he sought. Permission for printing for one treatise, a controversial property redistribution scheme aimed against the aristocracy’s luxury consumption, in which the Church was to be a key party, was refused after Pope Benedict XIV said that he did not want the work to be dedicated to him.23 Broggia’s plan for buying back the tax rights of the state, which had been sold off during Spanish rule over Naples, met with a lot of criticism. In 1754, immediately after one attempt too many to find political support for it, he was exiled to the small island of Pantelleria and subsequently to Palermo. As Galiani wrote in the second edition of Della moneta, Broggia was consumed by bitterness, which led to a ‘tragic and pitiful end.’24 From the moment Melon’s Essai politique sur le commerce first appeared, in 1734, Broggia had started working on an anti-luxury treatise. Melon’s work had been ‘the prime motive’ and ‘the occasion,’ Broggia declared, for him to expose all the misconceptions and lies about the advantages of luxury.25 His manuscript Della vita civil economica was to provide a vision of true political economy as the alternative to any justification of luxury.

22 Broggia, ‘Memoria ad oggetto di varie politiche ed economiche ragioni,’ 1027–51. From the correspondence between Intieri and Ferdinando Galiani it 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: la dialettica politica a favore e contro la pubblicazione,’ Frontiera d’Europa (1999), 173–236. Already in 1788, Luigi Diodati ridiculed Broggia’s idea that Intieri was behind Della moneta; see Diodati, Vita dell’abate Ferdinando Galiani (Naples, 1788), 23–4. 23 Broggia, ‘Memoria ad oggetto di varie politiche ed economiche ragioni,’ 1017. 24 Galiani, Della moneta, 8. 25 Broggia published an outline of his ideas in 1754 (Broggia, ‘Memoria ad oggetto di varie politiche ed economiche ragioni,’ 1015–6, 1041–59).

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All of Broggia’s published works derived from his manuscript Della vita civil economica, which evolved over time and of which several versions still exist.26 The very title of this work was a reference to Doria’s La vita civile. Della vita civil economica was Broggia’s blueprint for a modern virtuous state in which people’s commercial interactions were politically monitored. Broggia saw political economy as the means for regulating the wellbeing of modern societies. In earlier times, religion fulfilled the equivalent function by keeping people in a ‘supernatural Unity [soprannaturale Uno].’ In modern times, when the wealth and political freedom of a state depended on its commerce – of which ‘morality was the ultimate foundation [massimo fondamento]’ – the ‘ethical-political science [la scienza eticopolitica]’ of political economy served to create a ‘modern Unity.’27 Broggia defended the legacy of Doria and Vico against modern ‘sensists, sophists, sceptics and Epicureans.’28 Broggia, like Doria, saw true commerce as a new form of ancient military virtue, whereas luxury ‘by its very nature induces laziness, idleness and the abuse of pleasures [l’abuso de’ piaceri] and enjoyments and distracts the mind from every pure and more necessary industry and effort, like the economic [l’economica] and military ones.’29 Still echoing Doria, he argued that luxury overturned man’s true wealth-seeking and disrupted the relation between honesty and utility.30 Luxury was mere appearance, false and deceptive utility and the main cause of poverty, decay, and social disintegration. Using Vico’s terminology, Broggia wrote that, compared with Britain and France, Naples had developed an extremely ‘excessive culture [eccedente coltura].’31 Broggia argued that Naples could preserve its liberty and become wealthy by cutting out luxury.32 The mark of good

26 Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, XXI.17.1–2, XXI.18, XXI.17.3. The BNN holds a large number of hitherto virtually unstudied works by Broggia that merit close attention. For an overview of Broggia’s manuscripts conserved in Palermo, see Raffaele Ajello, Arcana Juris: diritto e politica nel settecento Italiano (Naples: Jovene, 1976), 368–87. 27 Broggia, ‘Memoria ad oggetto di varie politiche ed economiche ragioni,’ 1006–7. 28 This set of terms featured also on the front page of his later critique of Della moneta as part of its intended title and was repeated many times in the text (Broggia, Del pubblico interesse economico, politico, morale, f. 1r). The same set of terms was used by Doria, most of all in his attack on Celestino (Doria, Difesa della metafisica degli antichi filosofi contro il signor Giovanni Locke ed alcuni altri moderni autori [Venice, 1732–3]). 29 Broggia, ‘Memoria ad oggetto di varie politiche ed economiche ragioni,’ 1123. 30 Ibid., 1042. 31 Ibid., 1040, 1049, 1021. 32 Ibid., 1050.

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government was the moderation of a state’s rich citizens, who reinvested their wealth directly into the domestic economy and were not tempted to waste it on luxury, especially not on foreign luxury.33 It was not true that it was ‘more difficult for a rich man to go to heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.’ The evil was not inequality, but luxury.34 The problem in recent times was that people’s desire to ‘overly distinguish [troppo distinguere]’ themselves was seen as a boost to economic growth. It was not true that luxury stimulated ‘industry’ because it made people lazy. To argue that ‘luxury contributes to the conservation of the state [conservazion dello stato]’ was a ‘filthy and poisonous maxim [sconcia e velenosa massima].’35 Following Doria, Broggia believed that false philosophies like these, which he saw as modern revivals of Epicureanism, naturally upset the necessary relation between honesty and utility, prompted man’s laziness, and turned his dedication to honest industry into a vicious love of luxury.36 Broggia incorporated Vico’s cyclical images of the decay of societies and the ‘deceit [boria]’ of scholars into this vision.37 The task of political economy was to stop the rotation of the ‘wheels of Fortune.’38 Ideally, the standard of ‘true nobility’ which stopped moral corruption would be upheld by the aristocracy, but in Naples the opposite was the case. The aristocracy and its taste for luxury set the wrong example, and, when a bourgeois class developed, its members adopted aristocratic tastes while ‘detaching themselves from industry’; they tried to acquire an artifical stature of nobility inspired by ‘the falsest maxims of true civil and noble life.’39 Thus, Broggia claimed, it was necessary to institute reforms, rather than to ‘take evil for good and good for evil … that which is for that which ought to be, and that which people do for what they should do.’40 The first part of the title of Broggia’s attack on Della moneta was ‘Of the public interest of the state, in its economic, political, moral and

33 Broggia, Trattato dei tributi, 2: 67. Within Broggia’s idea of patriotism, the love of one’s own country and the good use of wealth were intimately connected. 34 Broggia, ‘Memoria ad oggetto di varie politiche ed economiche ragioni,’ 1042. 35 Ibid., 1053, 1041, 1049; see also 1038–59. 36 Ibid., 1006. 37 Ibid., 1039–40. 38 Ibid., 1004–5, 1044. 39 Ibid., 1006, 1039. 40 Ibid., 1107, 1125–51.

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commercial dimensions, sustained and defended against the errors and traps of false scholars [Del pubblico interesse economico, politico, morale di stato e di commercio. Sostenuto e difeso contro gli errori e le insidie de’ falsi dotti].’41 The manuscript was a series of fulminations aimed at everything that Della moneta – according to him – represented. Broggia judged that Della moneta was ‘generally full … of structural scepticism.’ Its author was a follower of ‘sensists, sceptics, and Epicureans’ like ‘Hobbes, Locke, Melon, which Italian pedantry enjoys aping.’ For Broggia, Galiani and all authors who justified modern commerce confused ‘the sovereign providence with the vices of humankind’ and denied ‘providence’ and ‘man’s free will.’42 Money, Broggia argued, was instituted by humankind as an invention that facilitated the increase of industry. The first lines of the second part of the Trattato dei tributi, delle monete e del governo politico della sanità, of 1743, recalled the ancient myth of Midas, which Aristotle had already criticised: ‘if everything turned into gold and silver, it is certain that humankind would perish and suffer a deplorable misery. These metals are not by themselves necessary for life.’43 According to Broggia, money and luxury were rival institutions. Money served the satisfaction of true needs and natural goods; luxury only satisfied false needs and concerned artificial goods. Broggia criticised Melon’s policy perspective on devaluations as an excuse for the disruption of the true economy and industry of the state. Echoing Locke’s famous dictum that through devaluations the state itself engaged in clipping money, Broggia, like most Italian writers on money in the early 1750s, accused Melon of justifying the deceit of the people by the state.44 Natural Value Broggia’s hostile attack on Della moneta for being an Epicurean treatise that condoned man’s natural greed and the immoral consequences of his taste for luxury was particularly ungenerous towards Galiani’s idea of

41 Broggia, Del pubblico interesse economico, politico, morale, f. 1r. 42 Broggia, ‘Memoria ad oggetto di varie politiche ed economiche ragioni,’ 1019–20, 1127–51. 43 Broggia, Trattato dei tributi, 1: 303–17; also 2: 48, 261. 44 See chapter 1.

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commercial morality. In fact, Broggia did not quite understand that the theory of the value of money that was central to Della moneta represented a perspective of the history of mankind in which the moral capacity of human nature grew along with the modification of the cultural institutions of society. Precisely in the light of his view of money, Galiani denied that luxury was morally problematic. He declared that it was akin to ‘terrestrial happiness [terrena felicità].’45 Thus, Galiani’s position on luxury was much closer to Melon’s than to Broggia’s.46 However, Galiani wanted to avoid getting sucked into this very polarised debate, which ever since Fénelon had started it at the beginning of the eighteenth century had been an enormous controversy. Through explaining the nature of money, Galiani wanted to clarify the status of luxury in relation to a country’s commercial development. He argued that luxury was not a trigger for economic growth, but its effect; it was simply ‘born out of peace, good government, and the perfection of the arts useful to society [della perfezione delle arti utili alla società].’47 At some point in the history of mankind, gold and silver, the ‘handmaidens of luxury [compagni del lusso],’ became valued, and soon afterwards money emerged.48 Thus, when Galiani explained that everything ‘in the world’ had ‘its natural value [il suo naturale valore],’ which derived ‘from certain, general and constant principles,’ and concluded that people ‘by nature’ were ‘inclined to luxury [inclinato al lusso],’ he meant that this was so only as an effect of commercial development.49 In Della moneta Galiani treated his theory of the value of money as a premise for his entire political economy. The problem, he argued in the preface to Della moneta, was that the ‘Arte del governo,’ the practice of politics throughout history, had never been based on philosophical considerations, and this was especially problematic in modern times with regard to money.50 Therefore, whatever truths Melon put forward on monetary politics, he had failed to prove them, and as a result he could easily be contradicted by anyone. By taking up the issue of the nature of

45 Galiani, Della moneta, 241. 46 Galiani’s approach to luxury, i.e. seeing it in terms of the progress of the arts (ibid., 242), echoed Melon’s argument. 47 Ibid., 241–2. 48 Ibid., 45. 49 Ibid., 38, 73. 50 Ibid., 12–13. See chapter 1.

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the value of money, Galiani built a bridge between philosophy and political economy. He claimed that he, ‘earlier than anyone else [prima d’ogni altro],’ had uncovered its true principles.51 Book I, chapter 2, of Della moneta was the backbone of Galiani’s argument. Here he set himself (and his teachers Intieri and Celestino) apart from the mainstream of the Neapolitan reform movement by means of a new idea of money. Galiani questioned the view that ‘the common consensus of men [il consenso degli uomini] has caused them, for their greater convenience, to adopt the common use of money’ by ‘giving metals a value they do not intrinsically possess.’52 Instead, which ‘few understand,’ it was the case, Galiani declared, ‘that the just price and value of the metals has been fixed and firmly established by their very nature and by the disposition of human minds [disposizione degli animi umani].’53 Galiani declared with great confidence that he wanted to refute the Aristotelian conception of the value of money that derived money from a social contract of mankind.54 However influential this idea was among political thinkers who dealt with money, Galiani believed the Aristotelian view was both untrue and unrealistic in historical terms. How ridiculous are those who hold that the human race once came together to agree [convenuti ed aver acconsentito] on the use of metals, which themselves are useless, and thereby gave them a value. Where then were these congresses [congressi], those conventions of mankind [convenzioni di tutto il genere umano]? In which century, what place? Who were the delegates, through whom the Spanish, the Chinese, the Goths, and the Africans agreed on ideas which, for many centuries, even when peoples ignored each other’s existence, never changed? The barbarians who destroyed the

51 Ibid., 38. 52 Ibid., 36–7. On theories of value and the principles of money see the classic Karl Menger, ‘On the Origin of Money,’ Economic Journal, 2[6] (1892), 239–55. On Galiani’s theory of value from the point of view of the history of economic thought see Luigi Einaudi, ‘Galiani Economista,’ in Saggi bibliografici e storici intorno alle dottrine economiche (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1953), 269–305 and Filippo Cesarano, ‘Monetary Theory in Ferdinando Galiani’s Della moneta,’ History of Political Economy, 8[3] (1976), 380–99, as well as his ‘Law and Galiani on Money and Monetary Systems,’ History of Political Economy, 22[2] (1990), 321–40. 53 Galiani, Della moneta, 37. 54 Ibid., 38.

180 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money Empire and the Romans who defended it, who in every other case were sworn enemies and took opposite sides, only agreed that gold and silver were valued as wealth. Ah! It is necessary to say that when all people for many centuries share the same sentiment this is not the result of deliberations or congresses held at the foot of the Tower of Babel or right after leaving Noah’s Ark. Instead, it is due to the dispositions of the human mind and the inner constitution of things [le costituzioni intrinseche delle cose], which are always the same and have always been the same throughout history.55

To show that such ideas were simply untrue, Galiani had started Book I of Della moneta with a chapter describing the history of money; how it really emerged and how states in history attracted money – and lost it, often owing to backfiring political actions that were inspired by greed and thereby upset the conditions under which the trade of a society could flourish. Galiani used the historical studies he made for his project Dell’arte del governo and his intended work on the earliest forms of trade in the Mediterranean to show how the commercial structures of modernity had arisen and how modern cultural properties evolved out of antiquity.56 In chapter 2 of Book I Galiani made clear his more profound reasons for rejecting Aristotle’s idea of the origin of money. Aristotle’s denial that the value of money was natural opened the way to the principle that the value of money can be altered politically, by fiat. This had been argued by modern Scholastics such as Covarruvias.57 And he added: Given that this principle is true, such conclusions would be correct, but I do not wish any people to be able to demonstrate by experience how fatal and productive of grief such views can be.58

55 Ibid., 67–8. 56 See chapter 1. 57 Galiani, Della moneta, 37. ‘Demand has come to be conventionally represented by money; this is why money is called nomisma (customary currency), because it does not exist by nature but by custom (nomos), and can be altered and rendered useless at will’ (quoted from Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 19, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 285, Bk. V, ch. 6, §8. See also The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker, intro. R.F. Stalley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Bk. I, chapter 9, § 8–11, for a similar statement on the nature of money, which Galiani referred to as well (Galiani, Della moneta, 37). 58 Galiani, Della moneta, 38.

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The influence of Aristotle’s principle was more pervasive than commonly assumed. Even those who disagreed with the practice of political leaders in changing the value of money failed to correct the basic Aristotelian valuation of money. But these opinions cannot be contradicted without destroying their very basis. Hence I do not know, or even begin to understand, how it could be possible that such writers as John Locke, Davanzati, Broggia, Melon, and Montesquieu, among others, could have had contrary sentiments [contrari sentimenti] so firmly established on so false a foundation [un falso fondamento], without ever denying the first principle. They were not aware either of the weakness of the latter or the instability of the former.59

This failure was the direct target of Galiani’s argument. He suggested that the real cause why the true principles of the value of money were never revealed was that other political writers came to consider its nature from distorting ideological perspectives. It would be wrong to consider me responsible for revealing so great a truth, should anyone be inclined to do so. The responsibility belongs instead to the infinite number of writers who have either failed to understand this, or have not wished to demonstrate it.60

Unlike all other political writers before him, Galiani set out to construct an idea of money that accepted the factual history of the institution of money. Moreover, Galiani went a step further than that by using his findings in his historical studies on trade in the Mediterranean in antiquity in the construction of his political idea of commerce. Instead of imposing a political normativeness onto commerce by constructing a contract theory of money and just price, Galiani had discovered that there was a specific type of commercial morality, which already had its own rules,

59 Ibid., 38. For the definitions of money of these authors, see John Locke, Locke on Money, ed. Patrick Kelly, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 [1690 and 1695]), 410; see also 181, 233, 249, 265, 326, 412, 423; Bernardo Davanzati, ‘Lezione delle monete,’ in De Monetis Italiae, ed. F. Argelati and C. Casanova, vol. 4 (Milan, 1752[1588]), 162; Jean-François Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce, nouvelle edition ([Paris], 1736), 166; Broggia, Trattato dei tributi, 2: 176, and Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Part IV, Bk. 22, chapter 2; see also chapters 3 and 10. 60 Galiani, Della moneta, 38.

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that had always been particularly successful in history and had become central to modern societies. This insight about the morality of commerce influenced Galiani’s idea of the value of money as well as his view of economic development in Della moneta. Thus, Galiani complained, other writers failed to understand that everything ‘in the world has its natural value [il suo naturale valore] which derives from certain, general and constant principles.’ Such principles were not susceptible to human manipulation, whether by ‘caprice, law, the prince, or any thing else,’ so that ‘eventually, in esteeming things, people, as the scholastics say, passive se habent.’61 Value, he meant, was not embedded in objects. Rather, it was personal and relative to one’s valuation of other objects: ‘value is an idea of proportion between the possession of one thing and of another in a person’s perception [una idea di proporzione tra’l possesso d’una cosa e quello d’un’altra nel concetto d’un uomo].’62 Any idea of value expressed a notion of equality. To say that ‘ten bushels of grain are worth as much as a cask of wine’ meant that the person who said it was indifferent to possessing the one or the other, which constituted a basis for trade with someone else who had a different opinion. According to Galiani, value had two components, utility and scarcity.63 Although people needed air and water to survive, Galiani reasoned, people would not think of trading in them, since they were freely available for everyone. These goods had the highest utility, but were not scarce at all. Any object needed to have a certain exclusiveness in order to be valued commercially. But scarcity on its own also was insufficient for generating value. A little bag of sand from a Japanese beach was a very special, but not a marketable good, since it did not have any utility for anyone.64 Honesty and Utility Reconciled Utility was the more problematic concept of the two components of value. Explaining the nature of people’s utility judgements required

61 Ibid., 38. 62 Ibid., 39. This formulation is redolent of the terminology in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 63 Ibid., 39. 64 Ibid., 39, 46–7.

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Galiani to go into the concept of pleasure and to deny that he was an Epicurean.65 Here Galiani paraphrased his earlier lecture Dell’amor platonico. His slightly earlier ideas of love and Platonic love were the basis of the notion of utility in Della moneta. Through the idea of Platonic love he had described the transformation of beliefs that were shared with other members of society into new configurations and argued that this was the secret behind human happiness and the progress of mankind. However, in Della moneta Galiani did not explain this moral philosophy in detail. As a result, the claim in the book that utility judgements incorporated religious considerations that regulated man’s pleasure-seeking appeared like a thin disguise of the author’s fundamental moral scepticism. This reading was enhanced by the fact that Galiani continued his argument on utility by justifying pride in a neo-Hobbesian key. He developed his argument by exploring the order of man’s passions. ‘Our passions are not only the desires to eat, drink, sleep … Man is constituted in such a way that as soon as he has silenced one desire another pops up that motivates him with equal strength.’66 Echoing Hobbes, Galiani argued that man was ‘perpetually agitated [perpetuamente è tenuto in movimento].’ True pleasure-seeking was not naturally restricted to the satisfaction of physical needs: ‘it is false [falso] that the only useful things are those that serve the basic needs of our lives [a’ primi bisogni della vita si richieggono]. Nor is it possible to find the limits and confines of what we need and what we do not need, as it is true that as soon as, by obtaining it, we do not need a thing anymore, we already desire another one.’67 It was not possible, Galiani meant, to determine where the consumption levels that Vico and Doria believed were justified turned into luxury. Man’s utility judgements provided him with a yearning to ‘distinguish himself from others [distinguersi].’ This passion was so strong that man often valued its gratification more than ‘the security of life itself [la sicurezza della vita istessa].’68 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].’69 In contrast to Doria’s definition of amor proprio as man’s natural instinct for

65 66 67 68 69

See chapter 4. Galiani, Della moneta, 40. Ibid. Ibid., 41. Ibid.

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self-preservation that could turn into corrupt selfishness, Galiani identified amor proprio as an innocent product of human nature: ‘if the feeling of pleasure derived from the reverence and esteem in which others hold us [sentir piacere della stima e reverenza altrui] were to be ridiculed, this would constitute a reproach against our nature [biasimare la nostra natura], which created this disposition of mind [disposizione d’anima], not us ourselves.’70 The aim of amor proprio was to preserve one’s self-esteem through society, which even induced man to forget about more primitive needs than the ones involved in satisfying this desire. Amor proprio was something ‘we neither should nor can defend or explain to anyone.’ But what, Galiani asked rhetorically, could possibly be ‘more just [piú giusta] … than to acquire something of great utility, even with great privation and labour, as long as it produces a great many pleasures?’71 Thus, against Doria and Broggia, Galiani denied that amor proprio was a fatal propensity of human behaviour that corrupted societies. Instead, market societies thrived on it because it enabled people to improve their living standards through peaceful commercial interaction with each other. Galiani represented markets as products of human nature that were authorised by providence. He saw society, ‘the company of our equals [la compagnia de’ nostri simili],’ as ‘the greatest gift conferred upon us by the Deity in this life,’ and people’s market behaviour sustained it.72 According to Galiani, ‘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’ watched over it.73 The ‘laws of commerce [leggi di commercio]’ corresponded to the ‘laws of gravity [gravità]’ and what gravity was ‘in physics, the desire for gain or happiness [il desiderio di guadagnare] is in man … All the physical laws of bodies can be verified perfectly in the morality of our life [nel morale di nostra vita].’74 Galiani claimed there was a ‘moral gravity [una gravità morale]’ present in the societies that had emerged in modern times. The

70 71 72 73 74

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 134–5. Ibid., 79–80. Ibid., 55–6. For an analysis of Galiani’s Newtonianism that links his use of physical terms to Celestino’s Newtonian scholarship, see Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 235 in particular.

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‘equilibrium’ of our passions ‘conforms neatly with the proper abundance of both the comforts of life and worldly happiness [terrena felicità], although not from human prudence and virtue [dall’umana prudenza o virtú] 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.’75 Because of the internal mechanisms of this order, Galiani suggested, 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.76 Abundance, the wealth of the country, and the price level reflected each other’s development. According to Galiani, commercial societies were perfectly balanced orders that sustained themselves and regulated all of their aspects in these ways. The profits that were made by people as a result of these mechanisms could only be described as just. Galiani believed that markets regulated their own moral dynamic. He claimed that ‘wealth does not fall to a person except as payment for the just value of his work [giusto valore delle sue opere].’77 The functioning of markets rested on the fact that people had expectations about how their work would be valued by other people. People who had a good idea of their talents used them in order to maximise their utility: ‘men regard as meritorious [merito] only the use of the talents which one may have [quel che si ha]. Anything else will either not be virtuous or will not require any skills [o virtú non fosse o fatica e destrezza non richiedesse].’78 People’s striving for the best use of their talents had a moral content even in the context of the market. A

75 76 77 78

Galiani, Della moneta, 55. Ibid., 106–7. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 51.

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man using his talent as he knew best naturally fulfilled the idea that honesty was in a man’s best interest. It was not right, according to Galiani, to view ‘some professions as synonymous with virtue or wisdom [virtú e sapere] … Virtue or kindness may not be able to produce either true utility or true pleasure [né vera utilità né piacere] for the multitudes.’79 The providential order that regulated market societies was fully based on earthly matters and did not reward any attempts to impose ideas of virtue onto it that did not serve people’s true interests. Galiani meant that ideologies, such as Doria’s or Broggia’s, based on ideas of virtue that did not correspond to people’s true interests were misguided and not truly virtuous. They confuse our errors with the ordered arrangements of providence, and on the other hand (filled as they are with the idea of their own merit) they complain that whatever transpires … is unjust and totally disordered [ingiustizia e tutto disordine]. In order to mask their own impiety they have invented words like chance, fate, and destiny [della sorte, del fato e del destino]. I, on the contrary, am thankful to God whenever I consider the order in which everything is constituted for our benefit. I see nothing but justice and equality [giustizia ed egualità] whenever I return to His works.80

Thus, the principles of value and price were ‘certain, invariant, universal, and based on the order and nature of earthly matters [sull’ordine e la natura delle cose terrene]. Nothing among us is arbitrary and accidental; all is necessary order and harmony [armonia e necessità]. Values vary from one thing to another, but not capriciously. Their very variation is orderly, with exact and immutable rules.’81 Therefore, Galiani concluded, the ulterior mechanisms of man’s utility-seeking ‘contain within them the ideas of justice and stability [giustizia e stabilità].’82 In this way Galiani’s theory of value and his idea of money served to define natural economic development. People’s utility judgements and their pride boosted both the supply of and demand for goods through

79 80 81 82

Ibid., 50. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 51, italics added.

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the application of people’s talents to economic competition. This sparked an improvement of the arts that accelerated economic growth.83 Money without Virtue In the last chapter of Book I, Galiani started to derive political consequences from his argument about the value of money, which he continued in Book II. Money emerged as a result of a transformation process that turned people’s shared beliefs into configurations that made them predisposed to act as commercial beings. Thus, he asserted that people did not deliberately create money. Yet, after it emerged, they imagined that they had invented it themselves: I believe strongly that none of the remarkable and most useful institutions [istituzioni grandemente utili e meravigliose] of civil life [vita civile] are due simply to human wisdom. Instead, they are all absolute pure gifts of an amiable and beneficient Providence [d’una Provvidenza amica e benefattrice] … They are sustained by nature itself [dalla natura istessa] in order to give them an orderly movement [il moto ordinato]. Man can neither perceive an institution at its start, nor arrest its growth [non può l’uomo né del principio avvedersi, né il loro crescere arrestare]. Neither can he undo it once it is established … True, as men see the good ordering [bell’ordine] of things accomplished, they credit themselves with having wished to institute such things and, so to speak, to perfect them.84

Such attempts at perfection based on misguided views of the nature of money conflicted with political strategies that recognised that money originated from people’s natural value judgements. Galiani insisted that gold and silver ‘are used as money because they are valuable, they are not valuable because they are used as money.’85 This seemed a trivial

83 See N. Giocoli, ‘La teoria del valore di Ferdinando Galiani: un’interpretazione unitaria,’ Storia del pensiero economico, 38 (1999), 72–86, for the suggestion that we can see in Galiani’s theory of value itself a supply-demand scheme, in which valuation processes revolved around people’s subjective utility judgements. Beliefs about their utility ultimately determined people’s decisions concerning the allocation of their labour. See also Augusto Graziani, Storia critica della teoria del valore in Italia (Milan: Hoepli, 1889), for a much earlier recognition of the nature of the relation between the elements of Galiani’s theory of value. 84 Galiani, Della moneta, 66. 85 Ibid., 58–9.

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statement, but it represented his main objection to the persistence of ‘Aristotelian’ views about the value of money in political economy; once these views were eliminated it would be much more difficult to develop misguided economic reform proposals. The purpose of this argument in Della moneta was to bring out the error of political writers and moral philosophers who believed that the moral basis of commerce required some sort of political monitoring. Galiani realised that this could be argued if one adopted the concept that money emerged as an agreement among people by which they turned gold and silver into money for one or more specific moral reasons. Consequently, these imagined reasons would constitute political maxims; legitimate political action had to be based on a recognition of the moral conditions that were implicit in the initial agreement on money. According to Galiani, any such consensual views of money created a basis for political disasters. Doria’s idea of money was an example of such a view. He saw money as an agreement between people to enhance the efficiency of real need satisfaction. As long as money served the satisfaction of true needs, commerce was ‘real [reale].’ Once money was used to satisfy false desires, Doria judged that it became false, at which stage politics had to restrict it. For Galiani, such arguments imposed onto commerce a ‘barbaric’ virtue that was no longer existent in modern society; political interventions based on such views violated providence and were therefore self-defeating. Since we have been able to advance, without suffering, by means of these otherwise useless bodies, from a primitive life in which we literally devoured each other to a civilised state [alla civile] in which we live peacefully, and trade with each other [in cui in pace ed in commercio viviamo], we need not return, in the name of wisdom, to the barbarism from which we have, by the grace of God, been happily delivered. The community of man can only improve its ideas within certain limits. Attempts made to exceed these limits will destroy and corrupt the order of things [l’ordine delle cose si guasta e si corrompe].86

Galiani saw ancient scholars as the predecessors of Christian philosophers who opposed the abuse of commerce and imagined that money

86 Ibid., 46.

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had to be regulated politically for moral reasons. Horace famously recommended throwing ‘the stones and precious metals and also that useless gold, creator of major evil’ into the sea.87 In his Politics Aristotle had already criticised the false moralism of the myth of King Midas. Galiani alluded to this myth and judged that the only thing which could have saved Midas was having lived in the ‘state of commerce [nello stato di commercio].’ Through commerce Midas would have enjoyed ‘the love of mankind [l’amore degli uomini]’ which was the only ‘wealth [quella ricchezza]’ that could have satisfied his miserable soul.88 Virgil, too, had portrayed money as the root of all evil, which, rephrased in the modern discourse of luxury, became both a moral and a political argument against modern commerce such as Fénelon had put forward. In the light of Galiani’s perspective on the true nature of money and its emergence, such ideas appeared unsustainable, and it would be dangerous to use them as political principles. However, Galiani’s real opponents were two groups of writers who developed arguments about commercial politics different from these outright anti-modern ones. Around 1750 a number of authors from across Italy (Pompeo Neri, Gianrinaldo Carli, Girolamo Costantini, and Giovanni Francesco Pagnini) proposed approaches to monetary politics as part of economic reform strategies for the revival of Italy’s commerce after the big succession crises of the first half of the century.89 These authors rejected luxury and tried to separate their notions of commerce from what they considered the morally negative aspects of modern market societies. In all this they considered themselves to be drawing on Locke’s writings on money and adopted his general outlook on commerce. This was not uncommon at the time. Across Europe, Locke’s idea of money, which he put forward in chapter 5, entitled ‘Of Property,’ of his Two Treatises of Government (1690) and in two long letters published in the context of the English recoinage debate of the 1690s, was very influential.90 In 1751 an Italian translation

87 Ibid., 45–6. 88 Ibid., 227. 89 For these authors see chapter 1. For an impression of the contexts of their monetary reform policies, see Carlo Capra, ‘Riforme finanziarie e mutamento istituzionale nello Stato di Milano: gli anni sessanta del secolo XVIII,’ Rivista Storica Italiana (1979), 313–68. 90 Locke, Locke on Money.

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of Locke’s works was published in Florence.91 In fact, Galiani himself had been working on such a translation in 1746, but abandoned the project when he realised his views differed from Locke’s.92 In contrast to Galiani, almost all contemporary Italian authors who wrote about monetary politics approved of Locke’s ideas. On Locke’s authority they inserted moral principles into their political reasoning through their ideas of money. Simultaneously, these authors rejected the political ideas of Jean-François Melon as advocating the abuse of commerce. Galiani rejected this moralistic identification of Locke with good political economy. So did his teacher, and follower of Melon, Bartolomeo Intieri, who declared that reading Costantini’s ideas turned his stomach. He regarded Costantini, Carli, and Neri as forming ‘a school of barbaric men more ignorant than the night and more petulant, arrogant, and disparaging than ignorance itself.’93 In Della moneta Galiani opposed their views because he disagreed with their political positions on modern commerce. He did so through his theory of the natural value of money, which was directly consequential in political arguments and was ideally suited for contradicting these authors. Thus, the fact that Galiani listed John Locke among the ‘Aristotelian’ theorists of money has to be seen in the light of his opposition to the reform proposals of his Italian contemporaries. The main reason why Galiani identified Locke’s idea of money as ‘Aristotelian’ in Della moneta lay in the moral philosophy behind the argument of the chapter ‘Of Property.’ In this chapter, Locke introduced money as the product of an agreement that paved the way for economic growth, but this agreement went along with assumptions about man’s moral being that Galiani rejected. Locke’s monetary views were in a complicated way related to his philosophy of the law of nature. According to Locke, the earth had been given to mankind in common. Before they created money, people were unable to acquire more goods than they could use. Thus, the condition of common ownership under which God had placed mankind was monitored by the nature of creation. This changed when people among themselves consented

91 John Locke, Ragionamenti sopra la moneta, l’interesse del danaro, le finanze e il commercio. Tradotti la prima volta dall’inglese con varie annotazioni e con un discorso sopra il giusto pregio delle cose e della moneta e il commercio dei romani, ed. and intro. Giovanni Francesco Pagnini and Angelo Tavanti (Florence, 1751). 92 Galiani, Della moneta, 307 (endnote II of the second edition of 1780). 93 Venturi, ‘Il dibattito sulle monete,’ in Settecento riformatore, 516.

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‘tacitly and voluntarily’ to ‘the use of Money.’94 Gold and silver, previously virtually useless, came to represent goods and enabled the more industrious to become wealthier than the slothful or less talented. Locke, famously, was highly ambivalent about the consequences of the creation of money. Money unleashed man’s natural ‘desire of having more than’ he needed and it created luxury, which Locke loathed and regarded as utterly destructive to society.95 On the other hand, Locke believed that God intended mankind to cultivate the earth and live in ever more comfortable ways.96 For Locke, economic development was justifiable as the product of both the way in which God created man and the way in which man developed himself within the boundaries of the law of nature. But this was not by itself the reason why Galiani distanced himself from Locke. From the perspective on the law of nature that Locke set up in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, it transpires that man’s task on earth is to develop the best possible understanding of God’s law of nature and to live in accordance with it. In that respect, for Locke, money and government were the vehicles by which mankind shaped the conditions within which each man should dedicate himself to obeying God’s law of nature. Accordingly, all of man’s pleasure-seeking was to be considered from this angle. In contrast, for Galiani the emergence of money and the moral properties of man’s value judgements were not in any way instrumental in the realisation of a moral objective. Instead, commerce had its own morality that already brought out precisely the way in which God had intended humankind to operate; there was no higher goal. Another difference was that whereas Locke’s social philosophy has been described as ‘applied theology,’ Galiani’s view of commercial sociability was profoundly sceptical about the relation between man’s moral beliefs and their epistemic content.97 Therefore,

94 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 302 (§50). 95 John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), the short essay entitled ‘Labour,’ 326–8. 96 István 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, ed. István Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 39–40. 97 John Dunn, ‘From Applied Theology to Social Analysis: The Break between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment,’ in Wealth and Virtue, ed. Hont and Ignatieff, 119–36; István Hont, ‘Commercial Society and Political Theory in the Eighteenth

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it could not even be the case that people agreed on any institution in order to bring humankind closer to its true goal. But ultimately it was not the notion of agreement by itself that made Galiani reject Locke’s idea of money; it was the fact that the moral principles behind Locke’s interpretation of economic growth relegated it to a function of moral self-determination. Locke’s ideas about justice in relation to monetary politics differed from Galiani’s for similar reasons. In the chapter ‘Of Property,’ Locke insisted that money was ‘made practicable out of the bounds of Societie and without compact.’98 Thus, governments did not have jurisdiction in this field; it was a pure matter of pre-governmental, or extra-governmental, mutual trust. Only extreme necessity could justify meddling with monetary standards or otherwise intervening in the economy by altering money.99 Accordingly, in his letters on monetary politics written in the 1690s, Locke was adamant that debts had to be satisfied according to the standard and that devaluation policies, by changing the standard of the nominal value of money, destroyed public faith.100 People had consented to the creation of money and to the creation of government as institutions that shaped the environment within which man determined his own moral personality and his actions. It was inappropriate for governments to extend their mandate themselves beyond that which was given to them. In fact, in the worst case this could even cause a return to the state of nature.101 Galiani did not disagree with Locke that only in cases of necessity should governments intervene with the functioning of money. But he conceptualised political justice in a very different way from Locke. The basis for his idea of political economy was his belief that it was impossible

98 99

100 101

Century: The problem of Authority in David Hume and Adam Smith,’ in Main Trends in Cultural History, ed. W. Melching and W. Velema (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 54–8. This did not mean that Galiani was a moral sceptic, as I argued in chapter 4 in my account of his lectures Dell’amore and Dell’amor platonico. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 302 (§50), italics added. Locke argued that the nominal value of money had been ‘settled by public authority’ then ‘grown into common use’ and ‘should not be alter’d but on absolute necessity if any such there can be’ (Locke on Money, 375). See also Locke, Political Essays, 339–43, the short essay entitled ‘Venditio,’ for Locke’s perspective on markets and morality. Locke, Locke on Money, 417, 419. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), chapters 10–13, analyses Locke’s theory of the state and his ideas on legitimate political action and resistance.

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to improve the mechanisms of the self-regulating order of human passions and beliefs. The task of politics was to align itself with man’s utilityseeking. This was exactly what Galiani in the few pages of the manuscript that bears the title Dell’arte del governo recommended: ‘good government should sustain and promote the strongest and most universal pleasures [il buon governo dee conservar e promuovere i piaceri piú forti, e piú universali].’102 The key for successful political economy was simply to abstain from imposing any moral constraints onto man’s natural utility-seeking or artificially to direct people’s efforts to certain political targets. However, in the case of necessity, which Galiani interpreted – much more broadly than Locke – as including the possibility of increasing the wealth of the state, or (which came down to the same thing) increasing its population, governments had to act. In such cases, justice was a mere political economic calculation that had no moral dimension other than that the good of the people was identical with the outcome of the calculation. Moreover, justice itself was an inadequate concept in some parts of political economy. Galiani held that, with regard to the payment of debts, ‘most writers’ believed that ‘restitution of the same weight is in conformity with natural justice [alla naturale giustizia],’ whereas in fact ‘time renders the just unjust and transforms justice into injustice.’103 Similarly, under circumstances in which a devaluation was necessary, everyone would accept it as justice.104 And when governments raised taxes these were only ‘just [giusto]’ if they led to greater ‘tranquillity’ and gave ‘sustenance’ to those who governed the people well. ‘Tyranny [la tirannia],’ the opposite of justice, Galiani defined as ‘poor rules by means of which riches are acquired by those who are either of no use to others or even harmful to them.’ It was a ‘law of nature [legge di natura],’ Galiani claimed, ‘that wealth must be obtained only by one who brings utility or pleasure to others [solo di chi arreca utile o piacere altrui].’105 The Reform of Naples Another group of people whom Galiani wanted to refute through his idea of money were the Neapolitan jurists who were internal critics of

102 103 104 105

Galiani, Della moneta, 391. Ibid., 300. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 159; see also 201, where Galiani repeats his definition of tyranny.

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the government’s economic policies. Galiani agreed with virtually all Neapolitan economists, including people like Doria, that agricultural development was the key to wealth. Furthermore, everyone had some idea that by producing higher-order agricultural goods, encouraging some manufacturing industry, and developing its foreign trade, Naples might be able to escape from its underdevelopment. Yet, Galiani had different ideas from most about the principles that governed economic growth, the political means for triggering it, and the appropriate limits of commercial development. Della moneta contained a view of the natural order of commercial development. This view ran parallel to his theory of value. When Galiani explained this view and described how gold and silver acquired their popular esteem and became money, he listed the objects of man’s value judgements in hierarchical form. People first needed to ‘eat, drink, and sleep,’ after which they became equally, ‘and with the same justification,’ interested in higher-order objects, among which were luxury goods.106 According to Galiani, this process had no natural limits, and man would be ‘perpetually agitated’ by his desires, which he tried to satisfy by employing his talents and exercising his commercial skills and morality. Galiani believed that just as it was easy to see that people could not be interested in gold and silver if they were starving, it was abundantly clear that luxury could only be a spur to industriousness once an economy had reached a certain degree of maturity and was itself also an effect of commercial development: ‘luxury cannot be born until the necessary arts [le arti necessarie] are sufficiently developed.’107 This was why Galiani felt that Melon had overstated his argument about luxury. As he wrote: ‘it is not proper to applaud luxury and laud it as the origin of every good [origine d’ogni bene], as Melon has. It is an effect and not a cause of good government.’108 According to Galiani, Melon made it seem not only that luxury could be a political tool, but also that luxury without economic development could produce positive effects. Such views were at odds with the natural order of a country’s commercial development. They gave rise to the idea that foreign trade could be set up centrally, independently of a country’s state of development, and that political means were suited to boost the balance of trade. This was exactly the idea Galiani wanted to refute in Della moneta.

106 Ibid., 40–2. 107 Ibid., 242. 108 Ibid.

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Throughout Della moneta Galiani took issue with internal critics of the government who recommended reforms directly aimed at boosting Neapolitan foreign trade. There had been plans, for example, for a national trade company designed on the model of the ones that had been set up by Europe’s dominant states. Galiani scorned such proposals, which he believed to be based on naïve views about the nature of commerce. Moreover, these proposals did not help the government keep a clear view of the path of progress. Since we do not have enough trade to sustain them there are no trading companies among us. To many who envy the present state of the maritime powers, this lack of trade is foolishly attributed to a defect among us. But this commerce, as they understand it, is not the beginning of the greatness of those states … Their power comes from nothing else than the source from which the Romans drew power, that is, from conquests and from the servitude of others. This is the trade of the English, Dutch, and French companies. Great conquests bring with them a good deal of land, abundant income, and a large number of slaves. And because these are so far removed from our present situation we keep shouting ‘Trade! Trade!’109

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.’110 He added, speaking about the jurist reformers, that ‘this is a class of men that becomes more and more pernicious to our state.’111 Seemingly like Doria, who distinguished between ‘real commerce [il commercio reale],’ directed towards need satisfaction, and false selfdeceptive modern commerce, Galiani held that the dominant states of Europe were in conflict with the providential mechanisms of commerce. In sharp contrast with Doria, Galiani believed, however, that luxury was not morally corrupt or self-deceptive as long as it was the effect of natural commercial development. Yet, he did see wealth that derived from conquest as the effect of bad politics. It was the worst possible idea for Naples to try to emulate Europe’s dominant states, Galiani realised. The

109 Ibid., 281. 110 Ibid., 136. 111 Ibid.

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wealth of these states was not justified by actual commercial development and was therefore unstable. Moreover, Naples was simply too weak militarily to manage to derive wealth from any form of territorial politics. Many of Galiani’s Neapolitan contemporaries, however, were blinded by the political fashions of the time. While they demanded reforms that were aimed at boosting Neapolitan trade, Galiani believed there was sufficient reason to be sceptical about the use of large-scale reform programs. Referring to the times of Montealegre’s reform government, which ended in 1746 with the fall of Montealegre himself, he concluded that ‘nothing is to be hoped for from inferior, albeit virtuous, ministers. They are too distracted by fear and by the desire for their own self-aggrandisement. Great enterprises rarely succeed unless they are directed by one who is above envy and malice. Whenever these enterprises fail, they are fatal to the honoured minister who promoted and directed them.’112 As Galiani believed that trade should be a natural effect from a country having realised a trade potential, this first required agriculture, ‘the mother of trade.’ The reformers who screamed for trade did not see this and ‘scorned’ agriculture. This was ‘generally wrong’ and ‘disastrous.’113 Galiani insisted that trade was only a derivative of agriculture: ‘without agriculture … trade is a spectre, a vanishing shadow.’114 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: ‘he who will note that the growth of a state results from the sale of its native goods will value agriculture, not trade. And if he will then note how much of the goods native to the soil of Holland are consumed there, he will find that agriculture is the mother of wealth. 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 matter.’115 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

112 113 114 115

Ibid., 128. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 282. Ibid.

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discovering in the Mediterranean some area full of whales, some streams of herrings, or some codfish beds.’116 Yet it was agriculture that should be the country’s real natural strength. Pursuing the issue why this was not the case, Galiani found, as had Intieri earlier, that the problem did not require large-scale reform projects. To unleash the potential increase in agricultural productivity, it was necessary to change only a small part of the tax system and keep on believing in the future of the Kingdom. Although commerce and agriculture may be linked together in such a manner that each is an effect together with a cause of the other, agriculture … is always found prior to trade. For, flourishing trade arises out of an abundance of superfluous goods. And this comes from agriculture, which is, in turn, made by population. Population arises from liberty, and liberty, finally, arises from just government. We already have the last two and, in part, even our population has grown. Why, then, do we not have a greater cultivation? This is because of our excises, which though not excessive, weigh too heavily on the provinces compared with the capital. This is an old effect, albeit one which grows less onerous each day. And the present government cannot be blamed if it is not eliminated entirely. Indeed, it is remarkable that in just sixteen years such a great and rapid change has come about. It would be an incredible and miraculous thing if this were not understood to be caused by a virtuous prince.117

By arguing in this way, Galiani attempted to discipline the Neapolitan reform debate. 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

116 Ibid. 117 Ibid., 282–3.

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of European states were still replete with such errors.118 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 it was far from perfect. He believed the English laws neglected agricultural development and 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.119 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 of Naples was that, by developing its economy in accordance with the laws of commerce, Naples could protect its freedom in modern Europe through trade. The appearance of luxury as well as price rises were natural effects of this process. The key to bringing about economic development was not to reform the political structures and capital distribution of the country directly: instead, this objective would be reached to a large extent as a result of economic regeneration that was due simply to good economic policies and a profound acceptance of the virtues of commerce.120 Devaluation One of the most vigorously debated issues across Europe during the 1740s was the question whether devaluation policies were suitable political tools to boost economic development and get rid of states’ public debts. This debate was the reason why Galiani’s Italian contemporaries distinguished between Melon’s and Locke’s ideas of commerce and its politics, since these two writers had, in different contexts, formulated the most famous pro- and anti-devaluation positions. Also because opponents of devaluations saw them as morally unjustifiable manipulations of the economy, they became the most controversial types of economic

118 Ibid., 12. 119 Ibid., 248. 120 Galiani, Della moneta, 243, argued in the section on luxury that, as an automatic effect of economic development, the old aristocracy would be replaced by a new bourgeois elite that was beneficial for the state.

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reforms. Therefore an account of the devaluation debate was naturally part of Della moneta, which was, after all, a defence of the line taken on reform by the Neapolitan government since independence in 1734, especially in more recent years. In particular, such an account served to support Galiani’s own perspective of the relation between his theory of value, his idea of commercial development, and his politics, and to distinguish his views from those of his Neapolitan contemporaries. Galiani declared in the second edition of 1780 that Della moneta responded to confusions about monetary politics that arose when ‘voices’ (which belonged to jurist reformers and people like Broggia) offered wild explanations of the state of the monetary system and thereby created a ‘threat’ to the government’s authority by proposing bad reforms.121 In 1747, just before Galiani started writing Della moneta, such confusion broke out when it was discovered that the silver coins that were issued in 1735 and 1739 were underweight according to the official standard of 1689. Although the money in circulation functioned perfectly well, the Royal Mint as well as the Deputazione delle monete decided that a general recoinage back to the old standard was desirable, claiming that otherwise subjects would be harmed and an injustice in the tax system would arise. Four days after the report by the Deputazione the King replied, ignoring the advice, and ordering more money of the same quality and weight as that in circulation to be coined, thereby making the accidental devaluation (alzamento) of the 1730s official.122 The protest by the Deputazione was supported by a pamphlet, dressed up as a scholarly treatise, written by Trojano Spinelli, entitled Riflessioni politiche sopra alcuni punti della scienza della moneta (n.d., probably 1748). Spinelli declared himself dogmatically in opposition to any changes of the official standard. In Della moneta Spinelli was listed alongside Broggia as a Neapolitan author who in some way contributed to the science of money. In fact, Galiani’s views differed enormously from those of Spinelli, who did not do much more than quote many natural jurisprudence thinkers on the subjects of money and justice in order to suggest that any devaluation was in principle unjust and an abuse of political

121 See chapter 1. 122 See Galiani, Della moneta, 126 and 324–5 (endnote XIV of the second edition of 1780). See also Lodovico Bianchini, Della storia delle finanze del regno di Napoli (Naples: Stamperia Reale, 1859 [1835]), and Venturi, ‘Il dibattito sulle monete,’ 487–90.

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power. Broggia felt that Spinelli had reproduced a simplified version of the argument he had published in 1743.123 In contrast to Spinelli and the position of the Deputazione delle monete, Galiani thought the government’s decision to change the standard was not a devaluation policy but simply a wise judgement of economic efficacy. The 1730s coins functioned well, prices had long been modified in accordance with the tacit devaluation, and as the price of silver rose steadily the stability of the monetary system had not been, and would not be, threatened by illegal money-makers.124 The effects of devaluation policies on the balance of trade of states had been a controversial topic of discussion in Naples, as elsewhere in Europe, for centuries.125 These effects were still the focus of discussion towards the end of the seventeenth century in Naples in relation to the problem of the economic underdevelopment of the state and the problems of the money supply.126 Galiani was well aware of the entire seventeenth-century history of Neapolitan monetary politics,127 but was equally

123 Franco Venturi, ‘Tre note su Carlantonio Broggia,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 80[4] (1986), 830–53; Diomede Ivone, La politica monetaria a Napoli nel Settecento borbonico. La disputa dottrinaria tra Trojano Spinelli e Carlo Antonio Broggia in un documento ‘americano’ (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2001). See the entries for both authors in Lilia Costabile and Rosario Patalano, ed., Repertorio Bio-bibliografico degli scrittori di economia in Campania. Parte Prima (1594–1861) (Naples: La città del sole, 2000). 124 Galiani, Della moneta, 324–5 (endnote XIV of the second edition of 1780). 125 One of its most famous episodes was the Bodin-Malestroit controversy. See Jean Bodin, La Réponse de Jean Bodin à M. De Malestroit (Paris: Colin, 1932 [1568]), and Jean de Malestroit, Paradoxes inédits du seigneur de Malestroit touchant les monnayes avec la response du president de la Tourette, ed. L. Einaudi (Turin: Einaudi, 1937 [1566]). 126 Luigi de Rosa, ‘Alle origini della questione meridionale: problema e dibattito monetario al tramonto del viceregno spagnuolo di napoli (1690–1706),’ in Studi storici in onore di Gabriele Pepe, ed. G. Musca (Bari: Laterza, 1969), 581–603. 127 A manuscript in the BSNSP reveals that Galiani planned, I believe in the early 1750s, to publish a set of seventeenth-century Neapolitan works on monetary politics. Galiani started writing an introduction of the work, which was to include texts by authors such as Antonio Serra and Giovanni Turbolo, starting with the phrase that ‘nothing consoles human minds as much as to be reminded of calamities of the past’ and then summing up the difficult conditions of seventeenth-century Neapolitan commercial politics. (See BSNSP, xxxi.c.8, ff. 129r–136v. The piece has a second page numbering, going from I to VIII, and is curiously bound in upside down with the rest of the manuscript volume. The quote above is on f. 136v.) See also the endnote in the second edition of Galiani’s Della moneta, 337–41. For Neapolitan seventeenth-century works on money, see Rafaelle Colapietra, Problemi monetari negli scrittori napoletani del seicento (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1973); G. Coniglio, Il viceregno di Napoli nel

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sensitive to the way in which Law and Melon had shifted its role to the centre of political thought, where money became a moral issue. Here, most Italian writers criticised Melon by means of Locke, whose works on money were written in the late seventeenth century. Citing Locke as their authority, authors like Neri and Costantini concluded that devaluation policies were unjust and failed to have a real effect on the problems they were supposed to resolve. This, too, had been the conclusion in Naples already in the late seventeenth century among intellectuals who discussed the issue.128 However, Melon’s discussion of monetary policies in chapters 12 to 20 of his Essai politique sur le commerce had added a new dimension to the existing debate and turned devaluation policies into one of the most hotly contested economic reform issues during the late 1730s and 1740s, in France as well as the rest of Europe. Book III of Della moneta, the middle section of which followed Galiani’s more general treatment of the value and the utility of money, was devoted to a reconsideration of the nature and the effects of devaluation policies. Galiani’s Italian contemporaries considered this to be the most contentious part of the book. Here, Pompeo Neri and Girolamo Costantini understood Galiani to be in agreement with Melon and thereby in opposition to the mainstream of Italian economic thought.129 Melon had argued that the government of a state that was facing a great public debt (such as France at the time) might consider having recourse to devaluationist measures in order directly to relieve its debt and to provide the economy with a boost that was generated through the redistributive effects of debt cancellation caused by a change of the nominal value of money. Melon’s project in his book was the outcome of a reconsideration of the options for reform in the aftermath of the crisis following the collapse of John Law’s Mississippi scheme. Melon developed an idea of economic development in which productivity growth that was accompanied by the emergence of luxury was central. This was

secolo XVII. Nuove notizie sulla vita commerciale e finanziaria tratte dagli archivi napoletani (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1955); Giuseppe Galasso, Contributo alla storia delle finanze del Regno di Napoli nella prima meta del Seicento, estratto da Annuario dell'Istituto storico italiano per l'eta moderna e contemporanea, vol. 11, 1959 (Rome: s.n., 1961). 128 De Rosa, ‘Alle origini della questione meridionale,’ 585, for Francesco d’Andrea’s views on the issue. 129 See chapter 1.

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the idea that had been enthusiastically acclaimed by Intieri and Celestino Galiani, and Della moneta echoed Melon’s vision in many ways, even if Galiani believed Melon had sometimes overstated his case. Melon’s Essai politique was criticised first by Dutot, in his Réflexions politiques sur les finances et le commerce (1738), and then by Joseph PârisDuverney’s Examen du livre intitulé Réflexions politiques sur les finances et le commerce (1740). Both authors opposed devaluations as unjust and damaging to the economy and the state. Dutot suggested sumptuary laws as an alternative to Melon’s proposals. His idea went against the grain of the core of Melon’s as well as Galiani’s outlook on economic development, because people’s market interaction thrived on luxury. Sumptuary laws restricted those passions that were ultimately responsible for the acceleration of economic productivity. Pâris-Duverney, in turn, criticised Dutot. He believed Dutot’s attack on Melon was a pretext for a general refutation of the French ‘ancienne Finance’ system and a defence of Law’s project. Dutot’s views, he argued, could not be reconciled with a critique of Melon. The French debate between Melon, Dutot, and Pâris-Duverney was very well known in Italy among the writers who published their books on money at the same time as Galiani. With the exception of Galiani, all of them rejected devaluation as a political instrument and instead represented Locke as the standard-bearer of good fiscalism. Galiani’s ideas about the nature of commerce differed enormously from theirs. With regard to the subject of devaluation policies, Galiani refused to share in their general rejection of Melon’s views. From Galiani’s standpoint, his contemporaries confused potilical economy and moral argument. Galiani did not completely agree with Melon’s conclusions about the effects of devaluationist policies either. In Book III of Della moneta he set out to reconsider in detail the arguments that various authors had put forward on the subject in the past decades. From the perspective of his idea of money and the laws of commerce, Galiani considered devaluations ‘an affront committed upon nature which is rendered necessary by state calamities [una violenza fatta alla natura, renduta dalle calamità dello Stato necessaria].’130 Essentially, they were consciously calculated political violations of providence. Nevertheless, Galiani believed, in some cases such policies might prevent greater evils: ‘one will see that in certain circumstances, in certain times and

130 Galiani, Della moneta, 299.

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places … the utility [l’utilità] of a devaluation exceeds the damage [i danni].’131 But in order to form an adequate judgement of when this was the case, it was crucial to apply his theory of value to the effects of devaluations. Galiani did so by ordering them under the four rubrics of true and false advantages and disadvantages. Devaluations were usually brought about by an ‘augmentation’ (hence alzamento) of the nominal value of money by fiat. This was ‘nothing but a change of the old idea of the sound of words, which has the effect that one calls, for example, a ducato no longer’ a certain amount of silver, but less.132 Galiani explained that an ‘augmentation’ changed the nominal relation between ‘ideal [ideale]’ and ‘real [reale]’ money. The first was the official price of money, ‘a common measure for knowing the price of every thing,’133 set by princely decree. This extrinsic measure determined the connections of ideas that people made with regard to their economic actions, and had to be just above the intrinsic value of the coins, which were ‘real’ money.134 People valued things in ideal money, whereas exchanges were made in real money. Devaluations were possible because in the minds of people these two concepts were confused. They committed ‘errors [errori]’ that arose ‘from the fact that people tend to take relative things in an absolute sense.’135 Devaluations were political tricks that governments played on the connections people made between goods and ideas. The raising of money is a profit that the prince and the state take from the delay with which people change their connections of ideas between the prices of goods and of money … It does not produce any mutations of things, but of expressions [voci]: hence the prices of goods, in order to remain the same, have to change in proportion to the expressions.136

Thus, the more a government performed this trick, the more people would expect it and be quicker to adjust their ideas, which minimised the effects. Further, repeated devaluations disturbed the connections

131 132 133 134 135 136

Ibid., 187. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 69, 138. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 188.

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that people made between prices and goods, which upset the whole national economy.137 Devaluations had no real direct economic effects. Echoing Locke, Galiani compared the deceit to a measure of length that the prince might change by decree so that his soldiers would wake up one day much taller than when they went to bed.138 Similarly, if the prince were to decide to confer on many people a title of nobility, the period of democratised glory would only last for a short time.139 Galiani also referred to Locke when he discussed the false belief in the utility of devaluation; that would be like throwing money in a pot and believing that it would grow if you boiled it.140 Galiani emphasised that devaluations did not directly increase or decrease the wealth of the ruler, or that of the people.141 Besides, in modern times princes were no longer ‘wolves [lupi]’ to their subjects, but relied on their industry.142 The only way in which the prince could gain or lose was through their utility-satisfaction, since his utility was the utility of the people.143 Devaluations also had no effect on the country’s exchange rate, and so would not have a negative impact on the balance of trade. This had been Dutot’s central economic argument, which Galiani rejected. In fact, ‘the only real effect’ of a devaluation was ‘the liberation of those who owed an amount of money from a part of their real debts.’144 The proper use of a devaluation resided in its potential for altering income distributions among social classes by means of which the wealth of the nation could be increased, so attracting new people to it. In maximising the population of a state through wise economic policies, the ruler confirmed nature.145 If a devaluation caused money to become more productive because capital ended up in the hands of the industrious, this would be an effect to take into account if a devaluation might be necessary.

137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145

Ibid., 189. Cf. Locke, Locke on Money, 417. Galiani, Della moneta, 188. Ibid., 191. Ibid., 190. Ibid., 193. Ibid., 194–5. Ibid., 196–7, 183, 206. Ibid., 199.

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Galiani rejected the abbé de Saint-Pierre’s objection that devaluations hurt the poor and orphans of the state. His response was that the ‘real poor and orphans of the state were the industrious farmer, the artisan, the seamen and merchants.’146 They were the people who profited from a devaluation, unlike the slothful aristocrats.147 As a result, devaluations helped to avoid the danger of concentration of wealth in a state and encouraged economic growth.148 The poor people that Saint-Pierre had in mind, Galiani argued, would only be affected negatively by a devaluation in times of prosperity when they had some money. Melon had argued against the tide of popular opinion that an important benefit of devaluations was that they relieved the burden on farmers.149 Galiani argued, however, that Melon had mistaken them for debtors of money, instead of debtors of labour. So they were, in fact, victims of a devaluation. On the other hand, Galiani continued, farmers were the last to be affected by the spread of the price adjustments that people made throughout the economy, starting with civil servants (whose wages were paid by the king), and accordingly a devaluation affected them least.150 The idea of the spread of the adjustment process also constituted a criterion for judging whether to devalue or not. After devaluing a currency, the ruler would be confronted with a decrease of his income from taxes.151 The prince had to be reasonably certain that the hard times would be over by the time the effect turned against him, or take immediate action by raising taxes.152 Galiani rejected the idea that, with regard to the prince’s debts or his short-term financial needs, a devaluation was unjust because the prince simply allowed himself to pay in augmented money. Galiani declared that public utility determined whether an act of government was just or unjust. Determining the just price by natural law for the satisfaction of

146 Ibid., 210–11; see also 306–7 (endnote I in the second edition of 1780). Galiani rejected Saint-Pierre’s political vision of a Perpetual Peace and agreed with Fleury’s judgement that Saint-Pierre’s ideas were the ‘rêveries d’un homme de bien.’ 147 Ibid., 211. 148 Ibid., 212. 149 Ibid., 196. 150 Ibid., 206–7. Galiani explained the economic mechanisms by way of the image of throwing a rock in the water. By the time the impact of the initial shock reaches the farmers on the outskirts of the whole market, the force of the ‘waves’ has decreased. 151 Ibid., 196–8. 152 Ibid., 207–8.

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debts was an embarrassing exercise anyway, Galiani claimed.153 Public utility was a consideration in politics superior to any idea of justice that philosophers might come up with. In spite of these considerations, most authors who had recently written about devaluations had sustained the popular dislike of them. Galiani explained that this itself was a prejudice that resulted from history. When, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the leaders of barbaric tribes from the north of Europe became feudal rulers, their system of government turned into a despotic-aristocratic barbarism, in which rulers abused the monetary system for their own ‘misguided greed [mal regolata avarizia].’ Although this ‘despotic’ abuse was halted at a certain moment by the emergence of ‘parliaments,’ altering the monetary standard, as a remnant of those times, was still seen as an utmost evil thing.154 In chapter 1 of Book I of Della moneta, Galiani had explained how these popular prejudices about politics emerged, which continued to exist in modern times and impeded the progress of the science of government.155 Compared with alternative options that a ruler might choose from in case of necessity – such as directly defaulting on the state’s debt or running up more public debt – devaluations had the advantage that the negative effects were rightly, that is progressively, spread out over the whole nation. Moreover, devaluations were slower and ‘less biting and clamorous’ than bankruptcy and less likely to incite ‘tumult and rebellion.’156 Nevertheless, devaluations, Galiani argued at the end of his whole discussion of the subject, could only be allowed under exceptional circumstances of ‘desperate necessity.’157 He usually feared situations in which ‘the coinage’ would be ‘tampered with without any necessity,’ but was reassured by the virtue of the King and ‘his grand and deserved good fortune,’ which themselves would prevent Naples from arriving at ‘such a state.’158 Naples was fortunate in this respect because the King was not, as in other parts of Italy, deceived by mistaken ideas about commerce and its morality that inspired disastrous reforms. To make his point even

153 154 155 156 157 158

Ibid., 300; see above. Ibid., 214–15. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 212–13; see also the chapter on public debts, ibid., 296–8. Ibid., 215. Ibid.

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more provocative, Galiani appropriated the words of Petrarch that Machiavelli had used at the end of Il Principe, in order to claim that Naples could show the rest of Italy the way to wealth and political stability. It pains and distresses me that while the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily are rousing themselves and recovering with the help of their own sovereigns, the rest of Italy fails in insensible degrees from day to day, and declines. Although the signs of this decay are many, the greatest is, in my opinion, the endless discussion and the innumerable quantity and types of reforms, improvements, laws, and institutions on government and trade, and on all the orders of the civil state [l’infinito discorso e l’innumerabili quantità di riforme, di miglioramenti, di leggi e d’istituzioni sul governo, sul traffico e sopra tutti gli ordini dello stato civile] – all so universally sought and competitively pursued. As in our older men, great ideas and a continuous, breathless pursuit, born of internal anguish and organic deterioration, are always indices of an imminent and irreversible end. And this to me is why it no longer seems possible to uphold the words of our ancient poet That the ancient valour In the Italians hearts is not yet dead But at the same time, I doubt that, finally, given peace, it will not be necessary to say that Italy is old and inclined to barbarism.159

159 Ibid., 305: ‘Conclusion of the work.’

Epilogue: Galiani and the Limits of the Enlightenment

Although Della moneta was received with mild enthusiasm in Naples and the whole of Italy,1 the book never became what Galiani had probably intended it to be, a manifesto for Italian enlightened political economy in the spirit of Intieri. Nevertheless, Galiani was hailed as the author of what was generally recognised as an impressive work on monetary politics, and travelled across Italy in 1751–3 to be introduced to the most important scholars and government figures of the time.2 The dominant Neapolitan government minister, Bernardo Tanucci, also discovered Galiani’s diplomatic talent, upon which he was sent to Paris, in 1759, to

1 The letters to Galiani in the BSNSP, xxxi.b.18, from f. 27r onwards give an impression of the reception the book got in Italy. See also Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, Da Muratori a Beccaria, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 507–9. Bernardo Tanucci was hesitant about the practical value of Della moneta, and declared that he preferred Trojano Spinelli’s Riflessioni politiche sopra alcuni punti della scienza della moneta as a policy advice piece to Della moneta. The actual influence of Galiani on the Neapolitan economic reform debate is curiously absent from the secondary literature. Galiani himself suggested in 1780 that his predictions about the future of Neapolitan commerce had come true. See Ferdinando Galiani, Della moneta e scritti inediti, ed. Alberto Caracciolo and Alberto Merola (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963 [1751]), 11. Translations of quotations are taken from Ferdinando Galiani, On Money: A Translation of Della Moneta by Ferdinando Galian, trans. Peter R. Toscano (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1977), but often with considerable modifications to improve the readability and to correct errors. Italian original terms are occasionally added in brackets. 2 Described by Venturi, Settecento riformatore, Da Muratori a Beccaria, 504–8. See also Luigi Diodati, Vita dell’abate Galiani (Naples, 1788), 15. On his trip Galiani was escorted as far as Rome by his friend Pasquale Carcani, who had an important role in the writing and editing of Della moneta and who was also involved in the Accademia degli Emuli. Galiani’s journey took him to Rome, Florence, Padua, Venice, and Turin.

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become the secretary of the Neapolitan embassy and later the chargé d’affaires until 1769. At the peak of the turmoil of the Seven Years’ War and the political and economic crisis following France’s defeat in 1763, Galiani became a favourite salon visitor and a close friend of Diderot, Grimm, d’Holbach, and other Enlightenment icons. From within these circles he followed the political debate on how to get rid of France’s burden of public debt, which led to the declaration of the famous laws of free grain trade in 1763 and 1764. While reporting to Naples about the latest political developments in France, Galiani spent most of his time satisfying the intellectual curiosities of the salon coterie of Diderot and Grimm, to which he belonged. In the mid-1760s, Galiani set out to intervene in a debate on natural religion that was instigated by his friend Diderot.3 The fruit of Galiani’s efforts, a manuscript entitled De l’opinion, was the start not only of Galiani’s intended intervention in that specific debate, but also of a new version of his juvenile project Dell’arte del governo.4 The pages he wrote represent his sustained belief that modern sociability emerged from religion and suggest that religion derived from a socialisation of man’s original passions. Galiani explained this process in a way similar to how he had described the effects of Platonic love as a teenager and based his ideas on a similar epistemology.5 Thus, De l’opinion was his second and last attempt to construct a full-blown theory of the history of mankind. In De l’opinion Galiani restated his juvenile modification of the role that Vico and Polignac attributed to religion as part of the necessary

3 See Girolamo Imbruglia, ‘“My ecclesiastical history”: Gibbon between Hume and Raynal,’ in Edward Gibbon: Bicentenary Essays, ed. David Womersley, John Burrows, and John Pocock, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 355 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997), 73–102; J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Gibbon and the Primitive Church,’ in History, Religion, and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950, ed. Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48–68. 4 Fausto Nicolini, ‘Un inedito di Ferdinando Galiani,’ Biblion (1959), 139–56. The manuscript was held by the British Museum, ms. J.6.VII.9 (currently by the British Library). It was written after 1766 because Boulanger’s L’antiquité devoilée par ses usages from that year is mentioned, and probably before 1768, when Galiani started on the Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds. 5 Nicolini, ‘Un inedito di Ferdinando Galiani,’ 146, on the resilience of shared false beliefs and customs. In De l’opinion Galiani argued that man’s religious ‘credulity’ enabled him by staying away from ‘imposture, selfishness, amour propre’ to form, share, and adjust useful, but false, shared beliefs to structure and coordinate human interactions (ibid, 155).

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development of mankind, representing it as founded on false beliefs about the world. These beliefs, from which society emerged, were formed in response to fear: Primos in orbe deos fecit timor. Thunder and tempest inconvenienced men, so they wanted to control them. They believed they could ally themselves with the beings that controlled thunder and tempest. This is the first religion.6

In the outline of his argument of De l’opinion, Galiani claimed that the development of religious opinions gave rise to the first politics when people accepted theocratic legislation.7 The emergence of monotheism, particularly of Christianity, was a leap forward in the history of mankind. It was the bridge between ancient and modern government, Galiani believed, that brought societies closer to the goal of their development, which was modern commercial society.8 In a letter from 1770 Galiani understood all culture, including the defining institutions of modern commercial societies, as the product of man’s religious compulsions. The whole history of mankind, including the dynamics of social processes, politics, and commerce, resulted from man’s inclination to form religious beliefs. Which is the part of education that is not natural at all and which distinguishes man from animals? Religion … It does not belong to any sort of animal and we owe it purely to education … Instead of saying that man is a reasonable animal, one should say that man is a religious animal [un animal religieux]. All animals are reasonable, but only man is religious … Society, politics, government, luxury, inequality of conditions, decorative arts, etc [société, politique, gouvernement, luxe, inégalité des conditions, beaux arts, etc] … all of it we owe to this characteristic of our species.9

6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 154–6. 8 Galiani explained to Mme d’Épinay that both ‘ancient and primitive theocracy,’ which was triggered by ‘fear of the thunder, shaking of the earth,’ and ‘modern theocracy’ were forms of ‘ancient politics.’ Ferdinando Galiani, Opere, ed. Furio Diaz and Luciano Guerci, Illuministi Italiani, vol. 6 (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1975), 1045–6. In De l’opinion Galiani argued that Christianity was the most natural religion because its principles formed a felicitous match with the moral principles of nature. On another occasion Galiani claimed that the spirit of Christianity had always ‘been one of a government, not a religion.’ F.M. Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, vol. 8 (Paris, 1877), VI, 105. 9 Galiani, Opere, 640–1.

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This was the conclusion of Galiani’s history of mankind that he had tried to write in the late 1740s and again in the 1760s in Paris, but never managed to complete. Instead, just as Galiani abandoned that work to write Della moneta, so he left De l’opinion unfinished to embark on his Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds and left only a sketch. The Dialogues emerged from conversations in salon circles about the decisions by two controllers-general in 1763 and 1764, during the reign of Louis XV, to liberalise the grain trade.10 This reform project was generally understood as a last attempt to revive the French economy in order to dissolve the state’s public debt and to prevent the revolution, and it sparked what was arguably the most hotly debated policy issue of the eighteenth century.11 On 12 November 1768, Diderot reported to Sophie Volland about a discussion on the reform of the grain trade that had taken place earlier that week after dinner at the d’Holbach salon. Diderot mentioned Galiani’s views. The baron d’Holbach is back: I had dinner with him last Monday … The abbé Galiani was there: he preached a lot against the export of grain, and that for a reason which is not at all common: namely that one has to let the bad laws subsist when in the ministry there are not enough men of considerable sense to keep the good ones working and accommodate the inconveniences with the most advantageous innovations.12

10 See Steven Laurence Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XI, 2 vols. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1976), for a richly detailed study of the debate in France in those years and an assessment of Galiani’s influence on it through the Dialogues. 11 See Michael Sonenscher, ‘The Nation’s Debt and the Birth of the Modern Republic: The French Fiscal Deficit and the Politics of the Revolution of 1789,’ History of Political Thought, 18[1–2] (1997), 64–103, 267–325, for the relation between the public debt in France and the French Revolution as an option for reform in the decades before 1789. See István 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, ed. István Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 13–26, for an analysis of the size and importance of the grain trade debate in eighteenth-century Europe. 12 This traditional theme returns in the Dialogues, even in its epigraph. See Franco Venturi’s ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 72[3] (1960), 45–64. It was also present in Galiani, Della moneta, 106–7. See also Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapter 21.

212 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money He preached against the favour accorded to agriculture for a very bizarre reason: he said that agriculture was the most important of conditions, and that it had cost us four thousand years of efforts to discredit it. Seeking to free it from this depreciation would be like getting rid of the two houses of parliament [les ducs et pairs] and have the king go to Parliament escorted by twelve bakers.13

Ten days later Diderot wrote again to Sophie Volland, recounting how Galiani’s further explanation of his position on the liberalisation made Diderot beg Galiani on bended knee to write a treatise on the subject. Finally, the abbé Galiani has explained himself clearly. Either there is nothing to be demonstrated in politics or it is that the export [of grain] is madness. I swear, my friend, that no one until now has even said the first word on this issue. I have thrown myself at his feet to make him publish his ideas. This is only one of his principles: What is selling grain? – It is to exchange grain for money – You do not know what you are saying: it is exchanging grain for grain. Is it possible at this moment to exchange the grain you have at a profit against the grain that they will sell you? He showed us all the aspects of that law; and they are immense. He explained to us the cause of the present dearness and made us see what none of us suspected. I have never in my life listened to him with so much pleasure.14

Galiani’s exposition on this occasion would feature, two years later when the Dialogues was published, as part of a more elaborate argument about the impossibility of grain export leading the economic development of an eighteenth-century agricultural monarchy. Galiani argued that the old legislation on grain reflected the history of the French state and that a sudden change implied a radical alteration of the constitution.15

13 See Ferdinando Galiani, Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, ed. Fausto Nicolini (MilanNaples: Ricciardi, 1958 [1770]), 335. 14 See Galiani, Dialogues, 335–6. 15 As Galiani explained in a letter to J.B. Suard: ‘Si vous touchez trop à l’administration des blés en France, si vous réussissez, vous altérez la forme et consitution du gouvernment: soit que ce changement soit la cause, ou qu’il soit l’effet de la liberté entière d’exportation. Or le changement de la constitution est une bien belle cause lorsqu’elle est faite, mais une fort vilaine à faire.’ Galiani, Correspondance avec Mme d’Epinay, Mme Necker, Mme Geoffrin, &c. Diderot, Grimm, d’Alembert, De Sartine, d’Holbach, &c, ed. Lucien Perey and Gaston Maugras, 2 vols. (Paris, 1881), 1:245.

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Moreover, the geographical location of France’s grain-producing provinces complicated the domestic effects of a liberalisation. Galiani predicted that expectations about agricultural development and the export of grain would not be met and that instead famine would become a real threat, as recent experience was proving. As Galiani made clear, which has often been overlooked, a legislative reform to stimulate economic growth was desirable, but had to take a different course.16 Yet, what made the Dialogues so controversial and what turned Galiani into the leading critic of the government’s reform was the manner in which the book dealt with the moral and political foundations of the liberalisation of the grain trade by addressing the categories of political economic debate in France during the entire eighteenth century. The liberalisation of the grain trade was famously inspired by the works of a group of moral and political thinkers, known as the physiocrats, or économistes, who were led by the physician François Quesnay. Their theory of a ‘natural order’ of economic progress was infused with republican moral notions of virtue and reform that came from Malebranche and Fénelon.17 Owing to the strong emphasis they placed on

16 However, while Galiani ‘excused’ the old laws, he acknowledged that liberalisation was desirable and that the ‘spirit’ of the edicts was good (Galiani, Dialogues, 33, 176, 229–41). Galiani emphasised that the trade-off of liberty and responsibility between the sovereign and the people caused too sudden a change. The sovereign’s discharge as the protector of life and the gift of civil liberty could be fatal (Galiani, Dialogues, 158, 173, 227–9, 238, 242, 255). One needed to ‘aller par un chemin bien différent de celui ils ont pris’ (Galiani, Dialogues, 189–90). 17 Basic insights into physiocracy can be gathered from T.J. Hochstrasser, The Politics of Reform (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976); Georges Weulersse, Le mouvement physiocratique en France (de 1756 à 1770), 2nd edition, 2 vols. (Paris: G. Doin et Cie, 1968); Catherine Larrère, L’invention de l’économie au XVIII siècle. Du droit naturel à la physiocratie (Paris: Presses Universitaires France, 1992) and her ‘Malebranche revisité: l’économie naturelle des physiocrates,’ Dix-huitième siècle (1994), 117–38. The most rounded statements of physiocratic theory are Pierre-Paul Le Mercier de la Rivière, L’Ordre Naturel et Essentiel des Sociétés Politiques (Paris, 1767), and Victor Riqueti Marquis de Mirabeau, Philosophie rurale ou économie générale et politique de l’agriculture, réduite à l’ordre immuable des Loix physiques & morales, qui assurent la prospérité des Empires (Amsterdam, 1763). Particularly perceptive accounts of various aspects of physiocracy are in Hont and Ignatieff, ‘Needs and Justice in the wealth of nations,’ 16–18; István Hont, ‘Free Trade and the Economic Limits to National Politics: Neo-Machiavellian Political Economy Reconsidered,’ in The Economic Limits to Modern Politics, ed. John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),

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the importance of free trade for the revival of France’s commerce and virtue, critics of their système tended to be portrayed as Colbertists. Moreover, the fact that the Dialogues ridiculed the physiocrats’ dogmatism added to the impression that Galiani joined the ranks of critics of the abstract theoretical character of Quesnay’s famous zig-zag model of economic growth, which was a commonplace at the time.18 However, Galiani’s aim was more ambitious. Not only questioning the liberalisation of the grain trade, but extending his critique to the main relations between ideology and economic reform in eighteenth-century France, the Dialogues managed to stir up French public opinion and trigger a host of particularly vitriolic responses by disciples of Quesnay.19 As Friedrich Melchior Grimm acknowledged, ‘there is no one here who has not understood that the book is not just a book on the commerce of grain, but a work on the science of government in general, that it is a new brilliant model of the way in which all governmental affairs should be considered and reflected on; that by dealing with grain our illustrious

45–9; and especially Michael Sonenscher, ‘Physiocracy as a Theodicy,’ History of Political Thought, 23[2] (2002), 326–39, which also gives useful further references. For the reception of physiocracy in Naples see Lucio Villari, ‘Note sulla fisiocrazia e sugli economisti napoletani del settecento,’ in Saggi e ricerche sul settecento, ed. Ernesto Sestan (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1968), 224–51. For Galiani and the physiocrats see Gilbert Faccarello, ‘“Nil repente!”: Galiani and Necker on Economic Reforms,’ European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 1[3] (1994), 519–50. 18 See Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati,’ 48–50. Albrecht von Haller too emphasised Galiani’s satirical critique of the physiocrats’ abstractions in his critical review of the Dialogues in the Gottingische gelehrte Anzeigen (April 1771), 338–40. I owe this reference to Béla Kapossy. 19 For example, P.J.A. Roubaud, Récréations économiques, ou Lettres de l’auteur des ‘Représentations aux Magistrats’ à M. Le chevalier Zanobi, principal interlocuteur des ‘Dialogues sur le commerce des blés’ (Amsterdam-Paris, 1770). For the campaign against the Dialogues see the account by Nicolini, in Galiani, Dialogues, 423–62. Galiani himself disagreed with the critiques from the followers of Quesnay: ‘Si j’avais dit qu’en laissant la liberté à l’exportation, il fallait en outre donner un encouragement et une gratification aux commerçants intérieur, vu la plus grande difficulté des chemins et du débit dans les provinces misérables de l’intérieur, tous les économistes m’auraient embrassé, baisé ou front, et peut-être autre part. J’ai dit l’équivalent; ils ont voulu m’assommer. Cependant, au lieu de donner un conseil impraticable, j’en ai donné un raisonnable et aisé’ (Galiani, Correspondance, 1:248–9). Galiani also drafted a satirical response, which remained unpublished and got lost for two centuries. See Galiani, La Bagarre: Galiani’s ‘Lost’ Parody, ed. Steven Laurence Kaplan (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1979). Diderot also wrote a defence of Galiani: Denis Diderot, ‘Apologie de l’abbé Galiani,’ in Œuvres politiques, ed. P. Vernière (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1963).

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abbé has managed to touch upon everything.’20 However, as Grimm added, the book could only be understood if one read between the lines. Galiani wrote to Madame d’Épinay, ‘the book has no conclusion … Let us wait and amuse ourselves with seeing how long Paris will fail to understand me and create a fuss over a question that cannot be resolved.’21 The epigraph of the Dialogues – in vitium ducit culpae fuga, si caret arte – taken from Horace’s Ars poetica, provided a major clue as to what was Galiani’s project.22 By playing out against each other the various shortcomings of existing positions on the nature of commerce and its politics within eighteenth-century French discussions, Galiani would rise above the debate and emerge as its true master. Thus, rather than try to discipline the reform debate, as he had with Della moneta, he performed in the Dialogues a rhetorical exercise in which critique took the

20 ‘Non, il n’est personne ici qui ne se soit aperçu que ce livre est moins un livre sur le commerce des blés qu’un ouvrage sur la science du gouvernement en général, qu’un modèle lumineux et neuf de la manière dont toute question d’Etat doit être envisagée et approfondie; qu’en remuant ses blés notre illustre abbé sait toucher à tout; que ses entretiens forment avec le canon de la Bible et celui de l’Opéra-Comique, les trois recueils dans lesquels on trouve les principes de toute sagesse et de toute science, surtout lorsqu’on sait lire (comme c’est un de nos devoirs les moins contestables) le blanc des entrelignes, c’est-à-dire, moyennant ce que l’auteur a dit, deviner ce qu’il n’a dit pas, pénétrer ce qu’il a pensé et ce que, pour des bonnes raisons, il n’a pas confié au papier; qu’en un mot, depuis l’esprit des lois il n’a pas paru en France un plus grand livre, ni qui ait autant fait penser que celui qui est venu si à propos nous délivrer du jargon économistico-apocalyptique’ (Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, 8: 424). 21 Galiani, Correspondance, 1: 57. Galiani’s letters to and from Mme d’Épinay have recently been published together and provide wonderful insights into far more of Galiani’s ideas than those regarding the Dialogues (Galiani, Correspondance: Ferdinando Galiani, Louise d’Epinay, ed. Georges Dulac and Daniel Maggetti, 5 vols. [Paris: Editions Desjonquères, 1992–7]). It needs to be mentioned, though, that Galiani himself must sometimes have had another audience in mind in these letters, since he declared that they would be published after his lifetime, as indeed would be the case since the end of the eighteenth century. For the relationship between Galiani and d’Épinay see Francis Steegmuller, A Woman, a Man, and Two Kingdoms (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991). 22 For Horace’s rhetorical strategy, which Galiani employed in his works, see E. Oliensis, Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 198–223, and D. Armstrong, ‘The Addressees of the Ars poetica: Herculaneum, he Pisones and Epicurean Protreptic,’ Materiali e Discussioni dei testi classici (1993), 185– 230. The epigraph of the Dialogues refers both to Galiani’s actual critique of the physiocrats and, through recognising Horace’s rhetorical strategy, to the presentation of his general political message.

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form of creating confusion. Unsurprisingly, Galiani was particularly amused to hear that his book triggered people’s desire to pin down his position in the debate as they knew it. Hence Galiani’s triumphant remark: ‘Raynal is right to say that the work is very profound. It is terribly profound, because he believes it is.’23 Against this background, it is easy to see how interpreting the Dialogues could become a difficult affair. In the Dialogues, Galiani dedicated many pages to arguing that the physiocrats had misunderstood the object of their works. For example, he ridiculed the idea of a beneficial natural equilibrium that had to be restored as ‘a truth in the mind of a metaphysician.’24 Having recourse to sceptical humanist views of the history of mankind, Galiani cast doubt on the underpinnings of the physiocratic imagery of agricultural productivity growth as the natural course of development.25 Moving on from there to one of the main polarising tropes of eighteenth-century French political debate, the opposition between agriculturalist followers of Sully, like the physiocrats, and those of Colbert, Galiani stressed Colbert’s merit of having realised the importance of industrial development.26 Colbert, in fact,

23 Galiani, Correspondance, 1:57–8. 24 Galiani, Dialogues, 88, 17, 143, 200, 221–3, 254. Note the parallel with Smith, who saw Quesnay as a ‘very speculative physician’ who did not seem to realise that the political body had self-corrective (or healing) mechanisms. See István Hont, ‘The Political Economy of the “Unnatural and Retrograde” Order: Adam Smith and Natural Liberty,’ in Französische Revolution und Politische Ökonomie, ed. Marion Barzen (Trier: Karl Marx Haus, 1989), 122–49. 25 The physiocrats thought that the solution to France’s economic underdevelopment resided in the state’s national character, the agricultural monarchy, while this for Galiani defined the very problem. The provision of subsistence due to France’s agricultural character depended upon the adequacy of harvests. Galiani calls France a ‘nation des joueurs.’ His description of French history was a reaction to the first pages (1–6) of the first chapter of Mirabeau’s Philosophie rurale. Galiani recounts how the country developed steadily through cultivating the land at the beginning of French civilisation and subsequently declined owing to wars and luxury. Attempting to resolve these problems through an increase in agricultural productivity – a natural response – did not succeed, since other nations exchanged expensive luxury goods for cheap agricultural goods. Suffering under the burden of a public debt, the miserable agricultural state was driven into the arms of either feudalism or despotism, while the superstitious belief of its joueur population remained (Galiani, Dialogues, 107–13, 70–1, 215–16). 26 The idea was reinforced by Jacques Necker, Éloge de Jean-Baptiste Colbert (Paris, 1773), and Sur la legislation et le commerce des grains, 2 vols. (Paris, 1775).

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had delivered France from the ‘idle poverty of the agricultural state and the ferocious anarchy of Chivalry to the tranquillity of submission, to the calm of affluence and to the luxury of industry.’ Nevertheless, Galiani insisted, the answer to France’s problems also lay not in copying Colbert’s politics.27 Galiani absolutely avoided joining any party, both on the topic of the grain trade and on the wider eighteenth-century debate on the reform of France. Understandably, Galiani was frequently criticised, first by André Morellet in his Refutation (1774)28 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.29 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.30 In the second edition of Della moneta, published in 1780, Galiani also publicly responded to Morellet’s accusations by claiming that both his main treatises stemmed from the same approach to commercial politics and accomplished its implementation into realistic policy advice.31 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 few distinctions in eighteenth-century political discourse. No doubt, Galiani’s scepticism about the foundations of society (which resembled Vico’s concept of a ‘sympathetic nature’) 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.

27 Galiani, Dialogues, 18, 101–11, 113, 117–19, 122, 124. 28 André Morellet, Réfutation 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, 463–520. 29 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 quotation is taken from Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati,’ 53. 30 Galiani, Correspondance, 1: 248–9. See also the letter from Galiani to Morellet dated 1 May 1770, in the BSNSP, xxxi.a.13, f. 41r. 31 Galiani, Della moneta, 334–5.

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When the Dialogues appeared in print, the physiocratic journal Ephémérides du citoyen immediately explained Galiani’s unusual position as a response to having witnessed the famines in Tuscany in 1764–5 on his return from a diplomatic trip to Naples. Struck by the painful reality of faulty grain legislation, Galiani no longer wanted to pursue the path of ‘vigorous reform’ in general. Thus, it was this particular experience, the Ephémérides 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 compatriot Beccaria was engaged in. Whereas Beccaria sought ‘sincerely for truth,’ with regard to Galiani one could no longer ‘establish what lies behind the mask that the abbé likes to hide himself with.’ 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.’32 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.’33 Consequently, Venturi argued, Galiani defaulted into ‘reason of state.’34 Influential as this account of the genesis of the Dialogues has been, it is not satisfactory.35 The famines in Tuscany were caused by the failure of

32 33 34 35

Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati,’ 50–4. Ibid., 50. Ibid. 51. 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 Ephémérides (see Galiani, Dialogues, xi–xii, 297–306, and Venturi, ‘Galiani tra enciclopedisti e fisiocrati,’ 46–8). The explanation for Galiani’s Wende was adopted, for example, by Hont and Ignatieff, ‘Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations,’ 17–18; by John Robertson, ‘The Enlightenment above National Context: Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and Naples,’ Historical Journal, 40[3] (1997), 690, 693–4; 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: Klostermann, 1968). Marco Minerbi, ‘Diderot, Galiani e la polemica sulla fisiocrazia (1767–1771),’ Studi Storici, 14 (1973), 151 argued against Venturi that his view on Galiani’s anti-liberalism is not accurate and misrepresents the perspective from which the Dialogues were written.

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the old legislation of the grain provision, the annona. 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 across Italy the grain trade ought to be liberalised and that this would not have the type of negative effects as in France. Thus, the famines in Tuscany simply did not make him change his mind. As he declared to 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.’36 More importantly, imposing onto Galiani’s political thought a derogatory label of ‘reason of state’ obstructs access to the content of his works. Taking Beccaria as a touchstone of Enlightenment political thought and opposing Enlightenment and reason of state in this way not only excludes Galiani from the Age of Reform, but thereby also disfigures any attempts to understand his ideas and the purpose of his specific ‘sceptical’ understanding of sociability. Interpreting Galiani’s works, and especially the Dialogues, becomes impossible if preconceived images of the nature of eighteenth-century political throught and restrictive notions of the Enlightenment are assumed.37 Rather than obscuring our view, our understanding of the Enlightenment will be strengthened if it also incorporates the ideas of critics of cosmopolitan reforms and their outlooks on commerce and human nature. While the Dialogues had a huge impact in France, in Italy the book was received with outright hostility. Rather than recognise Galiani’s criticisms of the French liberalisation policies as a contribution to the reform debates of the time, people branded him a traitor to the Enlightenment project. The 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 free trade policies in Paris, the centre of the Enlightenment.38 In 1780, Galiani published a second edition of Della moneta in which he tried to redeem himself to his Italian audience. By this time he had

36 Galiani, Correspondance, 1:193. 37 István Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) counters such notions and argues strongly for studying eighteenth-century politics on its own terms. 38 Novelle letterarie, ed. Giuseppe Bencivenni Pelli (Florence, 1774), 293.

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earned himself a reputation across Europe as the person who had dared to ridicule one of the most ambitious Enlightenment economic reform programmes. Yet, in the endnotes added to the second edition of Della moneta, Galiani addressed the critics of his Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds who had stressed his moral scepticism and presumed antireformism. He 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.39 In another note Galiani also claimed that he had been right to warn against 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.40 Galiani made these claims to a Neapolitan audience. By 1780 a new generation of Neapolitan political thinkers had emerged, whose heroes were Antonio Genovesi and Bartolomeo Intieri.41 Previously a university lecturer in metaphysics, Genovesi had been appointed to the new chair of ‘Commerce and Mechanics’ in 1754, and had embarked on educating his countrymen in a wide range of matters belonging to commerce and agricultural improvement.42 In the later eighteenth century, Genovesi’s pupils (Filangieri, Pagano, Galanti) acknowledged their master’s achievements and formed a movement that bore the hallmarks of a local Enlightenment culture.43 The figure behind the founding of the chair was Bartolomeo Intieri. Interestingly, Genovesi

39 Galiani, Della moneta, 334–5. 40 Ibid., 342–3. 41 See Melissa Calaresu, ‘Constructing an Intellectual Identity: Autobiography and Biography in Eighteenth-Century Naples,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies (2001), 157–77; John Robertson, ‘Enlightenment and Revolution: Naples 1799,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1999), 17–44; Girolamo Imbruglia, ‘Enlightenment in EighteenthCentury Naples,’ in Naples in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth and Death of a Nation-State, ed. Girolamo Imbruglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 70–94. 42 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: Liguori, 1998), 391–404. 43 On the Neapolitan Enlightenment in the later eighteenth century, see the forthcoming work by Melissa Calaresu, Enlightenment and Revolution in Naples: From Vico to Pagano (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming); on Filangieri, see Vincenzo Ferrone, La società giusta ed equa: Repubblicanesimo e diritti dell’uomo in Gaetano Filangieri (Bari: Laterza, 2003).

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declared that Intieri, rather than just stimulate his interests, had directed the changes in his thinking that enabled him to dedicate himself to political economy.44 Hence, it has always been the question whether, simply put, it was Genovesi, or in fact Intieri, who brought the Enlightenment to Naples. Intieri was also Ferdinando Galiani’s main teacher. Through republishing Della moneta and declaring in the new preface that the book was originally inspired by Intieri’s teachings, Galiani claimed paternity over the later Neapolitan Enlightenment and – in vain – urged his audience to reconsider his ideas as a genuine attempt to ground the reform of Naples on a morality that was both honest and self-interested. In sharp contrast with the legacy of Genovesi, Galiani never became a hero of the later Neapolitan Enlightenment, but was always portrayed, by contemporaries and historians alike, as an opportunist whose ideas were easily influenced by the contexts in which he operated. Galiani became known as a satirist, a sceptic, and as ‘machiavellino.’45 But do the chapters of this study not show that Galiani, from his teenage years onwards, worked on solving the same issues about commerce and morality that lie at the basis of Genovesi’s economia civile? A short comparison with Genovesi is instructive. 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.46 Here Genovesi joined the great European

44 Franco Venturi, Riformatori napoletani, Illuministi Italiani, vol. 5 (Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1962), 86, for the quotation 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 also Franco Venturi, ‘Alle origini dell’illuminismo napoletano, dal carteggio di Bartolomeo Intieri,’ Rivista Storica Italiana, 71[2] (1959), 426–7, and Calaresu, ‘Constructing an Intellectual Identity,’ 166–7. For a bibliography of Genovesi’s works and career see John Robertson, ‘Antonio Genovesi: The Neapolitan Enlightenment and Political Economy,’ History of Political Thought , 8[2] (1987), 335–44 and his The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 7. 45 See chapter 1. 46 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, ed. Domenico Demarco (Naples: L’Arte tipografica, 1956), 233–44, for an earlier attempt to reconstruct Genovesi’s moral philosophy.

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Enlightenment debate on commerce and morality. Thus, the shift, which he himself famously called ‘da metafisico a mercatante,’ of 1754, paved the way for a sustained focus on the morality of market societies that was central to the Enlightenment. The first chapters of his main work, the Lezioni di Commercio o sia d’Economia Civile, of 1765, reveal Genovesi’s idea of sociability.47 Genovesi, famously, considered ‘abstaining from doing harm to another’ as insufficient for society. True virtue was required.48 Rejecting neo-Hobbesian notions of false virtue, Genovesi explained that the idea of interest understood as ‘amor proprio’ is a type of self-delusion and also distanced himself from Manichean ideas of sociability: ‘those who say that man acts only in his own interest, like those who deny it, deceive themselves and both sides speak with little consideration.’49 Rather than see hate as countered by love and evil countered by good, Genovesi refers at the most crucial points throughout his oeuvre to Shaftesbury’s An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, which was immensely influential across Europe in the early part of the eighteenth century.50 Genovesi saw any

47 Antonio Genovesi, Delle lezioni di commercio o sia d’economia civile, con elementi del commercio, ed. Maria Luisa Perna (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofi, 2005 [1765]). 48 Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio, 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: Olschki, 1984), chapters 4 and 6. 49 Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio, 300. 50 The influence of Shaftesbury on Genovesi was also discussed by 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: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 283–4, 286–7, in an account focused slightly differently from mine. Similarities between Genovesi and Shaftesbury are not usually played out enough to bring to light Genovesi’s moral philosophy. Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (ed. David Walford [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977]) was originally published, unauthorised, in 1699. For Shaftesbury, see Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Daniel Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 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: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2001). In a more historical key, see István Hont, ‘Luxury and Commerce,’ in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. M. Goldie and R. Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 379–418.

Epilogue 223

links between honesty, interest, personal utility, virtue, love, and beauty through Shaftesbury’s idea of a balance between personal and social forces.51 This balance, according to Genovesi, following Shaftesbury, was naturally well regulated. Therefore Genovesi declared that Homo homini natura amicus.52 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.53 At this level Genovesi inserted education and reason into his scheme as the determinants of human happiness in the course of history. Here Genovesi used notions of love to discuss the way in which the balance between individual and society functioned.54 In spite of Genovesi’s adherence to a moral philosophy that was among the most sophisticated responses to neo-Hobbesian explanations of society and the most advanced ways of avoiding Bayle’s scepticism and the sharp edges of Locke’s hedonism, Galiani disliked his idea of sociability. According to Galiani, Genovesi’s views were too much within the mainstream of eighteenth-century cosmopolitan solutions to provide a morally robust idea of commercial society. Genovesi, like most famous contemporaries, expressed the spirit of Enlightenment, but his thinking did not make much progress. The bent of all mediocre spirits [esprits mediocres] is to express themselves according to the tone and jargon of the age. One needs to possess a great deal of character of mind to disparage an infallible glory and applause, rather than to assume the tone that is in fashion, as Beccaria, Genovesi, Baudeau, Roubeaud, etc. do.55

51 Genovesi, Lezioni di commercio, 306, 295. 52 Pii, Antonio Genovesi, 139. 53 See ibid., 157–8, for a different account of Genovesi’s idea of a divided mankind based on Rousseauian premises. 54 See Koen Stapelbroek, ‘L’economia civile’ e la società commerciale: Intieri, Genovesi, Galiani e la paternità dell’illuminismo napoletano,’ in Atti del convegno 250º anniversario dell’istituzione della cattedra di ‘Commercio e Meccanica,’ Naples, 5–6 May 2005, ed. Bruno Jossa and Rosario Patalano (Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, forthcoming) and my ‘Preserving the Neapolitan State: Antonio Genovesi and Ferdinando Galiani on Commercial Society and Planning Economic Growth,’ History of European Ideas, 32[4] (2006) for this interpretation at length. 55 Ferdinando Galiani, Il Pensiero Dell’Abate Galiani: Antologia di tutti i suoi scritti, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1909), 138 (letter to Grimm, dated 20 March 1775).

224 Love, Self-Deceit, and Money

More than accusing Genovesi and Beccaria of pursuing personal glory or of trying to be fashionable, Galiani believed that they were merely part of the fashion of the age. No doubt, there are aspects of bitterness and jealousy to Galiani’s dismissive statement. Yet the idea of seeing his scepticism in relation to a critical stance towards his contemporaries and, simultaneously, his own attempts to construe a vision of economic reform for Naples out of his radically sceptical ideas of Platonic love and self-deceit, to my mind, merits serious interest. Galiani, I believe, made a real effort to break through the limits of enlightened thought and, by grounding the idea of commerce in a new approach to the sociable nature of man, was engaged in overcoming the polarisations within eighteenth-century debates. However, in attempting to step outside of the ideological categories of eighteenth-century political thought, Galiani also turned himself into an outsider to the Enlightenment, whose ideas became easily misunderstood. In this sense, the Enlightenment created its own limits, which all too easily endure in our images of the most sophisticated political thinkers of the eighteenth century.

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Index

absolutism, 10, 21, 43, 100, 102, 220 abstract economy, 99–104 Accademia degli Emuli, 33, 127, 133, 208n2 Accademia degli Investiganti, 25 Accademia degli Oziosi, 93 Accademia delle Scienze, 29–30 Accademia di Medinaceli, 26 Accademia Gualtieri, 60 Adam, 114–16. See also Fall, sin Addison, Joseph, 4, 134n19, 150 afrancesados, 18n16 Africa, 8, 179 aggression: natural, 44; trade politics, 8, 52, 86. See also conquest agriculture, 8, 12–13, 22, 30, 32, 43, 54, 63, 105, 194, 196–8, 212–16 Aix-la-Chapelle (Aquisgrana), 23 Ajello, Raffaele, 39 alzamento. See devaluation ambition, 93, 102, 120 America, 8, 35–6, 73, 85–6 amor proprio, 96–7, 99–101, 106, 121, 166, 183–4, 222 amore di commercio, 101 amore verso la sapienza, 96 amour de nous mêmes, 99

amour de soi, 99 amour naturel, 132 amour propre, 47, 99, 101, 130–1 amour surnaturel, 132 annona, 219 Argento, Gaetano, 18n15 aristocracy, 134n19; and history of European government, 102, 205–6; and luxury and origins of money, 159; in Naples, 14–21, 176, 198n120, 205–6 Aristotle, 51n117, 110, 171, 177, 180–1, 189 Aristotelianism, 26, 59, 67, 70, 110; theory of money, 50, 171, 179, 180–1, 188, 190 Armed Neutrality, 8–9 Art of government, 6, 33–7, 55, 128, 162, 168, 178–80, 193, 209–11 artificial, 44, 66, 68, 71, 99, 101, 104, 124, 136, 139, 157, 177 arts and sciences, 51–2, 73, 83 atheism, 26, 56 Augustine, Augustinianism, 27, 70, 112, 114, 140n46, 164 austerity, 21, 34, 43 Austria, 15–16, 18–19, 26, 61–2

250 Index avarice, 101, 137. See also greed Azzariti, Francesco Paolo, 129n6 Babel, Tower of, 180 backwardness. See economic growth/ (under)development balance of power, 6, 9 balance of trade, 13, 65, 102, 194, 200 bankruptcy, 103n43, 206 barbarism, 3, 8, 36, 104, 124–5, 179, 188, 207 Baudeau, Nicolas, 223 Bayle, Pierre, 27, 45, 56, 88, 107, 112–13, 222 beauty, 50, 78, 127, 157, 161–3 Beccaria, Cesare, 218–19, 223–4 Bellamy, Richard, 39 Benedict XIV, 174 beneficence, 9 benevolence, 109, 131–2, 167 Berkeley, bishop, George, 93 Biscardi, Serafino, 18n15 Bodin, Jean, 200n125 boria (of nations): Vico, 125–6; Broggia, 176 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 145n61 Bottari, Giovanni, 20n22, 28n45, 32n58, 129n6 Boulanger, Nicolas-Antoine, 209 Brindisi, 104 Britain, 6, 8–9, 26, 36, 44–7, 50, 57, 64, 70, 74, 85, 104, 106, 195, 198 Broggia, Carlantonio, 172–8, 186; on devaluation, 177, 199–200; and Doria and Vico, 172–3, 175–6; and Ferdinando Galiani, 11, 40, 165, 170, 172–3, 176–7; and Intieri, 173–4; on luxury, 174–8; on Melon, 172–8; on money, 177, 181; on Neapolitan reform, 173–5

Calvin, John, 114 Calvinists, 98 Cambridge Platonists, 57n2 Carcani, Pasquale, 33n60, 208n2 Carli, Gianrinaldo, 52n117, 189–90 Carpio, Gaspar Méndez de Haro y Guzmán, 7th marquis del, 65 Carneades, 112 Cartesianism, 6, 25, 59. See also Descartes Carthage, 51n111 Catherine the Great, 8–9 Celestines, 58 ceto civile, 16–19, 21, 25n36 chance (caso), 109, 186. See also necessity Charles of Bourbon, 19, 23, 31, 129, 199, 206 Cheyne, George, 59 China, 179 chivalry, 3, 217 Christianity (and history of humankind), 84, 157, 210 Church (Catholic). See papacy Ciccarelli, Lorenzo, 27n38 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 141n52 cicisbeismo, 3, 127, 129n6, 134 civilisation: of humankind, 52, 72, 100–1, 104, 109–10, 119–20, 128, 157; of international order, 5, 9 Clarke, Samuel, 59 Clement XII, Corsini, Pope cardinal Lorenzo, 29 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, Colbertism, 42, 49, 54–5, 103–4, 214, 216–17 Collaterale, 20, 91, 93 colonies, 35 commedia dell’arte, 3 commercial sociability, 4, 7, 10, 35, 37, 41, 43–7, 49–52; Broggia on,

Index 251 173, 175–7; Doria on, 100–3; Celestino Galiani on, 65–83; Ferdinando Galiani on, 127, 165– 72, 182–93; Vico on, 124–5 commercium, 52. See also commercial sociability commercio reale, 106, 188, 195 commerzio, 124. See also commercial sociability competition, 34–5, 49, 54, 68, 93, 124, 187, 207 conjectural history: Celestino Galiani, 58, 68–86; Vico, 116–26 conquest, 34–6, 42, 51–2, 62, 85–6, 101, 103–4, 195 Contegna, Pietro, 18n15 contemplation (of human nature), 76, 114. See also reflection contratto alla voce, 13n4 convenable, 137–9 conservation. See self-preservation Cornelio, Tomasso, 25–6 corruption (moral), 22, 42–3, 91, 95, 106, 113, 124–5, 173, 176, 184 Costantini, Girolamo, 53, 189–90, 201 Covarruvias, Diego, 180 Creation (commerce and plan of): Celestino Galiani on, 10, 58, 75, 82–3, 87–8, 97; Ferdinando Galiani on, 127, 167–9, 184–91, 195 Cudworth, Ralph, 57n2, 75n58 Cumberland, Richard, 57n2 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 5, 24 custom, 29, 34, 56, 68, 75, 77, 79, 81, 113, 117, 119–20, 123 cyclical history (views of), 6, 10, 19, 34–6, 109, 124–6, 168, 176, 197 D’Andrea, Francesco, 16–17n12, 18, 25, 201n128

Davanzati, Bernardo, 181 De la Chambre, Marin Cureau, 134n21, 135n22 De la Court, Pieter, 196 dearth. See famine decline: of culture, 10, 12; of empires, 14, 34, 36; of Italy, 12–13, 207, 13; of morality, 10. See also corruption; of power and wealth, 6, 10; of republics, 100, 102–6 deism, 45 depopulation, 12 Deputazione delle monete, 199–200 Derham, William, 59 Descartes, René, 134n21, 135, 158; and Ferdinando Galiani, 129, 135, 137–40, 162; on love, 137–9; and Spinelli, 135, 139n40, 139n42, 141; and Celestino Galiani, 59; and Doria, 92, 109; and Vico, 109 despotism, 124, 206, 216n25 devaluation, 45, 48–50, 52–4, 65, 167, 171–2, 177, 189–3, 199–206 Diderot, Denis, 5, 37n75, 162n129, 209, 211–12, 214n19 Diodati, Luigi, 31n56, 33n60, 34, 129n6, 134n19, 174n22 Diogenes, of Sinope, 170 Don Quixote, 3 Doria, Paolo Mattia, 33, 186; on abstract commerce, 99–102, and the Accademia degli Oziosi, 93; on amor proprio, 96, 99, 101; and ancient virtue, 92–4, 100, 102–3; and Broggia, 172–3, 175–6; on Christian unity, 89; on restoration of Collaterale, 20; on commerce, 100–6; idea of commercio reale, 106, 188, 195; on Descartes, 92–3; on Epicureanism, 10; on essences,

252 Index 96–7, 100; follows Fénelon, 30, 93–4, 98–9, 102n40, 106, 127n1; on free choice, 94; against free trade Naples, 30, 104–5; and Celestino Galiani, 29–31, 93, 95; and Ferdinando Galiani, 90, 128, 163; on hedonism, 30, 93–4, 97–100; on intellectual appetite, 96–9; on Locke, 29–30, 74, 88–90, 92–3, 97; on love, 89, 95–101; on luxury and modern markets, 62, 66, 91, 100–6; on Machiavellism, 94–5n16, 104; on money, 101, 188; on moral corruption, 95, 100–1; on Naples and Europe, 5, 62, 103–6; and Neapolitan reform movements, 91, 103–4; on passions and pleasure, 95–9; idea of a perfetta repubblica, 92, 94; on Plato and Platonism, 94, 97– 100, 102, 105; as a political advisor Naples, 30, 91–2, 103–6, 194; on protection of the Neapolitan economy, 22, 30, 105–6; on self-love as self-deceit, 96–9, 101; on self-subjection, 94–100; on sociability 88– 90, 95–8, 164; on Spanish malgovernment Naples, 15; on true utility and virtue, 95–102; on unity, 96; and Vico, 107–9, 112–13, 115, 122–4; on virtuous republics and decline, 10, 100, 102–6; youth in Liguria, 90 Dutch (trade). See United Provinces Dutot, Pierre, 48, 50, 53, 55, 64, 202, 204 Dyke, Daniel, 143n57 dynastic: succession crises, 12–13, 23, 47; rivalry, 12 economic growth/(under)development, 13, 15, 21–2, 30, 32, 62–5,

86, 103–6, 165, 170, 178, 191, 194–8, 201–5, 211–14, 216 économistes. See physiocrats empire, 6, 14–15, 18, 34–6, 55, 86, 103, 180 emulation, 93, 195 Encyclopédie, 155, 162n129 envy, 102, 157, 196 Éphémerides du citoyen, 218 Epicureanism, 7, 9, 27–30, 40–1, 46– 7, 61, 66, 82, 89, 97, 107, 109, 112, 114–15, 119, 125–6, 128, 143, 148, 153, 155–6, 160–1, 163–4, 166–7, 170, 175–7 Épinay, Madame Louise, d’, 147n65, 210n8, 215 equality, 156, 184, 186. See also inequality, friendship, natural equality error: Galiani (on human history), 36, 197–8; Vico (on seeing in God), 115, 123 esprit fort, 37n75 essences (Platonic), 96–7, 100, 111 exchange rate, 23, 171 exports. See trade (foreign) Fabbrini, Giovannantonio, 53n118 fables, 118–19, 152 Fall (of man), 113–14, 116–17, 130, 164. See also sin, Adam falsehood, 6, 23, 42, 66, 84–5, 88, 93, 95, 98, 102–4, 115, 117, 119, 128, 132, 143, 146, 148–9, 151–2, 160, 164, 173, 177, 183, 188, 195 famine, 12, 24, 64, 213, 218–19 fashion, 4, 13, 90, 102n40, 161–2, 195, 223–4 fate (fato), 109, 114, 186 fear: Hobbes on, 117, 130, 155; Ferdinando Galiani on, 130, 137–8,

Index 253 154–5, 210; Polignac on, 155–6; Vico on, 117, 123, 155 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe, 66, 122, 127n1, 145n61, 173n18, 189; on Colbert and Louis XIV, 42–4; and Doria, 30, 94, 98– 100, 102n40, 106; on European politics, 43; against luxury, 43; and universal society, 43; and Mandeville, 44, 46; and Neri, 49; and Pallante, 21; and physiocracy, 213 feudalism, 13–14, 35, 124, 206, 216n25 Ficino, Marsilio, 94 Filangieri, Gaetano, 5, 220 finance, 55, 104; ancient Rome, 34; France, 42, 47, 165, 198, 201–2, 205, 209; Italy, 48–53; Naples, 198–201. See also Law, taxation, devaluation fishery, 8, 197 Fleury, Claude, 173n18 Fleury, André-Hercule Cardinal de, 205n146 Florence, 28, 45, 61, 190 foreign trade. See under trade Fraggianni, Niccolò, 18n15, 23n28 France, 4, 6, 8–9, 23, 26, 36, 42–3, 47, 57, 103–4, 106, 162, 165, 195, 201– 2, 205, 209, 212–20 fraud (beginning of morality), 44, 120 free trade, 22; Doria on, 30, 104–5; Fénelon on, 43; Intieri on, 32–3, 62–3 free ports: Doria on, 105 free will/free choice, 65–8, 79, 94, 109, 113–14, 116, 121, 144–7 French Revolution, 42n88 friendship, 118–19, 142, 156. See also equality, natural equality frugality, 100

Galanti, Giuseppe-Maria, 220 Galiani, Berardo, 8n7, 31, 33n60, 162–3 Galiani, Celestino: on academic reform, 31, 62, 87, 93; and Accademia delle scienze, 29–30; cappelano maggiore, 28–9, 32, 58, 61; and Cartesianism, 59; on comercio, 72–3, 77; on commerce as plan of creation, 10, 58, 80–3, 85, 87–8; and Doria, 29–31, 33, 62; on economy Naples, 10; and Gassendi, 27–8, 60; and Ferdinando Galiani, 37, 40, 65, 87, 90, 128, 143, 153, 163; suspected of heterodoxy, 29–30, 93; and Bartolomeo Intieri 10, 28, 30– 3, 61–4; on language, 70; and Locke, 29–30, 59–60, 74–5, 77; on luxury, 82–3; and Melon, 32–3, 62– 4; and Montesquieu, 60n10; on ‘moral good,’ 67, 71, 76–9, 81–3; on natural law, 60, 71–83; on natural religion, 78–80, 84; on necessity and free will, 65–7, 79, 87; and Newtonianism, 59–60; as political advisor, 28n46, 29–30, 61, 86; in Rome, 27, 58–61, 86–7; and Royal Society, 60; salon, 31n55, 86; on scepticism and Bayle, 56–7, 112; on scienza morale, 57, 65–87; on selfdeceit, 83–6; on sociability, 27–8, 58, 60, 65–87, 164, 171; on Spinoza, 84; on state of nature, 68–73, 77; and concordat Vatican 1741, 28n46, 61; and Vico, 28, 114–15 Galiani, Ferdinando: on amor proprio, 183–4; art of government, 6, 34–7, 143, 178, 180, 193, 209; on beauty, 157, 161–3; and Broggia, 165, 170, 172–8, 184; and Catherine II, 8; on

254 Index cicisbeismo, 3, 4n, 127; on commercial morality, 35–6, 41, 167–9, 182– 93, 195; and Descartes, 137–40, 158, 162–3; on devaluation, 45, 167, 171–2, 192–3, 199–206; and Doria, 90–1, 95, 128, 163, 183–4; on economic development Naples, 4–5, 7–9, 21–2, 127, 165, 170, 194– 8, 224; on Epicureanism, 143, 148, 153, 160–1, 163, 166, 170; and Celestino Galiani and Intieri, 31, 37, 40, 55, 65, 87, 128, 143, 153, 163, 171, 208; and Gassendi, 160–1; and Genovesi, 220–4; on grain trade, 211–20; on hate, 138–42; in historiography, 4–5, 9–10, 22n26, 37–9, 217–18, 221; on history of commerce, 33–6, 157–9, 168–9, 180–1; on history of humankind, 33–7, 156–9, 167–9, 178, 180–1, 210; and Italian contemporaries, 47–53, 165, 170, 189–90, 201; on justice, 9, 132, 147, 154, 167, 184, 186, 192–3, 205–6; juvenile lectures and manuscripts, 3–4, 9, 33, 128–9, 156–7; and lawyer-regalists, 11, 165, 170, 193–5; and Locke, 139–42, 149, 161–3, 189–93; on love, 3–4, 11, 33, 41, 127–8, 130–46, 162–3; on luxury, 178, 185, 194–5, 198, 210; on Machiavellianism, 7, 207; on Melon, 172, 178, 194; on money, 11, 33, 41, 127–8, 157–9, 166–71, 178–82, 187–92, 194; on origins of society, 132–3, 136, 140, 142–58, 163, 167, 210; on Naples history, 21, 24; on opinion, 133, 209–11; and Polignac, 155–6, 209; on Platonic love 3–4, 11, 33, 128, 132, 143–52, 169, 183, 209, 224;

and popular culture, 4, 127; and reform debate Naples, 22–4, 55, 165, 170, 195–201, 206–7; on (natural) religion, 33, 132–3, 151– 8, 209–11; and satire, 3, 134, 215– 16, 221; on self-deceit, 3, 6, 9–11, 41, 142–57, 166, 168, 183, 188; and Spinelli, 135n22, 141; and Spinoza, 147, 153; on Stoicism, 148, 153, 160–1, 163, 170; on superstition, 33, 156–7; on trade as conquest, 35–6, 195–8; on utility, 157–62, 165, 182–7, 193; on value, 158–9, 166, 168–9, 178–87, 194; and Vico, 90, 126, 128, 142, 152–3, 163, 183, 209, 217 Galilei, Galileo, Galilean, 25 Gassendi, Pierre, 27–8, 60–1, 93, 160–1 Genovesi, Antonio: on amor proprio, 222; and Ferdinando Galiani, 38–40, 220–4; and Locke, 74n56; on Neapolitan economy, 22; and Shaftesbury, 222 gentiles, 119, 125 Germany, 23, 85 Giannone, Pietro, 15, 18n15, 19, 24 Gimma, Giacinto, 27n38 Giornale della letterature italiana, 45 Giunta del Commercio, 63 Glorious Revolution, 44 glory, 13, 68, 104, 125, 173, 204 God: the idea of, 33, 74–6, 79–81, 83– 5, 89, 97, 117–18, 121, 133, 151–7; love of, 43, 114; seeing in, 115–16, 123, 128. See also natural law; superior (divine) gold, 34–6, 50, 52, 86, 124, 157–9, 162, 167, 169–71, 177–9, 188, 191, 194 Goldoni, Carlo, 134n19 Gozzi, Carlo, 134n19

Index 255 Gozzi, Gaspare, 134n19 grace, 114, 170. See also Redemption grain, 124, 182; price of, 13n4, 64, 212; trade laws, 43, 131n14, 211–19 Grand Tour, 12n1, 198 gravity (moral): in ‘laws of commerce,’ 184 greed, 35–6, 74, 86, 101, 103, 206 Grimaldi, Costantino, 26 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, freiherr von, 4, 209, 214–15 Grotius, Hugo, 9, 111n69, 113 Gualtieri, Cardinal Filippo, 60 Haller, Albrecht von, 214n18 hate, 139–42, 144, 146 hedonism, 30, 74–5, 93, 223 hegemony, 9, 49, 104 Hobbes, Thomas, 52, 67–9, 97, 113, 117, 130, 155–6, 177, 183 Hobbesianism, 9, 27, 40, 44–5, 52, 70–1, 164, 166, 183, 222–3 Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’, 5, 209, 211 Homer, 158 honesty (honestas), 52, 71, 97, 101, 148, 176, 221 honour, 4n2, 68, 70, 112, 125 Horace, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 4, 189, 215 Hübner, Martin, 9 Hume, David, 40; and Galiani (on honour), 4n2 Hutcheson, Francis, 45, 57n2 idolatry, 84–6, 114 independence: commercial, 22, 24, 30, 104–5; Neapolitan, 5, 19, 23, 38, 63; War of the American, 8; of primitive nations, 70, 80, 86

Index of prohibited books, 29, 89 Indies, Indians, 35–6, 158 inequality, 42–3, 54, 70, 74, 86, 106, 120n98, 124, 156–8, 176, 186, 210 Inquisition, 26 instincts, 67–9, 77–8, 85, 87, 96, 111, 123, 142, 167 intellectual appetite, 83, 96–7, 100, 119, 124 Intieri, Bartolomeo, 10, 20n22, 24, 220–1; on commerce Naples, 32–3, 62–5, 171; critic Italian economists 1750s, 190; suspected author of Della moneta, 37; on devaluation crisis 1691, 65; on foreign trade Naples, 62–3; and Celestino Galiani, 10, 28, 30–3, 62–4; and Ferdinando Galiani, 37, 40, 55, 171, 208; on Melon, 32–3, 62–5; and natural and moral philosophy, 28; and reform movements Naples, 24–5, 28; and statistical analyses, 64–5; teaches political economy, 31 Italy, 6–8, 11, 12, 47, 88; debate on money in 1750s, 47–53, 165, 170, 177, 189–90, 198, 201; decline, 12– 13; intellectual climate, 25–6, 45; and (ancient) Rome, 35 Jacobites, 42n88, 44, 127 Jannacone, Domenico, 3 Jansenism, 112, 164 jealousy, 101, 138, 141, 157, 224; of trade, 54n111 Jove, 118, 154 justice, 9, 89, 97, 110, 113, 119, 132, 147, 154, 167, 184, 186, 192–3, 205–6, 218 just price, 179, 168, 181 Justinianus, 158

256 Index Kant, Immanuel, 9 koinonia, 67, 70 Law, John, 47, 49, 64, 201 Le Clerc, Jean, 92, 102n40 Le Mercier de la Rivière, Pierre-Paul, 213n17 Lebrun, Charles, 134n21 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, von, 114, 147–8 Libertines, 56, 93 Locke, John, 222; on civilisation and progress of humankind, 190–3; on devaluation, 48, 189–92, 198, 201– 2; and Doria, 29–30, 92–3, 97; and English moral philosophy, 6, 30, 45, 57n2; Essay put on Index, 29, 89; in European moral philosophy, 29–30, 74–5; on free will and morality, 75, 50–1, 53, 161, 192; and Celestino Galiani, 29–30, 59– 60, 74–5, 77; and Ferdinando Galiani, 139–42, 149, 161–2, 189– 93; on justice, 192–3; on the law of nature, 74–5; on love and hate, 74– 5, 139–42; on luxury, 191; on markets, 192n99; on money, 11, 48, 50, 52n117, 177, 181, 189–92; reception in Naples, 29, 74n56, 88–9; and Neapolitan debate 1730s, 29– 30, 93; on property, 189–90, 192; and Spinelli, 140n46; and Vico, 89, 113 Lombardy, 48–9 Louis XIV, 18, 42, 54, 103–4, 134n21 Louis XV, 211 love, 3, 11, 33, 123, 139, 223; Descartes, 137–9; Doria: 89, 95–8, 101; Ferdinando Galiani, 127, 130–46; Locke, 139–40

Lucretius, Titus Carus, 28 lust, 101, 127, 138, 144 luxury: and aristocracy Naples, 13, 15, 176, 198n120; as corruption of proper self-care, 74, 91, 100–1, 123–4, 189, 191; in political economy, 23, 32, 35, 42–4, 46, 48–55, 62–3, 85, 102, 106, 172–8, 189, 194–5; as product of progress of society, 82–3, 157, 162, 178, 185, 194, 198, 210; results from invention of money, 50, 102, 123–4 Macchia, conspiracy, Gaetano Gambacorta, prince of, 16 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 6, 97, 104, 173, 207; heritage, 6, 18n16, 207 Machiavellianism, 7, 9, 94–5n15 machiavellino, 37n75, 38, 221 Malebranche, Nicolas, 114, 134n22, 213 Malestroit, Jehan Cherruyt, de, 200n125 man: as an animal that thinks himself free, 148; as a religious animal, 210; as a sociable animal, 72 Mandeville, Bernard de, 40, 44–8, 66, 70, 112, 120n98, 143, 155, 164 Manicheanism, 130–1, 133, 154, 222 manufacturing industries, 13, 51–2, 54, 63, 194 Marchetti, Alessandro, 28 Martorelli, Giacomo, 33n60 Masaniello, revolt; Tommaso, 14 Medina Coeli, Luis de la Cerda, duke of, 26 Mediterranean, 8, 34, 36, 180–1, 197 Melon, Jean-François: and Broggia, 172–8; on devaluation, 50–3, 177, 201–2, 205; and Doria, 103; and

Index 257 Ferdinando Galiani, 53–5, 172, 178, 181, 194; and Intieri and Celestino Galiani, 32–3, 62–5; and Galiani’s Italian contemporaries, 11, 48–51, 190, 201; on luxury, 48, 63–4, 178, 181, 194; and Voltaire, 64 mercantile commerce, 103–4 merchant republics. See trade republics Messina, 19 Metastasio, Pietro, 4, 147, 151 Midas, 177, 189 Milton, John, 4, 150 Mirabeau, Victor Riqueti Marquis de, 213n17, 216n25 Mississippi Scheme, 47, 201 Molyneux, William, 75n58 monarchy: Doria on, 92n10, 95, 100, 102–4; Ferdinando Galiani on, 43, 159n115, 206, 212, 213n16, 216n25, 217; Montesquieu on, 102n40, 220; Pallante on, 21; Vico on, 120n98. See also universal monarchy monetary politics, 47–51, 167, 171, 177, 187–206 monetary disorders, 12, 47 monetary union (Italy), 49, 51–2 money: as principle of civilisation, 52, 127, 167, 184–95; as corrupting society, 101–2; ideal and real, 203; origin and history according to: Ferdinando Galiani, 33–5, 157–9, 168–71, 179–82, 187–92, 194; Doria, 101–2, 188; Vico, 124; value of. See under value Montealegre, José Joachim de, Marquis of Salas, 19–20, 63, 174, 196 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de, 40, 51n111, 60n10, 90n6, 102n40, 157n103, 166, 198, 220

moral knowledge, 6, 57, 65–71, 95, 139 moral sense, 57n2 Morellet, André, 217, 220 multitude (anarchical), 99 Muratori, Lodovico Antonio, 88, 143 Muscovy, 196 Naples: aristocracy (power of) in, 14– 15, 19, 176, 198n120; part of Austrian Empire, 15–16, 18–19, 26, 32, 61–2; Bourbons and, 16n11, 19; Broggia reform proposal for, 173– 5; ceto civile in, 16–18, 21, 25n36; commercial treaty with Russia, 8; commonplaces about history, 6, 12, 15, 17–19; economic and monetary problems, 10, 12, 14–15, 64–5, 196– 7, 199–200; and Europe 4, 7, 13– 14, 20, 22, 30, 104–5, 197; and European political thought, 41–7; faction struggle in, 14, 16, 18, 20; foreign policy, 8–9; foreign trade, 7–8, 20, 22, 30, 104–5, 195–7; Celestino Galiani on, 10, 28–30, 61–2, 86–7, 93; Ferdinando Galiani on history, 21, 24; and independence, 5, 14–19, 61; intellectual culture, 24–31, 60–1, 88–9, 109; Intieri on, 24–5, 28, 32–3, 62–5; lawyer class (togati) in, 16–20, 103, 165; and Macchia revolt, 16; and Masaniello revolt, 14; papal influence in, 15, 16–17n12, 19, 25–6, 61; Platonic philosophers in, 145; political economy, 11, 22, 32–3, 62– 5, 193–8; in political economy Ferdinando Galiani, 8, 22–4, 41, 165, 170, 194–206; in political economy Doria, 30, 104–5, 194–5; popular

258 Index culture 4; port of, 104; reform movements, 5, 7, 11, 18–22, 32, 37, 55, 91, 103–4, 165, 194–6; regalisti in, 18–19; (Parthenopean) Revolution 1799, 5, 18n16; part of Spanish Empire, 14–18, 25; tempo eroico, il, 19; Vico on, 16n11 natura simpatetica, 10, 116–19, 128, 142 ‘natural economy,’ 43, 96n17, 99–102 natural equality, 70, 120 natural law, 30, 143, 199, 218; Celestino Galiani on, 60, 63–87; Ferdinando Galiani on: in Dei doveri, 9, in Della moneta, 193; Grotius on, 9, 111n69; Hobbes on, 68–70, 113; Locke on, 74–5, 77; Pufendorf on, 70; Vico on, 107, 110–13 natural religion, 78–80, 118–19; Galiani, 150–8, 209–11 natural sociability (of the family), 67–71, 96, 99 necessity: breaks law, 192–3, 202; fixed order, 186; and free will, 65–70, 79, 87, 109, 114 Necker, Jacques, 216n26 needs (basic human), 42–3, 49–51, 69–73, 78; Broggia, 177; Doria, 188, 195; Celestino Galiani, 78, 82–3, 85; inseparable from desires and luxury: Ferdinando Galiani, 169, 182–4, 194, Vico, 124 Neri, Pompeo, 48–52, 189–90, 201 neutral trade, 8 neutrality, law of, 9 Newtonianism, 59–60, 135n22, 184n74 Nicole, Pierre, 70 Noah’s Ark, 180 Novelle letterarie, 48n100, 219

obedience, 76, 79, 83, 87, 95 obligation, moral, 9, 57, 76, 82, 95, 109, 123 oltremontaigne, 12n1 opinion: for Galiani (principle of society), 133, 209–11; virtue mere, 30, 75, 79, 89, 112, 133 Ospedale (albergo) dei poveri, 38n76 Osservatore, L’, 134n19 paganism, 84, 118–19 Pagano, Francesco Mario 220 Pagnini, Giovanni Francesco, 50–2, 189–90 pain, 30, 60, 66, 72–3, 76–7, 79–81, 87, 93, 142, 147, 149, 160–1 Paisiello, Giovanni, 3 Pallante, Giovanni, 21 Pandolfelli, Girolamo, 33n60 papacy, papal states, 15, 17n12, 19, 25–6, 28n46, 61 Parini, Giuseppe, 134n19 Pâris-Duverney, Joseph, 48, 55, 202 Paris, 4, 8, 39, 209, 211 Parliament(s): and grain trade reform, 212; origins of, 206 Parthenopean Revolution, 5, 18n16 passions, 30, 40, 93, 95, 115, 134n21, 135–42, 144 patriotism, 101, 108, 157n103, 176 Paulus, 158 Pelagius, 114 perfection, 170, 178, 187 Perfetti, Cavalier, 33n60 Persians, 84 Petrarch, Francesco, 7, 207 Philip II, of Spain, 103n43 Philosopher King, 100, 102 Phoenicians, 159n115 physiocrats, 131n14, 213–18, 220

Index 259 Piemonte, 49n102 Pii, Eluggero, 39 Plato, 93–4, 110–11, 123, 150 Platonic love, 3–4, 11, 33, 128, 132, 136, 143–52, 154, 163, 169, 183; as principle of society, 148–52, 209, 224 Platonism, 90, 94, 143, 145–8, 154; Cambridge, 57n2; Doria, 94, 97–100, 102, 105; Neapolitan, 145; Vico, 109–10, 114. See also Platonic love pleasure, 4, 30, 60, 67, 69, 72–3, 76–7, 79–82, 87–9, 93, 95–8, 113, 123, 125, 136, 139–40, 142, 148–9, 160– 1, 163, 175, 183, 193 Poland, 64 Polignac, Melchior de, 155–6, 209 political economy, 4, 5, 9, 11, 20, 22, 24, 30, 32–3, 34, 47–53, 62–5, 103– 6, 179, 188–206 polytheism, 157 Pope, Alexander, 45n94 population, 12, 22, 65, 73, 170, 193, 197–8, 204 Portugal, 6, 86, 103 power (political), 6, 9, 34, 42, 51–2, 62, 66, 85–6, 104, 195, 197, 199 price level (of goods), 24, 198, 203 pride, 4, 112, 183, 185 primitive man and society, 65, 68–71, 86, 89–90, 109, 111, 115–22, 124, 142, 152, 158 progress of humankind: Celestino Galiani, 68, 72–4, 80–3, 86–7; Ferdinando Galiani, 37, 162, 167, 171 property, 70, 73 protectionism, 43 providence (provvidenza, provvedenza): Celestino Galiani, 10; Ferdinando Galiani, 160–1, 167–9, 184–7, 195; Vico, 111, 115–23, 128, 152

public debt, 54, 165, 172, 192, 198, 201, 206, 209 publishing industry: in Naples, 26–8, 61 Pufendorf, Samuel, 52n117, 70, 71n50, 113, 164 Punghino, Toccolino de’ Lapi Toccoli, Count of, 129–33 punishment, 36, 82, 143, 167, 197; in afterlife, 75–6, 98, 147, 160 pur-amour, 43, 100, 123n106, 127n1 Quesnay, François, 213–14, 216n24 Quito, 36 Ragion di Stato. See reason of state Ramsay, Andrew Michael, Chevalier, 42n88, 94, 97, 127n1 rapacity, 101 rational love, 138–9 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, 216 reason, 40, 123, 123, 138–9 reason of state, 6, 105, 218 recoinage crisis: 1690s England, 47, 50, 189, 192; 1691 Naples, 65; 1747 Naples, 199–200 Redemption, 152. See also grace reflection, 73–6, 78–83, 87, 112, 122– 6, 136, 163 reform movements Naples, 5, 7, 11, 18–22; and Celestino Galiani and Intieri, 32–3; and Ferdinando Galiani, 22–4, 55, 165, 170, 195– 201, 206–7 regalisti (regalism), 18n16, 19 Renaissance, 12, 173 religion: as collective self-deceit, 150–7, 210 religious awareness, 78–80, 89, 118–20, 126, 132–3. See also natural religion religious instinct, 78–80

260 Index repubblica ideale, 111 republicanism: modern, 10, 13, 39; ancient, 43, 92, 94, 100, 102 Revolution, French, 42n88, Neapolitan/Parthenopean, 5, 18n16, Glorious Revolution England, 44 reward (divine), 75–6, 147 Riccardi, Alessandro, 17n12, 18n15 Ricci, Francesco Maria, 155n95 Rinuccini, Alessandro, 31n56 Robertson, John, 39 Rolli, Paolo, 4, 150 Roman civil law/jurisprudence, 110– 11, 125, 158–9 Rome: ancient, 7, 15, 34–6, 51, 125, 157, 180, 195, 206; eighteenth-century: intellectual life in, 26–7, 58– 61, and Naples, 60–1; and Vatican: see papacy Roubaud, Pierre-Joseph André, 223 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 47, 74, 99, 101, 102n40, 112 Royal Mint of Naples, 199 Royal Society of London, 60 Russia, 8 Saint-Pierre, Charles-Irénée Castel de, 205 salons: Paris, 4, 134n21, 209, 211; Celestino Galiani’s (in Naples), 31n55 San Stefano, Francesco Benavides, count of, 65 Sant’Eusebio, monastery of, 58 Santisteban, José Manuel de Benavides y Aragón, Count of, 19 satire, 3, 44, 46, 134 scarcity, 50, 182 scepticism: epistemological, 7, 27, 41, 149, 164, 224; Ferdinando Galiani,

22n26, 128, 149, 153, 168; moral, 30, 45, 47, 65–8, 70, 88, 97, 107, 112, 119–20, 125, 153; religious, 56–7 scholasticism, 26, 93, 110, 180, 182 scienza morale, 57, 65–87 Selden, John, 113 self-abnegation, 109–10 self-aggrandisement, 196 self-awareness, 78, 113, 123, 138, 142–3 self-correction, self-balance, self-regulation, self-sustaining, 57n2, 82, 83, 101, 105, 144 self-deceit, 3–4, 222; as corruption, 97; in Doria, 97; in Celestino Galiani, 83–6, 95; in Ferdinando Galiani, 7, 128, 143–52, 166; and idolatry, 83–6; of moral philosophy 93, 125; in philosophical literature since 1970s, 7n4; as principle of society, 6, 149–52, 167–8; of states and empires, 6, 83–6, 195–8; in Vico, 115, 118, 123, 125–6 self-deception. See self-deceit self-degradation, 30 self-delusion, 128 self-denial, 87, 94, 98, 121, 130, 132, 145n61, 166–7 self-determination, 67, 87 self-improvement, 83, 99. See also perfection self-interest, 4, 10, 27–8, 41, 46–7, 67, 69, 76, 87, 132, 138, 141–2, 149, 159, 162, 168, 221 self-irony, 4 selfishness, 21, 58, 66, 88, 95, 124, 128, 132, 165 self-knowledge, 96, 99 self-liberation, 21 self-liking, 46–7

Index 261 self-love, 96–100, 121, 131 self-preservation: individual, 69, 96– 7, 99, 112, 116–17, 119–20, 122–3, 131–2, 142; of states, 9, 51, 176 self-restraint, 21, 44, 169 self-subjection, 30, 43, 94–100, 115, 123n106 Senault, Jean-François, 134n22 sensation (and reflection): Doria on, 97; Ferdinando Galiani on, 139, 149, 161; Locke on, 74–6, 149, 161; Vico on, 114–16, 118. See also passions Serra, Antonio, 200n127 Seven Years’ War, 209 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of, 45–6, 57n2, 97, 222–3 Sicily, 129, 207 Silhouette, Étienne de, 45n94, 48n100 silver, 34–6, 50, 52, 157–9, 162, 167, 169–71, 177–9, 188, 191, 194, 199– 200 simplicity, 86, 108 sin, 13–14, 88, 98; Vico, 113–16, 121; Ferdinando Galiani, 132–3 slavery, 125, 156, 195 Smith, Adam, 40, 216n24 social contract, 166, 171, 179, 181 society (origins of), 47; Celestino Galiani, 65–83; Vico, 109, 111–22; Ferdinando Galiani, 131–3, 142– 63, 166, 209–10 Socrates, 55 Sophists, 95, 97 Spain, 6, 14–17, 19–20, 23, 25–6, 36, 86, 103, 174, 179 Sparta, 94 Spectator, 4, 134n19, 150 speculative judgements, 56, 79

Spinelli, Trojano, 135, 139n40, 139n42, 140n46, 141, 199–200, 208n1 Spinoza, Baruch de, 84, 89n5, 93, 113, 147, 153, 156 splendour, 101 state debt. See public debt state of nature: Hobbesian, 44, 68–71, 223; Celestino Galiani on, 50, 52, 65, 68–73, 77; Vico on, 111–12, 115–22; Ferdinando Galiani on, 167 Steele, Richard, Sir, 134n19, 150 Stoicism, 89, 109, 114–15, 125–6, 131, 148, 153, 160–1, 163, 170 Suard, Jean-Baptise, 212, 219 Suárez, Francisco, 110 Suez, isthmus of, 8 Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, duc de, 216 sumptuary laws, 202 superior (divine), 43, 75–6, 78–9, 81– 2, 133, 143 superstition, 33, 85, 216n25 Supremo Magistrato del Commercio, 20 Swift, Jonathan, 4, 150 sympathetic nature. See natura simpatetica Tacitus, 118 Tanucci, Bernardo, 208 Taranto, 104 Tavanti, Angelo, 190 taxation, 12–15, 23, 105, 172, 174, 197, 205 theatre (world as a), 150 theology, Christian, 56, 79, 83–4, 112, 152–6, 191 theocracy, 210

262 Index trade: neutral, 8; in the Mediterranean (since antiquity), 8, 34, 36, 180–1, 197; Neapolitan foreign, 13, 20, 22, 30, 32–3, 62–5, 104–5, 194– 7; luxury: see under luxury trade companies, 106, 195–6 trade republics, 6, 104, 106, 159 Tribunale del commercio, 8 Trojan War, 33, 158, 168 Turbolo, Giovanni, 200n127 Turin, 49 Tuscany, 32, 48–50, 218–19 tyranny, 102, 105, 121, 193 Tyre, 30, 159n115 underdevelopment. See economic growth/(under)development United Provinces, 6, 44, 92n8, 104, 106, 195–6 unity, 4, 49, 70, 72, 96, 100, 115, 120, 175 universal society (in commerce), 43, 49–51, 111, 120–1, 190–3 universal monarchy, 6, 104 University of Naples, 28–9, 32, 58, 61, 106, 108 urbanisation, 12, 22 utilitates, 114. See also needs utility(-seeking), 40, 68–9, 71, 77, 88–9, 91, 95, 101, 113, 116, 119–21, 156–62, 164, 166–8, 173, 176, 182– 7, 193 Valletta, Giuseppe, 26–7 value of money, 50, 52; artificial/by consent, 50, 52, 101, 124, 169, 171, 179, 188, 191; natural, 168–71, 178–82, 187–92, 194; Aristotelian, 50, 171, 179, 188, 190 Vattel, Emer de, 9

Venice, 134n19, 173 Ventura, Francesco, 18n15, 103 Venturi, Franco, 38, 218 Vesuvius, Mount, 135n22 vice, 10, 34, 70, 77, 82, 86, 89–90, 176 Vico, Giambattista, 5; and Bayle, 27– 8n42, 88n1, 89, 107, 117; and Broggia, 172–3, 175–6; on corruption, 113–14; on cyclical history, 10, 109; and Doria, 107–9, 112–13, 115, 122–4; on Epicureanism, 10, 107, 109, 112, 114–15, 119, 125–6; on error as self-deceit, 113, 115, 118, 123, 125–6; on excessive reflection, 122–6; on fables, 118– 19; on fear, 117–18, 122; and Fénelon, 123n106; and Celestino Galiani, 28, 114–15; and Ferdinando Galiani, 90, 126, 128, 142, 152–3, 163–4, 209, 217; on honesty, 114; on ‘ideal justice,’ 110; and intellectual culture Naples, 27, 107–8n61, 109; on intellectual pleasure and friendship, 119, 122, 124; on luxury, 123–4; on Macchia conspiracy 1701, 16n11; on monarchy, 120n98; and natural law, 107, 110– 13; on natura simpatetica, 116–19; on original sin, 114–17; on origins of religion, 118–20; and Polignac, 155–6; and Platonism, 109, 123; on providence, 111, 115–23, 152; on repubblica ideale, 111; on Roman law, 110–11; and scepticism, 107, 119– 20, 125; Scienza nuova context, 27, 107–8n61; on seeing in God, 115– 16, 123; on sensation and reflection, 113–16, 120–2; on Spinoza, 89n5; on state of nature and origins of society, 89–90, 109, 111, 115–22,

Index 263 164; on Stoicism, 109, 114–15, 125– 6; at University of Naples, 106, 108; on virtue, 109, 111, 113–14 Virgil, 189 virtue, 7, 30, 36, 43–5, 67, 70, 77, 87, 89–90, 94–5, 97–8, 101–4, 108–9, 111, 113–14, 125, 143, 148, 164, 167–8, 175, 185–6, 188, 207, 212 Vitruvius, 162n129 voci. See contratto alla voce Volland, Sophie, 211–12

Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, 5, 64, 93 War of American Independence, 8 Warburton, William, 45, 48n100 ‘weakness’ (human), 112 wealth, 6, 24, 34–5, 42–3, 51–2, 62, 66, 101, 168, 185, 194, 196, 205 witches (streghe), 33, 156–7 Wollaston, William, 45n94 wonder, 78, 116, 118, 157–8