The Italian Enlightenment and the Rehabilitation of Moral and Political Philosophy

ABSTRACT

By reconstructing the eighteenth-century movement of the Italian Enlightenment, I show that Italy’s political fragmentation notwithstanding, there was a constant circulation of ideas, whether on philosophical, ethical, political, religious, social, economic or scientific questions, among different groups in various states. This exchange was made possible by the shared language of its leading illuministi—Cesare Beccaria, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Antonio Genovesi, Mario Pagano, Pietro Verri, Marco Antonio Vogli, and Giammaria Ortes—and resulted in four common traits. First, the absence of a radical trend, such as the French materialist-atheist trend and, British Deism. Second, the rejection of inhumane laws and institutions, capital punishment, torture, war and slavery. Third, the idea of public happiness as the goal of good government and legislation. And fourth, the conception of the economy as a constellation where social capital, consisting of education, morality, and civility, plays a decisive role. I conclude that the Italian Enlightenment, not unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, was both cosmopolitan and local, which allowed its leading writers to develop a keen awareness of the complexity of society alongside a degree of prudence regarding the possibility and desirability of its modernization.

KEYWORDS:

• Enlightenment
• morality
• religion
• public happiness
• equality
• civil economy

Notes

1. See Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. 1, 3–58; for a glimpse of Venturi’s path-breaking work, see Venturi, Utopia and Reform and Italy in the Enlightenment; for a list of his publications in English, see Wahnbaek, Luxury and Public Happiness, 2 note 4.

2. On Genovesi, see Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. 1, 523–644.

3. On Verri, see Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. 1, 645–747.

4. Rother, “Felicità,” 233–36.

5. Verri, “Osservazioni sulla tortura” (Remarks on torture).

6. On Ortes, see Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. 1, 403–10.

7. Mauzi, L’idée du bonheur.

8. Ansaldi and others, Raccolta; see Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. 1, 353–403.

9. See Guasti, “Antonio Genovesi’s ‘Diceosina’.”

10. D’Onofrio, “Concept of ‘Felicitas Publica’.”

11. See Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. 1, 177–86; on Muratori’s awareness of the gap in the private pursuit of happiness, as both a potential source of disorder and a possible civic virtue, and the Prince’s promotion of public happiness, a pursuit more general in its scope but more limited in its content, see Continisio, “Governing the Passions,” 384.

12. My emphasis; the quoted essay is a shorter version of Verri’s “Considerazioni sulla proposizione di restringere il lusso.”

13. Cf. Verri, “Discorso sulla felicità,” 241–22.

14. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 164. See Verri, “Discorso sulla felicità,” 242–43, note 119.

15. Beccaria, Essay on Crimes and Punishments, 2. Cf. Shackleton, “The Greatest Happiness,” 1472–74.

16. Ibid., 1477.

17. Ibid., 1479–81.

18. Verri, “Meditazioni sulla economia politica,” 3, 19, 37.

19. See Continisio, “Governing the Passions,” 384.

20. See Bruni and Zamagni, Economia civile, esp. 98–99. For a plausible critique, see D’Onofrio, “Concept of ‘Felicitas Publica’.”

21. Wahnbaek, Luxury and Public Happiness, 191.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sergio Cremaschi

Sergio Cremaschi, now retired, was Reader in Moral Philosophy at the Amedeo Avogadro University (Vercelli), Italy. He has published widely on ethical theory, the history of ethics and philosophy of economics. His publications include Utilitarianism and Malthus’s Virtue Ethics: Respectable, Virtuous and Happy (Routledge, 2014); and Normativity within the Bounds of Plural Reasons: The Applied Ethics Revolution (Aarhus University Press, 2007).