Boston College

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Department of History

LAND IN THE ENLIGHTENED IMAGINATION: FROM ASTROBIOLOGY

TO COMMODIFICATION. AGRARIAN DEBATES IN EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY ITALY

a dissertation

By

SCOTT D. McGEHEE

submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

May 1998
 Contents

Preface ………………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter I Introduction …………………………………………………………….9

Chapter II Antonio Genovesi and the Ethical Landscape ………………………….45

Chapter III Land and the Classical Past …………………………………………….84

Chapter IV Physiocracy …………………………………………………………….124

Chapter V The Newtonian Landscape ……………………………………………..174

Bibliography .…………………………………………………………………………215
Land in the Enlightened Imagination: from Astrobiology to Commodification.
Agrarian Debates in Eighteenth Century Italy

Scott D. McGehee

Boston College Department of History

Paul Breines, Advisor

Writings on the subject of agriculture expanded at a noticeable rate in the second half of

the eighteenth century throughout Europe, but particularly so in the Italian states. These

writings, only rarely treated by historians as a specific body of literature, are ordinarily

and inadequately understood as simple contributions to the science of agronomy or

appendages to the development of the economic theory. This enthusiasm for agriculture,

however, was a central component of the emerging spirit of modernity. Land, in all of the

principal currents of enlightened thought, was precisely the point at which man and

nature were linked. The specific way in which this link was imagined was one of the

pivotal determinants of competing cosmologies in the later half of the century. The

primary cosmological division was between those who tended to preserve an

astrobiological vision of man and nature, and those who tended to fragment this unity into

autonomous spheres of reality in a specifically economic universe. This study delineates

four principal discursive fields within which the nexus land/man is conceived. The first

focus is on the way in which the imagined ethical component of land defined the nature

of man. The second is a focus on the way in which the historical relationship of man to

the land determined the image of a particular future. The third is an assessment of the

influence of the Physiocratic concept of expanded reproduction. The fourth looks at the

way in which the Newtonian principles and scientific discourse reordered the concept of
land and man as an object of scientific reasoning. The commercialization of agriculture in

the eighteenth century was accompanied by profound efforts among the Italian illuministi

to give a particular character to the rapid changes around them. Their efforts in the field

of agriculture helped to lay the basis for the economic theories and social sciences that

would emerge more fully as independent fields of study in the following century.
 Preface

In its origin, this research began in a very different place from where it ended. Of

course, there is nothing unusual about this for historians who are always digging for

roots. In my particular case, however, the interest I developed in the dustier shelves of

the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence was largely accidental. While gathering background

material for a dissertation that was to focus on the latter half of the nineteenth century, I

stumbled upon an obscure little book on olive cultivation first published in 1776; an

accident that was to shift the focus of my research by more that a century. This little

book led me to a whole field of literature that, by and large, has been overlooked by

historians.

My research began as an investigation into the agrarian question as a problem of

Italian unification and the development of industrial capitalism. It was then, in its origin,

conceived as a fairly traditional research project into a particular problem of the agrarian

history of Italy in the modern epoch. The importance of agricultural development has

long been recognized as an essential component of industrial development. To be sure, as

Renato Zangheri noted: “in all known cases the development of a modern capitalist

economy are strictly conditioned by the resources provided by agriculture, by an

accumulation that has its place of origin in rural society.”1 This was an enormously

complicated area of research that could be usefully approached from many different

disciplines: micro and macro economic analysis, sociology, political economy,

technological development, and so on. As Luigi Dal Pane noted, “the cultivation of the

1
Renato Zangheri. “Agricoltura e sviluppo del capitalismo” in Agricoltura e contadini nella storia
d’Italia. (Torino: Einaudi 1977 ) 41-74.
fields does not involve only a relationship between the land and man, but also the

relationships between men; their economic, psychological, juridical, and moral

relationships.”2

In the beginning it was difficult to know where to begin such a project, as the

agrarian question is such a multifaceted phenomenon. The modern agricultural

revolution and the concomitant industrial revolution represents nothing less than a kind of

second Neolithic revolution for humanity, that is the moment in which nature was

domesticated and civilization became possible as a result of mastering the ability to

ensure a regular food surplus. With the agricultural/industrial revolutions of the modern

epoch, the daily activity for the majority of humanity, for the first time, was no longer

dependent on the perpetual cycles of nature. Most human activity came to be ruled by,

what we might call, industrial time or abstract time detached form all considerations of

nature. It goes without saying that the shift from agriculture to industry, from a rural

society to an urban one, from natural time to abstract time, has profound implications for

all aspects of human activity. Moreover, to take it one step further, the manner in which

the fields are cultivated, and the degree to which the forces of nature are harnessed and

altered by man, not only changes nature, but, as Marx would say, “changes at the same

time his [man’s] own nature.” Productive labor and nature are intimately linked in a

manner that is central to understanding the contours of the historical process.

“Domesticated nature,” writes Piero Bevilacqua, “made to serve the productive tasks of

society has gradually heated the planet, and since that time has become, itself, an element

in the historical process, an internal component in the social life of men.”3

2
Sergio Zaninelli. “La storia dell’agricoltura dalseicento al settecento,” in La storiografia Italiana
degli ultimi vent’anni II. età moderna. A cura da Luigi De Rosa, (Bari: Laterza 1989) 209-233.
3
Piero Bevilacqua. Tra natura e storia. (Roma: Donzelli 1996) 11.
 The relationships established between man and agricultural production deeply

influences man’s specific activity insofar as his metabolism with nature is concerned, as

well, it forms the parameters of social and political hierarchies that are possible between

men. The organization of rural life, and the changes in that organization wrought from the

political and economic developments of a particular culture, have historically formed the

very foundation of social intercourse. Technological advances help to order the

allocation of labor within an agricultural system in ways that are unique to the technology

of that system; whether a system is organized by extensive or intensive farming, whether

a system is dependent on large scale irrigation or is organized around small autonomous

productive units, whether a system makes use of organic or inorganic fertilizers, and so

on. But, within a technological system requiring a specific allocation of labor, we do not

find a necessary hierarchical relationship that can be said to emerge exclusively from a

given technology. Such relationships are essentially political relationships. Thus, we

might say that while man’s metabolic activity with regards to nature may be

technologically determined, the allocation of that activity is fundamentally political and

indeterminate. Large scale irrigation projects, for example, made possible by a

technological mastery of water management, required the coordination of large numbers

of laborers to build and maintain such systems. In this sense, the metabolism between

man and nature is technologically determined, that is, large-scale labor coordination is

presupposed in the application of the technology. But, that such coordination be based on

slave labor, corvee labor, wage labor, or cooperative labor, is decidedly indeterminate; it

is rather the result of the various systems of power present where the technology is

applied.

It was this general theoretical problem that I was interested in exploring; a

problem that Marx resolved within two different orders of mediation between man and

nature. That is, human activity that is ontologically necessary and activity that is

historically indeterminate. But the two orders of mediation suggested by Marx are not to

be understood as two different activities, the one necessary the other unnecessary.

Technological mastery of large irrigation projects, for instance, represents historically

accumulated labor that necessarily mediates the relationship between man and nature in

his self-reproduction in a very specific manner, it also represents accumulated capital, and

thus mediates relationships between men, but only under the general conditions of

capitalism; not as a different activity, but as two sides of the same activity, the one as

accumulated labor, the other as accumulated capital. Without the important distinction

between the two orders of mediation, Marxism becomes nothing less than a mechanistic

and completely deterministic social science, little different from Positivism.

I first recognized the importance of this problem while studying socialist

literature on the agrarian question during the turn of the century. I was struck by the

generally dismissive and often hostile attitude of the European socialists towards the

peasantry. With some notable exceptions, the pervasive attitude expressed by socialists

towards the peasantry was articulated by Fredrich Engles in his article The Peasant

Question in Germany and France (1895). “It is the duty of our party,” he writes “to make

clear to the peasants again and again that their position is absolutely hopeless as long as

capitalism holds sway.”4 It was Engles’ position that the socialists could not promise

anything to the peasantry in the way of protection of their property against the

“overwhelming power of capitalist production.” In general, socialists tended to equate

peasant production in agriculture against large capitalist farms to artisan production

4
Cited in Marxism and the Agrarian Question vol.I. Hussain, A., Keith Tribe. (Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities Press 1981) 17.
against the overwhelming forces of mechanized industry. In a speech to a conference in

Brussels of International Socialists in 1891, Wilhelm Liebknecht prophesied that

American grain would ruin the European peasantry driving them into the ranks of the

proletariat guaranteeing the victory of socialism. Indeed, for these socialist reformers,

every new smokestack in Europe necessarily represented the strengthening of socialism.

Thus, the ruin of the peasantry was an unfortunate but inevitable stage in historical

progress, a stage that thesocialist were all too happy to help accelerate.

Paradoxically the agrarian question (Agrafraga) became a critically important

issue for the Socialist International at a time when the percentage of population engaged

in agriculture was declining. It was also the moment in which parliamentary democracy

was expanding. The peasantry was experiencing increased pressure on its traditional way

of life and its discontent was expressed in the arena of mass politics for the first time. It

was imperative that the socialist adopt a position towards the peasantry that would

establish, if not an alliance, then at least a non-antagonistic relationship between them.

But, for the socialists this proved to be a difficult task. Insofar as the socialist program

included the peasantry, it included them in their capacity as “sellers of labor” rather than

peasant owners of land with traditional rights over production. Peasants were regarded as

potentially reactionary as they owed their very origin to the feudal mode of production. A

protection of peasant rights was essentially a defense of a historically outmoded

economic system and would slow the progress of industrial capitalism. In Italy, on more

than one occasion, the socialists refused to support peasant struggles, arguing that

progress towards socialism could only be made when peasants became rural wage-

workers.

At issue was the idea of transformation. For the socialists, the transformation
from feudalism to capitalism was essentially the transformation of man from one

economic category to another: from peasant to proletariat. But it was not the socialists

alone who wanted to transform this unknowable inhabitant of the countryside into a

modern man, from one who was governed by the irrational forces of tradition and the

mysterious rhythms of nature to a subject of a modern state. In a speech to the Parliament

on July 7, 1880, the Tuscan landowner and statesman, Sidney Sonnino argued that,

The rural classes are estranged from our institutions. And I maintain that a
modern state can never be vigorous if the great masses of population do not share
in its prosperity with its heart and not only its purse. The peasants represent more
than 60% of the population, and Italy will never be strong, and will never be
secure of its own future until our peasants feel themselves to be truly Italian.5

The peasant, whatever he might be, did not seem to belong to the modern world

in the eyes of the most powerful forces for social change. He must become, in fact, is

destine to become something else, either rural proletariat or Italian citizen, but however

else he may develop, he must accept the logic of the modern capitalism and be

transformed into a sufficient mass of election fodder. The transformation of the peasantry

into something else was not the inevitable result of natural processes, but rather the result

of competing political forces each seeking to transform the peasant into its own image.

At this point in my general research my interest shifted away from the question:

what is the nature of the peasantry and its role in the development of industrial capitalism,

to what is the history of the image of the peasantry or the history of its concept in the eyes

of those who sought to transform him? Only by understanding how the peasant was

conceived by the cultured classes, or the “artificers of the norm” as Heinz Deiter-

5
Cited in Rivista Storica Italiana anno CII fasc. I. April 1990. 91-92
Kittsteimer called them, can we begin to see how the concept itself was instrumental in

the transformation.

The government sponsored inquest on the conditions of rural life in Italy,

initiated shortly after unification in the 1870’s, seemed a natural starting point for a

research project of this kind. The Inchiesta Agraria Jacini, as it came to be known, was

conducted over the course of several years with a considerable heterogeneity of

observational approaches. The results seemed to be, less a question of what the

investigators observed as how they observed or within what theoretical and discursive

framework their observations were made. The Inchiesta itself was recognized by

contemporaries as a critical step in the formation of the Italian state. Archangelo Di Staso

wrote that by means of the Inchiesta, “ Italy began to take knowledge of its own

conditions, of its own needs, of its own future,” it was “the revelation of Italy to the

Italians.6

Upon my first visit to the State Archives in Rome I was excited by the prospect

of studying the original documents of the Jacini Inquest, certain that I would find vastly

divergent concepts and images articulated by this rather random assortment of local

investigators. Indeed, in my initial pass I was not disappointed. Some of the contributions

bordered on the comical, expounding on the moral laxity of family life or the physical

characteristics of the peasantry—woman with thick ankles, broad waists, and

impenetrable black eyes. Other reports failed to even mention the actual peasant as they

made detailed descriptions of farming organization and commerce. But, in the end, I was

in fact disappointed insofar as I was unable to formulate clearly competing concepts of

6
Cited in Alberto Caracciolo. L’Inchiesta Agraria Jacini, (Torino: Einaudi, 1973.)
the peasantry as expressed by divergent points of view. There appeared to be an

overriding unity of discourse within which all of the reports that I read seemed to

comfortably reside. The Jacini Inquest, approved by the Italian Parliament, tended to

examine the agrarian situation essentially on the basis of production, agricultural

technique, fiscal weight of tariffs, and so on. In other words, all of the categories that are

essential to the economic progress of a developing nation. But still, the peasant seemed

to be little more than an inert mass of raw material. Since I was unable to delineate

clearly divergent concepts of the peasantry within the report, I decided to begin to explore

that point at which the peasantry is incorporated into the ideology of economic

progress—the instance at which the peasant himself becomes an economic category.

It was at this point that I stumbled on the obscure book on olive cultivation from

the late eighteenth century. The peasantry, insofar as it was mentioned, still resembled a

mass of raw material for the erudite intellectual to fashion according to his own whims,

but the imagined social structure in which this raw material was placed differed sharply

from the nineteenth century dogma of economic progress. The demand for agricultural

improvement was embedded in a discourse of ethical and moral development rather than

the technocratic rationality that so dominates the modern age. The peasantry, as an

isolated concept, superficially seemed unchanged, but when placed within a different

universe of meaning was radically transformed.

As I began exploring the problem with this approach in mind, I discovered that

the essential transformation was taking place nearly a century earlier than I had imagined.

The peasantry, as an economic category within an ideology of economic progress, was

emerging in the eighteenth century, but its actual transformation as a subordinate subject
the modern world of capitalist production and a global market would not be complete for

more than a century. The material transformation itself was accompanied by an ongoing

conflict over the image of the future of man. To transform the peasantry was in fact to

transform humanity itself. That this transformation was met with tenacious resistance is

evident by the observations made by Carlo Levi as late as the 1940’s.

To the peasants the state is more distant than heaven and far more of a
scourge, because it is always against them. Its political tags and platforms and,
indeed, the whole structure of it do not matter. The peasants do not understand
them because they are couched in a different language from their own, and there
is no reason why they should even care to understand them…They do no and can
not have what is called political awareness, because they are literally “pagani,”
pagans, or countrymen, as distinguished from city-dwellers. The deities of the
state and city can find no worshippers here on the land, where the wolf and
ancient black boar reign supreme, where there is no wall between the leaves of
the trees above and the roots below. They can not have even an awareness of
themselves as individuals, here where all things are held together by acting upon
one another and each one is a power unto itself, working imperceptibly, where
there is no barrier that can not be broken down by magic. 7

Today, the Italian peasantry has all but disappeared, leaving only traces of its

historic endurance behind. Unable to withstand forces that were outside of its conceptual

universe, he succumbed and was forced to abandon his ancient dwelling place among the

fields or terraces of his Mediterranean mountain slopes. The modern city-dweller, the

heir to the rustic countryman, has discovered his individuality and found himself

immersed in a network of circulating commodities, producing and consuming at ever

faster rates till he finds it difficult to distinguish himself from the elusive objects of his

desire. No longer chained to the eternal cycles of nature, modern man finds himself

trapped in an ever expanding world of commerce where his innermost secretes become
7
Carlo Levi. Christ Stopped at Eboli, translated by Frances Frenaye. (London: Penguin 1982) 78-
79
the latest target of a relentless search for another market niche. He accepts his condition

because he has accepted the language of progress, where progress is an end in itself and

judged solely by the criterion of economic expansion. But this condition, whether one

regards it favorably or not, is not the inevitable outcome of the natural process of

economic development. It is the result of nearly three hundred years of social, political,

and intellectual conflict. It is this conflict that I attempt to explore in the following pages.
 Chapter One

Introduction

The heaven without the earth would have been an abyss of shadows, and

the Earth without the heaven empty and useless; both were created in the manner

of two twins from the infinite goodwill of God.

Gio. Battista Ferroni 1636

Geoscopia cerale, discorso astrologiofisco

Agriculture is much followed among them; there is not a span of earth

without cultivation, and they observe the winds and propitious stars.

Tommaso Campanella 1623

Civitas Solis, idea reipublicae Platonicae

On the front of an agricultural handbook8 reprinted in Venice in 1772 is an

allegorical design depicting three goddesses standing in a field holding the symbols of

science, art, and law. Behind the three goddesses is an astronomer seated at his telescope

following the path of a comet overhead with geometric symbols marking the comet's

trajectory in the sky. Between the goddesses and the astronomer are two peasants

working the fields near a row of olive trees and in the foreground of the entire design

8
Ricordo d'agricoltura was first published in 1567 went through many reprints until in 1772 Gian-
Francesco Scottoni added an introduction, numerous footnotes and the front piece.
rests a modern plow. As late as 1772, this image -- suggesting a universe in which the

celestial and terrestrial worlds are entirely interconnected, a universe where the fields of

law, art, science, agriculture, and astronomy can be conceived as but particular

expressions of an overall unity, in what Georges Gusfdorf calls an "astrobiological"

conception of the cosmos -- can still make its appearance on the cover of a highly

respected book on agricultural techniques. Such visions, depicted in either graphic design

or in discourse itself, would become increasingly rare in the following century, so much

so as to be considered anachronisms, or, if persisting, would serve purely ideological

functions. The astrobiological cosmos suggested by the design, could find no home in the

modern world of highly developed, yet autonomous systems of law, science, and

economic theory. The contemporary world is largely characterized by the breakup of the

unitary vision of the universe.

"Modern times” writes Geroges Gusdorf, “are times of disassociation of the

truth, times in which truth is researched in its disassociation."9 What value could the

knowledge of astronomy or art have for the practice of agriculture in the modern sense, or

conversely how could agricultural improvement have links with the problems of justice,

arts, or sciences? Yet agriculture, since the time of the Greeks, has always been

conceived, as all things were conceived, as particular parts of a greater whole. The Greek

conception of Nature was of a Being that embraced the totality of particular things. Thus,

man himself was imagined as but a particular element that was ruled by an intelligibility

that embraced the whole. Gusdorf asserts that in Greek thought, "Ancient anthropology

cannot be dissociated from the cosmology from which it is an aspect. Astronomy,

physics, physiology, natural history, psychology do not form themselves as distinct

9
Georges Gusdorf, Origine delle scienze umanes (Genova: ECIG, 1992) 339.
fields." 10 Nor could they, as the very idea of law or intelligibility, in its origin, is an

affirmation that "necessity is exercised from high to low by virtue of the divine over the

human. "11

This unitary cosmos, in which all things were understood specifically in their

relationship to the whole, dominated western thought until the late Renaissance, when the

first serious signs of a fracture made its appearance and Galileo radically dissociated

physics from metaphysics and united celestial motion with terrestrial motion. This is not

to say, however, that the astrobiological cosmos had ever been a stable system of thought.

On the contrary, it has a two thousand year history of profound mutations and

transformations that characterize western man’s relentless efforts to find his place in the

world. But in spite of all of the perplexing mutations, the singular concept of unity was

more or less preserved. The history of its breakup, its fragmentation, and disintegration

in the modern sense, is the history of a long and torturous process that has its roots in its

origin. This study, of agricultural writings in eighteenth century Italy, is conceived as a

small contribution to understanding this process of fragmentation.

The history of fragmentation or dissociation between areas of human cognition

and activity, however, is something different from asserting the presence of an overriding

principle of unity, whether of mythos, logos, or divine providence, in which all particulars

must refer back to the intelligible whole. Dissociation does not occur all at once as the

singular shattering of the center. It occurs piecemeal, with the whole gradually loosing its

dominion over the parts. Yet, even when the parts assert themselves as autonomous,

more often than not, they become reincorporated and reunified into a new cosmological

synthesis. One example will serve to illustrate the point.

10
Gusdorf 48.
11
Gusdorf 39.
 All attempts to order human reality in space give rise to a cosmology and

attempts to order that reality in time give rise to history. In Greek thought these two

orders of reality were always united. The Greek concept of space and time were both

ordered on the basis of the circle. The cosmos was hierarchically organized by concentric

spheres moving in perfect circular motion, and time itself was based on the same motion

of the circle. The time/space cosmology of the Greeks was not imagined as the simple

ordering of facts in the modern sense; it was simultaneously the ordering of norms and

values that were called to govern the field of human activity along with the course of the

planets. The rotation of the planets was the model that determined the course of human

events where all things return to themselves. History, within this conception, is the story

of the rise and fall of civilizations bound by the eternal course of circular time. "We must

affirm,” writes Aristotle, “the opinion formulated that men periodically return identically

to themselves, not only one, two or a few times, rather an infinity of times."12

But the circular cosmos of the ancients was interrupted with the introduction of

the prophetic or linear time of the Jews. For the Jews, history was specifically the story

of a chosen people fulfilling God's prophecy in time moving towards the long awaited

promise of redemption. There were no endless cycles within human history as with the

movement of the celestial objects; there was but the movement towards a specific goal

after which history will end. The ascendance of Christianity in the West was also the

acceptance of a radically different conception of historical time, Judeo-Christian time,

that interrupted the harmonious structure of the eternal return. This radical disjuncture

between the structure of space and time dissolved the bonds that defined the universe as

imagined by the ancients and had to be profoundly transformed in the medieval period by

12
Cited in Gusdorf 41.
the scholastic doctors in a way that could satisfy both the demands of reason and divine

prophesy. The universe was now governed by two orders of reality, one, celestial,

divine, and eternal; the other, terrestrial, profane, and transitory. But the medieval

scholars were able to unite this fragmented universe under the unifying concept of divine

providence. That this synthesis was never entirely satisfactory is shown by the constant

struggle to separate that which was knowable through reason from that which was the

knowable only through revelation. But in spite of the ontological conflict engendered by

this separation, the overriding assumption was still that the parts always referred back to

the whole and that both orders of reality, celestial and terrestrial, were part of a

cosmological order that was also an order that governed the norms and values of human

activity.

For the unitary conception of the universe to be fragmented, its various

components had to assert themselves as, not only separate, but also, autonomous spheres

of reality that had an intelligibility independent of the whole. That is, for example, it had

to be asserted that nature worked according to laws that are not subject to divine

intervention, or that the laws of history operate independently of divine providence, or,

further that human history is independent of natural history, or that norms and values do

not spring from divine will but from individual will, and so forth. The intellectual history

of the West, since the medieval synthesis, is checkered with attempts to conceive of

various spheres of reality entirely in their autonomy. Petrarch's creation of the love

sonnet in the fourteenth century, for example, was an expression of this phenomenon. It

was an attempt to conceive of poetic beauty according to its own impulses rather than

something subordinate to divine love. What Petrarch did for poetry Leonardo da Vinci

did for art and nature and Machiavelli did for politics. But on the whole, the Renaissance
struggled to preserve a cosmological unity within a new synthesis, not to break it apart

into its separate components. The Renaissance generally sought to recover circular time

of the ancients as they themselves marked the return or rebirth of a Golden Age.

But to speak of the unity or disunity of thought in such fundamentally basic

realms as man’s place in the universe would be absurd without reference to man's activity

and the relationship of his activity to his mode of thought or the way in which he

structures his cosmos. Here is not the place to propose exactly what this relationship is,

but simply to assert, that the structure of man’s imagined cosmos gives meaning to his

activity, all of his activity, and situates it so to speak, in both time and space. Since the

time of the Neolithic revolution up until the late twentieth century, man’s primary activity

has always been to secure the conditions of his own reproduction in and through

agriculture, both crop production and husbandry. Starting with the assumption that there

is a relationship between man’s activity and his thought, it would be reasonable to further

assume that any fundamental change in his primary activity would have implications for

his mode of thought, and conversely that any fundamental shift in his mode of thought

would have implications for his primary social activity.

In the eighteenth century, the focus of this study, the structure of man’s primary

activity in agriculture began to make a fundamental shift in the form of an agricultural

revolution, a revolution that Marc Bloc suggests, in the social sphere, marks the end of

community and the birth of agrarian individualism.13 At the same time the broad outlines

of modern thought began to take shape in what is known generally as the Enlightenment.

By and large, however, these two areas of research, agricultural transformation and

Enlightenment thought, have been treated separately by historians, or when on rare

13
Marc Bloch, La fine della comunita e la nascita dell'individualismo agrario (Milano: Jaca Book
1997.)
occasion they have been treated as a body of literature specific to the eighteenth century,

agriculture has been subordinated to a marginal position and subsumed under the general

categories of modern political economy rather than integrated into the broader concerns

of the European philosophes. In Enzo Piscitelli's excellent, but all too brief overview of

the agricultural writings in the Italian settecento (1979)14, we have a useful glimpse of the

general scope of the problems of agriculture as perceived by the Italian economisti. But

Piscatelli organizes his research almost in the manner of a data bank, categorizing various

writers according to their general policy positions regarding various issues of the day:

free export or import of grain, large verses small land holdings, sale of church land,

breakup of large estates, peasant property, elimination of the grain provisioning system,

support for Physiocracy, concern for the peasant's well being, revision of the peasant

contract, rural credit, direct and indirect taxes, tariff policy, and so forth. Indeed, these

and many more were the central policy issues, albeit with innumerable specificities

depending upon the specific region. By utilizing only the categories of public policy and

traditional political economy, however, Piscatelli unites thinkers whose world views are

entirely incompatible. If one only looks at the issue of the grain trade, we will find

dogmatic utilitarians from Milan defending the same position as Catholic humanists from

Naples. The policy position in the narrow sense may be essentially the same but the

economic and social theory from which such a position is derived diverges sharply in its

structure. The mistake that Piscatelli makes, by organizing the economisti italiani

according to economic policy alone, is to assume that the strictly economic argument had

been delineated in the minds of the illuministi themselves and could thus be treated as a

body of strictly economic thought, or even if the economisti were not clear, modern

14
Enzo Piscitelli, "Il pensiero degli economisti italiani del '700 sull'agricoltura, la proprietá terriera
e la condizione dei contadini," Clio anno XV-n.2 1979: 245-292.
historians can confidently reach back into their writings and remove the economic theory

as though nature itself had delineated the boundaries of such thought for us.

But the nature of economic thought was far from clear in the eighteenth century.

The very categories from which today's historian organizes his research were being

formulated during the period under study. The boundaries that separated an ethical

arguments from an economic argument, or the political, the theological, the scientific, and

so forth, were sometimes impossible to distinguish. Economic discourse, strictly

speaking, did not exist in the eighteenth century. Those subjects that we have come to

regard as economic in nature--that which treats the production and distribution of the

wealth-- in the eighteenth century were in fact encased in a far broader modes of

reasoning that displayed a multiplicity of faces, and while immediate policy issues may

have frequently overlapped, these economisti italiani were not traveling down the same

road. The very multiplicity of reasoning used to formulate an economic argument,

according to Screpanti, suggests that "political economy may not be a Darwinian

discipline, that the last ring of evolution does not contain in itself all of the preceding

developments and that these cannot be forgotten as irrelevant or separate."15 The various

“irrelevant” logical structures were not vestigial organs destined to drop off once the

proper "economic" argument asserted itself. The "economic" aspects of a particular

discourse did not have an autonomy independent from the larger discursive structure, but

rather were dependent upon those larger structures for its own meaning. To remove the

presumed "economic" discourse from its larger context is to impose retroactively a

meaning on the fundamental categories of political economy necessarily different from

what was originally intended, giving rise to the illusion that economic theory had

15
E. Screpanti and S. Zamagni, Profilo di storia del pensiero economico (Roma: NIS, 1989) 2.
something of a linear development culminating in the modern concept.

But economic theory emerged in and through a clash between fundamentally

divergent world views or competing epistimologies and ontologies, each organizing the

essential categories of political economy according to different principles. If we take but

one of the central components of economic analysis in the eighteenth century--land--

which was considered the basis of every robust economy by most eighteenth century

writers, we will see that it carries a good deal more meaning for some economisti than

for others. Modern economic theory understands land as a factor of production with

varying degrees of productive potential. For many, if not most of the Italian writers up

through the eighteenth century, however, land was not defined and understood as simply

a geographic space within an economic structure. For writers like Antonio Genovesi and

numerous others, it also constituted an ethical space that helped to define man’s moral

activity in a larger political, social and spiritual context. That is to say, that man’s

activity in relation to the land gave him a special claim to an ethical life that was not

equally present in all spheres of human activity. The model of the citizen-solider-farmer

of the early Roman Republic was central to this concept in many of the "economic"

writings of the century. Before land could be treated as a variable component of an

autonomous system of economic science, the ethical definition of land had to be detached

so that the concept of land was unfettered. But this detachment was not the result of a

gradual evolution within "economic" theory itself, nor did it emerge as the reflection of

the "actual" evolution of the economy; it was the result of broad philosophical conflicts

that largely helped to redefine mans place in both time and space. It was, in a word, a

critically important part of the philosophical debates in the century of light.

Before establishing more clearly the links between agriculture and Enlightenment
philosophy, we should point out the degree to which agricultural questions became part of

a general enthusiasm in the broader culture, an interest that increased at a steady rate from

the late fifteenth century through the nineteenth, increasing at an exponential rate during

the course of the eighteenth century if measured by the number of publications on

agriculture alone. Thokild Kjaergaard has estimated that by 1814 more than 200,000

agricultural texts circulated throughout Europe as against only 10,000 in 1470.16 Even in

Poland, where there were no existing agricultural texts circulating in 1700, by 1750 there

were over 300.17 Prior to the fifteenth century there were only a few significant texts on

estate management and farming published in England in the thirteenth century, but these

seem to be isolated instances rather than part of a general trend. A more widespread

active interest in agriculture began in the late fifteenth century with a large demand for

the republication of many of the Roman agriculturists, Columella's Rei rusticae in

particular. Most notable was an uninterrupted enthusiasm for agriculture that began in

England with publications like Fitzherbert's Boke of Husbondrye (1523), Weston's

Systema agriculturae (1669), Mortimer's Whole Art of Husbandry (1707), culminating

in Jethro Tull's Horse Houghing Husbandry (1731) and Arthur Young's Rural Economy

(1770).18 But the English were not alone in their interest. According to Schumpeter,

where the Dutch may have led in agricultural practice on the continent, the Italians led in

the literature on the subject 19 with a notable group of contributions reaching all the way

back to the thirteenth century: Pietro de'Crescenzi (1230-1320) author of Liber ruralium

commodorum; Pier Vettori (1499- 1585) Delle lodi e della coltivazione degl'ulivi;

16
Thokild Kjaergaard, "Origins of Economic Growth in European Society Since the XVI Century:
the Case of Agriculture," Journal of European Economic History n.3 1986.
17
Jeremy Black, Eighteenth Century Europe 1700-1789 (New York: St. Martin Press, 1990).
18
Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986).
19
Schumpeter 158.
Giovanni Vittorio Soderini (1526-1597)Due trattato della cultura dell'agricoltura della

coltivazione dele viti; Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556) Coltivazione; Bernardo Davanzati

(1529-1606) Coltivazione toscana delle viti e d'alcuni arbori; and Camillo Tarello's

Ricordo di agricoltura first published in 1567 and reprinted several times in the

eighteenth century. Schumpeter's general assessment of the importance of these writings

taken as a whole is that they "contributed considerably to the formation of some of the

habits of thought that are most characteristic of modern economics."20

Notwithstanding the analytic importance of these writings, however, the general

enthusiasm for agriculture did not reach circles beyond rural practitioners or specialists

until the eighteenth century, an enthusiasm that eventually led Voltaire to remark that

European intellectuals have abandon their humanistic interests in order to discuss the

grain trade21 recording in 1750 that France had turned its attention to agriculture as a

relief from "verses, tragedies, comedies, operas, novels, moral reflections and

theological disputes concerning grace and religious trances."22 The notable increase in

agricultural writings stretched across Europe during the course of the century spawning

widespread interest. The Saxon, J.C. Schubert (1734-87) was ennobled by Joseph II with

the significant title of "Cloverfield" for his writings on rural economy and for the

establishment of a model farm. Another tribute to the fashionable craze of "agricultural

systems" was the ceremony performed by the Dauphin at Versailles in 1768 when he

publicly held the plow. And the Calabrian landed aristocrat, Dominico Grimaldi, nearly

lost his family fortune in his attempts to establish a model farm prompting him to demand

20
Schumpeter 158.
21
Lucio Villari. "Note sulla fisiocrazia e economisti Napoletani del'700," Saggi e richerche sul
settecento, a cura Ernesto Sestan (Napoli: Nella Sede dell'istituto, 1968) 230.
22
Quoted in Paul Johnstone. "The Rural Socrates." Journal of the History of Ideas vol. v. January-
October (1944): 162.
state support for his efforts. In addition to these individual expressions of interest in the

rural economy, more systematic efforts were established by agricultural societies and

academies, the first of which was the Scottish Society of Improvers in the 1720's, and the

second the Accademia Georgofili in Florence (1751), prompted by the publication of

Abate Ubaldo Montelatici's Ragionamento sopra i mezzi piu necessari far rifiorire

l'agricoltura and supported as part of the reform efforts of the Granduke Leopold II. By

the end of the century every country and many cities had their own agrarian societies. In

1756 the physiocratic Journal oeconomique boasted:

It is no longer necessary to urge the study of the economic arts and sciences. The
taste for them has spread so universally over all of Europe that their traces are
apparent in most literary productions. Academies had been founded uniquely to
this purpose; and some of those that formerly were concerned only with the most
sublime speculation, now devote a portion of their effort to the consideration of
practical truths, which heretofore had been ignored with haughty scorn. Among
the innumerable works born of the press everyday, for one that formerly was
devoted to the perfection of agriculture, commerce, and the arts, there are today
ten.23

But probably nothing is more revealing than Voltaire's comment, which in fact,

reflects how far the interest in things of a rural nature had spread beyond the practitioners

themselves. He himself confessed in 1758 that he was "idoltre de la campagne" and kept

himself busy sowing grain with a drill and performing agricultural experiments.24 The

agrarian question found its way into the writings of nearly every major philosophe of the

century, giving birth to an entire schools of political thought in France known as

Physiocracy which was eventually to have an immense impact on both public policy and

the general philosophical environment of Europe. Emperor Josheph, Margrave Karl

23
Cited by Johnstone 163-64.
24
Cited by Johnstone 164.
Fredrich of Baden, Gustavus III of Sweden, Catherine the Great, Stanislaus of Poland,

Charles III of Spain and Ferdinand of Naples were, among other, princes keenly

interested in the physiocratic program.

The widespread and intense interest in agriculture in the eighteenth century needs

to be explained. Why, for instance, were intellectuals, who had become known for their

writings on metaphysics, turning their intellectual interests to the problems of agriculture?

Or why, in the case of Italy, did such a large number of the clergy, who had been trained

in the traditions of canon law and theology, so enthusiastically take up the cause of land

improvement? To answer such questions it is useful to make a provisional distinction

between two types of writings on agriculture. The first would be writings of a technical

nature, agricultural handbooks and manuals designed for the practicing farmer for the

purpose of improving his yield through better management and scientific farming.

Included in this first type are also scientific texts on land improvement and water

management. The second type could be classified as writings of a social nature. These

writings vary dramatically, from discussions of the relationship between agriculture and

military power, or agriculture and population, to manufacturing and commerce, the grain

trade, tariffs, and so forth. At another level, we find writings on the nature of the peasant

contract, or the duties of the peasant and landlords, as well as utopian projects to re-

colonize deserted farmland with destitute peasant families.

In the first case, writings of a technical nature, we might easily attribute their

greater production and circulation to the general increase in demand for agricultural

products during the century. The rapid rise of population in Italy, from 13 to 17 million

during the century, in keeping with European trends, created a greater internal demand

and likewise pressure on land usage. In addition, the commercial-industrial development

in countries like England, Holland, and France provided an external demand for Italian

agricultural goods. In fact the export of wheat, oil, wine, citrus fruits, silk, wool, and

cotton all steadily increased during the century. The increased demand and the general

price revolution of the sixteenth century had already stimulated the introduction of mono

culture, like rice in the Po valley and cereals, wine, olive oil, cotton in Sicily and Naples.

These new techniques of scale were also made possible by large land reclamation projects

using Dutch dike-masters to supervise drainage and irrigation projects in Lombardy as

early as the late fifteenth century. Other land reclamation projects were under way by the

sixteenth century in Brescia 1534, Aquilea 1561, Tuscany 1572 and even the Papal States

under Pius V 1566.25

By the eighteenth century, Italy had become an overwhelmingly agrarian society

to a far greater degree than it had been two centuries before, and agriculture was

increasingly becoming commercialized. Thus, we might assume that, with the growing

commercialization of agriculture in an expanding market, men naturally have need for

information that can help to rationalize agricultural production to keep up with demand.

At one level this is certainly true, but alone would not be able to explain the far broader

interest in agricultural as a social, political, and historical phenomenon. We can find a

link, however, in the limitations on the application of certain techniques that were

imposed by social relations, specifically the contractual relations, between landlord and

peasant. Terello's book, cited above, advises that deep plowing enhances productivity, but

what had become apparent in the eighteenth century was that the incentive for deep

plowing--a laborious process--was impeded by the short term contract that entirely

favored the landlord. A change in the fundamental contractual relationship between

25
B.H. Slicher Van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, trans. Olive Ordish (London:
Edward Arnold, 1966) 196.
landlord and peasant was then the precondition for the implementation of improved

agricultural techniques. What was true at the micro level in the direct relationship

between landlord and peasant was true at the macro level between landlords and the

market in the larger context of political power. A cursory glance at the political structure

of land holdings in Italy in the eighteenth century will reveal an astonishing number of

social and political obstacles to the application of better farming practice.

In spite of the fact that the agrarian character of Italy had been accentuated by the

progressive decline of the cities in the previous two centuries, the cities for the most part

maintained a control over the countryside in its traditional fashion. There was first of all

an obligation of producers to provision the cities with grain to avert the possibility of

famine, a recurrent problem in Italy in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The

control of grain and grain prices by city administration was responsible for a constant

interference with the market price of grain. The prohibition of grain export and other raw

materials used by city guilds also kept prices artificially low. In addition to these

restrictions placed on the countryside, which required complex administrative structures

to support essentially mercantilists policies of low food prices and support for domestic

industries, the fiscal system also discriminated against the countryside. The major part

of consumption taxes and exceptional taxes fell most heavily on the rural communities.26

The eighteenth century was also characterized by an increase and consolidation

of land holdings by the nobility and the Church in Italy. Church property grew steadily

from the continual donations of both large and small estates, which then fell into

mortmain or the "dead hand" exempting such lands from taxation and removing it

permanently from the land market. With the decline of the cities along with the decline

26
Stuart Woolf A History of Italy 1700-1860 (New York: Routledge, 1991) 43-44.
of urban industry and trade, former merchant families were investing their money in land

which increasingly became the source of social prestige. Also, in the feudal principates,

such as Naples or Piedmont, an increase in noble titles was accompanied by the

expansion of noble land ownership. In some regions of Italy, noble and ecclesiastical

absorption of land was fairly insignificant, but these tended to be the regions of lowest

fertility in the Alpine mountains in the north or the Apennines, where farming was

traditionally organized by small holdings. But elsewhere, above all in the plains, the

Church and aristocracy predominated. In Lombardy, the nobility owned over 40 per cent

of the land with Church property accounting for more than 20 per cent. In some specific

regions the percentages were unusually high, like the Vicenza plain, where more than 90

per cent was owned by the nobility. In the Bolognese plain in 1784, 70 per cent was

owned by the aristocracy. But perhaps nowhere in Italy was a higher percentage of land

in privileged hands than in the Papal States. In the Agro Romano 113 families owned

more than 60 per cent of the land and 64 ecclesiastical institutions another 37 per cent.27

In the kingdom of Naples and in Sicily the Baronage and the Church owned more than 50

per cent of the land in some of the largest estates in Europe. Only in Piedmont did noble

and ecclesiastic land holdings not predominate. There, the nobility owned around 10 per

cent and the clergy another 10-15 per cent. But this general outline of land ownership is

only significant when the implications of the feudal structure are made clear in relation to

political- administrative and economic rationality that was thwarted.

This feudal structure guaranteed the administrative, political, and economic

autonomy of literally hundreds of properties, in most case impeding any attempts at

economic transformation by restricting the collection of taxes or the sale of properties and

27
Woolf 45.
limiting incentives for landlords themselves to improve their land. Where these feudal

properties maintained the virtual political autonomy of many of the larger landowners, it

often included protection for the peasants in the way of common lands, grazing rights, or

fixed dues paid for perpetual leases or emphyteuses received by ancestors.

On the whole, all of these diverse forms of property constituted an

extraordinarily complex network of restriction for any smooth transition into an

agricultural market economy. These restrictions and privileges became the primary target

for those interested in improving agriculture but also the primary target for reform in

general. What had become clear in the course of the century was that the structure of

land holdings throughout the peninsula was the very basis of social and political power.

We can certainly see that the commercial growth in the eighteenth century constituted, if

not an internal and external pressure to reform the agricultural systems throughout the

peninsula, at least a field of growing possibilities for reform. We must be careful here to

insist that such pressure is not of a mechanical nature as it is sometimes depicted. Rather,

such pressure must be formulated by agents who are capable of articulating those

pressures, but those agents are often not directly or even indirectly linked to particular

commercial interests, nor are they necessarily linked to a particular class formation in the

traditional sense, even if the new commercial landscape was creating new fields of

operations and even giving rise to new groups of men who were of some economic

significance. These included the growing number of non-noble landowners and

ambitious farm stewards, known variously, depending on regions and exact function, as

fattori, fittanzieri and gabelloti, who began to buy up land as legal restrictions on land

purchases were gradually lifted. These stewards, however, only superficially resembled

the capitalist tenant farmer of the English countryside, and unlike their English
counterparts, the Italian stewards were more content to exploit existing relations of

production within the expanding market rather than fundamentally altering the mode of

production itself. At any rate, this group never really constituted an emerging class in the

traditional sense in that they were never able to articulate their individual interests as the

universal interests.

Most of the reforming impulses in Italy were to come from within existing

political, economic, and social structures rather than from without as is often posited in

the model that cites the primordial conflict between the historical aristocracy and rising

bourgeoisie as the essential motor for change. The significant Italian reformers were

either themselves aristocrats or clergy or both. Only a few of the writers in this study

were neither and virtually all of them held at least some administrative ecclesiastical or

political position at some point in their careers. This phenomenon was wide spread in the

century and is indicative of the importance of what could be called an administrative

revolution in governments, a phenomenon that Norman Hampson asserts is "probably the

most active force of change"28 in the century. In this sense, one might suggest that the

reform movement taken as a whole in Italy is the expression of the emergence of a state

service class with in own interests which are inseparable from the growth of a centralized

state. The model of capitalist development that focuses on the historic conflict between

the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, as for example Gramsci's concept of the passive

revolution,29 is derived from mixing a specifically English economic development with

French political developments. Ellen Meiksins Wood suggest that this economic model

28
Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (London: Penguin, 1990) 48.
29
According to Gramsci the "social groups that should have been leading" were not strong enough
to act as an independent force and placed themselves at the disposal of the Piemontese state that
acted as a substitute for a leading class. See "Notes on Italian History," in Antonio Gramsci
Selection from the Prison Notebooks, trans. by Quintin Hoar (New York: International, 1987) 105.
may in fact be unique to England and can in no way provide a model for the

understanding the development of capitalism in later developers like Italy. "The capitalist

system,” she writes, “was born in England. Only in England did capitalism emerge, in the

early modern period, as an indigenous national economy, with mutually reinforcing

agricultural and industrial sectors, in the context of a well developed integrated domestic

market. Other capitalist economies thereafter evolved in relation to that already existing

one, and under the compulsion of its new systemic logic.”30

In the case of Italy, it is perhaps more fruitful to focus on the specific relationship

between landlord and peasant as the principle cite of change rather than embarking on the

search for the elusive bourgeoisie. An emphasis on landlord and peasant, on exploiter

and exploited is at its most fundamental level a question of man’s relationship to the land.

But this relationship, as Wood points out, is not one that emerges spontaneously in the

context of a well integrated domestic economy but rather one that emerges under the of

the systemic logic of England, an existing capitalist economy. In this context, what

Schumpeter said in relation to practice and theory in regards to Dutch practice and Italian

theory, we might say for political and economic theory. The English indigenous

development meant that it theoretically could not articulate that for which there was no

existing model, contemporary or ancient, whereas the Italians, by seeing the practice of

others, could articulate theoretically what they sought for themselves. Since this

articulation in theory was not, in the Italian case, subordinated by the specific demands or

needs of a particular class, the range of theoretical formulations were perhaps less

restricted.31 One can see in the writings on agriculture and reform in general in Italy an

30
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) 1.
31
There are certainly important exceptions to this generalization. There is little doubt for instance
that the Accademia Georgofili in Florence by the end of the century had become an unambiguous
mouth piece for large landowners.
astonishingly wide range of proposed solutions.

Can we say, then, that there is anything that overlaps in all or most of the reform

proposals in relation to agriculture? Regardless of whether particular reforms are

advocating programs beneficial to large landowners, middle size land owners, or small

independent peasant farms, whether advocating agrarian laws to divide large estates, or

championing the cause of absolute property rights, whether formulating utopian schemes

to reclaim abandoned land or linking land, labor and agricultural goods to a strictly

market mechanism, all of the reform proposal in this study have two overlapping

principles. The first is that all were ideas that sought to rationalize and maximize the

exploitation of the earth on the basis of modern practice and scientific farming, and

secondly, that all proposals required implicitly or explicitly a strong or stronger

centralized state capable of initiating and guaranteeing the various reforms. Even those

who can be considered proto-liberal reformers, who sought only to remove the various

obstacles to "natural" market economy, required a strong state power to overcome the

multitude of autonomous sources of social, political and economic power. In this sense

the general tendency within the multiplicity of reforms is dependent on a strong state to

centralize power and rationalize, through a general homogenization of laws,

administrative structures, property relations, labor contracts, etc., divergent social

activity.

For Italy, the eighteenth century was a moment when capitalism was emerging

beyond its pockets of isolation, self-consciously attempting to reorder its political and

economic system in such a way that it could participate in the developments emerging

beyond the Alps. Capitalism is, in its origin, principally a question of reordering the

relationship of man to the land. "The first condition for the development of capital,”
writes Marx, “is the separation of landed property from labor, the emergence of land, the

primary condition for labor, as an independent force, a force in the hands of a separate

class, confronting the free laborer."32 But in the Italian case this "separate class" had not

yet emerged as a real economic entity, with the possible exception and embryonic

development of Tuscany and Lombardy. The reformers of the century certainly sought to

free land from its feudal restrictions (vincoli), but the form in which land would emerge

was entirely unclear. Who was to be this new class? Many sought to generally maintain

land ownership in its present form, excluding church property, but simply encouraged

new land usage. Others sought to create a class of middle size farmers who had absolute

property rights and who had enough intelligence and capital to properly invest in the land,

while still others sought to create a large class of small peasant farms whose autonomy

over their own land was protected. The spontaneous, and organic class formation that

characterized the English development of the large capitalist tenant farmer did not exist in

Italy. What occurred "naturally" in England could only occur through the implementation

of state policy in Italy, but before it occurred as policy it had first to occur in theory.

The relationship of land or feudal land holdings to emerging capital is formulated

by Marx in broad terms in the following way:

... the form of landed property with which the incipient capitalist mode of
production is confronted does not suit it. It first creates for itself the form
required by subordinating agriculture to capital. It thus transforms feudal landed
property, clan property, small peasant property in Mark communes--no matter
how divergent their juristic forms may be--into the economic forms
corresponding to the requirements of this mode of production. One of the major
results of the capitalist mode of production is that, on the one hand, it transforms
agriculture from a mere empirical and mechanical self-perpetuating process

32
Karl Marx, Theories of Surpluss-Value (Moscow: Progress, 1969) 50.
 employed by the least developed part of society into the conscious scientific
application of agronomy, insofar as this is at all feasible under the conditions of
private property, that it divorces landed property from the relations of dominion
and servitude, on the one hand, and , on the other, totally separates land as an
instrument of production from landed property and landowners. . . it dissolves
the connection between land ownership and the land so thoroughly that the
landowner may spend his whole life in Athens, while his estates lie in Scotland.
Landed property thus receives its purely economic form by discarding all its
former political and social embellishments and associations, in brief all those
traditional accessories, which are denounced, as we shall see later, as useless and
absurd superfluities by the industrial capitalists themselves, as well as their
theoretical spokesmen, in the heat of struggle with landed property. The
rationalizing of agriculture, on the one hand, which makes it for the first time
capable of operating on a social scale, and the reduction ad absurdum of property
in land, on the other, are the great achievements of the capitalist mode of
production. Like all its other historical advances, it also attained these by first
completely impoverishing the direct producers.33

In this passage Marx highlights some of the essential tendencies of the

transformation that was occurring throughout Europe in the second half of the eighteenth

century--in some places more rapidly than others. The final outcome of this process for

Marx is that "land will receive its purely economic form by subordinating agriculture to

capital " and by "discarding all its former political and social embellishments and

associations." What is necessary for this process to complete itself is that agriculture be

rationalized to the extent that it is "capable of operating on a social scale" where it is no

longer "employed by the least developed part of society" but rather subject to the

"conscious scientific application of agronomy." But above all, for any of these

developments to occur landed property must be "divorced . . . from the relations of

dominion and servitude." The relations of dominion and servitude to which Marx refers

are nothing less that the basis of the entire social and political structure of eighteenth

33
Karl Marx, Capital vol. 3, (Moscow: Progress, 1978) 617.
century society: that the form from which man guaranteed his own reproduction

economically was the same form that ordered his political, and one might add, his

spiritual life. To alter one was necessarily to alter the others.We will see that the Italian

reformers of the eighteenth century addressed themselves to all of the essentials outlined

above. Although, not all with the same imagined outcome. Some were quite hostile to

the idea that land would receive a purely economic form. But, whatever reforms were to

be made, there were explicit implications for the relations of dominion and servitude. To

alter these relations was to tamper with fundamental social and political relationships or,

in a word, to redefine man himself.

The agrarian question was far more than the problem of simply removing

irrational obstacles to the smooth functions of the emerging market economy. To remove

the various economic and political ties, vincoli, whether tariffs, taxes, dues, or labor

obligation, so that agriculture could employ scientific agronomy and operate on a social

scale, other non-economic ties had to be removed. That is, land, as one of the essential

and primordial elements that positioned man in his cosmos, had to be detached from its

former meaning. It had to be redefined, and if it was ever to take on its purely economic

form in the Marxist sense, this redefinition had to be a fundamental separation of land

from its former position insofar as it had ties to larger social, political, spiritual, and

ethical, meanings. It had to exist only in its autonomy as an economic category. This is

an essential part of the fragmentation of the modern world or in Gusforf's words we might

say that land comes to exists in its "dissociation. "

But this process of dissociation or fragmentation was not a smooth transition

theoretically, nor was it the automatic outcome of changes taking place in the material

conditions of society, specifically in the economic sphere. The rate of economic change
in Italy was largely dependent on the implementation of public policy, and public policy

was the outcome, at least in part, of vigorous debate and elaborate theoretical

formulations that utilized all of the fashionable currents of thought available. It is

critically important for understanding the various proposals made in the eighteenth

century that one delineate the various currents of thought available to the philosophes

themselves. "The author,” writes J.G.A. Pocock, “inhabits a historically given world that

is apprehensible only in ways rendered available by a number of historically given

languages; the modes of speech available to give him the intentions he can have, by

giving him the means he can have of performing them."34 These historically given

languages, as Pocock refers to them, establish a fundamental framework within which an

argument is constructed. Any particular argument is necessarily constructed by a

language that is far larger than any singular discourse. Thus, for example, the problem of

agriculture might appear to be narrowly delineated but is itself enclosed in a complex

network of meanings, a conceptual grid, from which meaning is given and meaning is

derived. The conflicts over the agrarian question are not simply conflicts over proper

land usage; they are simultaneously conflicts between these historically given languages.

Agriculture, in this sense, is one of many critical points of antagonism between

competing world views. These philosophical conflicts in the eighteenth century, when

taken as a whole, are situated in the very heart of Enlightenment thought.

The Enlightenment was largely an attempt by philosophers and intellectuals to

submit existing laws, practices, and institutions to the test of their own critical rationality.

In light of this general tendency, it is often presented as a uniform rejection of tradition in

favor of rationality. As Steven Smith writes: "Enlightenment and tradition therefore

34
J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
4.
represent two radically opposed ways of legitimating society: one by means of critical

deliberation and reflection, the other by long experience and awestruck reverence for the

past."35 But even Smith acknowledges, that the boundaries between tradition and reason

were not so clear. The Enlightenment is all too frequently imagined as a fairly

homogenous movement away from superstition and darkness into the light of rationality,

and it would certainly be foolish to argue that the Enlightenment was not guided by the

language of rationality. But rationality itself is hardly of one kind, expressing itself often

in a multiplicity of forms with sharply divergent results. One can think of the "pure"

rationality of Descartes and Spinoza, who, seemed to use the same geometric logic, but

arrived at radically different ends. The difference between the two is not so much

between methods of reasoning or language as between ontological assumptions. For

Descartes the truth resides in the parts and the parts themselves are irrevocably separated

between the material and the spiritual. For Spinoza, on the other hand, the truth resides in

the whole, the parts of which contain in themselves less truth because only the whole

gives meaning to the parts. In the case of Spinoza and Descartes, rationality itself was

linked to differing cosmologies, one that preserves the historically traditional ontological

category of totality and the other which, in the modern sense, ontologically dissociates the

whole.

One could enumerate endlessly the ways in which the Enlightenment is

permeated with dozens of subtle counter currents that make generalizations about

eighteenth century European thought quite difficult. For example, the presumed conflict

between tradition and rationality, a conflict that appears so pervasive in the general

intellectual environment, is more often than not the rationalization of tradition rather than

35
Steven Smith, Hegel's Critique of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) 57.
opposition to it. We can find a significant current of thought that does not seek to subject

institutions, laws, and practices to the critique of reason alone but rather subjects them to

a comparison with a better tradition, a rationalized tradition. In the Italian case, this was

the classical tradition of Athens, Sparta, and particularly Rome, an authentic tradition

interrupted by barbarian invasion to which the present system of laws and institutions is

heir. This, too, was Enlightenment rationality. Perhaps we can learn more by looking at

which rationalized tradition is suggested as the model of society rather than making a

simple opposition between tradition and reason. The Physiocrats, for example, attacked

Sparta as a model for present society due to their poor agriculture and supported Athens

for its developed commerce, whereas Mabley praised Sparta for its egalitarian morality.

Linguet in his Theorie des lois civiles (1769), turned to the Asiatic models for his

political formulations and opposed the Physiocrats--who also praised Asiatic models for

different reasons-- for advocating the free use of land as a commodity, whereas for

Holbach, all models derived from history were useless if they were not in conformity with

the "laws of nature."36 With all of these subtle or not so subtle divergences within

Enlightenment thought--and this of course is hardly even the tip of an iceberg-- it can

become quite difficult to see in any of them anything particularly significant. Are they

perhaps simply variations on a theme? Athens, Sparta, Rome, or China, is the difference

really so significant or is the significance in the use of historic models themselves?

Perhaps the conflict is really between the use of history and the exclusive reliance on

natural law as the basic criterion for judgment as with Holbach. But then, the Physiocrats

believed that Athens, China, and even ancient Egypt were in conformity with natural law.

The lines are once again a bit blurred. To delineate not only the subtleties but the

36
Luciano Guerci,. Libertá degli antichi e libertá dei moderni: Sparta e Atene e i "philosophes"
nella Francia '700 (Napoli: Guida Editori, 1979).
significance of the multitudinous differences would require a detailed comparative

exegesis among carefully selected authors. As useful and necessary as this task is, I

propose something quite different in this study.

By utilizing the central category of land it will become possible to look at

Enlightenment discourse from a different angle. Land, as a concept, is narrow enough

that any shift in meaning is easily recognized, yet, at the same time, land is a category

that has, if not universal significance, a significance that permeates divergent discourses

in ways that are fundamental to the structure of the discourse. Furthermore, land is not

only part of the mental geography in the theoretical construction of a cosmology; it is also

the precise and principal point at which the intercourse between man and nature occurs.

A shift in the nature of this intercourse—man’s daily activity in his material reproduction-

-must be accounted for in his theoretical understanding of his activity. Likewise, a shift at

the conceptual level has immediate implications for his activity, an activity that quite

literally reshapes the material landscape. Land and philosophy were bound together in the

most intrinsic manner. In the words one of the Italian economisti, Giambattista Corniani,

"agriculture has an intimate connection with the most noble part of philosophy. "37

Here we must return to the original thesis, that the shifting meaning of land is

part of the larger process of the dissociation or fragmentation of a cosmological

conception in which everything--man, nature, metaphysics--is necessarily interrelated. It

is in the Marxist sense the process by which land is dissociated from "all its former

political and social embellishments and associations" so that it can be reconstituted in its

"purely economic form." This fragmentation and reconstitution occurs at two levels: the

37
Giambattista Corniani Della legislazione relativamente all'agricoltura. Discorsi due. in Scrittori
classici Italiani di Economica politica, part moderna tomo XVIII. (Milano: Destefanis, 1814)
170.
material and the theoretical. Not only can the concept of land be freed from its ethical

and historical meaning, but farms can be consolidated, peasants removed from the land,

new crops introduced, and the landscape restructured.

The period of this study, as mentioned above, is precisely that point at which

Italian intellectuals were self-consciously attempting to reconstruct the economic, social,

and political architecture of the peninsula. The outcome of this process would eventually

pave the way to highly developed form of industrial capitalism in the twentieth century.

But the outcome should not lead us into believing that these reform efforts, the multitude

of theoretical formulations that were expressions of Enlightenment thought, were all

traveling down the same road towards the same or even similar ends. Nor should we

utilize the schema whereby the mode of thought is determined by the economic base in a

crude sense of mechanistic Marxism. There is a connection, capitalism was developing in

embryo in Italy and was more or less fully developed in England, and of course it had its

articulate spokesmen. Yet, this mode of production was not so generalized that its logic

was ubiquitous. And only when capitalism is the dominant form of economic

organization is the theoretical sphere conditioned by its general logic. Marx is clear on

this point when he writes that "the mode of production determines the character of social,

political, and intellectual life generally, all this is very true for our times, in which

material interests preponderate, but not for the middle ages, in which Catholicism, nor for

Athens and Rome, where politics reigned supreme." 38

The eighteenth century was, by all measures of reckoning, a century in flux or a

century in transition; a century in which the old bonds that held society together in both

the ideological and material spheres were in a process of dissolution. Catholicism was in

38
Karl Marx, Capital vol. I (Moscow: Progress, 1968) 68.
retreat as secular states asserted their political power and church lands were secularized.

New theories challenged the hegemony of Catholicism and offered in its place an eclectic

mix of ideas that emerged from various combinations of the new rational theories in

experimental science, history, and ethics. Old forms of society were dissolving and new

forms were reconstituting themselves but not in a mechanistic fashion somehow

determined by the "needs" of capitalism. New social formations must be constituted by

human agents whose ideas organize their activities. The ideas themselves have a

multiplicity of sources, not simply a mode of production that has yet to fully assert itself.

To be sure the growing importance of commerce was always in the background, but it did

not in itself impose a logic on the reform movement as a whole. If anything, it opened a

larger field of possibilities within the context of the dissolution of a mode of production

expanding the field of possibilities and creating the context in which an amazing variety

of ideas could be formulated.

Before one could assert that the general intellectual environment is an expression

of the capitalist mode of production, that environment must be characterized by the

general fragmentation of the categories of reality itself. That is, as Gusdorf suggests,

"reality must be studied in its dissociation." This dissociation in theory is both a cause

and a result of the material dissociation in the manner in which man constructs the

conditions of his own reproduction. A critical component of this fragmentation, and the

precondition of capitalism is, as Marx said, the transformation of land into its purely

economic form. The impulse for this transformation, however, is not to be found

exclusively in developments occurring in the economic organization of society. The

pressures to commercialize land were of course increasingly present during the century,

but there were pressures in the opposite direction that were not simply the retrograde
forces of tradition. If it were true that modernity was incarnated in capitalist economic

development alone, and all else considered so much weight of tradition, then international

capitalism would have had a fairly homogenous development even if its rate of

development differed. But capitalism developed quite differently in Italy than in

England, or France, or Germany.

The historic development of capitalism is of course dependent on the particular

relations of class forces, state power, rate and source of capital accumulation, the balance

of power internationally, and various natural conditions, but taken as a whole, these

relationships are, in the end, a question of the political culture that gives them unique

form. This culture is largely what Pocock has in mind when he refers to the "historically

given language that makes intentions possible." The formation of this language is the

singular result of the intersection between various discourses that compete for ascendance

in the political culture, a culture that ultimately organizes the mutual intercourse between

men in their daily activity and relations of power.

By using land as a conceptual focal point, this study attempts to delineate various

currents of thought or discursive fields present in eighteenth century Italy that address the

problems of agriculture either directly or indirectly, with the purpose of exploring how

the concept of land is defined and redefined. It examines more particularly how these

unstable meanings are linked to the larger context of Enlightenment thought with a view

of determining how various historically given languages contribute to the detachment of

the concept of land from its former embededness, or conversely how those languages may

work to preserve the former concept of land

I have divided this study into four basic areas that can be said to have some direct

bearing on defining the concept land and the human relationship to land: the ethics of
agriculture, agriculture and history, Physiocracy, and science and agriculture. The

intention here is not necessarily to give a comprehensive treatment of the whole of

agrarian discourse in the century in Italy, nor is it really to develop an explanation of the

evolutionary shifts in the dominant discourse. Rather, the purpose here is simply to

delineate modes of discourse that were present and had specific links with and

implications for Enlightenment philosophy as a whole. A comprehensive study would

necessarily be an expanded version of the work done by Piscatelli (the only study

available that specifically delineates Italian agrarian discourse in the eighteenth century)

which might lose in depth what was gained in breadth due simply to the difficult task of

linking agrarian writings to issues not directly of an economic nature. On the other point,

the temporal limitations of this study, make it difficult to assert a strictly evolutionary

schema. All of the linguistic "habits" outlined below continue to coexist and to combine

with one another is numerous ways throughout the nineteenth and even into the twentieth

centuries. The purpose here is to delineate the articulation of these habits insofar as they

directly impose meaning on the land question in the eighteenth century.

The first, the problem of the ethical structure of man’s specific relationship with

the land in agricultural practice establishes the point of departure for the entire study.

With the growing enthusiasm for agriculture, numerous classical authors were

resurrected, particularly Cato, Cicero, Varro, Virgil, Columella, Palladius, Pliny and

Horace, to give a specifically ethical-moral component to its practice, from quoting

Socrates to the effect that agriculture was the mother of all the arts to Xenophon that

"Agriculture is a truly noble art, and capable even of communicating nobility to those

who practice it."39 The ancient noble qualities or virtues as defined by Plato were

39
Xenophon, quoted in Paul Johnstone "Rural Socrates," Journal of the History of Ideas vol. v.
January-October (1944): 157.
wisdom, temperance, courage and justice, which were themselves the goal of the ethical

state. In the hands of many of the eighteenth century illuministi, the link between the

ancient virtues, the ethical state, and agriculture was made explicit within a synthesis that

included various degrees of Catholic humanism and scientific rationality. While many of

these authors leaned heavily on the image of the classical past this was anything but the

adulation of tradition over innovation. On the contrary. The classical erudition provided

the overriding principles that imposed social and political imperatives for agricultural

improvements using the most modern techniques. Within this synthesis, man himself was

tied to the critical nexus of society and nature. Yet, for the most part, the agricultural

ethic was linked to an image of ones own decadence, the idea that the modern Italian

states had fallen from a former greatness: the Golden Age of the agricultural republics of

the early Romans. The modern goal was to recover the essence of ones own former

greatness, that, in the case of Rome, was built on a foundation of productive farms and a

free citizenry. The importance of the image of decadence raises the critical question of

history or the evaluation of specifically agrarian history.

It was generally acknowledged that the ancient practice of productive agriculture

was disturbed by the introduction of feudalism after the barbarian invasion. "After the

collapse of the Roman Empire,” wrote Gio. Battista Landeschi (1770),

one found wrapped up in the feudal system brought by northern peoples, that
divided everything up and subdivided the country in tiny independent
governments, always at war... and were obliged to sacrifice all the objects of
politics to self-defense to accommodate the military and as a result had no
concept of agriculture and commerce, with maxims totally contradictory to
property and the liberty of man, not seeing in itself an indiscreet despotism
imposing on the peasants a miserable slavery.40

40
Gio. Battista Landeschi,. Saggi di agricoltura 2nd ed. (Firenze: Piatti, 1787) 4.
 This sentiment, though common, was not universal. The debates over agriculture,

the economic, political, and social structure of the Italian states, were critically linked to

the image of history or the model that one could derive from such images. Consequently,

not only was history or historical erudition an integral component of the agrarian question

in the course of the century, but the focus on agriculture or more generally economic

history had profound implications for historical methodology. What exactly could history

tell us? If history is the story of man's ethical life and land and agriculture were the

foundations of this ethical life in the state, then the history of land and land holdings were

critically important. If land was not to be the privileged domain of the ethical life,

however, then what was? The idea of historical progress was variously bound to man's

moral and ethical life but was increasingly linked to his technological mastery in the

economic sphere. Many of the ideas or models that were derived from ancient forms of

society were bound within a vision of redistributive justice, that is, the proper ordering of

social activity and concomitant allocation of goods. Among the most decisive historical

conflicts was between those who privileged the early Roman Republic of the citizen-

farmer and those who privileged the commercial nation of Carthage. Increasingly,

however, these conflicting images of a Golden Age gave way to the discourse of

productivity. This fundamental shift from the emphasis on circulation and just

distribution to the absolute expansion of wealth found its most decisive voice in

Physiocracy.

As a system, Physiocracy had a decisive influence on state policy in France and

the Tuscany of the Granduke Leopold who was personally interested in the physiocratic

program. Karl Marx noted the Physiocrats as the first who were able to imagine the

economy as a system from the point of view of production rather than circulation. This
shift was critical from the point of view of its impact on the role that history could play in

the formulated image of society. Productivity was, for the Physiocrats, and increasingly

for those influenced by its discourse, the new standard from which political economy

could be measured. No longer could one look at the elusive presence of the ancient

virtues for the image of ones future, it would henceforth be the rational exploitation of the

earth through a highly evolved agriculture, for the Physiocrats, the sole source of surplus

wealth. This mastery of agricultural productivity was the result of the correct ordering of

society with nature according to the precepts of natural law. The powerful advantage that

physiocratic discourse had over its alternatives is that it could lay claim to an objectivity

insofar as surplus wealth could be measured quantitatively. Increasingly this emphasis on

quantifiable aspect of economic organization effectively displaced the ethico-historical

mode of discourse privileging above all technique.

But technique itself was linked directly to the application of scientific discourse

to the economic sphere. It was clear that England, the most advanced agricultural nation,

had successfully utilized modern experimental scientific methods in the field of

agriculture with spectacular results. England was also the home of Isaac Newton and

focal point of the scientific revolution. Newtonian science increasingly became the

model for the mastery of technique in the field of applied agronomy. Perhaps more

significantly, however, it became the model that might be applied to the social

organization of agriculture. The implications of this application in the social sphere were

profoundly important for redefining man in his relations to land, a redefinition that had

far reaching consequences for the structure of social and political power. The scientific

exploitation of land was inextricable from the social organization of land relations. The

problem for those seeking to utilize the Newtonian discourse in the field of economics
was simply that the complexity of social phenomena did not lend itself to the abstractions

of mathematical reasoning. In order to make this application, social organization and

man himself had to be radically redefined: simplified and universalized. With this

discourse, the final step of separating land from its former historical and ethical meaning

was made. Land became qualitatively indistinguishable from any other object with which

man interacts.

These four general areas of discourse or historically given languages-- the ethical,

historical, productivist, and the scientific--all offered alternative visions of agricultural

organization, and each offered alternative definitions of land insofar as land constitutes

man’s primary activity in the material reproduction of his life. In all of these areas we

will find various combinations of discursive overlap. Only rarely do we find them

expressed in pristine form. But the two tendencies that can be found in each of these

areas or in their combinations are those which tend to preserve elements of the

astrobiological or unitary vision of dependent interconnectedness and those which seek

to separate various departments of reality into autonomous areas of knowability. In

1787, a decade after the publication of the Wealth of Nations and after utilitarian theory

had been a well developed attempt by Italian economisti to apply Newtonian discourse to

social phenomena, an anonymous agricultural handbook appeared in Venice entitled Del

debito che hanno i parrochi ed i curati della campagna, di educare ed istruire i contadini

nelle migliori regole dell'agricoltura ed in qualunque ramo dell'economia rurale. In this

instructive handbook one can still find a lyrical vision of the metaphysics of agriculture:

The vast plains of Caldea, and of Syria, abounded with the greatest treasures of
nature, and were attended with great care by agricultural people who depended
upon the advice of wisemen. Exact codes to observe the course of the stars and
to determine the times most adopted for work, planting, and harvesting, were
 formulated and served as the foundation of the science of astronomy. . . . Among
the Persians, at the time of Alexander the great, people prospered more than all
other nations due to its work with agriculture. All were obliged to work--all
worked from rich to poor in the fields and gardens--as part of their religious
belief. . . All of the great civilization, the Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, the Rustic
Tribes of Rome, and China were founded upon the care of their fields. 41

This vision or tendency coexisted with those whose discourse inclined to

fragment into autonomous components the various natural, social and ethical elements of

the cosmos, and even found numerous points of overlap. The second tendency--the

progressive discursive fragmentation of land until it assumes it purely economic form--

was the necessary precondition for the implementation of policies that were designed to

guarantee absolute property rights, fostering not only an agrarian individualism, but a

more general economic individualism that could no longer find a sense of community in

the soil. This fragmentation of land was simultaneously the universilazation of the

concept of land as nothing more than property, which was also the homogenization of

both the idea of man and the space he occupies. This dissasociation of the concept of

land was a critical process that formed part of the very foundations of modernism.

41
Del debito che hanno i parrochi ed i curati della campagna, anonymous (Venezia ,1787) 34.
 Chapter Two

Antonio Genovesi and the Ethical Landscape

On the title page of a book, first published in Naples in 1776 is a small allegorical

lithograph depicting the goddess Athena in full armor sitting on a stone. In the

background of the picture are rows of robust olive trees stretching out across the distant

hills to which Athena is authoritatively pointing. At first glance, the modern observer is

tempted to dismiss this design as an example of eighteenth century kitsch. However, the

lithograph fully reflects the contents of the book and takes on a greater meaning as the

author of Memoria intorno a i sessantadue saggi diversi di olio enthusiastically and

eruditely links the divine greatness of classical culture to the humble olive.

Written by Giovanni Presta of Gallopoli, the book is composed of two relatively

distinct elements, two elements not always so clearly separated within the text. On the

one hand, we can read it as a handbook on the proper cultivation of olives. In this part is

included the best location for planting the trees, the ideal time to harvest, the time and

method for grafting young trees, descriptions of the various varieties of olives, the best

method of storing oil and so forth. On a slightly different level, one might say at the

"macro" economic level, Presta writes about the oil trade, the relationship between num-

bers of olive mills (frantoio) and the quantity of olives in the kingdom, and so forth.

On the other hand, Presta's book can be read as nothing less than a eulogy to the

olive. In one passage, Presta writes about the use of olive oil by the ancient Greeks and
Romans:

But then we should not be surprised by the knowledge of the immense use they
made for purposes of anointing. The solider was anointed prior to combat, the
athlete prior to demonstrating his skill and strength in the gymnasium, they
anointed themselves to restore themselves from fatigue, they anointed themselves
as prescribed by their doctors when sick. Noblewomen and peasant women,
patrician and plebeian all anointed themselves, (even the slave was not excluded)
before entering and upon leaving the bath. In short, they believed that oil may
very well have been the universal cure that God gave to Mortals.42

In this short passage Presta cites the following authorities: Livy, Virgil, Dante,

Plato, Hesiod, Plutarch, and Pliney. One cannot help being struck by the interesting

mixture of agronomy and classical scholarship. Only a few pages separate a discussion of

rancid oil from a discourse on Greek arts and science. Indeed, the text itself makes no

explicit distinction between the analysis of the current conditions of the olive trade in the

Kingdom and the historical evaluation of Greek and Roman civilizations. In fact, it is

precisely Presta's point that there is a deep affinity between the two. He notes for

example that "the two civilizations that have most distinguished themselves in all the

world, the most celebrated, the most cultured, Rome and Athens, did not misapply the

value they placed in it [oil]. In Athens, where they favored all the arts and all the

sciences, we cannot read that oil was too glorified." 43

This eulogy to the use of olive oil quickly and remarkably becomes the center of

an historical analysis of the fate of Italian civilization. After the barbarian invasion of the

empire and the sack of Rome in the fifth century, Italy went into an inexorable decline,

which eventually gave birth to feudalism with all of the retrograde implications. This

42
Giovanni Presta, Memoria intorno a i sessantadue saggi diversi di olio. Presentati all Maesta di
Ferdinando IV Re delle Due Sicilie ed esame critico dell'antico frantoio trovato a Stabia (Napoli,
1776) 8.
43
Presta 14-15.
thesis, all but universally accepted by the enlightened writers of the settecento, had given

rise to many explanations but probably none so bold as Presta's claim that this decline

was due to Butter! Presta continues:

Who could be surprised, after agriculture had become a mere servant always
going from worse to worse, where slaves were forced to extract fine oil for
Barbarians who seldom if ever anointed themselves, who had a passion for meat
and loved butter, who could be surprised, I repeat, if amidst the slaughters, the
oppression, the poverty, the ignorance, or the military catastrophes suffered by
Italy, that our forefathers forgot how to make fine oil as they once had. ...
Everywhere agriculture became the work of slaves, the land was concentrated
into the hands of these few who used butter. Poverty, depopulation and
oppression followed; commerce declined and was obstructed by thousands of
obstacles, who could be surprised that after many generations in such conditions
they forgot how to make oil? But even after new swarms of semi-Italians
returned they were prohibited from recovering the good life of the ancients by
their poverty and even more so by their ignorance44

The problem of agriculture as conceived by Presta, and in his particular case,

olive culture, was inextricably linked to all facets of high culture. Only when civilization

had its former harmony, where men of knowledge participated actively in the agricultural,

economic, political, and philosophical life of the nation, would the age of Magna Grecia

return. Presta's little book on oil seems to be as much a contribution to the flowering of

the new philosophical spirit sweeping across Europe as it is a technical handbook on

agriculture. "We will,” Presta proclaims, “be seriously guilty, if at a time when the whole

of Europe is living in the splendid light of the true philosophy, when the intellectuals of

all the foreign nations have rebelled in order to care for their agriculture and commerce,

each choosing to study and to improve that which is right for their own soil, we do not

study passionately the olive and its products.” 45

The Memoria is very much a part of the intellectual fabric of the settecento with

44
Presta 21-22.
45
Presta 21.
virtually all of the characteristics that have come to define the late Enlightenment. Presta's

book is, if nothing else, a detailed compendium of all classical references to olives, olive

trees, olive oil, the olive trade, as well as an up to date source book for modern

cultivation. What Presta may occasionally lack in scientific erudition is amply made up

for by references to classical authorities. Rome and Greece loom large across the pages

of Presta's book as he creates an image of Italy's future in which Cicero and Virgil are

indispensable. His reforming enthusiasm is irrepressible throughout, as he participates in

what he sees as the great transformation towards the more rational and scientific social

order of a Europe basking in "the splendid light of the true philosophy." Presta's image of

the classical past and its recovery is no less characterized by his hostility towards the

barbarian interlude when Italians were forced to live in abject misery at the hands of those

who "seldom anointed themselves" and "loved butter."46

While it is not difficult to situate Presta's work within a broader intellectual

climate of his day, it is a more complex task to discover what, if anything, the Memoria

and works like it, may be able to tell us about that climate, about the Enlightenment in

general, or about Enlightenment philosophy in particular. With Presta's work as our point

of departure, our window so to speak on the broader characteristics of the Italian

settecento, we are tempted to read it as a technical handbook on olive cultivation written

by an enthusiastic agronomist only superficially familiar with current intellectual trends.

Such a reading could easily explain the appearance of the rather novel thesis on the

relationship between butter and the decline of civilization. At one level this would appear

46
While Presta may exaggerate the importance of butter in his historical evaluation of Italy he is
not off the mark in his assertion that the barbarian invasion brought in waves of semi-nomadic
peoples from the north who disrupted the classical triad of alimentation--wine, oil and grain-- to
replace it with animal herding requiring large tracts of uncultivated land. The cultural importance
of this shift is not insignificant. See Massimo ,Alimentazione e cultura nel Medioveo (Bari:
Laterza, 1988) 13-22.
to indicate the fairly broad appeal and influence of the "true philosophy" in the latter half

of the settecento. That is, we might conclude that even Italian agronomists were reading

the philosophes and incorporating some of their ideas, however awkwardly, into their

works. On the other hand, we might read Presta as an obscure philosophe himself who

attempted to use agriculture as the point at which the new experimental philosophy might

apply itself. The enthusiasm for the olive might be explained by the discovery of its

importance in classical civilizations through a careful reading of ancient texts. It might at

first be difficult to distinguish between the two readings. That is, do we read Presta as an

agronomist who attaches philosophy to his technical writings in an effort to create an air

of importance, or do we read him as a philosophe who attaches technical knowledge to

give his classical erudition a practical application?

Giovanni Presta, however, was no obscure agronomist. Born in Gallipoli in 1720,

he received a first rate education, taking a degree in medicine from the University of

Naples. According to biographical sketches, even as a young boy his intelligence was

quickly recognized and he was encouraged by his teachers in school where he thrived in

his studies of geometry, astronomy, physics, natural law, commerce, history,

metaphysics, and theology. He was recognized by Tommaso Briganti as a "sublime

talent" and was often referred to as "il Columella de'tempi nostri." In addition to his

work on oil production he suggested the expansion of tobacco cultivation in the Agro

Salentino and worked for its improved quality. He dedicated numerous essays to

Catherine II, even sending her samples of refined oil, and received lavish praise from the

Marchese Palmieri and several agrarian academies including the Georgofili in Florence.

In a biography of illustrious men in the kingdom of Naples published in 1814, seventeen

years after Presta's death, he was cited for "perfecting this field of rural philosophy that
made the Salentina peninsula so delightful."47 It becomes clear that Presta's work was not

considered by contemporaries as an anomalous curiosity but rather very much a part of

the intellectual revolt advancing towards the "true philosophy."

If we look at other books on agriculture published in the course of the century we

can begin to determine exactly what elements in Presta's book were characteristic of the

age. In 1726, fifty years before the appearance of the Memoria, a Tuscan from Pistoia,

Cosimo Trinci, published in Lucca an important book entitled Agricoltura sperimentato48

which, unlike Presta's book, was not limited to a single plant culture. Trinci's book does

in fact resemble an antiquated hand book on regional agriculture. Each chapter is

dedicated to a different crop including the olive but without the exalted status attributed

to it by Presta. Trinci's book, perhaps one of the most noted works on agriculture

published in Tuscany in the eighteenth century, went through multiple printings and was

considered to be a model of its kind worthy of emulation. Books like Trinci's made

available to the landowner all of the latest information on how best to maximize land

production through careful planning and control of crop selection. Agricoltura

sperimentato is written in a manner that appears more scientific in tone than Presta's book

that relies so heavily on traditional practice and advice of ancient authors. Trinci's

position as a publico stimatore near Modena, gave him a detailed knowledge of

agricultural practices and organization.49 Although his work in its first edition is almost

entirely of a technical nature, Agricoltura sperimentato seems to anticipate, ever so

modestly, Presta's work. Trinci makes only one fleeting reference to ancient culture and

only a passing comment on the social value of agriculture. But even in his brief

47
Biografia degli uomini illustri del Regno di Napoli, vol. I (Napoli: Nicola Gervasi, 1814).
48
Cosimo Trinci, Agricoltura sperimentato (Lucca: Salvatore Marescandoli, 1726).
49
Antonio Saltini, Storia delle scienze agrarie (Bologna: Edagricole, 1987) 201.
introductory remarks a similar spirit animates his work. Trinci writes:

...one must be stirred at the marvelous nature of agriculture and its value, it was
not only from the plow to the bastion of command that the battle fields (campi di
Marte) were conquered and ruled, where the ancient Roman emperors so often
passed, but on the contrary, after winning their laurels on the battlefields they
returned to make the soil fertile by the sweat of their brow. It was on that
account that the wise Cicero thought that the art of cultivation was of the greatest
utility in enriching the Republic and that it was likewise the duty of the best
citizens and free men. 50

Trinci's book had gone through six printings by 1796; was widely distributed in

Italy and cited by many publications in France.51 In the second edition of the book,

published in 1736, ten years after its first appearance, Trinci added an essay entitled

Discorso generale sopra l'agricoltura.52 In his addendum, Trinci is more directly

concerned with the contemporary social organization of agriculture, and in particular to

the many obstacles that hinder a more rational exploitation of the land and the effect such

obstacles have on those who work the soil. “Extend the eyes slightly,” he writes,

to other kinds of lands and observe the sadness and how nature is constricted not
to be a good mother but rather only a poor stepmother. I speak of maggioraschi
and fideicommissi, nearby that pass to other hands, commende, prebende, benefizj
simplici, and other properties53 of which one cannot bequeath, after the death of
one who enjoyed its use (usufruct) and cannot be enjoyed by his descendents or
parents. There is no lack of certain God-fearing ecclesiastics, and secular persons
of honor who care for their own properties. But others unfortunately are too
negligent and have forgotten their duties, deaf to the voices of conscience, only
thinking to squeeze the juices from those lands, without repairing or maintaining
their farms, without replacing the trees they cut, and without wanting to spend
and penny in goods on those unfortunate lands, those who think it is enough to
look at themselves to know that they are Padrone.54

50
Trinci VI.
51
Antonio Genovesi, Antoniio Genovesi Scritti, a cura di Franco Venturi (Roma: Einaudi, 1977)
120.
52
Saltini.
53
Here Trinci is listing various restrictions on landed property and rents that for the most part are
designed to keeplarge estates in tact for noble families and the church and do not allow alienation.
54
Saltini.
 There is a certain bitterness in these additional observations that Trinci added to

the second edition. It had become clear to him, as to many others, that agriculture was far

more than simply a technical question. As we will see, the evolution of Agricoltura

sperimentato mirrors the rapidly growing concern with land as a socio-political problem,

a concern that men from all the regions of Italy, of widely divergent backgrounds,

education, and politico-philosophical perspectives would come to focus on in agricultural

practices generally.

In a 1764 edition published in Naples, a preface to the Trinci's book first

appeared written by none other than the Neapolitan, Antonio Genovesi. Genovesi's

preface was destined to become a seminal work by one of the most important animating

spirits of the Italian Enlightenment. The centrality of Genovesi in the intellectual

environment of the mezzogiorno was readily recognized by his contemporaries, as he was

once affectionately referred to as "our Diderot" by Fernando Galiani while the latter was

living in Paris. Genovesi's interest in agriculture, and the particular value he placed on

Trinci's book, had a profound influence on the intellectual climate of the Kingdom of

Naples, spawning a tremendous enthusiasm for agriculture among the cultural elite.

The publication of Genovesi's preface also coincided with one of the most tragic

events of the settecento. It was the year of the great famine where men like Genovesi and

others witnessed thousands upon thousands of peasants pour into the cities to die of

hunger. Niccola Fiorentino in his Riflessioni, published in 1794, wrote that "the year

1764 still fills our hearts with horror."55 At the time of the famine, Genovesi held the

first chair ever created in Europe in Commerce and Mechanics at the University of

55
Illuministi Italiani, tomo V, Riformatori Napoletani, A cura di Franco Venturi.(Milano:
Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1963).
Naples. His lectures were already highly popular, but the tragic events of the year and the

publication of the preface spawned an even greater interest. Students from all the

provinces, Molise, Calabria, Puglia, Abruzzi, .attended his lectures on metaphysics,

ethics, and economics and by the end of the decade in almost every city and town there

were those who had returned to establish agrarian and patriotic societies, referring to

themselves as the partito genovesiano.56

A close look at Genovesi's preface will reveal that the growing interest in

agriculture was something considerably more than a marginal concern for the increasing

numbers of cultured men who would come to engage it problematically. It will also reveal

that it was more than just a matter of practical economics so that the farmer could better

improve his yield, or even a humanitarian matter for the state so that the catastrophe of

another famine might be avoided. Agriculture, in the mind of Genovesi, as for many

others, was becoming a central component of his philosophical universe. In his brief

preface he would elaborate considerably the cryptic comments made by Trinci almost

forty years earlier and pave the way in the coming decades for dozens of brilliant and

erudite works on agricultural economics, history, political commentary, ethics, and

philosophy, including such imaginative works as Giovanni Presta's Memoria .

Genovesi begins his preface to Agricoltura sperimantato with some historical

observations on the problem of population:

Reading the old history of this region, and of the many republics, and populations
it supported with great armies and navies, public works and wealth, he writes,
one comes easily to the realization that there was some difference between the
population of those times and ours. Montesquieu thought that the Greeks, Asians,
and the Italians of earlier times, before the Romans abandoned their farms, may
have been without comparison more populous than today, ascribing this to two

56
Illuministi Italiani, tomo V.
 very reasonable and probable causes, one is to have had very small republics, and
the other was that the land was less unequally divided ...57

The interest in population had been a concern of the mercantilist writers long

before Genovesi. It was their conception that population was a critical measure of

national wealth, somewhat like the human equivalent of bullion. Beyond being directly

linked to the volume of national wealth, population was conceived as a national reserve

from which large armies and navies could be formed. Since mercantilist theories are

derived essentially from the relationships between nations, the quantity of bullion and

men was the essential measure of a nation's well being. A decline in population was a

critical indication of the economic decadence of a nation. In his neo-mercantilist writings

Genovesi generally accepted the economic significance population. However, he did not

accept it uncritically. Of the many mercantilist writers studied by Genovesi, English,

French, and Spanish, two in particular were to have a profound and lasting influence on

his thinking, both Spaniards, Geronimo Uztáriz and Bernardo Ulloa. Neither Uztáriz nor

Ulloa offered anything substantially new in the way of economic theory, as their method

was essentially historical and political in substance. But they were both intimately

familiar with the Spanish empire (Uztáriz had even been the Spanish governor of Sicily

for some years) and had witnessed its decline.58 Although both writers accepted that

population growth was a necessary component of economic power, they viewed the

problem from a new angle. According to Earl Jefferson Hamilton, Uztáriz "outstanding

achievement as a theorist was his unequivocal contention that population depends upon

economic conditions rather than vice versa."59 Genovesi accepted the view of the

57
Antonio Genovesi, Antonio Genovsesi Scritti (Torino: Einaudi ,1977) 121-122.
58
Venturi XXIII.
59
Cited in Venturi XXIV.
Spaniards and argued that better economic conditions would result in the increase in

population. "It seems to me”, he writes,“that every country in the long run must

depopulate itself if life there becomes difficult and painful. Whence it is that a place is

more crowded where one easily finds needs and desires satisfied....But if our country is

depopulated, that is to say, not as populous as it could be or merits, it is not really due to

natural causes but rather moral causes....Among all the moral causes of depopulation and

frequent famine (a phenomenon that surprises anyone who knows our land, soil and

climate), it is without comparison the crudeness and debility of our agriculture.60

Genovesi had placed agriculture at the center of his analysis of the population problem.

But population was not understood by Genovesi as a strictly quantitative problem. Rather

population was linked to agriculture not just in relation to its size but also, and perhaps

more essentially, its character. The reform of agriculture was a central ingredient for the

recovery of the presently diminished population,61 but the reform of agriculture was no

less linked to the type of man who would be the guardian of the fields. Genovesi's image

closely resembled his conception of the independent entrepreneurial farmer of the English

countryside rather than the rough and crude contadini who were so abundant in Kingdom

of Sicily and who suffered so deeply in their ignorance and poverty; contadini who were

little better than feudal serfs owing their entire existence to the goodwill or malevolence

of the padrone. Genovesi asks:

To whom is agriculture left? To the lowest and most miserable of men; to those
who have nothing but knowledge of the worst practices and none of the best
practices of their ancestors. They have no spirit to undertake any kind of

60
Genovesi.
61
Genovesi had already responded to the numerous treatises on ancient population and while
agreeing with David Hume's On the Populousness of Ancient Nations that other writers had
exergerated the numbers of the past. He still believed it evident, however, that they were larger
than now and certainly capable of greatly expanded numbers.
 improvement, fearing they will not succeed; they will risk nothing and they have
nothing to spend. It requires consequently an agriculture employed by gentlemen
and scientists. They have more intelligence and they know how better to profit
from circumstances and from knowledge, ... they have read more: they can better
know the best things done in other times by the Greeks and Romans as well those
things done today by the wiser and more cultivated nations....Finally they have
the courage to initiate without the fear that they must give an account of
themselves to others.62

The image of the country gentleman sketched in Genovesi's "Preface" is not

derived from the English countryside alone but equally from the classical past, as we read

in the works of both Presta and Trinci. Genovesi continues:

It will always be crude agriculture that will render less public hope as long as it
is not in the hands of wise men and gentlemen. In Sparta little was pulled from
the land and they often suffered from famine: the reason is that for them
agriculture was a mystery for Helots and the slaves and not of gentleman. But
not so in Athens, where learned men and gentleman made it their glory to live in
the country and work the land. As long as in Rome the consuls and dictators
picked up the plow, and Cato and Varro and infinite signori took the most
delightful pleasure in agriculture, everything was in abundance, full of virtue, that
could not thrive better than in the country amidst the simplicity, but everything
changed as soon as it was regarded the profession of slaves.63

Genovesi goes on to contrasting those delicate sorts of people whose only

ambition is to pursue luxury with the savages of Africa, America, and Tartaria who think

it a "disgrace to cultivate the land." These two extremes produce the same effect

according to Genovesi: a crude undeveloped or decayed agriculture. He draws his more

contemporary models first from the Tuscans, who have a long history of the best

agricultural practices and can boast of a number of great writers on matters of agriculture

citing Vettori, Crescenzi, Soderini, Alamanni, and Davazanti, "who were all philosophers

62
Genovesi, Scritti 123.
63
Genovesi, Scritti 126.
or nobleman or both together."64 But of all the Europeans it is the English who cultivate

the best and in no other part of Europe do "philosophers and gentleman spend so much

time in the countryside and take such an interest in cultivation."65

As Genovesi imagines the new man of the campagna, his motivation is not

simply to remove the obstacles to improved agriculture or only to lighten the burden of

the contadini, although it is certainly both of these. His image is one that places or

replaces man in his primordial relationship with nature. Genovesi's concern is to

reestablish a metabolism that had been lost between man and the natural world; a

metabolism that is essential to the well-being of the body, mind, and soul. The practice of

agriculture is the "the only art,” he writes,

that exercises the body, gives it strength, makes one breathe a more elastic air
lengthening life. This nourishes the spirit with an innumerable array of ideas, all
happy, all real, all useful and always varied. Agriculture nourishes sweet hopes,
simple and honest loves; it generates humanity in the sweetness of country life,
without hypocracy.”66

Agriculture is precisely the point at which man constructs his higher nature. His

explanation for the present state of man's alienation from his essential link with his

natural environment is critical to an understanding of Genovesi's movement towards a

modern vision of humanity. Speculative philosophy must be abandoned in favor of a

philosophy that grounds itself, mind, body, and spirit, in the "stump of nature." "God has

given us”, he writes,

64
Pietro de'Crescenzi (1230-1320) author of Liber ruralium commodorum; Pier Vettori (1499-
1585) Delle lodi e della coltivazione degl'ulivi; Giovanni Vittorio Soderini (1526-1597)Due
trattato della cultura dell'agricoltura della coltivazione dele viti; Luigi Alamanni (1495-1556)
Coltivazione; Bernardo Davanzati (1529-1606) Coltivazione toscana delle viti e d'alcuni arbori
65
Genovesi, Scritti 127.
66
Genovesi, Scritti 126.
 a certain quantity of force and of action from which we form our nature and our
lives. This is our root. Therefore the actions that give us life, can here and now
make us supremely happy or miserable according to those which we adopt.
Consequently, the systems of philosophy, if they wish to be truthful and
beneficial must not separate themselves from nature. ... Philosophy has pushed
thought outside the human realm and has removed itself from life and happiness,
buried itself in an idle body; the first cause of the misery of certain people is too
much speculative philosophy ... Philosophy is "learning to die" said Plato, that is
to detach oneself from all the senses: to wrap oneself up and become a chrysalis.
I adore this great philosopher and I am his greatest admirer, but of all the crazy
blunders I do not believe there is one greater than this.67

In this short passage one can sense the influence of a number of others who have

preceded Genovesi. Here he uses the language of Newtonian science in his description of

the human body as a "quantity of force and action," a language for which the intellectual

environment in Naples at the time was a fecund source.68 The importance of this new

language is above all that it introduces into the discussion of agriculture a materialistic or

naturalistic definition of man with profound social implications. Secondly, we can sense

the influence of two other Italians in rather compressed form: Giovanni Pico and

Giambattista Vico. The idea that man makes himself or forms his own nature, is a central

component of Vichian thought, and in the hands of Genovesi takes on fairly radical

implications when applied to agriculture. That is, there is no fixed order, either divine or

rational, to which man must subordinate his social and spiritual life. Man is, on the

contrary, in a constant process of searching for the proper balance of "forces" that will

determine whether he makes himself "supremely happy or miserable." Here we feel the

distant echo of Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man and its assertion that mankind makes

the choice to move up or down "Jacob's Ladder," to rise above the angels whose nature is

67
Genovesi, Scritti 124.
68
Vencenzo Ferrone, Scienza natura religione: mondo newtoniano e cultura italiana nel primo
settecento (Napoli: Jovene Editore, 1982).
fixed, and share is God's glory or sink into antediluvian misery. Whereas Pico remains

within the realm of philosophy, religion, mysticism, and magic, and Vico remains within

the realm of language, Genovesi adds the materialist component of the earth itself. That

is, the most essential component of human happiness is the material transformation of the

land (agriculture) upon which all other human activities depend. Genovesi’s hostility to

philosophy is precisely that it has entirely omitted the work of the soil in favor of abstract

metaphysical speculations. But it is not just philosophy (and philosophers) who have

turned their backs on agriculture; for Genovesi it is more importantly the men of culture

"who wallow in fat, without knowing from whence it comes, who speak of things

agricultural with disgust and great savagery, as though they are beyond this world: but I

know better on this point," asserting "that there is no greater savagery to be found than in

the large cities among those who dress, eat, and live in soft luxury.69

Genovesi's interest in the practical application of philosophy makes his preface to

Agricoltura sperimentato something of a manifesto. His analysis of the immediate

obstacles to improved agriculture and his proposed solutions fall just short of a radical

political program. The first problems of agricultural renovation, as he mentioned at the

outset of his preface, is the unequal division of the land, absentee landlords who live in

the city and give no thought to their properties, and peasants who are treated as virtual

slaves. There is a vast difference for Genovesi between one who works his own land and

one who works the land of others. A peasant working his own property, writes Genovesi,

is "always wiser, more judicious and more industrious. They do not think only of the

present but always push their thoughts towards the future, the ways to improve and

perpetuate cultivation."70 Whereas, those who work another's land become "resentful at

69
Genovesi, Scritti 123.
70
Genovesi, Scritti 127.
seeing others getting fat on their hard work, making them wicked and bringing out the

worst destructive instincts, becoming in some cases rogues, thieves, and assassins."71

We should be clear at this point that Genovesi's adulation of the rural life bears

little resemblence to the pastoralism of Rousseau or the Romantics of later decades.

While Genovesi holds a deep sympathy for the contadini in their misery, it is a concern

that emerges from his sense of Christian charity not one that emerges from a belief that

the contadino can provide any sort of model for humanity. He makes this abundantly

clear in a footnote to his widely studied Lezioni di commercio in a section on luxury

arguing that the growth of the politeness of manners is an indication of the civility of a

nation. In this regard he formulates a virtual hierarchy of humanity. “Put in a row,” he

writes,

ten large orang-outangs, ten of the savages of Australia as described by Dampier, ten of

our bare footed peasants from Basilicata, ten provencial semi-gentlemen from certain

small countries, ten Neopolitan gentlemen from this era, ten Florentine gentlemen, and

you will have the whole of humanity ascending to its heights.”72

This belief in increasing degrees of civility has a long and complicated history

that will be explored more fully in chapter two. The issue revolves around competing

definitions of virtue that are derived from the presumed conflict between ancient Roman

virtue and the corrupting influence of commerce. In the settecento, commerce

increasingly came to be seen by many as the source of civility. Genovesi does not, as we

have seen, exclude one in favor of the other. For him, the simplicity of Roman virtue is

71
Genovesi, Scritti 127.
72
Genovesi, Lezione di commercio in Scritti 151. The importance of the development of manners
in the settecento will be explored in chapter two.
not necessarily corrupted by the influence of commerce, but in fact can be, in a specific

context, a mode by which virtue is expanded and enriched.

It was for Genovesi, as it was for Trinci, primarily noble privilege, feudal law,

and the church itself that presented themselves as the main obstacles to the improved

social organization of agriculture. The Church had accumulated an extraordinary

percentage of land, according to Genovesi: "two thirds of the property of the kingdom is

in the hand of ecclesiastics." Genovesi certainly did not advocate the confiscation of

church property for the purposes of direct redistribution. "What is to be done,” he asks,

“An agrarian law? God free me: I am not a fool, nor am I so reckless as to imagine a

remedy that is impossible or a danger to public peace."73 He makes it clear that the land

would be better cultivated if a small portion of it was in the hands of the poor peasants,

and other portions were in the hands of conscientious gentleman and nobles. But it is not

Genovesi's concern with a class of would be gentlemen farmers that animates his vision

of improved agriculture. It is, rather, that the state itself would benefit directly. "I know

that where the land is less unequally divided,” he writes, “there is better cultivation,

greater abundance, fewer famines, greater quantity of people, the higher orders richer

and the sovereign more powerful."74 Among the greatest obstacles to modern agriculture

is the neglect of the religious orders who do not care for their lands. Such care would

include studying the important works on agriculture, including Varro, Columella, Pliny,

and all the Tuscan, English, and French writers. This knowledge would be directly useful

to the cultivators of the land enlightening them and insuring [for the ecclesiastics] a

better income.75 “ It is the first rule of economics, says Varro, "that he who buys a farm

73
Genovesi, Scritti 128.
74
Genovesi, Scritti 128.
75
Genovesi, Scritti 128.
must sell his house in the city ," writes Genovesi, “as one cannot be sure that the farm

will not go to ruin if it is cultivated by sharecroppers or tenants.”76 A change in the spirit

of the landowner is the central component of Genovesi's program. The landowner must

be secure on two points. He must be certain that his income is constant, and that his farm

does not go to ruin. The best way to insure this is to be constantly present on the land, to

provide his cultivators with the knowledge of the best practices, and especially to

abandon the pernicious idea that the peasants must be treated as slaves in order to render

hard work from them. Genovesi writes:

It was believed by certain of our ancestors that slaves and the most wretched of
men must be kept subdued, and oppressed in every way in order that they be
obliged to toil. The greater the need one has the more one will work. ...This
maxim is wicked: repugnant to the laws of nature; ignores the Gospel ... it leaves
men crude and villainous and dishonors the prince.”77

Genovesi's brief preface is a compressed synthesis of the whole of his world-

view. It either synthesizes thoughts that had been developed elsewhere in earlier writings

or anticipates ideas that he would later develop. But one thing becomes clear concerning

Genovesi's world-view, even in this brief preface: his economic theory is inseparable

from his ethical politics, his metaphysics, and his vision of history. Elsewhere Genovesi

writes that philosophy has no other end "than man himself . . . to be of use to our

happiness because everything is connected in this world; and therefore there is nothing in

this world that does not interest us."78 Lucio Villari has observed that Genovesi

conceives of man as an active working being in a frame of complete interdependence

76
Genovesi, Scritti 130.
77
Genovesi, Scritti 129.
78
Genovesi, Scritti 130.
between phenomena within the course of history.79 To discover an autonomous and

specialized economic thought in Genovesi one must first eliminate his ethical philosophy,

a philosophy that gives his economic theories coherence. "In nature,” wrote Genovesi

two years after the publication of the preface to Trinci, “these words just, honest, virtue,

utility, and interests, cannot be detached ... every politics, every economy, that are not

founded on justice, virtue, and honor will destroy themselves."80 His interest in land and

agriculture in general is not a peripheral question to his more substantive interest in

metaphysics. Indeed his whole work on commerce and economics can be considered a

course on applied ethics where land is a central component in the definition of virtue

without which a sovereign power would destroy itself and an economy fall into decay.

Genovesi does not depart from the general mercantilist conception of the state

and its central role in the economy and thus in the ethical life of its subjects. His

conception of the state, like his more general world-view, is an interdependent organic

whole. And even though Genovesi was a free trader, the mercantilist doctrine of a strong

state was fundamental to his organic concept. He did not separate the state from its

juridical expression or its social and economic force that would be indispensable to the

struggle against feudal residues. His image of sovereign power is tellingly illustrated in

the metaphorical conclusion to his preface to Trinci's Agricoltura sperimentato taken and

modified from Political Thoughts and Reflections by Milord Halifax published in

England almost a century earlier. "The heart of the subjects (and I would add also the

hands),” he writes, “yieldeth but a lean crop, where it is not cultivated by a wise prince."81

We can imagine the state and the economy as modeled on the image of a well ordered and

79
Lucio Villari, Il pensiero economico di Antonio Genovesi ( Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1958)
70.
80
Genovesi, from the Diceosina in Villari 71.
81
Genovesi, Agricoltura sperimentato, 132
productive farm. For Genovesi, there is without question, a reciprocal relationship

between the two.

It is important to point out that Genovesi's knowledge of agriculture in the

Kingdom of Naples was not derived from first hand experience. He seldom traveled far

from the capital city and made virtually no reference to direct experience in relation to the

countryside, the conditions of rural life, or specific agricultural practices in any of his

writings. Genovesi's knowledge of the social and physical contours of Italy was derived

almost entirely from secondhand sources. This fact, in and of itself, has little importance,

as first hand experience never guarantees superior skills of synthesis or analysis. In

Genovesi's case however, it does serve to illustrate an important point concerning the

significance of agricultural writings. Since Genovesi's writings are not derived from

either direct observation or experience on the land, an epistemological problem is

immediately brought into relief. Since we can preclude from the outset that Genovesi's

reflections were the result of immediate sense perception, we must assume that they are

derived through linguistic filters-- the filters of others and filters of his own construction.

In other words, the rural world that Genovesi depicts in and the problems that are derived

from it are the product of a synthetic imagination where the data that make up the

contents of his image are selectively chosen and placed according to the structure of his

world view. This is not to suggest, of course, that such an epistemological problem could

be overcome if Genovesi or any other writer had been more directly engaged with the

objects of analysis, as was the case for example of Cosimo Trinci. What was true for

Genovesi was no less true for Trinci where the data of direct observation was structured

by a conceptual grid that gave such data specific meaning. The purpose here is rather, to

bring to light the particular way that a discursive filter, conceptual grid, or more generally
the cosmological structure impinges on the formulation of the image and its meaning

specifically as it relates to agriculture. It is not difficult to imagine that the word, peasant

(contadino), has different meanings according to one's experience and/or one's

cosmology. The very meaning of words and concepts are easily altered by placing them

within a different discursive context. But there is also a dialectical relationship between

the shifting meaning of the concept and the structure the cosmology. The focus on

agriculture and the value placed on the renovation of its practice, for example, can have

profound implications for the structure of the larger political imagination. That is, as

already mentioned, agriculture was, in the hands of many, a critical wedge against feudal

inertia. In the case of Genovesi, the image of the state was that of a well ordered farm. Or

more imaginatively, from Giovanni Presta, the olive served as a critique of contemporary

culture.

A focus on the unstable meanings of the constructed images in agriculture is a

departure from the analysis provided by many if not most of the historical works that

have taken up the subject of agricultural discourse in the broad sense. Virtually all of the

Italian economisti of the eighteenth century either treated agriculture as the focus of a

particular analysis or incorporated it as a central component of larger theoretical works.

In addition to Genovesi, there were many others whose works are considered theoretically

far more sophisticated, like the other Neapolitan Ferdinando Galiani whose Dialogues

Sur Le Commerce Des Bleds was considered among the sharpest and most successful

critiques of French physiocracy, Gianmaria Ortes the Venetian whose works anticipated

Thomas Malthus, Pietro Verri the founder of Il Caffé in Milan that for a few brief years

was the focal point of the Italian enlightenment, and Cesare Becarria whose Crime and

Punishment was hailed across Europe as a model of enlightened thought. Of these

particular writers, Joseph Schumpeter, in his magisterial History of Economic Analysis,

gave "high honor in the field of pre-smithian systems of production, and arguing that,

whereas in zeal for fact finding and in grasp of practical problems they were not inferior

to the Germans, they were superior to most of their Spanish, English and French

contemporaries in analytic power and achievement."82

Schumpeter ranks Beccaria and Galiani above all of their European counterparts

including Adam Smith. But Schumpeter, like many other historians of economic thought,

tends to read retroactively into the historic record judgments on analytic validity that are

derived from subsequent states of economic analysis. To some extent this approach is

unavoidable. Schumpeter's assumption is that there was an economic reality in the

eighteenth century that the economisti were analytically attempting to apprehend and

reflect theoretically. The economic reality, then, is the ground, so to speak, from which

increasing analytic accuracy emerges. Those elements of the economists' theory that do

not reflect the economic reality are considered by Schumpeter as examples of "non

essential frills" and "illogical associations" to the gradual emergence of the "essential

economic kernel" 83 of analysis. Though one might argue that Schumpeter has specifically

delineated the discourse of economic analysis for historical treatment, giving him every

reason to treat those elements within the discourse that are historically rendered

superfluous to modern analysis as something "non essential," it in no way overcomes the

problem that emerges when one element of discourse is removed or decontextualized

from a larger conceptual structure. Although not specifically writing of an Italian context,

Ronald Meeks, in his important study of Physiocracy, takes the identical analytical

82
Jos. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986)177.
83
Schumpeter 229.
approach as Schumpeter when he writes:

If methods of analysis developed in connection with the natural sciences are to be

usefully applied to an economic system, that system must possess two
characteristic. In the first place, the various parts of which it is composed must be
integrated and coordinated with one another to a degree which is sufficient to
enable that system to be visualized as a single entity. In the second place, the
nature of the tie linking the constituent parts together must be such that the net
results arising from the confluence of human activities are sufficiently regular,
and sufficiently independent of the will of the individual man, to be regarded as
'subject to law'. The emergence of 'political economy' or 'economics' as a general
system of theoretical principles had to await the entry on the historic scene of an
economic order possessing both these characteristics. 84

In Meek's view, as economic systems emerge in the material world free from

human will, then analytic systems will emerge to reflect that reality. As the economy

itself becomes more complicated, the theory will follow in more complex forms. With

this approach, the history of economic analysis is then a history of the gradual but

inexorable jettisoning of "illogical associations" until the "kernel" is revealed. If one

adopts this approach without recognizing the epistemological problem it presents, then

the work of the historian must be the constant effort to reconcile thought (discourse) with

reality on the presumption that one can apprehend reality from a third position outside of

thought (discourse) itself. Thus one can judge "illogical associations" from this

privileged position. With this approach, furthermore, one has difficulty in accounting for

the role that discourse itself plays in the construction of reality. In her work on

Physiocracy, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, challenges the validity of Meeks' and

Schumpeter's argument by recognizing that physiocratic theory makes little sense outside

of its "metaphysical and epistemological context."85 In other words, one cannot isolate

84
Roland Meeks, The Economics of Physiocracy (Cambridge: Harvard, 1963) 370-71.
85
E. Fox-Genovese, "The Physiocratic Model and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism"
one element of the discourse without violating another and turning it into something that

it is not. Instead of seeing in Physiocracy a theoretical attempt of the bourgeoisie to break

free from its "feudal mold" one can, in Fox-Genovese's words, see it as an "alternate

vision of modernity."86 One can see it as a vision of modernity that is not dependent on

the rise and political domination of a liberal bourgeoisie.

In his Land Labor and Economic Discourse, Keith Tribe has effectively

demonstrated that the various categories of economic discourse-- land, labor, and rent for

example-- have never been, strictly speaking, accurate reflections of changing economic

realities in the structure of society. The basic categories themselves have shifting

meanings. Tribe opposes the idea that "the economy is prior to or independent of the

discursive categorizations,"87 as he attempts to break from the old epistemological notion

that ideas reflect the real. The economic categories of land and labor are constructed

within specific discursive conditions and do not historically emerge as economic

categories until the early nineteenth century when they are released from their specifically

political, juridical, moral, and even religious contexts and claim exclusive association as

purely economic agents. Tribe successfully problematizes the history economic analysis,

going so far as to argue that economic theory, strictly speaking, does not exist until a

specifically economic cosmology emerges to give the various conceptual categories and

data a nearly exclusive economic meaning, essentially precluding the very idea of a

history of economic analysis, however, Tribe moves too far in the other direction by

detaching discourse from the surrounding material conditions that exist independently of

the discourse, even when those conditions were brought into existence partially as the

86
Fox-Genovese.
87
Keith Tribe, Land Labor and Economic Discourse (Boston: Routledge and Kagen Paul, 1978) 8.
result of discursive struggles. In other words, a material transformation of the contours of

the landscape , like terracing, enclosures, or irrigation, transformations made possible

originally through human labor, may have resulted from a particular discursive order, but

once transformed it is no longer dependent on any particular order. Tribe writes that a

discursive order can never be expressive of a non-discursive order,88 but nowhere

indicates exactly what is the relationship between the discursive and the non-discursive.

While the material transformations do not subordinate the discursive, in the sense that

Tribe opposes, they do establish the parameters or limitations on such discrusive

meanings.

The eighteenth century was, by all measures, a century of profound

transformations in the material conditions of life. In Italy, according to Giorgio

Giorgetti,89 changes in rural life in certain parts of the south and the islands issued in the

gradual transformation of the feudal latifondo into a more market oriented, bourgeois

latifondo. These changes were facilitated, especially in the second half of the settecento,

with particular intensity by the rapid privatization of common lands, of mortmain, and in

general, the elimination of feudal laws. In other parts of Italy, the center and north, the

same period is characterized by the progressive introduction of intermediate rentiers or

captialist farmers who, in turn, employed peasants creating a class of proletiarian or

semiproletarian farmworkers. Of course, these general tendencies took on a multiplicity

of forms depending on the particular region, its socio-political structure, its geography

and its specific history. But everywhere there was a profound pressure to restructure

agrarian relations in both the physical and social sphere.

88
Tribe 113.
89
Giorgio Giorgetti, Contadini e proprietari nell' italia moderna (Torino: Einaudi, 1974.) 15-16.
 Every transformation in the material life of a culture is accompanied by a related

intellectual and spiritual transformation. Not necessarily one that is an objective reflection

of the actual changes, but rather one that takes account of those changes in order that they

may be incorporated into a universe of preexisting meaning. The conditions or the events

of a transformation never come into being full of meaning. They take on meaning

according to the structure of a given worldview. As such, they are necessarily unstable,

given that the conditions of the transformation have a reciprocal relationship to the

meaningful context. The perception of the world in terms of space and time is constituted

by a multiplicity of images that seek to place man within a universe of meaning. The

general structure of that meaning determines the contours of any specific image. But it is

essential to note, as Georges Gusdorf writes, that "every image of the world is an

affirmation of man in the world, and as such an ordering of the world in a way that man

can construct his material and spiritual residence."90 The important element in Gusdorf's

words is the emphasis on the role that the image plays in the very "construction" of the

world in both the spiritual and material senses. That is to say, contrary to Meek's

assertion, the images that emerge do not emerge from the material conditions themselves,

although the material conditions form the basis of such images. Various images are

capable of emerging in a variety of forms from similar material conditions depending on

the conceptual framework within which the image is developed. And the images that do

emerge in the end, if one can ever say that there is an end, are essential to the mode and

the content of the constructed space in the material and spiritual world.

The "image," according to Paul Eulard, has always been an issue of what

remains to be seen, rather than what has already been seen, an attempt to conceive more

90
Georges Gusdorf, Origine delle scienze umane (Genova: ECIG, 1992) 71.
than has been perceived, to unite various notions in the mind despite their diversity. In

this sense, our perception of the locale never correlates with the actual location as seen at

first glance: the image provides the essential instrument that allows for a temporary

replacement of perceptions during the transfer process in both physical and human

spheres.91 The imaginative landscape emerges as a necessary prelude to the construction

of the material landscape and man's place within it eventually results from the intersection

between the potentialities existing in the material conditions of a culture and the

imagination of that culture. The conflict over the image, or competing images, always

accompanies periods of great transformation.

To return to Genovesi and the Italian writings on agriculture in general, we can

begin to see how agriculture in the broad sense constitutes precisely one of those points at

which the material transformation of a culture, a moment that has come to be called an

agrarian revolution92, is conditioned by the emergence of new images that compete for an

91
Antoine Bailly, "Imaginaire spatial Plaidoyer pour la geographical des representations,"
Espaces-Temps, 40/4, 1988
92
The literature on the agrarian transformation of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is vast
generally dating the transformation from about the middle of the eighteenth to the end of the
nineteenth century, see J.D. Chambers and G.E.Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750- 1880.
(1966) but is worth pointing out that recent literature has begun to periodize this general
agricultural movement into distinct divisions each with specific characteristics. See F.M.L.
Thompson, “The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815-1880” in The Economic History Review
(1968) who makes three distinct divisions within the more general agricultural transformation.
The first phase of the revolution, ending around 1815, was the shift from peasant subsistence-
farming to cash-farming for the market, leaving the methods of cultivation and the physical
organization of farms substantially unchanged. The second phase involved the technical changes
of crop rotations and livestock improvement;; it generally involved the physical changes of
enclosures, and it embodied the economic changes of increased intensity of cultivation, that is,
production functions were altered by an increase in the amounts of both capital and labor that
could be profitably employed in relation to the land. And finally in the third stage labor was
replaced by machinery [...] and fertilizers were applied in hitherto undreamt-of quantities per acre,
and continuous cereal cropping became possible without incurring the disapproval meted out to
soil-mining. (p 63-65) Even though these contours are very general in nature and based more
specifically on the English example it is useful for conceptualizing distinct aspects of the more
general movement especially as they relate to different aspects of agrarian discourse
ascendancy within a broader discourse. We find in Genovesi's preface to Agricoltura

sperimentato a series of interconnected images of the material and spiritual landscape

that places man in a new cosmology of time and space. Genovesi is attempting to "affirm

man in the world" in such a way that he will be able to "construct his residence" in a

period of acute transition.

At the outset of his preface, as was mentioned, Genovesi discusses the problem of

population in terms of a depopulated countryside: uncultivated expanses of land that held

a great potential beneath the soil. This potential was not only of crops and population but

of ethics, politics, and history. Genovesi’s conception of the unrealized potential hiding

in the deserted countryside is derived primarily from a comparison with ancient cultures

that "were without comparison more populous than today." This comparison is important

for a number of reasons. His approach is essentially historical, that is to say, it is derived

from the reading of ancient documents that described "vast armies, navies, and public

works." Of course this is not surprising, as the modern scientific concept of the carrying

capacity of the land was not a tool available to Genovesi. But with this as his starting

point, we are left with an image of a countryside that is best described as in a state of

decay, decline, and decadence from its former greatness. The implication is that the

current task of reform is to facilitate the recovery of the land's former self; a return, so to

speak, of its Golden Age of well managed farms and abundant crops capable of

supporting vast populations.

But a return to abundance is also a return to the forms and structure of society

that created and supported the conditions of abundance: the Athens of Pericles and the

Rome of the Republics. The idea that civilization had degenerated from a Golden Age

was nearly, though not entirely, an unchallenged assumption in the early decades of the
eighteenth century. For the question of land it has a deep significance. In so far as one

envisions the landscape from the perspective of the presumed conditions, undoubtedly

idealized, of ancient Rome, one necessarily attaches selective elements of it social

structure, its political organization, and its spiritual sentiments. The image of the

landscape, populated and fecund, is simultaneously a re-imagining of the social

organization of the countryside. In Genovesi's case, he imagines agriculture organized

around smaller allotments of land managed by independent farmers living in virtuous

simplicity, reading Varro and Columella and applying the advice of Jethro Tull and

Cosimo Trinci. Genovesi's image of the future is drawn from his image of the past where

man lived in a kind of harmonious unity with nature in a political system that preserved

and protected a virtuous social structure, an image in which agriculture was a cornerstone.

The reliance on the past as the primary source from which the image of the future

is constructed has important implications for other aspects of Genovesi's work. At the

outset of his preface he quotes Montesquieu's analysis as to the cause of the decay or

decline of the population of Rome: "There were smaller Republics and the land was less

unequally divided." Beginning with this statement, Genovesi supported and advocated

the break-up of vast estates into smaller allotments of land in order that a class of

independent farmers could emerge. This position was not universally accepted by his

enlightened contemporaries. To cite the most important example, the Physiocratic school

argued for the preservation of large estates as economically more productive units of

land.

What seems to be at issue in these divergent positions is the very meaning of the

concept of land. For Genovesi the concept of land does not derive its meaning from its

economic function alone but from its ethical function as well. It is only through small-
holdings that "gentlemen and scientist" can employ their knowledge and oversee the

cultivation directly. The contemporary conditions as Genovesi conceived them amounted

to an agriculture of servile labor left to the "lowest and most miserable of men, without

the spirit of improvement" and without "courage," working for others on large estates

making one "resentful" and "wretched" bringing out the "worst and most destructive

instincts becoming in some cases rogues, thieves and assassins."

Without question, there is for Genovesi an ethico-political content to the concept

of land. The country life "nourishes the sprit with hope, simple honest love and generates

humanity. " These comments and others like them are derived from his image of Rome

where "as long as the consuls and dictators picked up the plow, and Cato and Varro and

infinite signori took the most delightful pleasure in agriculture, everything was in

abundance and full of virtue." While the Physiocrats did not detach the moral component

from the meaning of land altogether, they did introduce the concept of net product or

surplus wealth as its primary defining attribute. "The discovery of the net product,” wrote

Mirabeau, “which we owe to the venerable Confucius of Europe [Quesnay] will one day

change the face of the world ... The whole moral and physical advantages of societies is

summed up in one point, an increase in net product."93 In other words, the whole

economic, political, and moral edifice of a nation depends on the increase or decrease of

the "net product"--for the Physiocrats the sole source of which was agriculture.

This is nearly a reversal of the position taken by Genovesi. Whereas for the

Physiocrats, the moral order is derived from a rational ordering of the land (maximizing

the net product), for Genovesi the economic benefits are the result of the ethical ordering

of the land. While we will look more closely at the influence of Physiocracy in Italy in

93
Correspondence General se JJ Rousseau, vol XVIII in Meeks 171-71.
chapter three, suffice it to say that Genovesi was little influenced by Physiocracy and

never utilized the concept of net product as the explanation for the source of national

wealth.

The concept of net product as the fundamental criterion for evaluating the

position of a society has profound implications for the concept of historical time. If one

accepts Mirabeau's positions that all good done to a society is the result of the increase in

the "net product" and "all damage done to a society is determined by this fact, a

reduction in the net product. It is on the two scales of this balance that you can place and

weigh laws, manners, customs, vices, and virtues,"94 then history ceases to hold its

privileged position in the formation of the imagined landscape. The sole criterion for

Physiocracy is the rational exploitation of the land and if history cannot provide the most

efficient model, then others will be formulated through rational analysis. The image of the

future is no longer constructed on the basis of a presumed Golden Age, but from a

scientific understanding of the "laws of nature." The very concept of land becomes

detached from history. For Genovesi this detachment is inconceivable.

It would be incorrect to suggest, however, that Genovesi was trapped in a kind of

scholasticism from which all sources of authority are to be found in either the Scriptures

or the classics or the reconciliation of the two. Nothing could be further from Genovesi's

cosmology. In an insightful work, Richard Bellamy,95 places Genovesi between two

competing schools of thought that dominated the Neopolitan intellectual scene in the first

half of the eighteenth century, each representing what would seem to be different parts of

94
Meeks 171.
95
Richard Bellamy, “ 'Da metafisico a mercatante'- Antonio Genovesi and the Development of a
New Language of Commerce in Eighteenth-century Naples,” The Languages of Political Theory
in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden, (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1987) 277-
299.
a fundemantal shift from an old to a new world view. The first centered on the

Accademia degli Oziosi, founded in 1733 and supported by Giambattista Vico and Paolo

Mattia Doria. This group, known as the veteres, was especially hostile to the "material

and carnal sciences" of Newton's Principia and Opticks, arguing that a rigorous

application of the empirical method to the study of society was incompatable with

Catholic morality. The second group, the Accademia delle Scienze, known as the

novatores, founded the year before by Celestino Galiani and Bartolomeo Intieri, was

fervently anti-metaphysical, viewing Newton's experimental method as a model in the

natural sciences that could be perfectly applied to man and society. They saw in the

works of Mandeville, Bayle and above all Locke precisely this application. It is worth

looking more closely at this conflict that was "the central issue in contemporary Naples

"96 in order to situate Genovesi's place within it and to demonstrate its relevance for his

conception of land.

The formation of an independent Neopolitan kingdom in 1734 under Carlo

Borbone, stimulated widespread hopes for legal, administrative, and social reform that

could "revive a society hitherto crippled by feudal privileges and systematically

56
plundered by foreign rulers." The debates between the veteres and the novatores

developed within this hopeful context, each seeking to provide the intellectual tools

suitable for a renovation. The Accademia delle Scienze looked to Holland and England

as its models, attributing their success less to state intervention than to a culture and to

laws favorable to its commercial development. At issue between the two academies was

in part the nature of commercial development and its role in the overall development of

society. The debates over science were also reflected in their competing concepts of

96
Bellamy 278.
economic development.

The veteres stressed the social character of economic development which focused

not on individual self-interest, but on the Christian concern with mutual aid and social

justice which required "a most virtuous education and good training."97 The novetores on

the other hand attempted to "legitimize commercial practice by elaborating a lay

utilitarian model of society, based on immutable economic laws reflecting those of the

Newtonian cosmos, the principle of which was human self interest."98 For his part,

Genovesi did not adopt either position fully and appeared to steer a middle course

between these two opposing groups. His affinity with the novatores is revealed in his use

of Newtonian language and in his adoption of mathematical principles in his description

of economic and moral laws. "Therefore the first foundation of the moral sciences,"

writes Genovesi in his La logica per gli giovanetti (1766), "is human nature: the second

the relations between things, which surround us: the third the laws of these relations."99

In his attempt to formulate his own laws or principles governing human nature, he

continues to use explicitly Newtonian language by dividing human nature into two

essentially opposed impulses; the one centripetal and the other centrifugal. Elsewhere he

uses concentriva and diffusiva or espansiva and coattiva or in the language of Hobbes and

Mandeville self-love and love of the species. For Genovesi a just and prosperous society

developes from the proper equlibrium or the just porportion between these two necessary

forces. According to Villari, the principle of "equilibrium furnishes the key to Genovesi's

system and is the link between his economics and his ethics."100

97
P.M. Doria, Del commercio del regno di Napoli (1740) in Bellamy 279.
98
Bellamy 279.
99
Genovesi in Bellamy 283.
100
Villari 72.
 In the search for this equilibrium one must make use of the tools, according to

Genovesi, made available by the development of the new sciences and in particular of

mathematics. "Nothing in the world happens without causes," he wrote in reference to the

just equilibrium of population in a nation, and when a nation has become depopulated or

is in a state of disequilibrium the wise legislator must discover the causes and calculate

the measures that will remove the obstacles for a healthy balance. "Therefore the first

science of those who govern is political arithmetic; the second political geometry."101

Genovesi had in large part adopted the language of Newtonian physics, but had not

entirely reduced social interaction to the simple calculations of pleasure and pain.

Bellamy argues that Genovesi had successfully exploited and mixed the values of both

the theologian and the merchant by using Newtonian language as the mediator between

these two historically opposed world views. Bellamy does not, however, make it entirely

clear whether he believes that Genovesi's shift from metafisico to mercatante was a shift

that allowed Genovesi to express old values in a new language or new values in an old

language.102 However, Genovesi clearly formulated a concept of man with a complexity

101
Genovesi, Lezioni 85.
102
The shift from metafisco a mercatante, as in the title of Bellamy's article, was taken from a
letter of Genovesi to Romualdo Sterlich where Genovesi jokes about his own transformation from
metaphysician to merchant after accepting the chair of Commerce and Mechanics at the University
of Napels in 1753. In what is an excellent study of Genovesi's "shift" Bellamy still leaves a
somewhat ambiguous conclusion of whether Genovesi is expressing old values in a new language
or new values in an old language. The difficulty derives from a somewhat problematic use of the
concept of modernity. This problem is similar to the one alluded to already in the case of Meeks
and Schumpeter. Bellamy seems, perhaps inadvertently, to imply that Genovesi's mixing of two
different languages is a reflection of a "politics adapted to the needs of modern commercial socity"
(p.277) In Genovesi's particular case to a developing commercial society in the eighteenth century
Kingdom of Napels. The implication is that Genovesi like the Kingdom were stages towards the
evolution of a given modernity. But this is a narrow and certainly incomplete model of Modernity.
The assumption is that modernity , however defined, was an underlying reality towards which the
most developed societies were advancing and correspondingly the most advanced philosophies
ascending. But as Fox-Genovese asserted in another context, it may be that Genovesi was
expressing, not a stage towards modernity from which antiquated ideas tenaciously held on, but an
alternative vision of modernity.
that could neither be entirely subordinated to traditional theology nor to an exclusively

Newtonian universe. Genovesi, unlike many enlightened writers, notably his Neopolitian

contemporary, Galiani, was unwilling to reduce man to a simple attribute subject to

universal law. In his highly praised Della moneta, Galiani asserted that the desire for

gain was the equivalent in the moral sciences to gravity in the natural sciences. As we

have already seen, Genovesi argued that man was a complex of competing attributes--

centripetal and centrifugal-- and had a nature that was essentially divided into two parts;

an animal nature with appetites and passions on the one hand, and a rational nature

subject to all of the laws of reason on the other. Genovesi opposed those writers like

Mandeville, Hobbes, and Locke, who attempted to reduce all human actions to only one

side of man’s complex nature, and he wholeheartedly opposed the notion developed by

Mandeville that the pursuit of self-interests could lead to benefits for mankind. For

Genovesi, the passions always ruled man’s actions, but the passions were themselves of

two kinds--self-love and love of species. The rational side of man’s nature was essential

to excite the greater passion resulting in a just equilibrium between the two

Genovesi's acceptance of the language of the new sciences did not mean the

incorporation of all that this science implied in the way of mathematical reductionism. He

was unwilling to accept the existence of eternal formulas that could be applied to all

people at all times. "It is a popular error in judgement, he writes, that the happiness or

unhappiness of a people different from us or foreign can be applied to ones own nation.

here will be certain systems appropriate for England but that could not govern France,

and certain ones of Tuscany that would not be able to work in state of Milan."103

Elsewhere Genovesi explicitly refutes Montesqieu's naturalistic explanation made by

103
Genovesi, Ragionamento intorno all'uso delle grandi ricchezza in Villari 100.
regarding the character and spirit of nations. "Differences,” he writes, “do not come only

from the soil and the climate, but from the government, the laws, the sciences and

religious cults that tend to make one love hard work."104

While Genovesi was willing to accept the importance of scientific laws in a social

context and even apply a degree of mathematical analysis to social phenomena, he never

allowed the new scientific method to displace a deeply historical approach to social

events. The influence of Vico on Genovesi has already been mentioned, but he did not

utlize Vico uncritically. The evolution of Genovesi's historical thought is worth looking at

in order to situate his vision of progress and its relationship to a presumed Golden Age.

In 1745 Genovesi published a history of scientific thought with particular attention to the

problems of physics and the general question of scientific methods. Eugenio Garin called

the Disputatio physico-historica de rerum corporearum origine, et constitutione among

the most important and interesting attempts in the settecento to write a history of

science.105 In the first editions of his Disputatio , Genovesi makes ample use of Vichian

concepts particularly regarding the alternation of light and dark or in uniquely Vichian

terms corsi e ricorsi. In an updated and revised version of the book published in 1763,

however, Genovesi eliminated entirely the notion of corsi e ricorsi as regards scientific

knowledge and in its place substituted the idea of a migration of knowledge.106 This

knowledge, according to Genovesi, originated in the east among the Jews, Egyptians,

Phonecians, Caldeans, and others, moved to the west via the Greeks, and eventually

returned to the east with the Arabs, migrating back to the west during the Renassiance

104
Genovesi Ragionamento.
105
Eugenio Garin, Dal Ranascimento all'Illuminismo (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1970) 221.
106
Garin 337.
until the time of Galileo, and then towards France with Descartes, to England with

Newton and the Newtonians until finally advancing through Germany with the works of

Leibniz and Wolff. Garin writes that this new vision of Genovesi's "seems to suggest the

theme of the world spirit passing from one people to another."107

The importance of Genovesi's historical vision is not just that it might prefigure

Hegelian concepts, but, more importantly, that he was formulating a vision of progress

without jettisoning the social and intellectual relationships and achievements of classical

civilization; that is, a progress engendered by the expansion of commerce and a more

rational exploitation of economic forces that could make possible a recovery, albiet at a

higher level, of a Golden Age.

This historical vision allows Genovesi to formulate a conception of land that

aggressively encourages new economic developments, detaching land from the "dead

hand" and other feudal encumbrances, without separating it from its historical and

philosophical bonds. The idea of land as a commodity and nothing more could not find a

place in Genovesi's cosmology. Since land, for him, was inextricably linked to a complex

socio-historical evolution of the material reproduction of life with all the political, moral,

and spiritual attributes entwined within its concept, it should be understood as an essential

building block in his vision of a just and moral social structure.

Genovesi's just social structure certainly emerges from his sense of Christian

charity but is framed in the language of mercantilism identifying the family with the

nation in their dependent interaction. "The excessive inequality of land distribution,” he

writes, “greatly diminishes the wealth of a nation. One family may have as much as

107
Garin 337.
10,000 moggia of land and another equal portion may have as many as 5,000 families, it

is obvious that the second 10,000 will be very much better cultivated than the first.”108

Genovesi's concept of land as a part of the economic structure of society is inseparable

from his ethical vision where social divisions are based not on nature or on privilege but

by diverse activities within the economy corresponding to the division of work. The

relationship between the classes in a properly structured society should not be one of

struggle and conflict. For Genovesi, the non- producing classes were essential for the

proper regulation of the state, but nevertheless should be based on the "law of the

minimum possible." In his Lezioni, he elaborates his reasoning regarding the principle of

the minimum and writes:

The general and fundamental principle is, as I have said, that the classes of men
that produce income should be as numerous as possible and that can be supported
by the extension of the produce of the land, the commodities from the sea and
other similar circumstances; and on the contrary those classes that do not
immediately yield revenue should be as few as possible. The reason for such a
principle is clear; in as much as it is obvious that the riches of a nation is always
the sum of hard work. It therefore follows that the fewer number of men who do
not yield revenue--often being larger than those that do yield-- larger must be the
sum of toil and consequently larger the revenue of the nation.109

With his emphasis on toil and hard work as the source of wealth, Genovesi was

approaching a labor theory of value. This is in sharp contrast to the physiocratic theory

that the sole source of wealth were the natural processes found exclusively in the

production of crops. For the Physiocrats, labor, in and of itself, produced no new wealth

but simply reworked that which was given by nature. Genovesi's humanism compelled

108
Genovesi in Villari 103.
109
Genovesi Lezioni in Villari 92.
him to emphasize the socio-historical component of economic development and the active

intervention of human labor, rather than, as the Physiocrats had done, subordinate

economic and social structures to the laws of nature. Thus, the active intervention of the

state was an essential component of his theories of the minimum possible and just

proportion.

One final comment on Genovesi's concept of land is necessary as it relates to

space and historical time. It has already been shown that Genovesi cannot be understood

without incorporating his intertwining visions of historical development, ethical ordering,

and scientific epistemology. His concept of land is inseparable from these larger contexts.

Genovesi, as we have seen, advocated a gradual parcellization of the land into the hands

of those who could best work it with the application of the latest experimental

technologies and tools, that is, a reordering of both social and physical space. However,

Genovesi also knew that such parcellization would be expensive and virtually impossible

without ample access to capital. In fact, he was among the first reformers to demonstrate

the necessity of capital investment in land.110 Such investment necessitated some form of

rural credit to be guaranteed by the state. Again, the importance of Genovesi's insight is

not simply that he prefigures later reformers and economists, but that the introduction of

the concept of credit, insofar as it impinges on the meaning of land, imposes a

contradictory concept. For Genovesi land is imbedded within a both a moral structure and

a vision of historical time that derives its essential image from a Golden Age. With the

introduction of credit, land increasingly becomes subordinated to another measure of

time, time that is based on the credit cycle. Within such a vision, land must be evaluated

on the basis of a future (anticipated) value and a necessary growth through improvement

110
Villari 107.
and valorization of goods through market expansion. The implications of this shift could

not have been recognized by Genovesi, as rural credit was virtually unavailable in the

Kingdom at the time.111 But it would be incorrect to evaluate Genovesi as somehow

simply a transitional figure who randomly mixed incompatible concepts, who was unable

to separate the "essential kernels" of sound economic theory from the "non-essential

frills" of classical erudition.112

It would be difficult to place Genovesi within one of the schools of economic

thought in the eighteenth century without greatly distorting his vision. Furthermore, he

was not a great systematic thinker who was driven by the discovery of singular directive

principles. However, two characteristic qualities should be emphasized in conclusion.

First, Genovesi was always deeply concerned with the concrete realities of the Kingdom

of Naples and never attempted to subordinate the complexities of human interactions to

abstract formulas. The second characteristic was his adherence to a philosophic project

that resembled what Georg Gusdorf calls an astrobiology. That is, a vision of reality as a

complex interlocking whole where history, science, metaphysics, and nature were

mutually dependent. The reductionism that would come to dominate the natural and

human sciences in the following century was not a path that Genovesi's thought could

follow. This again is not a question of remnants of pre-modern thought that would prove

to be obsolete in the coming decades, but rather a vision of modernity along a different

111
The problem of credit and its relationship to the conceptualization of time will be explored in
chapter four.
112
See Studi in onore di Antonio Genovesi, a cura Domenico Demarco (Napoli: L'Arte Tipografica,
1961) in which Attilio Garino Canina for example concludes that "Genovesi did not succeed in
formulating exact principles fundamental to economic science-- on the other hand it may have
been that his era in Italy made it impossible..." In his search for the roots of modern economic
thought Canin does not recognize that Genovesi is not incomplete or inexact but rather operates
through a different discursive framework, one that is not a reductionist paradigm characteristic of
modern economic science.
axis. His was a vision that attempted to synthesize and combine the language and insights

of the new experimental sciences with that of traditional humanism.

Genovesi could not accept man defined simply as homo economicus. For

Genovesi, economic man was also historical man, ethical man, and natural man. Just as

his image of man was encased in his attempts to find a new synthesis that would not

fragment and define man by a singular attribute, neither could land be separated from its

presumed historical, natural, and metaphysical qualities.

 Chapter Three

Land and the Classical Past

The history of Rome is a gallery that presents itself to the spectator as pictures of
infinite marvels. One can consider the singular example of the private virtue of its
citizens, the love of country, frugality, sobriety, simplicity of custom; or public
virtue, the valor and tolerance of its soldiers, the discipline of its army, the skill
of its commanders, the politics of the Senate; all of these things guaranteed that
they would overcome the greatest difficulties, all united and guided by Rome to
subject diverse nations to the glory of its rule.113

So begins the Preliminary Discourse of a book first published in Rome in 1785

by Giuseppe Francesco Maria Cacherano de'Conti di Bricherasion entitled De'mezzi per

introdurre ed assicurare stabilmente la coltivazione e la popolazione nell'Agro Romano.

It is not be surprising that a book directed to the problem of population and cultivation of

the Roman countryside should begin with a eulogy to the historical greatness of Rome.

But Cacherano has other purposes in mind for the historical discourse on the rise and fall

of Rome. The first is to create a clear contrast for the reader in relation to the present

conditions of the Agro Romano. Where once there were grand roads, lush gardens and

magnificent fertility, today's traveler is filled with a "sadness of spirit" at the sight of the

squalid countryside, barren fields, empty of inhabitants. "The greatness of Rome has

fallen so low that the countryside is uninhabitable due to the physical causes of unhealthy,

stagnant air, void of its natural elasticity."114 Cacherano asserts that the bad air is the

113
G. Francesco M. Cacherano, De' mezzi per introdurre ed assicurare stablimente la coltivazzione
e la popolazione nel'Agro Romano (Faenza: Societa Anonima Aziende Agricolle Maremmema,
1936) III.
114
Cacherano.
result, not the cause, of the depopulation of the Agro-Romano. One need only look to the

example of America, claims Cacherano, to illustrate how unhealthy swamplands were

converted to bountiful farmlands by the hard work of productive settlers. Again, as with

Genovesi, we have a description of the eighteenth century Italian countryside that not

only establishes a link between mankind and the land, but assumes a complete

interdependence between the land and man. It is for Cacherano, like Genovesi, a

metabolic interdependence in both the spiritual and material sense. This metabolic

interdependence was once deeply entrenched in the Agro-Romano of ancient Rome, but

has fallen into such decline as to be an unrecognizable remnant of its former greatness.

The second purpose of the historical approach to the problem is not only to

analyze the cause of the decline but also to create a model for the future of the Agro

Romano. The model of ancient Rome, from which Cacherano formulates his own vision,

is not of course to be replicated in its historical detail. The eighteenth century Papal States

bare little resemblance to the Rome of the Republic. It is rather the spirit of the Roman

Republic that Cacherano wants to capture or recapture, that is, the private virtue of its

citizens, the public virtue of its politics and law, and the greatness of its nation.

In his preliminary discourse, Cacherano recounts history from the rise of Rome--

abundantly populated by citizen-solider-farmers-- to the beginnings of its decline and

depopulation with the introduction of slavery and the barbarian invasion. He writes

glowingly of the agrarian laws of the Gracchi and others who attempted to limit land

ownership. Luxury is attacked by Cacherano as one of the central causes of the

weakening of the empire, dissipating the will and motivation to work. With the

expansion of the empire, the solider-farmer was taken too far from his landed patrimony

to properly care for it and with such developments a vast inequality of wealth was created
between Romans themselves cultivating a deep hostility between the rich and poor.

Like Trinci, Genovesi, Presta and many others, Cacherano used the classical past

as an axis from which present economic, social and political conditions could be

subjected to either direct or veiled critiques. Cacherano, however, has moved the

discourse to a higher level of dependence on classical erudition not only to criticize

present conditions but to establish a specific plan of action for the economic recovery of

the Agro Romano. The publication of this extraordinary book all but ruined the very

successful career of Cacherano.

Giuseppe Cacherano was born October 5, 1736 the second son of a father who

held the illustrious titles of Commendatore della Santa Croce di Vercilli, Vicer 115 e

Capitano Generale del Regno di Sardegna, Governatore di Trotona, Allessandria e della

cittadella di Torino. As the second son, Giuseppe was not to make his mark in the

military orders but rather in the civil and political history of the church states. He

received his degree from the University of Torino and after moving to Rome took

religious orders in the Croce di Malta which marked the beginning of a rapid rise in his

career as a prelate. He became the Governor of the city and countryside of Todi in 1760;

Sabina in 1765, Fano on 1766 and by 1790 had become Segretario della Comunita

Ecclesiastica.116 Cacherano was widely noted for his erudition, penetrating insights, force

of argumentation, eloquence and clear judgment. He corresponded with the Accademia

Georgofili and notably with Abate Francesco Gemelli the author of an important work on

Sardegna entitled Riforimento della Sardegna proposto nel miglioramento di sua

agricoltura published in 1776.

The same year that Cacherano published his work on the Agro Romano, 1785,

115
Cacherano, from the introduction of Cesare Grinovero 7-50.
116
Cacherano 60.
Pope Pio VI had published the catasto generale that had been ordered by a decree in

December of 1772. It is not difficult to understand the negative reaction caused by

Cacherano's book if one takes even a cursory glance at the general results of the catasto.

According to the publication of 1785 the land area of the Agro Romano was 204,427 ha.

Of this, 127,320 ha. were in the hands of 113 families, over 60%. Prince Borghese alone

owned 22,149 ha. with the Capitolo di San Pietro holding 20,162 ha. and the Ospedale of

Santa Spirito with 15,130 ha. The total population at the time was estimated to be

424,000.117

Such an uneven division of land, concentrated in the hands of so few, strikes at

the very heart of Cacherano's reforming project. Unlike Genovesi, however, Cacherano

was less timid with his proposals concerning agrarian laws and his special colonization

project that would effectively move large numbers of peasant families into the waste

lands of the Agro Romano, essentially reestablishing the small family patrimony that

once characterized the ancient Romans.

Against such powerful opposition, Cacherano evokes a higher moral ground upon

which the state itself can and must derive the necessary power needed to rectify the

centuries of damage and decay to which the Agro Romano has fallen. "If the many suffer

from the bad use of the land,” he writes,

then in their misery they will not be able to contribute to expand the pleasures
and comforts of the other portion of citizens; even dissolving, or at least
weakening the bonds of society itself, diminishing the reciprocal concourse
between members of society. Mankind's obligation to help his fellow man is
derived from nature. Society has no other duty than to expand these obligations
and regulate the means for their fulfillment. It would be a violation of the laws of
nature and the laws of society to exclude all or even part of this debt.118

117
Grinovero 34.
118
Cacherano XV.
 Although Cacherano's moral ground, as we can see, is derived from a rather a

vague recourse to natural law his work as a whole is emphatically historical. What

interests us here is not only the unique characteristics of Cacherano's specific proposal but

also, and more importantly for our purposes, his mode of exposition and his specific

historical argument. De'mezzi is divided into three sections. In the first, preliminary

discourse, Cacherano gives us an eloquent summary of his view that the decline of Rome

was directly the result of the changing land ownership patterns. In part two, we find a

more detailed historical and analytical elaboration of the various points outlined in the

first section, and in the third section, in what distinguishes Cacherano's work from that of

most of his contemporaries, we find a specific and very detailed proposal for the

colonization of the Agro Romano.

The work as a whole is an eloquent and forceful text that centers on the

chronological history of the rise and fall of Rome. In Cacherano's view, the historical

events themselves speak directly to the current conditions of the Agro Romano and

equally suggest a clear outline for its remedy. The Romans, according to Cacherano, as

we have already seen, created the initial conditions, political, social, and spiritual, that

would guarantee its ascendance and world dominance in all fields. As long as those

conditions were operating, Rome's success was guaranteed. The seeds of the decline of

Rome are to be found very specifically in the loss of the ancient wisdom that assured a

landed patrimony to its citizens.

The patrimony of the first Romans, Cacherano writes, was only two jugeri 119 of

119
One jugeri equals 2400 square meters and was initially derived from the amount of land that a
man with an ox could plow in one day.
land measure from which one could not sustain a family. The necessity to supply ones

subsistence was itself a stimulus for war."120 After this initial phase of expansion, the

land granted was extended to seven jugeri at which point the greater part of the Roman

citizenry cultivated its own patrimony. In ancient times it was "a preeminent honor to be

from a Tribú Rustiche over the Tribú Urbane."121 The greatness of Rome was derived

not only from the guarantee of a landed patrimony to its citizens, but equally from the

limitations on that patrimony. In fact, all great civilizations of the past in some way

imposed limitations on land holdings. "It is not known,” he writes, “what limits the

Athenians placed on the acquisition of land but it is certain they were not allowed more

than a determined amount."122

The seeds of Rome's decay of are to be found in two developments, both of

which directly impinged on the cultivation of land. The first is the continuation of wars

that increasingly took the farmer-solider further from his land. Eventually the solider was

no longer able to return each year to cultivate his patrimony and thus "gradually lost his

affection for agriculture and little by little preferred the city to the country. ... Eventually

by the time of Mario the Tribú Rustiche were not in a just proportion to the urban citizens

and they were compelled to use slaves to guarantee adequate cultivation."123 As a

consequence of this growing imbalance between city and county, there emerged the

second critical and ultimately catastrophic development: the growing distinction between

patrician and plebe. The class war that followed, essentially between nobles and plebes,

ended in victory of the nobles. Consequently, the plebes were deprived of their landed

120
Cacherano XVII.
121
Cacherano XV.
122
Cacherano XVII.
123
Cacherano.
patrimony. The nobles then "imposed inhuman severity towards debtors.124 “ The Law of

the Twelve Tablets, Cacherano continues,

fixed that the creditor did not have to give more than one pound weight of grain
each day to his debtor, insufficient for his sustenance which allowed him to be
locked in the chains of a private prison and reduced to slavery, selling him and in
the end dividing his body among his creditors. They were laws against every
humanity, functioning only to make known the spirit of the Roman patricians
against the poor plebes. Similar were the sentiments of Appio Claudio head of
the Decemviri, implacable enemy of the plebes, and great partisan, if not the
author, of the maxim to keep them oppressed and miserable.125

The Romans did not moderate their land laws until 379, the year Licinio Stolone

forbade citizens from having more than 500 jugeri of land. According to Cacherano,

however, the evil had already grown from such deep roots and the laws were so poorly

observed that the plebes were always in worse condition. After the death of the Gracchi,

the last great proponents of agrarian laws, and the death of the Republic, the very idea of

an agrarian law was proscribed as a crime by the patricians "wanting to destroy even the

memory of liberty."126 But the memory was preserved, as Cacherano points out, by

Plutarch who attributed to Tiberio Gracco "a great spirit who proposed an agrarian law

from compassion for the misery of the Plebes and from seeing the uncultivated

countryside empty of inhabitants, from which was lost the force and the sustenance of the

Republic itself."127

Cacherano continues to trace the decline of Rome through successive centuries,

through the division of the Empire between east and west, the use of barbarian soldiers,

the growth of outrageous luxury, and finally the sacking of Rome and the invasion of the

124
Cacherano XXI.
125
Cacherano XXI.
126
Cacherano XXXI.
127
Cacherano 81.
Longobards, who introduced new property relations to Italy. Cacherano concludes his

preliminary discourse by laying direct blame for the miserable conditions of the Agro

Romano and thus the weakness of the State on the avarice of the rich. He writes:

When the rich dispossessed the poor citizens of their land, who were then left
without work and without patrimony, they were to blame for depriving Rome of
the best part of its population, and cutting the arms from the cultivators, so that it
had to lose the strength and robustness of its own center, while diluting and
extending its member to the outside. It was therefore inevitable that they were
not able to resist the driving force of its enemies, falling from the state of
greatness to which it had leaped: its countryside remained deprived of farmers,
deserted and uncultivated: it was the greatest harm that could befall a city, from
which Rome was never able to revive itself in the course of many centuries and
from which without enormous difficulty will it be able to revive itself.128

What is immediately striking about the text of this high ranking prelate is the

boldness with which he evokes the specter of class warfare as the impetus for the

implementation of new agrarian laws, laws that would effectively redistribute land to

landless farmers in the Agro Romano and reorganize rural social and political

relationships. Operating within a hierarchical structure fixed between state, church, and

subjects, Cacherano proposes a radical egalitarian land division as the only effective

remedy to the current economic and social decay. He confronts head on the numerous

obstacles that block the road to such a large scale plan for reform, including a reluctant

sovereign, a hostile nobility, commercial self-interest, and a distrustful class of landless

farmers.

Much of the text is significantly dedicated to historical erudition detailing the

tragic decline of the Golden Age of the Roman Republic. It is rare to find so clearly

formulated an historical text that provides the basis for such a detailed plan of action as

128
Cacherano 68.
we find in Cacherano's colonization project. His historical vision stands quite clearly as

the mediating link between contemporary conditions and a very specific image of the

future. Although on several occasions Cacherano makes reference to Natural Law, or the

"laws of nature", his plan for radical land division is inconceivable without his historical

vision. At every moment, regardless of how detailed he becomes in his outline for reform,

he refers back to the historical precedent of great civilizations, Rome being, for obvious

reasons, the primary though not exclusive model from which Cacherano draws his

justification. In all cases, he asserts, in all great civilizations as in Rome specifically,

it has not been the artist and manufacturers of luxury, neither the literati that have
founded the Republic and established the power of the people or that led it to
greatness. These men have added splendor, ornament and cultivation, if not in
fact false philosophers who opened the road to vice and error. But really the
cultivators of the land have formed the society, founded the cities, composed the
armies for defense or added greatness with conquests. They have above all
sustained it with food. To this class Rome was indebted for its progress, its
greatness, its victories and its triumphs. From only this class of men can it hope
for its rebirth and the remedy its ills.129

Whereas in Genovesi we may read that hard work is the capital of the poor or that

labor is the source of national wealth, both ideas formulated from a slightly more abstract

theoretical framework, Cacherano constructs his arguments almost entirely upon the

study of history. The glory of Alexander the Great, who destroyed cities, countryside, and

thousands of men, pales in comparison to Peter the Great, who attempted to destroy the

barbarism of his people and teach the love of cultivation and the arts. And who could

compare, continues Cacherano, Pizzaro and Cortez to the wise William Penn? The whole

of history has been subsumed to some degree within the framework of the history of

cultivation. The organization of agriculture provides the historical key to political and

129
Cacherano 127.
military history, fine arts and culture, philosophy, spiritual sentiments, and ethical values.

The reorganization of the mode of cultivation and property relations is, for Cacherano

like Genovesi, the reorganization of the whole social structure.

Cacherano seems aware of large scale opposition to his program of reform, the

most vehement, of course, coming from the large landowners themselves. It is

undoubtedly this recognition that impels him to favor a reform that emanates from the

central authority of the sovereign prince. Only such a central authority has both the power

and moral perspective to overcome both absolute and traditional property rights claimed

by the rich. "The opposition to agrarian laws, writes Cacherano,

have always come from the rich landowners themselves who have always and
everywhere valued the property rights authorized and defended by the laws, but
before this, and much more sacred are the laws of nature, that has the name of
nourishment; and it is this that society must assure for itself and its members. It
may mean checking the personal domination of some even when their personal
rights are oppose public authority, but public authority must always be privileged
and must be served by private rights. Perhaps the desire of the merciful Prince, in
directing and commanding the landowners to cultivate, is the wish to test if there
still remains among them a scentilla of love for the country.130

While Cacherano's specific proposal in the third section of the text can certainly

be included in the larger genre of utopian literature, it is noteworthy for both its detail and

a degree of realism that is often lacking in other similar utopian visions. Cacherano has

targeted a very specific population to colonize a very specific area of farmland within the

Agro Romano. His proposal is to induce 1900 families averaging five members each to

move to what has become abandoned wasteland and return it to its former levels of

productivity if not beyond. The families are to be divided into geographic parishes or

into "Tribu if we want to revive the glorious name of the ancient Tribú Rustiche of

130
Cacherano 106.
Rome."131 The region would be divided into twenty parishes with ninety five families in

each. Cacherano recognizes the initial hardships to be faced by the new families and

wants a plan that will be attractive orderly and fair. “The new population of farmers, he

writes,

must have a legislation adapted to their own profession and mode of life. It
belongs to the public authority to make new laws to replace the old. The new
inhabitants of the countryside must be attracted with favors, with advantageous
contracts and above all to be certain of the promise that the agreements will be
stable and immutable, otherwise they will not be induced to cultivate new lands
and inhabit new countryside . . . .The new population must form itself with a
certain order, and method, and the land divided with a certain equality and
proportion.132

The laws that will enable such a massive project can only be assured by a central

authority and must be founded on the basis of the historical laws and customs that have

amply demonstrated their effectiveness and superior virtue. The image of ancient Rome is

ever present with the new social organization founded on the guarantee of a landed

patrimony of equal proportions divided among families who share both the right and the

duty to participate in self government. Each Tribú is to be governed by five Capi selected

from among the families to serve on a staggered rotating basis each for five semesters

insuring stability, continuity and allegiance. For Cacherano, however, there is a limit to

this self- governing capacity. "People worthy of such a public cause must have first aid.,

he writes. Other than that for the body, and much more essential, is spiritual aid; that they

may be instructed in religion, in their duties towards God, towards their families, and

other men."133To these ends, one division of land is to be separated and called the

131
Cacherano 126.
132
Cacherano 126.
133
Cacherano 130.
"patrimony of the Tribú and must be cultivated by all of the families."134 The income from

this patrimony will support the parish church, doctor, non-agricultural workers and the

special needs of the children of the farmers. Cacherano suggests that each parish be

staffed by a Franciscan Frier who is always better suited for work with the peasants,

being himself humble, patient and hardworking. When the self-governing body of the

Tribú reaches and occasional impasse then the parish priest will arbitrate and, if

necessary, refer special cases to central governing authorities. At this point, Cacherano

seems to have departed somewhat from a pure model of the ancient Romans. He adds

what appears to be a kind of medieval millenarianism reminiscent of the first Franciscans

who arrived in New Spain to organize Christian communities among the indigenous

people after the conquest. But whatever he may add to his vision the core of his project is

to recover the ancient virtues of Rome that are the special patrimony to be found by

plowing up the historical subsoil of the Agro Romano.

Cacherano also engages in the utopian exercise of creating detailed spatial and

architectural plans for his proposed community. Included in his plan is a blueprint for the

parish church, incorporating living quarters for the parish priest, the parish doctor, the

veterinarian, grain storage, and so forth. The design is characterized by its simplicity and

utility of purpose. In addition to the design of the parish center, there is a map that

divides farmland into equal proportions; a grid with a network of roads all leading to the

center of parish organization. What is noteworthy about Cacherano's proposed land

division is an imagined homogenization of space, regardless of differing fertility within

that space, that to some extent replicates an imagined homogenization of virtue, a

flattening, so to speak, of both physical and spiritual topography. The spiritual center of

134
Cacherano 130.
the parish is simultaneously the geographical, the economic, and political center of

peasant life.

Like all utopian blueprints, Cacherano's is a total vision of harmonious unity not

only among men themselves, but equally between man, nature, and the spirit. It is a

cosmological unity that stands in direct opposition to contemporary efforts among the

economistsi to break apart the kind of unity explicated in Cacherano's utopian vision. At

one level, this would appear to link Cacherano to Genovesi, particularly the latter's

unwillingness to isolate human attributes that would reduce man to an expression of a few

essential qualities. To be sure, Cacherano emphatically insists on the necessary link

between virtue, land, and history, as does Genovesi, but we should point out the essential

difference between them.

Genovesi's use of history was not only to conjure up an image of a Golden Age

that could indicate a latent potential within contemporary conditions. His use of history

was also to demonstrate the extraordinary complexity of human development. It was a

vision of corso and ricorso on the Vichian model within an overall path of human

progress expressed as a migration of human wisdom. For his part, Cacherano uses

history to define a somewhat static model that could be entirely subordinated to a

rationality that imposed itself on the ordering of time, space, and human volition.

Whereas Genovesi could incorporate rationality and irrationality as phenomena

expressed in the same historical event, Cacherano seems distrustful of the spontaneous

development of the human mind. It is a revealing aspect of Cacherano's plan that there is

no education within the parish other than in the techniques of farming. By learning the

arts and sciences the peasant would "no longer be adapted to the plow becoming a burden
to the family and the parish. Forming robust bodies is the first need."135 Such an omission

would be unthinkable to Genovesi.136

The link between land and ethics or morality goes back at least as far a Biblical

times when God divided land among the twelve Tribes of Israel and it was a pervasive

theme among the ancient writers like Columnella, Varro, and Virgil. In modern times,

from the Renaissance on, these classical writings were the primary source of rural

wisdom--insofar as they were the most often cited authorities in subsequent agricultural

writings-- representing the Golden Age of agricultural practice and cultural achievement.

As such, discussions of Roman, Greek, Persian, or Egyptian agriculture were an integral

part of nearly all works on agriculture through the eighteenth century. However, the

manner in which these classical references were used began to change from mere

erudition to social critique much in the style that we have seen with Cacherano, Presta,

and Genovesi.

To illustrate this shift in the use of classical discourse we can cite the 1772

edition of Camillo Tarello's Ricordo D'Agricoltura.137 Tarello's book, first published in

1609, had gone through many printings and was widely known and often cited as among

the most important works on proper agricultural practices. What makes the 1772 edition

135
Cacherano 130.
136
It is interesting to note that Cacherano's text of 1785 was republished by the Fascist Ministry of
Agriculture in 1936 as an example of the historical roots of its own vision of rural reorganization.
Indeed, there are elements of his vision that seem to foreshadow the fascist egalitarian spirit within
a fixed hierarchy. It was also in Chacerano's hostility to absolute property rights and his
subordination of the rights of the individual to the needs of the sovereign that Fascists found an
opponent to Enlightenment's glorification of the individual. Cacherano was not an opponent of the
Enlightenment. His willingness to subordinate the individual to an imposed rationality is in fact
shared by major intellectual currents of the century. What interests us here however, is the
relationship between land, history, and virtue for which Cacherano was a brilliant spokesman and
advocate.
137
Camillo Tarello, Ricordo D'Agricoltura (Venezia: Gianmaria Bassaglia, 1772).
interesting is Padre Gian-Francesco Scottini's lengthy introduction, abundant notes, tables

and illustrations. Tarello's book is itself a handbook on cultivation basing the majority of

his proposals on classical sources, often cross-referenced with other classical writers or

occasionally more contemporary sources. Throughout the 1772 edition, Scottini adds his

own text to Tarello's work as a kind of running commentary written in the form of

footnotes. Scottini also makes use of classical sources and history, not only to elaborate

on the best techniques for cultivation, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to criticize

the social and political organization of contemporary agriculture. At one point in the

discourse where the primary text is comparing the vastly greater agricultural productivity

under the Romans, Tarello writes:

The reason is neither the rains, nor the winds, nor the birds, nor worms, nor rats,
or any other animal that may influence the produce of the land, one can truly say
that this is the result of the ignorance, negligence and prejudice of the farmers.
Whereas the ancient Romans lived among their crops, working in the two fields
given to each family by Romulus, they plowed a lot and seeded a little, our
modern farmers do the opposite, they plow little and seed a lot while dying of
hunger.138

Scottini uses Tarello's argument for the virtue of deep plowing as an opportunity

to criticize contemporary lease arrangements between landlords and peasants. His

primary objection is the widespread use of short term leases usually not exceeding three

years. For Scottini, the short lease has had dreadful consequences, placing the peasant at

the mercy of the landlord. The benefits of deep plowing will not only be felt immediately

but for years to come and will be advantagous to both landlord and peasant. But the

peasant, if he is not the landowner or is not secure in his long term tenancy, will not be

138
Scottini 34-35
motivated to undertake the laborious practice of deep plowing. In his commentary

Scottini concludes with his own classical reference “The Romans under the emporers,”

he writes, “worked their lands with slaves and the authors of those times lamented such

customs; as long as one cannot change their condition; they will not work without severe

goading. The peasants of our times under the despotism of the three year tenancy do not

work in any other way. They do not have the name of slaves, but in fact are such.” 139

Throughout the text, Scottini uses his commentaries as a springboard for his

particular social critique. Tarello's use of classical authors, particularly Columnella,

Virgil, Pliny, Varro and Cato are almost always cited for their technical wisdom. Insofar

as Scottini cites the same authors, it is to correct them on the authority of contemporary

agronomists or to confirm their observations from the point of view of a more modern

approach to knowledge in the spirit of works like those produced by Leibniz, Newton,

Galileo and Bacon, all of whom Scottini lavishes with praise. But even with Scottini's

introduction of the modern critical spirit, he does not abandon his dependency on the

image of marvelous past. "The long tenancy,” he writes, “most perfectly expresses the

best and most secure conditions, as much for the landowner as for the farmer. When this

is obtained, everything will flourish and return us to a Golden Age.140

Elsewhere in the text, at a point where Tarello discusses the methods for

maximizing grape production, Scottini launches into a discussion of the numerous evils

brought about by the introduction of the "Barbarian system" of agriculture that was to

blame for three enormous wrongs to society; the reduction of liberty, the reduction of

products of the land, and the reduction of men. "I am in agreement,” he writes with

139
Scottini
.
140
Scottini 23.
eloquence and passion,

that in the present system, using the method of force with the peasant, obtains the
greatest effect; but I speak with the supposition of the abolition of this Barbarian
system, and speak of a Republican state where one does not guide men with fear,
but with reason and virtue; where there is the maximum possible equality within
respective classes, always praised and provided for, because it is the bases of all
wellbeing. The peasant is in slavery, but I want subjects, I want him provided for
but not fat, frugal but not debilitated.141

The use of classical culture in the agricultural writings the of the second half of

the eighteenth century provided an essential lever from which contemporary political,

social, and economic practices could be criticized. Whether Athenian culture was used to

promote the renovation of olive cultivation as in Presta, or more philosophically that

Roman land holdings were used to explore the metaphysical side of the human condition

as with Genovesi, or, as with Trinci, simply to promote a greater respect for agricultural

work by pointing out that great Roman generals once stood behind the plow, or maybe,

like Cacherano, to plan a utopian landscape, or promote long term tenancy as did Scottini,

all of these writers and many more like them shared an assumption in regard to the

classical past. The past, for all of them, was part of their essential heritage that must be

recognized and recovered; it was the patrimony that must be protected, and above all it

was the standard or golden mean from which judgements could be formulated. The image

of land for all of them was inseparable from their image of a classical past; the concepts

were embedded within each other.

There is a temptation to read classical references in all of these texts as simply

part of the literary style of the day. Given that the standard humanistic education in the

eighteenth century included Latin and Greek and a familiarity with most of the classical

141
Scottini 144.
authors, one might assume that the writers of the settecento were merely using the tools

that were readily available to them at the time. While this is certainly the case, one would

then have to explain those authors who were similarly educated but chose either not make

use of the classical sources or to structure a categorically opposite argument in relation to

land. It is an old conflict that has come to be known as the Querelle between the ancients

and moderns, one that was expressed in several different areas of culture in seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries. We will explicitly explore how this conflict expresses itself in

relationship to problems of land and perhaps see how the problem of land can give us

insight into the nature of the Querelle and the rise of modernity with which it is typically

associated.

In traditional scholarship, as Hans Baron 142 has pointed out, the Querelle tended

to be dismissed as little more than a literary dispute rather than a milestone in modern

thought. In many civilizations there was a common belief in the superiority of ones

ancestors, a belief that was a central component of the social cosmology; the Jews had

the Garden of Eden, the Renaissance had the Romans, the Protestant Reformation had the

image of the early church, the Aztecs had the semi-mythical Toltecs and so on. Implicit in

such an image of the superiority of the ancients is either a cyclical vision of rise and fall

or a vision of constant decay from a former greatness. A shift away from the image of

ancestral greatness has important implications for the way in which a culture imagines its

own trajectory.

Two important books published in the first half of the twentieth century

142
Hans Baron, "The Querelle of the Ancients and Moderns as a Problem for Present Renaissance
Scholarship" in In Search of Civic Humanism, Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern
Thought, vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) 72-101.
formulated the Querelle as something more than a literary dispute confronting directly the

more general significance of the image of the Golden Age: J. B. Bury's The Idea of

Progress and F. Jones' Ancients and Moderns: A Study on the Background of the Battle of

the Books. For Bury, the struggle between the ancients and moderns in the seventeenth

century was a revolt against the intellectual tyranny of the Renaissance. In his view the

Renaissance had worshiped and imitated the ancients to such a degree that it succeeded

only in replacing scholastic authority with the authority of the ancients. And for Jones,

quite simply, the victory of seventeenth century Humanism retarded the growth of

modern science. What the Humanist model lacked was the essential idea that nature was

always and everywhere the same and that without such a view, progress in the sciences

was blocked.

Other books, as Baron points out, published in the following decades, notably

Herschel Baker's The Wars of Truth (1952), and John Randall's The Making of the

Modern Mind (1940), argued that the Renaissance was essentially conservative as it was

basically a program of imitation and any program of imitation presupposes a superior

model. Francis Bacon believed that the idea of cycles in history was among the greatest

obstacles to the progress of the sciences. Baron however, challenges the idea that

opposition to the notion of permanent decay did not have to await scientific progress but

could be constructed within a vision of cycles and the rise and fall of civilizations. Baron

cites numerous sources of opposition to the idea of constant decay in Renaissance

thought from Pico to Bruno to Jean Bodin and others, arguing that the modern mind was

not dependent upon Bacon's formulation of science for its origin. This alternative vision

offered an idea of historical relativism where every civilization had its own cycles of rise

and fall, and, as was pointed out in the case of Genovesi, such cycles do not necessarily
preclude a general movement towards progress, or in his particular case a progressive

migration of wisdom.

It is certainly true that modern thought is characterized by the abandonment of

the dependence upon classical sources and correspondingly the loss of the guiding image

of a Golden Age. Perhaps one of the earliest expressions of this was the proclamation by

Charles Perrault and Bernard de Fontenelle in 1687 and 1688 that the age of Louis XIV

was superior to that of Augustus, citing Descartes' rationalism and the emergence of the

new natural sciences.143 One can be fairly certain that modern texts on agronomy will

make little mention of the Roman Republic or the laws of the Gracchi. But it would be

short sighted if the use of classical sources or the evocation of a Golden Age became the

litmus test separating modern from pre-modern modes of thought. The loss of the image

of a Golden Age is a profoundly significant development in the history of Western

thought, but it is not the moment at which modernity triumphs over tradition, progress

over reaction, science over metaphysics, rationality over superstition. Rather it represents

a particular path towards modernity, characterized fundamentally by the loss of a clear

image of one's own future. The image of the future, without an ancient model, depends

upon either the laws of nature awaiting to be discovered and implemented, or finds its

future as a reflection of itself free of the vestiges from the past: a greater quantity not

necessarily a different quality, and consequently an endless cycle of self-negation and

obsolescence.

A look at the way in which these issues express themselves within the context of

agrarian debates is very revealing in regards to the issue of two divergent paths towards

143
Baron.
modernity. The land, unlike the poetic forms that were central to the Querelle, is a

fundamental axis in the material reproduction of social life- as all of our writers never

tired of pointing out- and as such represents the point at which these debates expressed

themselves as a material transformation of both nature and the social structure by which

nature is organized. In other words, the fruits of these debates emerge as restructuring of

the landscape and the social activity that makes it productive. Is it possible to say that

there is a modern conception of land as opposed to a pre-modern, and if so, how is it

related to the debates of the Querelle?

If one is to argue that any of the authors already cited, all of whom venerated the

classical organization of agriculture for one reason or another, were pre-modern in their

thinking, then one must argue that their respective land reforms would not contribute to

the development of agriculture and thus the economy as a whole. If we use the language

that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one might refer to certain tendencies as

reactionary or regressive-- that the proposed reforms would in no way contribute to the

renovation of agriculture, even retarding its progress specifically due to its emulation of

an antiquated model. But land reform differs from literary forms in that the model is

impossible to replicate due to the material transformations that have historically shifted

the conditions for change. Nature, social structure, and general economic conditions

provide a new point of departure from which reform must emerge. The ancient world as a

Golden Age cannot be a model in the literal sense but serves to create an image of

contrast to contemporary conditions. As such, all models that emerge from a presumed

Golden Age are necessarily negations of the present. The question, then, is really less

one of progressive verse regressive modes of economic organization or even modern

verses premodern, but rather, how such reforms are organized within a particular
discourse. In other words, on what discursive basis is the image of the future imagined?

The classical past, as regards agriculture, serves essentially three functions within

the discourse looked at thus far: it serves as critique, it serves to delineate a divergent

spirit, and it indicates a latent potential within the present. In the case of agriculture,

moreover, the use of an ancient model is not incompatible with the new scientific spirit as

Bury and Jones suggested. The issue is not that humanistic discourse displaces or is

opposed to scientific discourse, but rather, in the case of land reform, that it formulates a

different relationship to scientific discourse.

The dominant current of the modern spirit that has come to characterize the

contemporary world is not only expressed as the abandonment of the image of a Golden

Age, but perhaps more importantly, as a profound form of reductionism and a

fragmentation of the categories of being. In the case of agriculture, this is expressed in

the formulated images of the land itself. As was previously elaborated in the case of

Genovesi, the concept of land, for all of these writers, is encased in a framework in which

land, ethics, natural science, and history were all part of a single unity. Among the

primary competing or alternative visions of land is one in which land is detatched from

its ethical, historical, and spiritual meanings. This process did not develop fully until the

following century when David Ricardo defined land as nothing more than a factor of

production, an economic category, or merely a source of ground rent. To suggest that this

fragmented formulation of land is somehow more progressive or modern than the

conception that incorporates problems of ethics, history, and social organization, is to

argue that one mode of discourse diverges from the other on the central issues of

eighteenth century reform: free trade in grain, the break up of common lands, mortmain

and other feudal encumbrances, parcelization of land, the use of rural credit, application
of scientific techniques to crop production, and so forth. There is quite simply no

necessary connection between the use of the classical image and the position adopted in

relation to these reforms. All of these writers, from the point of view of their opposition

to feudalism, were in general agreement. But this agreement tends to mask from the

modern observer deeply divergent differences in world view.144

What seems to be at issue between those who depend on the image of the

classical past and those who do not is the gradual displacement of the ethico-historical

meaning of land; in other words, a breakup or fragmentation of the astrobiological

category. Before land can conceptually become nothing more than an economic category,

a factor of production in the modern sense, those modes of discourse that link it to other

meanings must be displaced. There is no straight path or direct evolution from the

astrobiological conception to the fragmented conception, or as was said earlier, no direct

or necessary path from the non-essential to the essential. Rather, there exist competing

modes of discourse that intersect to create divergent meanings for the central category of

land. Again the debates over agricultural reform, whether the classical past is present or

not, is not a struggle between modern and pre-modern thought but rather two divergent

paths towards modernity. The issue is not progress or reaction but rather progress towards

what? Initially, the divergence is expressed between opposed images of antiquity, Sparta

vs. Athens, or Rome vs. Carthage, which were essentially debates over the absolute rights

of individual property over the collective needs of society and the primacy of commerce

over the agrarian economy. The emerging commercial spirit found a fertile ground within

which to develop in the context of the free circulation of goods. Just as the restriction on

common lands, mortmain, feudal laws of inheritance, just price, and high tariffs, represent

144
See Enzo Piscatelli cited in chapter one.
bonds that restricted the free circulation of grain and agricultural lands within the

emerging commercial landscape, so too did the ethical and historical meaning of land, or

more generally the astrobiological conception of land, represent bonds that restricted the

intellectual circulation of the concept of land as a purely abstract category which was a

prerequest for the development of classical economic theory. For abstract economic

theory to make use of a concept, the concept itself must be reduced to its presumed

essential meaning. In the case of land, the historically specific, historically relative

meanings and ethical components must be omitted in order that the abstract theories have

universal meaning and that mathematical precepts can be applied, that is, that nature and

society are always and everywhere essentially the same. This redefining of the concept of

land is simultaneouly a redefining of the concept of man, from ethico-historical man to

abstract, natural man.

The divergent concepts of land, from ethico-historical to abstract natural, do not

always confront each other directly but sometimes confront each other indirectly over the

lessons one can derive from history or a shift in the spirit of society or by the insertion of

another mode of discourse within an old one. A look at an important contribution of

Francesco Mengotti of the Veneto to the debates on the historical assessment of the

Romans will illustrate the point. First published in Venice in 1788, Dei commercio

de'Romani dalla prima guerra Punica a Costantino did not address the issue of land or

agriculture directly but offered a radically divergent view from the previous writers of the

historical position of the Romans that was to have far reaching consequences for the way

in which Rome could be utilized in the contemporary debates over the question of land.

For most of the agricultural writings up to the time of Mengotti, Rome was an

unquestioned model of virtue and wise rural organization that was to be praised and
emulated. For Mengotti, however, Rome was a hideous monster that served primarily to

destroy the superior achievements of surrounding cultures. The extent to which Rome

achieved anything noteworthy in any field was the result of the importation of the

wisdom, knowledge, and skills of other cultures, significantly the Greeks, the Eutruscans,

the Egyptians, and the Carthagenians. With his book on the Romans, Mengotti quite self-

consciously was aiming to correct common historical misconceptions regarding the

achievements of Rome using commerce as his critical wedge in much the same way that

Cacherano used agriculture as his critical wedge. He writes:

Today there is a common consensus, he writes in his introduction, of the most

cultivated and enlightened states of Europe to regard commerce as the basis of
the strength and greatness of nations, it is a noble and lofty subject to know about
the commerce of the Romans who founded the most extensive and most
formidable monarchy of the world. If the Romans were feared, opulent, and
great, were they also the most prosperous and rich in commerce? Is force or
industry the strength of an empire?145

To this question, Mengotti opposes the image of a virtuous Rome with an image

of a violent people who lived through force and war and had no appreciation of the

manufacturing arts and commerce, the two essential ingredients of national greatness. In

his study of Roman commerce, Mengotti divides the eleven centuries of Rome, from

Romulus to Constantine, into its infancy,Republic, its adolescence, the early empire, and

its old age of despotism and tyranny. "I will demonstrate,” he writes,

that in the first epoch the poor Romans and soldiers had neither genius, nor
concern, nor cognition of commerce. In the second, that the Romans, great and
powerful in war, took no pride in commerce and thought only to enrich
themselves with the spoils of other nations. In the third, that the Romans with

145
Francesco Mehgotti, Del commercio de'Romani dalla prima guerra Punica a Costantino
(Venezia: 1788) Now in Scrittori classici italiani di economica politica, parte moderna, tomo
XXXVI (Milano: Destefanis, 1814) 9.
 slaves and luxury, with a passive and ruined commerce fell into a new poverty
and barbarism.Its weakness was obscured as it became powerful and illustrious
through war, amassing immense wealth with force and rapine, losing everything
with its luxury and laziness.146

Mengotti’s introductory comments contrast rather sharply with the images

offered by Presta, Trinci, Genovesi, Cacherano and many others concerning the world of

classical Rome, Republic or Empire. But Mengotti is not entirely at odds with the

assessment of the former writers concerning the early Romans' agricultural practices.

Rather, he shifts the importance away from agriculture to the more important principle of

social organization; commerce, Mengotti mockingly writes:

The historians exalt to the heavens the ancient simplicity of the Romans. They
say that for five centuries they applied themselves to the cultivation’s of their
small farms; that agriculture and war were their sole occupations; that Camilli,
Cincinnati, Curi, and Fabrizi displayed their bastons of command in their fields;
they passed from the plow to take command of their legions; that Fabi, Pisoni and
Lentuli took their names from the vegetables that they cultivated. I will do even
more and eulogize the turnips that were the flavorful foods of the consuls and
dictators. They are worthy of admiration these good and austere customs, but
what does one observe with respect to their commerce? That there was not
any.147

It is not Mengotti's purpose to denigrate the importance of agriculture; he, like

virtually all of his contemporaries, acknowledged that an advanced agriculture was the

basis of any healthy economy, without which national greatness was beyond reach. A

robust agriculture is assumed by Mengotti, but agriculture alone is incapable of providing

the dynamism necessary for the ascendance of a powerful nation. Agriculture without

commerce condemns a nation to remain in a state of primitive simplicity, incapable of

satisfying or expanding the basic pleasures and comforts of its own people without

146
Mengotti, Commercio 12.
147
Mengotti, Commercio 23.
recourse to the destructive practices of warfare. The Romans may well have been

dedicated and productive farmers, as Mengotti is ready to concede, but the presumed

greatness of the Romans, asserted so eloquently by Cacherano at the opening of this

chapter, has little if anything to do with agriculture.

In his discourse on Roman commerce, Mengotti makes a clear demarcation

between two fundamentally different forms of culture, each with a different spirit,

different customs, and different institutions that determine each nations fate. It is

essentially the difference between the conqueror and the merchant. "It is perhaps

impossible, he writes,

to unite together in the same people the character of the conqueror with the
character of the merchant. The one is in opposition to the other. The one is grand,
proud and ferocious; the other is timid, cautious, and fearful. The one does not
think to destroy, the other to conserve. The one aquires with weapons and force,
the other with peace and industry. Therefore, to combine the spirit of conquest
with the spirit of commerce is to unite fury with timidity, boldness with fear,
violence with industry, war and destruction with quiet and peace."148

For Mengotti these two principles divide barbarous people from the civilized.

"Moreover, he continues,

a fierce and conquering people regard barter as an ignoble business, mercenary

and unworthy of their own greatness. With vast ideas, magnificent plans, brilliant
projects, ambitious thoughts of glory and of fame, the splendor and the
celebration of victory, ... they cannot bother themselves with small ideas and with
the minute details of commerce.
The history of all barbarous and conquering people confirms this principle. ... All
barbarous people in all times prefer piratry and war to commerce. Such were the
heroes of the Greeks before they civilized themselves; such were the Huns and
the northerners who desolated the Empire; such were the Danes in the earlier
centuries; such were the Romans as we will soon see. For that reason nothing was
valued by the Romans more than military arts. War gave them nobility, honor,

148
Mengotti, Commercio 20.
 offices, titles, rank, triumph, and riches. ... Consequently the character and the
spirit of the nation, the institutions, the customs, political and religious maxims
and public opinion, were directly opposed to commerce by the Romans in the
first centuries.149

Because of their warlike spirit, the Romans, according to Mengotti, placed little

value on the manufacturing arts, industry, and trade, and without a developed economy

they were equally incapable of producing anything of value in the fine arts. These two

spheres of social activity are intimately connected and dependent upon one another.

"What arts consequently, what industry, what manufacturing, what commerce were the

Romans able to have without culture, without literature, without science? All of the arts

and sciences give a reciprocal help to the other, and the light of one reflects upon all the

others."150 According to Mengotti, the Romans themselves were without high culture and

always relied on the work and genius of others to do that which they were incapable. "In

the first five centuries of Rome,” he writes, “painting, sculpture, architecture, arts,

manufacture, were all Etruscan; in the other centuries painting, sculpture, architecture,

music, arts, manufacture, were all Greek. This is the history of the Roman arts."151

Mengotti has quite simply located the secret of civilization not in the stable

hardworking and virtuous farmer, but in commerce itself. It is the movement of goods in

economic circulation for which money was the essential ingredient, "the impulse and the

spirit of industry and commerce", that laid the basis of an expansive and cultured

civilization. The Romans were without an adequate supply of money, making commerce

"slow and languid", and they were consequently without arts, scholarship, science,

manufacturing, and so on.. Where then, does one find commerce, according to Mengotti?

149
Mengotti, Commercio. 20-22.
150
Mengotti, Commercio 47.
151
Mengotti, Commerrcio 114-115.
 Where one always finds it in every century. Among the nations cultivated and
civil, that love and honor the arts, literature, and sciences: among the
Carthaginians, where the artisans, manufacturers, merchants had privileges and
particular distinctions and were able to rise to most honorable positions in the
state: among the Rhodes, the Athenians, the Corinthians and other Greeks, where
the poets and the orators celebrated and praised the arts. ... among the Egyptians,
where the philosophers, historians, astronomers, geographers and all great men
were honored, where the king protected the talents of industry that erected with
one immense hand a library and an illustrious academy and excavated with the
other a wondrous canal for communication with the distant parts of the seas and
among the great cities of Asia; ... in sum among the people enlightened and
industrious...152

Mengotti's panoramic study of Roman commerce was simultaneously an

assessment of its historic achievements and its position by way of other historic cultures

and civilizations. His judgement is uniformly negative, attributing nothing of lasting

value to its eleven century rule: slighting its presumed ancient virtue, ridiculing its arts

and literature as the products of either non-Romans or slaves-- even its language is

criticized as being inflexible and lacking in subtly. The corruption and decadence of the

Romans was not the result of historic contingencies, as asserted by so many other writers,

whether the loss of a landed patrimony or the introduction of slaves and luxury. Rather

its decline was assured by the seeds that were present in the very foundation of Rome.

Luxury, for example, is not, in and of itself, a necessary vice but was destined to have

destructive consequences for the Romans. "Riches,” he writes, “generate luxury, luxury

excites the hunger for riches. In a people where riches are the reward for hard work,

sobriety, and commerce, the passions themselves can be good, because they encourage

industry and talents. But in a people where opulence is born of crime, injustice, and of

piracy, the passion for riches is bad because it excites and foments vice and corruption.

So it was with the Romans.”153

152
Mengotti, Commercio 49-50.
153
Mengotti, Commercio 109.
 It was not the passion for luxury, but the bellicose spirit of the Romans that was

incapable of using that passion for positive purposes. The desire for gain and luxury

encourages commerce, as we have seen, and was for Mengotti the organizing principle

for all great nations. The wealth of the Romans was the result of plunder and nothing

more. Its military expansion was responsible for the ruin of Italian agriculture, subduing

its more industrious and free neighbors, ultimately depopulating the Italian countryside

making Rome dependent on distant provinces, like Sicily and Africa, for its food supply.

Rome’s lack of industry and its reliance on war and force for its revenues created a

passive form of commerce in much the same way that the riches obtained by Spain in

later centuries, through the conquests of Cortez and Pizzaro, were squandered as the gold

and silver passed to Spain's more industrious neighbors to the north. For Mengotti, the

barbarous end of Rome was the result of its barbarous beginning.

Mengotti has entirely recast the image of ancient Rome in such a way that one

ceases even to admire the ancient wisdom, the virtue, the devotion to family, courage,

hard work, and patriotism, that had been the presumed character of the early Romans.

Indeed, with Mengotti it becomes difficult to find even traces of such virtues. Striking in

Mengotti's discourse is the absence of any discussions that focus on ethics and virtue at

all. The fundamental human qualities that make up the spirit of a cultured nation are

acquisitiveness and industriousness. Courage, simplicity, and patriotism are not the

essential ingredients of national greatness. If they exist at all, they are the circumstantial

by-products of a successful nation, and a successful nation is one that privileges

commerce over war.

The conflict or the conflicting images expressed most sharply here in the works of

Cacherano and Mengotti and studied elsewhere in an English/Scottish context by J.G.A.

Pocock, are "conflicts,” according to Pocock, “between two explicitly post-feudal ideals,

one agrarian and the other commercial, one ancient, the other modern."154 Pocock is

rightly careful, in spite of the use of the terms ancient and modern, not to impute to one a

reactionary vision and the other a progressive one. Both Cacherano and Mengotti conjure

an image of the past to excite an image of the future. In the texts examined so far, both

are dependent upon a Golden Age, albeit a different Golden Age: for one Rome, for the

other Greece, Carthage and Egypt. The conflict between these two visions of the ancients

has been seen as a conflict between "virtue" and "corruption" typically formulated as a

conflict between "landed interests" and "monied interests" or in historical terms as

differences between Rome and Carthage. Among the most important and eloquent

spokesmen for one position earlier in the century was Montesquieu himself in his history

of Rome. "Having become rich sooner than Rome,” writes Montesquieu,

Carthage had also been corrupted sooner. In Rome, Public office could be
obtained only through virtue, and brought with it other than honor being preferred
for further toils, while in Cartage everything the public could give to individuals
was for sale, and all service rendered by individuals was paid for by the public.
...The Romans were ambitious for pride, the Carthaginians from avrice; the
Romans wanted to command the Carthaginians to acquire. Constantly calculating
receipts and expenses, the latter made war without loving it.155

For Montesquieu, the organizing principle for a great republic was its moral

strength.

“...the strength of the republic consisted in discipline, austerity of morals, and constant

observances of certain customs, they corrected the abuses that the law had not foreseen,

154
J.G.A. Pocock, Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present, eds. Anthony Parel and Thomas
Flanagan (Calgary: Laurier University Press,1978) 144-66.
155
Charles-Louis De Secondat Barone de Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the
Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (New York: Free Press, 1965) 44-45.
or that the ordinary magistrate could not punish ... more states have perished by the

violation of their moral customs than by the violation of their laws.”156

Pocock suggests that the competing ideals expressed on the one hand by the

commercially minded Carthaginians and on the other by the Roman farmer-soldier, are

conflicting concepts of how property might determine "relations of personality to

government."157 The ideal of the citizen farmer working his own land entailed a

personality free and virtuous because it was unspecialized. Property, or the landed

patrimony, so central to Cacherano's project, gave its owner independence and autonomy.

His autonomy gave him the liberty to engage in public life, the care of his landed

patrimony gave him the will to defend it, fostering a patriotism which was the test of his

public virtue. For the merchant, on the other hand, and commercial society in general,

economic activities were more specialized, requiring a constant effort in the pursuit of

gain. Such effort did not provide either the autonomy or time to pursue political or

military activities themselves. A commercial society was more likely to pay mercenaries

and political specialists rather than disrupt their economic activities, increasing the

possibilities and likelihood for corruption.

According to Pocock the criticism of commercial society that based itself upon

the concept of virtue "presented a clear and coherent image of the unity of the human

personality, in its relation to both society and property."158 To overcome this criticism,

those who favored the primacy of commerce had to pose an alternative vision of the

personality and thus an alternative image of man. Pocock locates this alternative image in

the notion of "refinement and politeness" which, were crucial elements in the ideology of

156
Montesquieu 86.
157
Pocock.
158
Pocock.
eighteenth-century commerce. He writes that

... if speculative man was not to be a slave to his passions, he had to moderate
these by converting them into opinion, experience, and interest, and into a system
of social ties which these things reinforced; and the reification followed by
exchange of the objects on which his passions focussed was an excellent means
of socializing them. When polite man of commercial and cultivated society
looked back into his past, what he necessarily saw were his passions not yet
socialized, to which he gave such names as "barbarism" and "savagery"; and his
debate against the patriot ideal could be far more satisfactorily carried on if he
could demonstrate that what had preceded the rise of commerce and culture was
not a world of virtuous citizens, but one of barbarism. To demonstrate that the
citizens of antiquity were barbarians themselves was plausible, but for most
people too destructive. The apologist for commerce therefore preferred, to any
scheme of history based on civic humanism, those schemes of natural law and jus
gentium propounded by Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke and the German jurists,
which stressed the emergence of civil jurisprudence out of a state of nature, since
the latter could be readily equated with barbarism.159

For those who worried about the rise of unbridled commercial activity,

overspecialization presented itself not only as the threat of political corruption, but also as

a loss of man's unity with himself, an imagined unity that was central to the concept of a

Golden Age; a fragmentation of his basic nature, or in Marxist terms, self-alienation.

These conflicting images confront each other as one seeking to preserve what still

remained of an astrobiological vision of man in his natural, social, and spiritual

environment, and the other seeking to liberate man from traditional political and

economic constraints thus allowing the fullest development of his creative energies by

asserting his personal autonomy. The loss of the republican ideal was for many thinkers

of the settecento a tragedy for man at his deepest most personal level turning him into

little more than a series of mechanistic reactions over which he could have little

159
Pocock.
understanding much less control.160

These two conflicting ideals, the one agrarian, the other commercial, are

intimately connected to the way in which various thinkers link man to land as property. In

the ideal of the agrarian republic, property gives man his autonomy to act in a free and

virtuous manner in the defence of the political order that he has created. His land as

property is the fount of his virtue and to alienate his property is to alienate his virtue. For

the commercial ideal, the ancient republican forms of land ownership may be linked to

the formation of virtuous citizen, but at best condemns him to a rude simplicity that

prevents him from developing and satisfying his more refined needs and appetites. It is,

rather, property in circulation that is capable of linking each to the other for the good of

the whole through a complex of mutual interests of buyers and sellers. Only through

160
We find the republican ideal as the point of departure for a criticism of the growth of
commercial society express in various levels of clarity from Vico to Genovesi, from Rousseau to
Hegel and even into the late nineteenth century with Marx himself. Hegel expressed this concern
with particular lucidity in his early writings at a point in his development when a return to the
ancient republic was still his ideal. With the loss of the Republic, Hegel writes, "The image of the
state as a product of his own activity faded from the soul of the citizen: understanding and concern
for society as a whole became the provenance of a single man, or a few men; each man was
assigned a more or less limited place, different from that of his fellows; the government of the
machine of state was entrusted to a small number of citizens and they served as individual cogs
whose value lay in their association with each other. The part assigned to each man in the
fragmented totality was so minute in comparison to the size of the whole that the individual did not
need to see or understand it. Usefulness to the state was instilled in its subjects by the state and the
aim they all set themselves was the acquisition and self subsistence and perhaps also vanity. All
activity, all purpose henceforth referred to individuals. There was no longer any activity for the
whole, for an idea--each man either labored for himself or was forced to work for another. The
freedom to obey self-imposed laws, to follow self-imposed authorities in peace and in war to obey
generals who were implementing plans which all had resolved upon--all this died out. All political
freedom faded away; the law only gave the citizen a right to the security of property, the pursuit of
which now filled his entire life. The phenomenon that tore to shreds the whole web of his
intentions, the activity of his whole life, namely death, became something terrible for him: for
nothing survived him, unlike the republican whose republic lived on after him and so he began to
conceive the vague idea that his soul must be immortal." G. W. F. Hegel. In G. Lukacs The Young
Hegel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976) .46-47.
commerce is man capable of focussing his passions and interests on objects outside

himself. This objectification of his desires or "reification," as Pocock terms it, is essential

if the wild, bellicose passions of the nomadic society or the warlike agrarian society are to

be tamed, refined, and ultimately civilized. The free acquisition of goods in circulation

becomes the focus of man's activity, always seeking to accumulate and expand his newly

acquired comforts and pleasures. This, for Mengotti and many others, is the secret of

civilization.

At this point it should be made clear why both of these positions must be

considered modern: they are explicitly post-feudal ideals. The commercial ideal is clearly

a rejection of all the feudal bonds that politically link man to a fixed hierarchical

relationship and equally a rejection of the political fetters on a free economy. What is

perhaps less obvious is how the republican agrarian model based on the idealized image

of the ancient Golden Age is equally modern. The republican ideal posits a virtuous man,

because he is autonomous and free, acting of his own volition in a world that he self-

consciously creates and bends to his will. This model is clearly opposed to feudal ideas of

obedience and duties, of man acting within a fixed hierarchy, and submitting to laws that

have a divine origin. Both the commercial and agrarian ideals have formulated the human

character and personality in relation to forms of property which are themselves explicable

in terms of material and historical processes. Specifically, the insertion of the

natural/materialistic and the historical elements into the discourse on social organization

makes both of these conflicting positions modern and the point at which they seem to

share a common ground. That is, they can utilize a similar language. But the difference

between these two positions, though not always apparent when one considers only the

political consequences, is important when one considers the divergent meaning of land.
Land in turn can help show how these positions conflict.

Commercial discourse tends to conceive of land as movable, alienable property

stripped of all meaning other than as an object in circulation, passing from hand to hand

seeking its optimal price. To restrict land from the free circulation of goods is to impose

restrictions on the whole economy as agriculture is the basis of any strong economy

The circulation of goods as the civilizing aspect of a culture has an epistemological

component worth considering. If we depart from a Lockean epistemology, as did many

of the writers under study, the mind formulates and develops its ideas in response to the

sensations of the objects encountered through experience; the more numerous the

objects, the greater the experience, the more sophisticated the response of the mind, the

higher is social development.161 Commerce provides precisely this experience and

commerce is dependent on the conception of all goods as property freely exchanged in

the unrestricted market.

Land exchange should no more be restricted, according to this model, than the

grain it produces or the products manufactured from its bounty. The discourse that

privileges commerce simultaneously praises the diversity of objects while effectively

homogenizing the specific character of goods in circulation as goods exchanged as

equivalents. The ideal medium for expressing undifferentiated equivalents is, of course,

money. It is for this reason that Mengotti criticizes so caustically the Roman monetary

161
In Neal Wood's book on Locke, John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkely: University of
California, 1984) one finds a fascinating link between epistemology and Locke's labor theories.
"The dynamism of Locke's history is due to his labor theory of property. His view that man's
entitlement of property depends on "shaping" the raw stuff of nature with his labor [...] this natural
history of property begins, just as does Locke's later natural history of the psyche in An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, with the Tabla Rasa, a white paper void of all characters, no
doubt following Bacon's similar expression, a fair sheet of paper with no writing on it. In this
instance the blank tablet is a vast, unproductive and scantily populated wilderness like
America.”51.
system as wholly inadequate for the development of commerce. Without a simple

quantitative means of expressing equivalents, exchange is slow, cumbersome, and

primitive. If a specific good in circulation has a character that cannot be easily expressed

as a quantity, then it will have difficulty entering the market economy. How, for instance,

can land as a source of virtue, land as the basis of political stability, land as a familial

patrimony, or land as the mediating element in the metabolism between man and nature,

be expressed purely in terms of a quantity of money, no different from luxury goods? For

writers like Mengotti, to release land into an unrestricted market requires a set of critical

assumptions, , that philosophically, historically, and ethically redefine man.

Pocock focuses on the conflicting manner in which property and personality are

linked: landed property bequeaths autonomy and virtue to man while circulating property

enriches and civilizes the personality. But the very concept of property, particularly

landed property, is itself highly unstable, and to account fully for the problems raised by

Pocock one must look at the way in which the divergent concepts of land are linked to

some of the central issues of Enlightenment thought. In general we can say that the two

formulations of landed property diverge in the following manner: one tends towards

increasing degrees of abstraction detaching land from its presumed non-essential

meanings ultimately expressing itself as a pure quantity, while the other tends to preserve

the non-quantitative character of land, linking land to an ethico-historical formulation not

easily reduced to mathematical expression.

The latter can be placed within a general philosophical tradition beginning with

the pagan philosophy of the ancient Greeks, to Erigenia in the ninth century as perhaps its

highest theological expression, to the rationalism of Spinoza, the scientific formulations

of Kepler or Leibniz, to the historicism of Hegel, and finally to Marx who preserved what

Lukács called the concept of totality as the central organizing principle of his

philosophy. The former current might be said to originate from Descartes'

epistemological revolution incorporating to a greater or lesser extent Galileo, Bacon, and

the Newtonionism popularized by Voltaire in the field of science, Locke in political

theory, and Kant in the realm of ethical theory.

To illustrate the continuing movement towards conceptual abstraction and

fragmentation, we can return to the works of Mengotti. In 1791, four years after the

publication of his work on Roman commerce, Mengotti wrote another book to which his

name is more widely linked, Il Colbertismo. This work is a response to a problem posed

by the Accademia dei Georgofili of Florence as to whether legislation should favor

manufacture over the agriculture or whether the growth of population and production in

general responds better to the perfect liberty of natural commerce? Mengotti's response is

an interesting companion piece to his work on Roman commerce in that it is more overtly

theoretical and synthetic in its construction. The influence of Adam Smith is clearly

visible in Il Colbertismo. In fact, Mengotti was among the first Italians to make a direct

citation of the Wealth of Nations.

Mengotti's work is a polemic against the disastrous trade policies of

mercantilism, against favoring manufacturing over agriculture, against trade restrictions

in general, and against the notion that national wealth is measured by the quantity of

bullion; in other words, against the mercantilist policies most clearly expressed by the

French minister Colbert in the previous century. Mengotti believed that this system was

responsible for an infinite number of bonds and fetters (vincoli) preventing the free

expression of the natural order of a free economy. Il Colbertismo is among the most
decisive defenses of free commerce that one can find in the writings of the settecento

riformatori.

We have already seen how Mengotti reassessed the history of the Romans

through a critique of their inadequate commerce; indeed, commerce was the fulcrum for

a reinterpretation of the entire historic process. The most civilized nations are, and have

always been, those with the most developed commerce. In Il Colbertismo, Mengotti raises

this historical assertion to a theoretical principle regarding the nature of the human

species. "In every class in every condition of society,” he writes,

everyone trades that which is his own and has a price; some sell their industry,
some force, some agility, some courage, some patience, some their council, some
a doctrine, some their words, some homage, some praise, some affection, some
fraud, some a little sincerity, some rare sentiments; but in all of these reciprocal
exchanges of things and offices nothing else governs it more than interest and
cupidity, and an ardent desire for self advantage. ... In fact we are all avaricious:
every class of society is intent to overcome the other classes, every business the
other businesses, artisans with merchants, merchants with farmers, artisans with
artisans, merchants with merchants, are all in a continual struggle and conflict of
interests, of means and ends.162

The common ground with Smith is of course apparent, the whole of humanity,

everywhere and for all times, is engaged in an uninterrupted process of buying and selling

each to his own advantage. Mengotti resolves the apparent chaos of such a picture in a

classical Mandevillian fashion. In Mengotti's words:

Now in such near feuds and battles of opposed interests, how can so many wills,
so many demands, and contrary tendencies be brought together again? Who will
be able to establish the just price of so many goods and commodities, who will
establish fair pay and recompense for different sorts of labor, of work, of
industry, of study, things so completely different in their quantity, in their utility,

162
Mengotti, Il Colbertismo 288-89.
 their relations, and in their effects so complicated and varied and innumerable?
Only competition can do this. It puts in opposition all of the contrary forces, all of
the discordant means and holds back every class to its own sphere; it is from the
impact and from the conflict of private interests that the common interest springs,
from confusion and battle arises order and harmony, from animosity agreement,
from jealousy affection, from rivalry brotherhood. Bring everyone together in the
same place, frequently and in great numbers, and with equal rights all of the
buyers and sellers, make known at every moment the quantity of things and the
extension of needs, from this then arises the just and legitimate price established
through public suffrage and the general consent of all, and it is precisely this
price more than anything else that brings together an agreement in the
circumstances and councils the relations of all the classes of society.163

The purpose of citing these two lengthy fragments from Il Colbertismo is not to

trace the lineage of such a discourse, but rather to bring to light specific conceptual

elements that diverge most sharply from the writings of Genovesi, Cacherano, Trinci, and

others. We see, first of all, and most importantly for our purpose, that the very concept of

virtue has been entirely reconceived. All of the virtuous qualities as defined by Genovesi,

Cacherano, and others, are no longer attributes of a generalized way of being in the world

but have become individual possessions that can be bartered and sold. We see that for

Mengotti, "courage, patience, wisdom, affection," and "sincerity" have become a kind of

commodity that can be expressed as a "price", a "just and legitimate price" to be sure, but

one that can be expressed as an equivalent of say so many yards of cloth or sacks of gold.

The qualities of virtue, in Mengotti's mind, have become goods to sell in the public

square, goods that can circulate in a free market, goods that can become the possession of

others through exchange.

For Mengotti to imagine that the attributes of virtue could actually be bartered, it

was essential to detach those attributes from all of the bonds that may prohibit their free

alienation. We have already seen how Montesquieu, Genovesi, and Cacherano all linked

163
Mengotti, Il Colbertismo 289-90.
the presence of virtue directly to land as a patrimony. For all of these writers, the victory

of Rome over Carthage in the Punic Wars resulted from the use of mercenary armies by

the avricious Carthaginians. The Romans displayed greater courage and valor on the field

because they were prepared to sacrifice their lives for a higher purpose; they were, as

Hegel would later remark, "republicans whose republic lived on after them," and the very

existence of the republic was dependent upon the presence of a class of free and

autonomous small land holders. For Mengotti, the use of mercenary armies is a natural

process in a free market where courage and strength on the battlefield can be purched by

a wealthy nation.

We can see that in the most basic sense Mengotti has stripped man of what was

presumed by others to be his necessary link with the land, Menghotti has likewise

stripped land of its necessary ethical and spiritual meaning. Both Mengotti and

Cacherano are equally interested in overturning the economic and political relations of

feudalism, but the discourse that organizes their respective visions of this change are

fundamentally opposed to one another insofar as man is defined and placed within a

network of meanings.

As Pocock points out, the discourse that privileged commerce tended to abandon

the concept of civic humanism, replacing it with theories of civil jurisprudence derived

from the state of nature. Indeed, we see with Mengotti that the market only functions

when every individual has "equal rights" in the conditions of "public suffrage." The

political, economic, and social order is now derived from what the individual naturally

possesses as an individual. This reduction of man as one defined by his rights as man

necessarily homogenizes the concept of man, a homogenization made possible only by

reducing man to a few universal and essential qualities and fragmenting man from those
meanings that are not necessary in the definition of these qualities. If society is nothing

more than an infinite process of commercial exchanges and if mans' essential nature is to

gain most in each exchange, that is that he is fundamentally diriven by avarice, then the

whole of history, the whole story of the multiplicity of social forms, can be seen as the

story of commerce facilitated or commerce hindered. In other terms, that social

organization either conforms to the laws of nature or distorts it by inhibiting the free play

of individual will.

In Mengotti's vision there is no fundamental difference between the simple

farmer and the banker, the mercenary soldier and the hermit monk, the financial

speculator and the teacher, the priest and the absentee landlord. All are driven by the need

to exchange what they possess and to maximize their personal gain. The specific activity

of man in society no longer defines man's ethical relationship to society. Now the farmer

is no more virtuous than the financial speculator. The differences that exist are simply

those between what each possesses for exchanges purposes, and all possessions can be

expressed as equivalents of money. For this society to function in its most natural state

then, it must guarantee one thing, the absolute right of personal property. Only when each

is allowed to freely exchange for his own gain that which he possesses can social

harmony be established.

Of course Mengotti was not the originator of this particular discourse, one that

places commerce at the center of social organization and historical evaluation, but he is

important here for three reasons. The first is that he expresses his position with particular

clarity and eloquence through two distinct modes of explication, historico-critical with

Commercio dei Romani, and with a more synthetic, theoretical treatment in Il

Colbertismo. Secondly, his works coincide with the those of Chacerano and others who
argue with a similar mode of reasoning, demonstrating the degree to which his discourse

conflicts with that of his contemporaries. In other words, we are not emphasizing how

one discourse evolves into another but rather stressing the degree to which they are

opposed. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, however, Mengotti's radically divergent

discourse paradoxically leads him to conclusions similar to Genovesi, Cacherano and a

host of others regarding political and economic reform. On the issues of the inversion of

feudal land law and free trade in grain, Mengotti holds positions indistinguishable from

those with a sharply contrasting vision of humanity. The distance between Mengotti and

a Cacherano or a Genovesi has been clearly outlined but this distance is often obscured

simply because on the issues of many specific economic reforms, they are in accord. If

only the categories of political economy are used,164 to evaluate them we would tend to

place them in the same group regarding any differences as what Shumpeter called the

"non essential frills" of economic theory. But it is the presumed non essentials that reveal

not how divergent discourses are walking the same path towards an inevitable modernity

ushered in by capitalism and the free market, but rather the extent to which these paths

diverge offering sharply opposed visions of modernity.

Mengotti's work either introduces or greatly develops a number of critically

important discursive categories that depart sharply from the previous writers, virtually

redefining both man and land, categories that make possible the rapid development of

classical political economy. To begin with, we have already seen how Mengotti conceives

of man with increasing degrees of abstraction, defining his essential nature as avaricious

always seeking personal gain through exchange. This abstraction into a few simple

categories allows for the identification or subsumption of a multitude of social processes

164
As mentioned previously in the works of Schumpeter and Piscatelli.
with natural processes. Although Mengotti uses history to criticize modern economic

policies in Commercio dei Romani, the net result is to demonstrate that man and society

are everywhere and always the same, which, in one sense, annuls the importance of

history itself. This is a critical assumption to make if one is to apply the logic of the

natural sciences to social processes. While Mengotti does not develop his argument using

the language of natural science as his organizing principle, the assumptions that he makes

in his work are a necessary step in that direction. This is clearly articulated by Mengotti

when he discusses money in Il Colbertismo:

If therefore, as it seems to me, it is proven that money has its own free and
independent nature, that it cannot be subject to regulations and laws, that it obeys
a voice more powerful, a more efficient force that is always active, that is its
attraction to the goods produced, that it follows them from the moment it emerges
from the mines, that it follows them in their course through all Europe and does
not abandon them when it enters a nation, but it circulates and spreads to every
corner, in every class, in every family to a portentous degree and always in
proportion to things...165

Mengotti has taken a product of social activity, money in this case, and given it

complete autonomy from and even power over human intercourse. This objectification or

reification of the products of human activity is simultaneously the personification of

nature with a life that imposes its will on social organization. No longer can man operate

under the delusion that he can organize his social activity and order the objects of his

productivity to conform to his ethical will. Regulations and re useless when confronting

nature. Mans’ only choice is to understand these laws, laws of attraction, force, and

efficiency, and order his social and political life, nation, class, and family, to conform to

those forces.

165
Mengotti, Il Colbertismo 275.
 The increasing abstraction of the concept of man and the identification of social

activity with natural processes are essential developments in economic discourse if the

application of mathematically universal models are to be employed to explain human

activity, an application that is considered the hallmark of modern sciences. Furthermore,

economic activity must increasingly be distinguished from a vast array of other human

activities in the political, ethical, and spiritual sphere. This progressive breaking apart of

the astrobiological conception of man is not a phenomenon found only in the realm of

economic thought with the separation of land from its ethical meaning, rather, it can be

found in parallel developments in ethical theory itself. We need only cite the Kantian

separation between noumena and phenomena to see the similarities. Kant, like Mengotti,

opposed the idea that the material ordering of life gives rise to the ethical ordering. For

Kant, ethical universals reside in the autonomous individual and are not subject to either

historical or contingent influences. The moral imperative is valid for each individual

everywhere and always. The separation and universalization of noumenal categories from

phenomenal ones bear a striking resemblance to the universalizaton of the market in

nature conforming to the eternally present category of commerce in human thought.

Steven Smith makes a similar observation when he suggests that in Kant's works there is

a "certain homology between the anonymity and impersonality of the moral law and the

impersonal network of market and exchange relations governing modern civil society."166

The depersonalization of land is simultaneously the universalization of the category of

land as a commodity. Within this framework, land, like man himself, ceases to be

anything other than an object in circulation.

166
Steven Smith, Hegel's Critique of Liberalism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1989) 75.
 Chapter Four

Physiocracy in Italy

Agricultural discourse organized primarily through an evaluation of history, as

we have seen with Cacherano and Mengotti, could yield sharply divergent visions of

contemporary society depending on the particular mode of analysis. But the historico-

ethical discourse was itself increasingly confronted by natural law discourse tending to

annul the importance of historical development either by asserting eternal and invariable

principles or by subordinating historical development to a law-like movement. The

influence of Physiocratic theory in Italy is important for demonstrating precisely this

point. Physiocracy was largely the application and elaboration of a particular version of

natural law theory in order to create a vision of an agricultural republic. The Physiocrats

introduced a number of alternative modes of analysis into the discussion of the problems

of agriculture Their approach enabled the Physiocrats to redefine land. At the core of this

redefinition is the problem of productivity which became a critical component in

redefining the ethical formation of society through its revaluation of land as property. The

idea of productivity was to remain a central part of the debates long after the Physiocratic

system declined

For the eighteenth century Italian reformers, the problem of property was nearly

always at the center of their respective programs. For some, like Mengotti, to liberate

property from its feudal restrictions was to liberate the creative capacities of humanity;

for others, like Cacherano, to redistribute property was to unite men into a commonweal.
In most cases, the different conceptions of property were not so clearly opposed as were

those of Mengotti and Cacherano, nor were they derived from such different

philosophical worldviews. In fact, in most cases we will find Italian reformers who blend

languages that are derived from various modes of discourse, seldom if ever expressing

themselves exclusively through only one form of discourse, whether civic humanism or

civil jurisprudence, whether ethico-historical or abstract-theoretical, and so on. The

reason most often cited for this apparent eclecticism is that, unlike their French

counterparts, the Italian philosophes were more likely than not directly linked to their

respective governments through civil or ecclesiastical offices or universities. Their

concerns tended therefore to be directed towards the reform of very specific problems

within their own political sphere of influence. Rather than being great system builders or

initiators of new schools of economic thought the Italian’s strength was in critique and

synthesis.

The reception of Physiocracy in Italy is a reasonably clear illustration of this

point. The Physiocrats, or as the Italians referred to them, economisti, had a large

influence in Italy, but even so it is difficult to find any major writer or even many minor

ones who adopted the program of the economisti in its entirety. Simultaneously, it was in

Italy that Physiocracy received its most decisive critique as a system, most notably from

the pens the Milanese, Pietro Verri and the Neapolitan, Ferdinando Galiani. But

whatever the influence, negative or positive, we can agree with Lucio Villari that

Physiocratic ideas and the lively debates over them in France "crossed the frontiers and

acted as a leaven for many courageous reform programs elaborated by the Lombard,

Tuscan, and Neapolitan economists."167 Villari also suggests that if we are to understand

167
Lucio Villari, "Note sulla fisiocrazia e sugli economisti napoletani del '700" in Saggi e ricerche
sul settecento, a cura Ernesto Sestan (Napoli: Nella Sede del'istituto, 1968) 230.
the rich complexity of the Physiocratic influence in Italy we not only need to reconstruct

the Physiocratic phenomena and elaborate the theoretical principles of Physiocracy, but

also pay particular attention to the terminology, the linguistic mixtures, and the particular

way in which certain terms assume new meanings. If the concept of land, for example, is

redefined or conceived in a new way as the exclusive source of social productivity, as in

the case of Physiocracy, then all of the concomitant concepts that derive their meaning

from a particular relation to land as a concept necessarily shift. If man's ethical life was

formerly derived from his activity as a patriot farmer, the insertion of productivity as the

essential defining attribute of land simultaneously redefines both the ethical life of man

and the socio-political formation in which it develops.

To this end it will not be the purpose here to write a definitive history of

Physiocracy in Italy or to catalog a complete or even partial list of those Italians who felt

the impact of the Physiocratic influence. Rather the focus will be on the latter part of

Villari's suggestion: the terminology or mode of discourse that enters in the general

circulation of ideas in the second half of the settecento due to the presence of

Physiocracy.

The problem of the forms of property, as in the previous chapters, is a good point of

departure from which the Physiocratic discourse can be assessed in its relation to the

shifting meaning of land, a shift that has far reaching consequences for man's self-

understanding. Superficially, most of the reformers advocated the rights of private

property and were hostile to the multitude of legal and traditional encumbrances that

prohibited the free use and exchange of land. Thus, if we are to look only at the reformers

of the settecento advocacy of landed property without situating the precise way in which

property is conceived within a broader cosmology then we run the risk of overlooking
critical distinctions that separate them insofar as they offer differing visions of society.

Francesco Gemelli, cited in the previous chapter as a long time correspondent of

Cacherano, published a text in 1776 as a critique of Sardinian property laws and traditions

insofar as they impinged on the needs of modern agriculture. That Gemelli was indebted

to the Physiocrats is not only clear by the way in which he formulates his discourse, but

also through direct reference to more important French texts, notably Mirabeau's L'ami

des hommes first published in Paris in 1756. According to Franco Venturi, Gemelli, a

classically educated Jesuit from Piemonte was, "destined to exercise a noteworthy

historical weight," on the policy formulations implemented by the Savoy in the decades

after his death.168 He was, continued Venturi, "the writer who with the greatest

thoroughness and energy said that to transform the island required, first of all, the

liquidation of the ancient relations existing between agriculture and pasturage, quickly

getting rid of the communal uses of the Sardinian village, the periodic redistribution of

the soil, the long established ancient rotation of village lands."169 It was an "archaic

equilibrium" between the country and the mountains that had to be broken. Only then

could the technical improvements advocated by others be implemented.

The structure of the "archaic equilibrium" of which Gemelli writes was indeed

widespread with roots deep in collective tradition. Every village exercised a complex of

diverse rights that constituted its unrenounceable patrimony, in Sardinian, fundamentu, in

which every member of the commune could participate by reason of residence. Therefore,

each village was the basis of the concrete horizon of economic opportunity. No single

family or farm could fail to correlate the availability of its particular resources (private

land, house, carts, yokes, seeds etc.) to that of the community (pasture lands, state lands,

168
Franco Venturi, Illuministi italiani, tomo VII (Milano: Ricardo Riccardi, 1963) 891.
169
Venturi, Illuministi 891.
hunting, collecting etc.). Gian Giacomo Ortu calls this relationship between village and

individual farm a "constituent and organic nexus" in which the community is the

necessary condition for the autonomous productivity of a single family, its individualism,

a structure that is deeply rooted in the collective solidarity of the village.170 Gemelli

opposed the two synergetic forces of the collective mortgage of the land and the general

aspiration to preserve autonomous productivity. But Gemelli's push for reform was also

driven by developmental pressures that were increasingly making this archaic equilibrium

inviable. Populations pressures on the island had become acute during the course of the

century, rising over 41% between the census 1728 and 1782, dimming the prospects not

only for dividing the land in its age old fashion, but even the prospect for finding work

for the younger generation.171

Gemelli's reform program was thorough and vast, incorporating issues from field

enclosures to land improvements, from modification of the agrarian contracts to new

policies on grain exportation, from the introduction of new techniques of agriculture to

the struggle against the prejudices of the peasants and shepherds in every aspect of their

lives. In 1777, the Florentine journal Novelle leterarie called Gemelli's Rifiorimento

della Sardegna proposto nel miglioramento di sua agricultura "one of the best books on

modern agriculture."172 The Biblioteca georgica in 1787 praised Gemelli's book, stating

that the author was "not only an agronomist but also an economist and natural

historian."173 The Journal des sciences et des beaux-arts was highly enthusiastic over the

appearance of the book, suggesting that its instructions could be used in all countries not

170
Gian Giacomo Ortu, “ Economia e societá rural Sardegna” in Storia dell'agricoltura Italiana
in etá contemporanea, vol. 2, a cura Piero Bevilacqua (Venezia: Marsilio Editori, 1990. ) 327-
328.
171
Ortu 329.
172
Venturi, Illuministi 899.
173
Venturi, Illuministi.
only Sardinia. However, the same journal was critical of the exalted status Gemelli gave

to the agriculture of the ancient Sardinian. 174

Gemelli's strength is his own recognition that a book on agricultural reform must

be based not only on the widest possible readings of agricultural topics from across

Europe, but, in the spirit of the new sciences, it must also be based on direct observations

and up to date statistical data. In 1769 Gemelli was transferred from Piemonte to Sassari

to hold the title of prefect of the Collegio di San Giuseppe and by 1771 he had been

named professor of eloquence at the University of Sassari. He took advantage of his

presence on the island to travel extensively throughout the countryside collecting

information and data whenever possible.

In the introductory chapters of the second volume, Gemelli examined the causes

most often cited for the decadence of Sardinian economy: the bad weather, the source of

malaria and other common sicknesses that was a perennial feature of Sardinian life, the

laziness of the masses and other defects of the population. Rejecting these explanations,

Gemelli summarizes the "true causes" of Sardinian decadence in the following manner:

1. The lack of free landed property due to its communalization or semi-

communalization; 2. The lack of cottages or peasant houses on the farms
themselves; 3. The lack of stable relationships between the peasants and the
landowner; 4. The lack of enclosures around the farms. Before however
undertaking the treatment of this subject, I warn the reader that the communal or
semi-communal land generically considered, is the true infected root that spreads
its defects to every branch of Sardinian agriculture.175

Gemelli, like the previous writers, employs historical argument, using the varied

174
Venturi, Illuministi 902.
175
Francesco Gemelli, Rifiorimento della Sardegna proposto nel miglioramento di sua agricoltura.
in Settecento reformatori, tomo IV, cura Franco Venturi ( Milano: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore,
1963) 907.
examples of the Jews, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Persians and Chinese to demonstrate

the importance of land divisions and more particularly to demonstrate the disorders

wrought by communal holdings. These communal land holdings were, of course, not

classical in origin but rather the result of a series of barbarian invasions led by the

Vandals in the fifth century, followed shortly thereafter by the Goths then the

Longobards. The barbarian invasions left the island "devastated and depopulated,”

obliging others to migrate leaving land abandoned and uncultivated. This uncultivated

land was then free to whoever wanted to cultivate it. The northern German customs of

common holdings and the periodic redistribution of land were then introduced. In fact,

according to Gemelli, the system of common redistribution of land was introduced

wherever the Germanic tribes successfully settled. Similar circumstances were

responsible for the communalization of the land in England. The introduction of the

common land in England created a miserable state of agriculture "obliging the island to

beg grain from the continent for its own subsistence. "176 But, Gemelli notes, today "it is

probably not an exaggeration to state that English agriculture is the best in the world."

He attributes the renovation of English agriculture in large part to the breaking up of

common lands. Quoting Mirabeau's Amico degli uomini, Gemelli writes: "The steps taken

by England are well known truths that they have converted all of their commons into

private property." Mirabeau councils that the division of the commons is done in an

orderly fashion with the aid of expert judges with a "formality relative to the principles of

government. "177 He continues by explaining that “no fundamental law of the kingdom

opposes the division of landed property, likewise no fundamental law of the kingdom

commands communal land.... That if no law forbids the distribution of landed property,

Gemelli 921.
176
177
Gemelli 922.
reason, authority, wisdom, and the examples of ancients and modern nations, convinces

us of the necessity to adopt it for the prosperity of agriculture.” 178

Gemelli's discourse differs from that of Genovesi, Cacherano, and even Mengotti

in that the problem of ethics and virtue as the principle from which the political and

economic structure is to be derived or subordinated is not an essential component in his

analysis, nor do we find that Gemelli has derived the political and economic structure

from the presumed nature of man in the reductionist form found in Mengotti. Gemelli's

emphasis throughout the text is on productivity rather than circulation, productivity rather

than ethical ordering or moral progress. "The enclosures,” writes Gemelli, quoting the

English author, Henry Patullo,

“that is, the hedges or walls around the farms, have at times made the income from the

land increase ten times, it always results in a large gain. The hedges protect the crops

from the wind in their maturity and from the cold winds of spring, conserving the vigor

and fertility that the soil receives from manuring. Finally the manure itself doubly

benefits in a field well enclosed than those left open.”179 Quoting other authorities to

make the same point, Gemelli summarizes the fundamental advantages to the land that

field enclosures produce, reducing them to four: I. To maintain an adequate degree of

warmth and to ward off the winds. II. To preserve it from the damage of animals. III. To

protect it from men. IV. To encourage in the padrone his delight in his property and his

interest in studying how to cultivate it.

Aware of the extensive opposition to enclosures, opposition that rests in the deep

traditions of the Sardinian peasant community and among the feudal nobility itself of

which, as Gemelli has already noted, Sardinia is full, Gemelli never approaches directly

178
Gemelli.
179
Gemelli 925.
the problems that were central to Genovesi, Cacherano and even Mengotti, that is, the

problems of social cohesion. It is taken for granted that social cohesion emerges from a

rationally ordered state that above all protects the absolute rights of private property

ensuring the greatest level of productivity. Productivity displaces circulation and

distribution as the essential principle of social organization.

Gemelli reveals this aspect of his discourse in his discussion of various types of

government, particularly his assessment of despotism. Departing from Montesquieu's

Persian Letters, Gemelli condemns Ottoman despotism "where the landowner is insecure

and consequently uninterested in the studies of how to make it productive: he does not

have title, and does not posses a guard against the caprice of government."180 Despotism

in this sense is most destructive because it diminishes the productivity of the land. But the

despotic form of government is not everywhere the same and must be assessed

specifically in its relationship to land. “ I do not believe,” Gemelli continues,

anyone will object to the examples of despotic states where agriculture does not
flourish. The objections are anticipated where I have limited the proposition to
those despotic states where land is possessed in a precarious manner, lacking the
particulars of true property or at least the security of property. In sum the
despotism of certain states does not extend itself to the land. Such is the principle
of China. And one can hear from Montesquieu the reason. "...the population is
always growing in China, requiring a tireless labor to make the land produce
enough to nourish it. Here it receives care from the government that elsewhere it
does not. It is interested in making sure that everyone can work without fear of
being frustrated in their labors." The Chinese are assured of their landed property
and stimulated by the honor and recompense connected to their diligent
cultivation ... what surprise is it then that in this vast empire the agriculture
flourishes so greatly?181

Unlike Mengotti whose focus is commerce, Gemelli subordinates the whole

180
Gemelli 941.
181
Gemelli 941-942.
economic and social organization of man to the productivity of the soil. While Mengotti

uses commerce, its history and current practice, to critique contemporary political

conditions, Gemelli uses agricultural productivity. But unlike Cacherano, who also uses

agriculture to criticize current political formations, Gemelli does not specifically focus on

the ethical component of land, i.e., land as patrimony. While Gemelli and Cacherano

might both agree on the importance of private land holdings, on the importance of free

trade in grain, or the necessity of the application of science to agriculture, Gemelli would

have little in common with Cacherano's plan for land reserved as a patrimony of the

Tribú. This would resemble the common holdings that were so destructive in Gemelli's

eyes, serving no necessary function in relation to increased productivity. The ethico-

historical component of land is missing for Gemelli, as he reduces the meaning of land to

the crops it produces. Such products can be easily quantified and objectively compared.

That is, one can now measure the proper or rational use of land by measuring the increase

in its products. While Gemelli has jettisoned the direct ethical meaning of land, as did

Mengotti, he has preserved a vision of society as an interlocking whole. Gemelli's ethic is

derived from the order of the entire system; for him, as for the Physiocrats in general;

ethics is not differentiated from the rational organization of the political system insofar as

the system conforms to the laws of nature. For the first time, the degree of rationality can

be quantitatively measured as the increase in the productivity of agriculture, or net

product, the term used by the Physiocrats. The net product, that is, the surplus over and

above the initial economic inputs, is a gift of nature. Consequently the social and

political order must be subordinated to problem of maximizing the gifts of nature or net

product.

Gemelli and Mengotti share a language derived from natural law theories; both
make abundant reference to the laws of nature as the guiding principles from which a

more rational order is to be constructed. However, they utilize this language in a very

different manner. Mengotti locates these laws in the individual's natural propensity to

exchange what he possesses for personal gain. For Mengotti, then, the whole political

and economic structure must be rationalized to allow for the maximum freedom of

individual initiative, which is for him the true expression of nature. Gemelli, too,

subordinates the social structure to nature, but nature for him is not located primarily in

the individual but in the soil itself to which the individual is necessarily linked. The

individual and the social structure, then, must conform to a rationality that liberates the

products of the earth. This shift in emphasis from the nature of man to the nature of the

soil, from commerce to productivity, has important consequences for their respective

visions of society. One envisions man living in a society where his natural activity as an

individual determines the social structure in the condition of commercial freedom; the

other imagines the individual only as part of a well-structured society that imparts on the

individual a rational and moral life.

As was shown in the previous chapter, Mengotti was hostile to the idea that

government, any government, was capable of fairly mediating the vast complexity of

social intercourse when comprised of individuals with so many opposed wills.

Government should interfere only as to guarantee the absolute freedom of the market.

Since society was and always has been, in Mengotti's definition, a vast market of

conflicting private interests, then free competition alone would regulate the common

interest. The Physiocratic model of the economy is derived from a medical model of the

animal body where circulation is regulated by the physical order of the body in a manner
analogous to the political body.182

While Gemelli uses the same appeal of identifying society with nature, his

differing concept of land leads to very different conclusions. Unlike Mengotti, who

identifies all human possessions as fundamental equivalents, Gemelli privileges land over

all else. For the Physiocrats land is the sole source of net product or new wealth. In

manufacturing, for example, labor simply reshapes that which is given by nature.

Nothing new emerges in the process, merely a new form of an old material. Land, then,

has neither the same economic meaning nor social meaning. It, and it alone, must be the

primary object of government intervention. Circulation of equivalents for Gemelli does

not create new wealth; only the fertility of the soil can do this. Thus, whatever

government policy enhances the net product is a rational policy. Gemelli's interest in the

absolute rights of property does not focus on all forms of property, as does Mengotti's.

Gemelli's interest is in landed property. Guarantees of private property in land insure the

proper use of the soil and are thus in conformity with the laws of nature.

We have already seen how Gemelli accepts and even praises the despotism of

China on the basis of its productive agriculture. What is not yet clear are the implications

of this praise for the policies of his small corner of Italy. In the conclusion to book two

182
The tendency to equate the animal body to the political body in economic discourse goes back at
least as far as William Petty's publication significantly titled The political Anatomy of Itrland
(1691) introducing the concept of circulation of money and its velocity as an essential part of the
health of the political body. This concept was directly derived from the celebrated work of
William Harvy Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus in 1628. Within
this model, advanced by Petty and developed by many others, notably Richard Cantillon's 1734
work Essai sur la nature du commerce en general, is the concept that the wealth or poverty of a
nation depends on the circulation of money and that every state passes inexorably through a
continual cycle of prosperty and decadence. The legislator can intervene to accelarate or slow this
process but is unable to stop it. Quesnay himself published Essai physique sur l'oeconomie animal
(1736) making the same analogy between animal and political economy. However, physiocratic
introduction of produit net, or expanded reproduction opens the possibility of rapid circulation
without decadence.
on Sardinian agriculture, Gemelli indirectly reveals this relationship. In no other part of

Italy, he writes, are the conditions more similar to Sardinia than in the Maremma region

of southwest Tuscany. The problem of Maremma’s agriculture extends at least as far

back as the writing of Discorso economico by the Senese Archdeacon, Salusto Bandini in

1737. Bandini's book, though not published until decades later, was considered to be a

precursor of the Physiocrats with its advocacy of free trade in grain. The Maremma,

however, presented massive problems as far as agricultural renovation was concerned.

Not only were there the obstacles of feudal restrictions on land as outlined by Gemelli in

the case of Sardinia, but the Maremma was plagued with considerable physical problems:

flooding, extensive swamplands, unhealthy water, and so on. In 1769, the Jesuit and

hydraulic engineer, Leonardo Ximenes published Della fisica riduzione della Maremma

senese in which he outlines the need for massive engineering projects to return the

Maremma to its ancient levels of fertility. Gemelli concludes book two by quoting a

personal letter from Ximenes in 1772. “The Maremma will never flower, writes Gemelli,

until the Ombrone River is dammed, Lake Castiglione is reduced, the swamps are dried,

and the water is made healthy once again.” Quoting Ximenes, he adds that

This is the indispensable condition not only of the present enterprise, but also of
all the human operations of a certain size and greatness that are not rapidly done
in the manner of a decisive battle, but rather slowly in the manner of an
industrious encampment marching to the orders of a wise general on the way to
begin a revolution of a new and happy system that emerges a lot more certain and
durable and more mature with the duration of time and human effort.183

Such expansive land reclamation projects as imagined by Gemelli and Ximenes

may not have required an empire to undertake but certainly could only be the product of a

183
Gemelli 948-949.
centralized state capable of marshalling both the capital and labor necessary for such

large scale work. The image of "a wise general on the way to a revolution of a new and

happy system” certainly invokes the need for an enlightened despotism capable of

rationally caring for the whole society.

To understand Gemelli's insistence on the break-up of the common lands, his

insistence on unrestricted property rights, and free trade in grain, one must keep in mind

the importance of the centralized state in his vision, otherwise it would be difficult to

distinguish Gemelli from either a Mengotti or a Cacherano who share similar positions on

the fundamental issues of property and land reform. Gemelli concludes his book by

reminding the reader that it is

often noted that rich subjects make a rich prince and that with the larger number of

subjects grows the power of the state. And it had been demonstrated with reason and

wisdom that with the division and appropriation of the land that wealth grows equally to

the growth of the population of the state.184

Gemelli never loses sight of the state conceived as an organic whole. The need

for such drastic land reforms while confronting a system of such deeply entrenched feudal

residues requires a strong, centralized political power. At this level we do not find

objections from any of the previous writers, whether Genovesi, Cacherano, or Mengotti.

What distinguishes them from one another is not the need to utilize state power, but the

basis on which the state is conceived. For Cacherano, the imperative of the state is driven

by its ethico-religious function that must insure the virtuous development of its subjects

184
Gemelli 949.
through the proper ordering of its economy, guaranteeing, as in ancient Rome, a landed

patrimony. For Mengotti, the state must be in conformity with man’s instinctive nature

deriving its imperative from the need to guarantee the free play of man's acquisitiveness.

Property rights are the primary and indispensable condition for the circulation of goods in

an economy driven by mans' natural propensity to barter and trade. With Gemelli one can

recognize a third position. Like Mengotti’s, Gemelli’s state must be in conformity with

nature, but not nature derived from individual man; rather nature conceived as the

complete integration between society and the natural world. This integration results in

the rational ordering, not of individuals in perpetual conflict, but of a society enhancing

the fruits of nature. Unlike Cacherano, who focuses on ethical intangibles, Gemelli's

society can be easily quantified as the expansion of grain production or, in more abstract

terms, as net product. In short, the sole criterion for political power and the social order is

productivity. The division of property is not an end in itself, as with Mengotti, but the

means to the expansion of surplus wealth.

Gemelli was not a theoretician of Physiocracy in the sense that he elaborated a set

of abstract principles, but his reform proposals were derived from acute observations of

contemporary agricultural practices organized within the Physiocratic worldview. Before

proceeding further with the influences of Physiocracy in Italy it is worth outlining some

of the most important theoretical principles of Physiocracy so that we can evaluate the

degree to which various reforms were specifically Physiocratic reforms or whether such

reforms merely overlapped the program of the economisti.

Evaluations of Physiocracy have always been somewhat problematic. To

Tocqueville, the Physiocrats were doctrinaire advocates of absolute equality. To

Rousseau they were supporters of an odious if "legal" despotism.185 These divergent

reactions are not surprising when we consider the nature of Physiocracy as what J.

Schumpeter indicated was perhaps among the first western ideologies, and certainly the

first ideology with a specifically economic program. Schumpeter suggests that such

phenomena have occurred only three times in history, the first with Physiocracy, the

second with Marxism, and the third with the Keynesians.186 The Physiocrats were,

according to Schumpeter, "thoroughly alive to the importance of propaganda," founding

discussion groups, publishing journals of a popular nature, and working upon individuals

in key government positions to further their cause.187 The Physiocratic School, or sect as

many referred to them, was characterized by the overwhelming dominance of one man

who acted as master to his disciples. François Quesnay (1694-1774), the son of a

successful lawyer, was himself a surgeon-physician with an outstanding career in

medicine that was to absorb most of his energies. In his own mind his interest in

economics was of secondary importance to his work in medicine. He became General

Secretary to the Academy of Surgery and editor of its journal and medical advisor to

Mme de Pompadour which was to strategically place him at the center of intellectual life

at Versailles and Paris. Before he made any incursions into the field of economic theory,

he wrote an important treatise on circulation and bleeding. Of his economic writings his

most important were the Encyclopedie articles 'Fermiers' (1756), 'Grains' (1757),

'Hommes' (1757), and the famous Tableau ôeconomique (1758).

Physiocracy had a brief but spectacular career between the years 1760-1780 when

not only tout Paris but all of the intellectual circles of Europe were talking about

185
Henry Higgs, The Physiocrats (New York: Langland, 1952) 182.
186
Joseph Schumpeter, The History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986)
223.
187
Schumpeter 126.
agriculture. After 1780, according to Schumpeter, most had forgotten about Physiocracy

with the exception of professed economists. While Physiocracy as a system had lost its

grip on the general imagination of Europe, due in part to the growing importance of

manufacture and foreign trade and most certainly the expanding economic power of

England where Physiocracy never had much influence, its theoretical impact was deep

and long lasting because it had introduced certain economic concepts into the general

culture of Europe. The Physiocratic project can be reduced to four general areas that

represent its philosophy and its political economic program: Natural Law, Agriculture,

Laissez Faire, and l'Impôt Unique.

The term Physiocracy, meaning rule of nature, came into being in 1767 ten years

after Quesnay's first economic writings, captures quite well the essential premise of

Quesnay's school. The Physiocratic project was to establish a correspondence between

Natural Law and Positive Law. All evils- physical and moral- were due to a lack of this

correspondence. In Schumpeter's assessment, Quesnay's theories of state and society are

rather inadequate and inferior reformulation of Scholastic doctrine. Whereas the

Scholastics accounted for the historical relativism of social states and institutions,

Quesnay's view was that the ideal and natural order was historically invariable. In his

paper on Droit Naturel he defined Physical Law as "the regulated course of all physical

events which is evidently the most advantageous to mankind,” and Moral Law as "the

rule of every human action conforming to the physical order evidently the most

advantageous to mankind": these laws form together what is called "natural law" and they

are immutable and the "best possible ones."188 It is on this point that the Italians criticized

the Physiocrats, particularly the Neapolitans, who had been influenced by the work of

188

Schumpeter 229.
Vico, who insisted on conceiving social and natural phenomena a distinct. Schumpeter

argues that Quesnay's Natural Law theory was not essential to his insightful and common

sense economic formulations, which were simply part of the fashion of the day making

him especially popular in court society when he used them to support absolute monarchy

and a belief in progress without the anti-clerical sentiment that often accompanied

advocates of natural law. Quesnay's Natural Law was the complete identification of

social processes with natural processes.

The Physiocrats were fond of metaphors drawn from nature as, "the state is a tree,

agriculture its roots, population its trunk, arts and commerce its leaves."189 In other

words, it was a vision of total interdependence as a system. Mirabeau and Quesnay wrote

in their Philosophie Rural in1763,

We must consider the common weal in terms of its essence, and humanity as a
whole in terms of its root, subsistence. All moral and physical parts of which
society is constituted derive from this and are subordinate to it. It is upon
subsistence, upon the means of subsistence, that all branches of political order
depend. ... Introduce one wrong note into the harmony of society and the whole
political mechanism feels the effect and falls apart. 190

This vision of a harmonious totality, a political, ethical, and economic totality, is

critical to understanding Physiocracy. Without the assumption that humanity and nature

form a system, it is difficult to imagine that Quesnay and Physiocracy could have

imagined the economy itself as a system. Although this is not a view shared by

Schumpeter, who believes that the famous Tableau ôeconomique, where the Quesnay

analytically structures the whole economy depicting the flow of expenditures and

products between social classes, has a validity independent and separable from the rest of

189
Higgs 182.
190
Meeks 57.
Quesnay's work. The Tableau is the point, according to Schumpeter, at which social

classes become exclusively "actors in an economic play."191 Schumpeter believes that it

would be impossible to overestimate the importance of the Tableau for the development

of economic analysis. "Economics, like every science,” he writes, “started with the

investigation of "local" relations between two or more economic quantities ... in other

words a partial analysis."192 Quesnay's contribution not only simplified the concept of

economic life and created an analytic pattern that opened great possibilities for the

application of mathematics to social phenomena, but above all it created an image of all

economic phenomena as interrelated conveying an explicit conception of an economic

equilibrium. Such a concept was, for Schumpeter, not fully realized until Walras, and is,

in short, the Magna Carta of economic analysis.193 In fact, it is worth noting that

Quesnay's most important non-economic work was a study of bleeding and blood

circulation where equilibrium and disequilibrium are fundamental concepts. Quesnay's

particular idea of natural law was always a seminal concept that structured Physiocratic

theory. Quesnay's medical background and the use of the terms found in medicine and

zoology suggest that his economic analysis did not have its origin in direct observation of

social phenomena but rather that social phenomena were structured along the axis of a

pre-formulated medical discourse.194

The second essential area of the Physiocratic program was its emphasis on the

fundamental role of agriculture in the life of the economy. As has already been well noted

agriculture for the Physiocrats was the sole source of new wealth in an economy. What

191
Schumpeter 239.
192
Schumpeter 242.
193
Schumpeter.
194
See footnote 16.
was unique in Physiocracy was not simply that agriculture was the foundation of any

healthy economy, this was recognized by many including Mengotti who understood that

without an developed agriculture commerce and manufacture could not flourish, but the

Physiocrats imagined the economy as a whole just as they imagined nature and humanity

as a whole and in doing so focused their point of analysis on the origin of the creation of

new wealth. Quesnay termed this new wealth produit net which was similar to Cantillon's

produit de la terre. What was unique for Quesnay was that the produit net or net product,

that is the net return on the rent of land, was the sole source of new wealth. It was the gift

of nature that multiplied returns through natural processes. The concept of net product for

Physiocracy provided the basis for the classification of society into distinct economic

classes.

Quesnay distinguished three basic classes defined by their relationship to

productivity. There were the farmers and tillers of the soil known as the Classe

productive, those engaged in manufacture, merchants, lawyers, civil servants and so forth,

known as Classe sterile, then the Classe des proprietaires- the monarchy, aristocracy and

clergy. The productive class was, of course, the only productive class because it alone

was engaged in agriculture. It is important to note that Quesnay did not envision

productivity as the result of labor. It was not the farm worker who was productive but the

farmer himself who rented the land and managed the farm. The laboring classes

represented either a fourth class for Quesnay or were to be divided between the

productive class and the sterile class. Furthermore, he did not conceive of the sterile class

as meaning useless, simply that it did not create net product. All of the classes were

essential for a well-regulated society and each played a necessary role. Within this

framework, Quesnay did not see classes as having opposed interests. It "is part of the
natural order,” he writes,

that the strongest should be the head of the family, but it is part of the order of
justice that he should encroach upon the natural right of those who live in a
community of interest with him. There is thus an order of compensation in the
enjoyment of the natural right of each person which must be to the advantage of
all the individuals in the family, and which must be regulated by the head,
according to the order of distributive justice itself, in conformity with the duties
prescribed by nature and with the system of co-operation in which each person
contributes to the welfare of the society, according to his ability. Everybody
makes his contribution to it in a different way, but the services performed by one
lessens the services which have to be performed by others ... as a result of this
mutual supplementation each person contributes almost equally to the welfare of
society. Thus each person in it ought to enjoy his natural right to its full extent.
195

Quesnay imagined the nation as he imagined a healthy body, a robust family or a

well-ordered farm, as a harmonious system where each part contributed to the functioning

of the whole. It was evident for Quesnay that any family or farm must be guided by one

whose personal interests were identical with the whole, and for the good of the nation,

stood the Classe des proprietaires who were most interested in the well being of the land

as the source of their rents. Simultaneously, their personal interests were nearly identical

with the interests of the nation insofar as both directly benefited from the expansion of net

product.

It may at this point be difficult to see how the Physiocratic advocacy of laissez-

faire can be conceptually reconciled with a system imagined as an integrated totality

where if one were to "introduce one wrong note into the harmony of society the whole

political mechanism feels the effects and falls apart."196 But laissez-faire and the free

trade in grain were the programmatic centerpiece of Physiocracy. It has often been

195
Quesnay, “Droit naturel” in Meeks 51.

Mirabeau, Rural Philosophy in Meeks 58.

196
suggested that if John Locke was the one who most forcefully articulated political

individualism then Quesnay and the Physiocrats did the same for economic

individualism. Superficially it would appear that the Physiocrats differ little from the

position asserted by Mengotti. In an extract from “Rural Philosophy” we can read that

"the whole magic of a well-ordered society is that each man works for others, while

believing that he is working for himself."197 In spite of the striking similarity between this

formulation and Mengotti or Mandeville, the essential difference is that Physiocracy does

not take it point of departure from the nature of the individual. That is, it is not from the

avaricious individual in perpetual conflict that a common interest emerges, quite the

opposite. The common interest is always present in each and every act of the individual,

"but their private interests do not lend themselves to an insight into the general welfare.

Such advantages can be expected only as a result of the wisdom of the governments."198

For the Physiocrats the absolute liberty in trade is, as it is for Mengotti, derived from the

laws of nature, but it is the whole of society that must be in conformity with nature,

society as a harmonious system of individuals working for a common purpose, not, as in

Mengotti because it reflects the innate character of man. The moral element is very much

present in Physiocratic theory but unlike Genovesi or Cacherano not because working on

the land imparts virtue on each individual but because the whole nation is in harmony

with nature. "Morals,” writes Mirabeau, “are with good reason regarded as the shield of a

nation; but it is cultivation, that cornucopia, which governs morals."199 In other words it

is produit net as a national aggregate from which morals are developed.

While some policy similarities between the Physiocrats and other contemporary

197
Meeks 70.
198
Quesnay, "Hommes" in Meeks 97.
199
Meeks 69.
reformers are evident, it would be an over simplification to homogenize essential

concepts as lassez-faire. Similar policies between the Physiocrats and contemporaries

who are formulating more classical liberal doctrine are derived from different

philosophical foundations and contrary ideas of man. Such different foundations conjure

sharply different images of the state and economy as a whole. We can get a sense of how

far removed Physiocratic doctrine is from Mengotti in the opening to Quesnay's “General

Rules for the Economic Government of an Agricultural Kingdom” (1758).

1. Sovereign authority should be exercised by one; it should be superior to all

members of society and above the unjust aspirations of private interests, for the
object of ruler ship and of obedience is the security and the protection of the
legitimate interests of all. the principle of the separation of power through a
system of checks and balances is a sinister idea, which can only lead to discord
among the great and to the oppression of the small. The division of society into
different groups of citizens in such a way that one group exercises sovereign
authority over the others is in opposition to the national interest, and tends to give
rise to conflicts between the private interests of different classes of citizens: such
division would divert the system of government of an agricultural kingdom which
has to unite all interests in a supreme end--namely, the prosperity of agriculture,
which is the source of all wealth of the nation as well as that of all citizens. 200

Conflict, for Quesnay, is the result of a poorly ordered society and can only be

overcome through a form of enlightened absolutism employing "the general laws of the

natural order, for which for obvious reasons constitutes the most perfect order."201 Free

trade is not a central component of their program because it is the right of the individual

or because it is in conformity with mans' innate character, but rather because it conforms

to the natural order of the whole economy conceived as an integrated totality. It is only

through free trade that the bon prix (good price) will emerge which is the essential

200
François Quesnay, "General Rules" in The Portable Enlightenment Reader Ed. Isaac Kramnick
(New York: Penguin, 1995) 496-97.
201
Quesnay, "General Rules" 497.
condition for the full circulation of goods which itself is necessary to optimize productive

(agricultural) output. Any right that the individual may have to dispose of his goods or his

wealth is limited by the demands of the whole economy. The primary means of limitation

is though direct taxation. The whole of state policy is subordinated to the maximization of

productive output. In a fragment from his Taxation, Quesnay writes:

The proprietors ought not to hold back the net product. It is necessary that the
landed properties, which receive this revenue, should spend it annually so that
this kind of wealth is circulated among the whole nation. Without this circulation
the state would be unable to subsist; if the proprietors held back this revenue, it
would be very necessary to deprive them of it. Thus this kind of wealth belongs
as much to the state as to the proprietors themselves. 202

The taxation policy advocated by the Physiocrats, l'Impôt Unique, was based on

the above argument, that the whole of the annual net product finds itself in the hands of

the proprietors of the land. "Taxes should not be destructive or out of proportion to the

sum total of the national revenue. Any increase of taxes should be dependent upon the

increase of this revenue."203 And since net product expresses itself as ground rent alone,

then taxes must be derived only from rents otherwise they will be taken from the capital

fund of the nation ultimately restricting annual advances to agriculture. The image of the

economy, political power, and the social structure of the nation is a considerable distance

from the image created by Mengotti; it is closer to Cacherano or Genovesi with some

important differences. In the supplement to the Tableau of 1758, the “General Maxims”,

Quesnay writes:

202
Meeks 104.
203
Quesnay, "General Rules" 497-98.
 In order that land should yield a revenue work in the countryside must render a
net product over and above the wages paid to the workers, for it is the net product
which enables the other classes of men who are necessary for the state to subsist.
This should not be expected from poor men who work that land with their hand...
they can only procure subsistence for themselves alone. Thus it is not to these
poor peasants that you should entrust the cultivation of your land. It is animals
that should plow and fertilize your fields; it is consumption, sales, and free and
unobstructed internal and external trade which ensures the market value that
constitutes your revenue. Thus it is wealthy men whom you should put in charge
of the enterprise of agriculture and rural trade, in order to enrich yourselves, to
enrich the state and to enable inexhaustible wealth to be generated. With the aid
of this wealth you may enjoy in abundance the products of the land and the arts,
maintain powerful defense against your enemies.204

The image painted by the Physiocrats is a landscape dominated by wealthy

farmers, renting large tracts of land from the classe proprietaires employing, in the most

efficient manner possible, farm workers as wage laborers. The whole structure must be

subordinated to the single goal of increasing net product, which itself must circulate

throughout the economy to increase demand making possible expanded capital outlays for

agriculture. When properly organized, this system will cause inexhaustible wealth to be

generated. It is, in short, a very precisely structured system that bears little resemblance

to the spontaneous chaos of commercial exchange imagined by Mengotti. The

spontaneity of Quesnay's system has very clear parameters that govern its domain and its

extent.

In spite of Schumpeter's claim that the Tableau imagines men exclusively as

"actors in an economic play," the Physiocratic system, including the Tableau, is an

ethico-political system. It is an organic system that integrates the whole of society into a

singular directive, imagining society to some extent, as a well run, well ordered family

farm, in which each has a necessary and indispensable role, the outcome of which

204
Meeks, 259-61.
becomes the "ethical shield of the nation." The similarities with Genovesi and

Cacherano are to be found in the inextricable connection between the ethico-political with

the economic order. The material conditions of society are the source of the ethical

development of man. But the ethical development does not occur in the same way. For

Genovesi and Cacherano, the immediate activity of the farmer, insofar as he works to

improve his own land, is the source of his ethical development. For Quesnay it is not

one's immediate activity or interaction directly with the plow but rather the proper

ordering of society as a whole that gives rise to ethical development. Quesnay is entirely

unconcerned with the problem of republican virtue arising from the virtuous farmer. The

structure of the agricultural landscape is to be entirely subordinated to technical

efficiency. In the eyes of Quesnay, such efficiency best emerges from large consolidated

farms capable of employing vast capital outlays, and contracting large-scale wage labor.

While virtue and ethics are still a central concern of the Physiocrats, the source of this

virtue is no longer the soil itself. Land, when considered by itself in the conceptual

framework of Physiocracy, has taken on an exclusively economic meaning. Virtue has

been subordinated to the production of produit net.

Land assumes distinctly different meanings in the works of Genovesi, Mengotti,

and the Physiocrats insofar as its relationship to man's economic activity is

simultaneously an image of man's ethical life and social order. For Genovesi, land is the

focal point of man's ethical activity; for Mengotti land is simply one more commodity in

circulation and man's ethical order is derived from that which everyman naturally

possesses; for the Physiocrats, land is the exclusive source of net product and the ethical

order is derived from social organization as a whole. Between Genovesi, Mengotti, and

the Physiocrats we can delineate three very distinct images of land corresponding to three
distinct images of man and his social order.

Another element of the Physiocratic system that departs sharply from the works

of Genovesi or Cacherano, is the complete subordination of the system to their particular

idea of natural law, a subordination that entirely displaces the problem of historical

development. Natural law is valid everywhere for all times, thus, for the Physiocrats, an

assessment of any historical culture must be made from the reference point of the

particular culture's production of produit net. Therefore, when considering the despotism

of Imperial China, one must first consider the organization of agriculture as a whole.

Assessments of Physiocracy vary widely as was noted above. From the view of

the development of economic analysis Schumpeter saw Quesnay's brilliance emerging

from his rudimentary insight of an economic equilibrium. Karl Marx believed that the

"great and specific contribution of the Physiocrats is that they derive value and surplus-

value not from circulation but from production." 205 In this sense Marx is in agreement

with Mirabeau who also believed that the discovery of produit net was the most important

discovery of that "veritable Confucius of Europe." But for Marx, Physiocracy was

trapped in a particular historical moment in which capitalism was attempting to break free

of its feudal shell. Physiocracy expressed the full weight of the historical contradictions

of this moment. The Physiocratic support of absolute monarchy was, for Marx, in

contradiction to its bourgeois content. He writes:

All these are contradictions of capitalist production as it works its way out of
feudal society, and interprets feudal society itself only in a bourgeois way, but
has not yet discovered its own peculiar form--somewhat as philosophy first builds
itself up within the religious form of consciousness, and in so doing on the one
hand destroys religion as such, while on the other hand, in its positive content, it
still moves only within the religious sphere, idealized and reduced to terms of

205
Marx,Theories of Surplus-Value, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress, 1969) 49.
 thought....Hence also, in the conclusions which the Physiocrats themselves draw,
the ostensible veneration of landed property becomes transformed into the
economic negation of it and the affirmation of capitalist production.... By placing
the burden of tax entirely on rent, because it alone is surplus-value-- and
consequently any taxation of other forms of income ultimately falls on landed
property, but in a roundabout way, and therefore in an economically harmful
way, that hinders production-- taxation and along with it all forms of state
intervention, are removed from industry itself, and the latter is thus freed from all
intervention by the State. This is ostensibly done for the benefit of landed
property, not in the interest of industry but in the interests of landed property.206

That Physiocracy was unwittingly undermining itself theoretically with its program of

l’Impot Unique may be evident; what is less evident, however, is that the theory was

expressing itself in the language of feudalism. The Physiocratic glorification of landed

property of which Marx writes, bears no resemblance to the glorification of landed

property in the feudal cosmology. For the Physiocrats land is nothing more than a source

of produit net. Furthermore, the Physiocrats themselves were unreservedly hostile to all

forms of feudal privilege and restrictions of any kind on private property. Rather than

seeing in Physiocracy a kind of embryonic bourgeois program trapped in feudal garb, as

Marx does, it may be more useful to assume that its very appeal was its self-consistency.

Its political absolutism is a considerable distance from the kind of religious absolutism

current in the previous century. 207 The absolutism of Physiocracy was remarkably

consistent with an economic theory that was a completely structured rational system

subordinated to a single guiding principle. If one takes Marx' cryptic statements about

Physiocracy's feudal mode of expression superficially, then we would be in exactly the

same epistemological frame as Schumpeter and Meeks in believing that there was an

economic reality that was asserting itself independently of the theoretical discourse that

206
Marx, Theories 52-53.
207
It would be a mistake to suggest, however, that there was not an important religious element in
the cosmology of Quesnay. The rational order itself was the design of God and it was man's duty
to conform.
both attempts to apprehend that reality as well as bring it into being.208 Nowhere in the

eighteenth century is there a better example of a theory that simultaneously attempted to

reflect reality in thought and to subordinate that same reality to its own theory through its

programmatic efforts.

It is not so much the analytical merits of Physiocracy as such, but rather its

discursive significance in the broader sense that is important. That is to ask, what

elements of Physiocratic discourse entered into the broader circulation of ideas in the

settecento? What elements of the Physiocratic program moved across French frontiers to

influence social thought and the formulation of various reform programs in the latter half

of the century?

Italy, as mentioned, was highly receptive to Physiocracy in general. Physiocratic

ideas entered into circulation throughout the peninsula among many important reformers

who both developed and criticized its theory as well as pushed for the implementation of

many of its reforms. But in no part of Italy was Physiocracy received with as much

enthusiasm as the Tuscany of the Granduke Pietro Leopoldo. In recognition of this

enthusiasm Mirabeau, dedicated his book Rural Philosophy to the Granduke in 1763.

Tuscany, more than most Italian states, was characterized by a long tradition of

collaboration between reformers, administrators, academics and often ecclesiastic circles.

Furthermore, Tuscany had a long history of fairly developed agricultural practice. The

demographic and commercial shifts that put increased pressure on agriculture in the

eighteenth century coupled with recurring famines, especially the famine of 1764, made it

clear that the problem of agriculture was a political, social, economic, and moral problem

208
The suggestion that this would be a superficial reading of Marx is based on the dialectical nature
of theory and consciousness in the construction of material world as Marx expressed in his
"Theses on Feurabach."
of the first order.209

Tuscany itself was characterized by two basic forms of land tenure. The

Maremma region, the region Gemelli assimilated with Sardinian land holdings, was

characterized by large latifondi characteristic of southern Italy and the Agro Romano with

its sheep farming and extensive grain cultivation as well as the accompanying feudal

traditions of common lands, right of pasturage and numerous other common or noble

privileges. But for the most part, Tuscany was characterized by administrative units

known as the fattoria, which were themselves typically broken up into poderi of less than

ten hectares. Each podero was cultivated by a separate family known as mezzadri or

sharecroppers. The distinguishing characteristic of Tuscan sharecropping was that half of

the agricultural produce was paid in kind rather than in cash as in other forms of

sharecropping in Italy. This required or facilitated a tight control and coordination over

the mezzadri by the administrator of the fattore. The particular Tuscan land tenure

arrangement differed from that in other forms in Italy in that it gave the landlord more

direct control over the peasants’ agricultural practice. Elsewhere in Italy estates were

managed by stewards whose primary function was initially to collect cash rents;

eventually many of them grew to become prosperous agricultural entrepreneurs

themselves often buying up land and managing their estates specifically to exploit the

expanding markets. The close connection between the landlords and agricultural practice

linked the ruling circles of Tuscany quite directly with the problems that were coming to

preoccupy the administration.

209
In keeping with European trends, the population of Italy increased during the century from 13 to
17 million. Industrial and commercial developments in the north of Europe created a rising
demand for agricultural products, thus there existed both strong internal and external incentive to
increase agricultural production.
 One result of this close connection was the creation of the first agrarian academy

on the continent.210 On the initiative of the Canon Ubaldo Montelatici and after his

publication Ragionamento per far rifiorire l'agricoltura, the Accademia dei Georgofili

was founded on June 4, 1753. The initial purpose of the Georgofili was essentially an

educational one: to reform peasant customs and practices and to transform the mentality

of the landowners.211 After its first chaotic beginnings, the Georgofili, at the height of the

Leopoldian reforms, became an organ of the large Tuscan landowners seeking to justify

the new reforms through the diffusion of Physiocratic arguments.212

The deeply entwined intellectual and administrative spheres of Tuscan life and

the support given by the great landowners tended to give the reform movement a very

practical quality that had the effect of dampening the more theoretical developments that

tended to flourish in places like Lombardy and the Kingdom of Naples.213 However, the

Tuscan reform movement was given a considerable boost after the return of Pompeo Neri

in 1758 from his successful administrative efforts in Lombardy. Neri remained the most

important minister under the Granduke until his influence was replaced by the energetic

Angelo Tavanti, former editor of Locke's monetary writings and by Francesco Maria

Gianni, former director of the Pisa customs and superintendent of the silk guild.214 But

none of these intellectual administrators would have had much impact without the

enthusiastic support of the Granduke himself. Pietro Leopoldo, the second son of Maria

Theresa, was an enthusiastic and widely read supporter of the European philosophes. His

210
The first agrarian academy was founded some decades earlier in Scotland as the Society of
Improvers.
211
Renato Pasta, "L'Accademia dei Georgofili," Rivista Storica Italiana, anno cv, fasc II: 485
212
Mario Mirri, "Proprietari e contadini toscani nelle riforme leopoldine." Movimento Opera,
Marzo-Aprile 1955 N. 2: 176.
213
Stuart Woolf A History of Italy 1700-1860 (London: Routledge, 1991) 104.
214
Woolf 105.
interests were vast and his vision was of a broad humanistic reform movement inspired

by the works of Leibniz and Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, the Catholic reformists,

Turgot and the Physiocrats.

Upon his ascension to power in 1765, the Granduke was immediately confronted

by the disastrous effects of the famine of the year before. The difficulty revolved around

the archaic grain provisioning system leftover from a time when the cities were clearly

the dominant economic force in Tuscany. The continual subordination of the country to

the city created an inefficient system of artificially imposed pricing system and grain

storage. Most of the reformers were in agreement that a unified domestic market was

essential to overcoming the difficulties. In 1766, with Leopard's directive, all internal

market controls were abolished. The problem of external trade in grain, however, was

more problematic as powerful special interests were involved. Ganini voiced a modified

Physiocratic position in favor of the big landowners who wanted free export of grain but

protection from imports. Neri who wanted completely free markets expressed the more

doctrinaire Physiocratic position. Leopold cautiously implemented reformed trade

policies in 1767, which were essentially a modified version of the French policy of a few

years earlier. But by 1771, the new minister of finance, Tavanti, successfully argued for

the complete freedom of imports. Renewed famine conditions occurred in 1772-75 that

created deep divisions among reformers and led to considerable popular agitation against

the reforms. Finally, by 1775, Leopold enacted the Physiocratic policy of totally free

imports and exports regardless of internal shortages.215 The enthusiasm among the

reformers was tremendous and was expressed by the journal Novelle letterarie with these

words: "Experts in political economy spread truths and ministers and princes listened to

215
Woolf 105.
them... We hope to be believed when we point to out Tuscany as the first country to

experience in practice the beneficent influence of economic science."216

The Physiocratic triumph, however, was not without its problems. The new trade

policies and the unified internal market did give greater opportunities for the

commercialization of agriculture resulting in an increase in prices. But the new

commercial opportunities were also pressures on the peasant families themselves. Small

variations in the mezzadri contract could mean significant savings for the proprietors and

near catastrophe for the peasants; for example, whether the mezzadri or the landowner

who furnishes the seed for the next years crops. The traditional mezzadri contract was

based to some extent on the notion of mutual obligations between sharecropper and

landowner. But the new commercialism was increasingly substituting a cash relationship

as the essential bond between landowner and tenant. Neither the Physiocratic spokesmen

nor the Georgofili prioritized the problem of the worsening conditions of the peasantry.

Many were aware of the problems and recognized the need for some form of relief for the

peasantry, but the first real reckoning with the problem came with the publication of

Lettera parenetica of Mons. d'Ippoliti, the Bishop of Cortona, who focused on the duties

of the landowners towards their peasants. The misery of the peasants, he wrote, was "an

irritation to divine justice." Writing entirely within an ethico-religious framework,

d'Ippoliti writes:

God alone has planted on this earth all the goods that we enjoy, ...man has no
other task than to work and toil if he wants to enjoy the fruit. What inhumanity
consequently, what injustice to defraud a little bread from the miserable peasants,
they alone pour their sweat on the ungrateful earth, they alone suffer the weight
of the cold and the heat, they alone seem to have the right to as much as the land
produces! God united toil and nourishment; you have left them the toil and taken

216
Woolf 105-6.
 away the nourishment. ...If it is true, humanly speaking, that the earth has no
value without man, neither has man without the earth, which God has given us to
mother and nourish in this mortal life, we must confess, that the peasant is the
true author, and the sole depository of basic wealth, that passes through his hands
to those of all others.217

What emerged from the pen of Mons. d'Ippoliti, out of a sense of Christian

charity, was also expressed by the Granduke himself out of a deep humanist sentiment.

What resulted was a struggle between the proprietors, whose primary interest was to

attain the widest possible freedom over the contracts, and the Granduke who believed all

should benefit from the recent reforms. The debates centered over the issue of state

regulation on the mezzadri contracts. In 1771 Leopold asked the Georgofili for its

opinion regarding possible improvement of the contract in a way that might perhaps

guarantee a minimum subsistence level to the peasants regardless of market conditions.

The most eloquent spokesman for the Physiocratic position, Ferdinando Paoletti, argued

that such intervention would be an affront to the sacrosanct right of private property

which was itself the very cornerstone of civilization. By 1778 the Georgofili requested

and gained from Leopold the right of landowners to dismiss sharecroppers. Leopold's

frustrated attempts to create a more humane environment for the peasants seemed to be

continually thwarted by the powerful landowners. The plight of the peasants had become

so difficult that one Tuscan journalist, Giovani Ristori, dared to suggest a need for an

agrarian law and wrote:

What more insulting prospect for humanity exists than to see five rich men strut
about pretentiously and proudly in front of a thousand poor, who are humiliated
by their unhappy condition, and rendered squalid by hunger and hard labor! Ah!
When inequality of fortune is carried to such extremes, would it be so wrong to
think of passing agrarian laws? 218

217
Mirri 195.
218
Woolf 131.
 Rather than confronting the issue of the contract more forcefully, Leopold hoped

that the pressure on the peasants could be reduced by creating small holding out of

confiscated church lands, but the powerful Physiocratic voice within the Georgofili stood

in the way of even this small attempt. However, before Leopold departed from Tuscany

in 1790, in spite of the worsening conditions of the peasants, he had left a considerable

legacy of reform and was consequently considered to be among the most enlightened

rulers in Europe. By the end of his rule, large portions of the Physiocratic program had in

fact been adopted; the grain provisioning system had been abolished in favor of free

trade, communal lands and pasturage had been divided and turned over to private

cultivation, and finally the Florentine guilds were abolished in favor of free labor.

Beyond this, the complex and antiquated administration of the Duchy had been made

uniform and rationalized. Physiocracy as a political force was considerable in Tuscany

largely because it voiced the organized demands of the large landowners, who

increasingly had become the dominant political class. The most articulate Physiocratic

spokesman associated with the Georgofili was Ferdinando Paoletti, who published two

important works, De' pensieri sopra agricoltura 1769 and I veri mezzi di render felici le

societá 1772. With these two works Paoletti became the most important apologists for

the Leopoldian reforms in Tuscany, and was probably the closest one will find to a

doctrinaire Physiocrat anywhere in Italy. A brief look at Paoletti and a few specific

aspects of his works will further round out our understanding of Italian Physiocracy and

prepare the way for a better understanding of its critique and its legacy.

Paoletti was born a few miles from Florence in 1717, and, as did so many of our
reformers, took religious orders. He was eventually called to the pieve of San Donnino at

Villa-Magna six miles from Florence where he was to remain at Villa-Magna for the next

fifty-five years. When he arrived at Villa-Magna he discovered an uneducated backward

peasantry practicing an appallingly inefficient form of agriculture. In addition to his

religious duties, he dedicated the following decades to teaching the "rustics" reading and

writing and methods of improving their agricultural techniques. Paoletti was, in short, a

living example of Genovesi's idea of the clergy teaching the most advanced agricultural

techniques to the peasants in his parish. Through his practical experience locally and his

studies of the foreign "economists," particularly the French, even corresponding with

Mirabeau himself at one point, Paoletti became an impassioned agricultural reformer and

convinced Physiocrat. He was highly respected by his peers serving in administrative

capacities in both the Georgofili and on special commissions appointed by the Granduke.

Both of Paoletti’s works are noteworthy, like many Italian reformers, for directly

addressing local conditions and formulating solutions for local problems. His works are

worth close look order to glean a more rounded vision of the Physiocratic imagination in

Italy.

The Physiocratic doctrine was a total vision of society, weaving the political,

social, economic, natural, and we might add religious components of the world into single

cloth. But how this total vision impinged on the image of the immediate conditions of

agricultural life is not always apparent from theoretical works alone. Like all Physiocrats,

Paoletti's philosophical foundation was natural law. "The laws of nature alone,” he

writes, “are invariable, because the author of nature alone is incapable of error."219 The

219
Fernando Paoletti, I mezi di render felici le societá in Collezione Custodi, Scritori classici
Italiani di Economica politics, part moderna ,Tomo XX (
Roma:Edizioni Bizzarri ) 114.
natural law doctrine that guides Paoletti precludes a historicist or relativist vision of

legislation, and likewise simplifies an analysis of other social orders to the single criterion

of agricultural productivity. "Agriculture therefore has to be, after religion, the prime

object of all thinkers and of all the activities of every sovereign."220 His adherence to

reason as the guide to good government is accompanied by his unreserved hostility to the

tyranny of tradition.

"Reasonable men must govern with reason,” he writes,

She alone will render them prosperous. But men from one end of the earth to the
other up to now have gone to great lengths to make themselves unhappy. Created
to live in a single family, to cultivate the earth and to enjoy by means of their toil
the infinite bounty given to them by God, yet they have not listened to the voice
of nature. It shows them the happiness that they can find on this earth; ... they
have defeated the sprit in order to imagine the most barbarous institutions and to
create the strangest laws, which not being in conformity with nature, the law that
everyone carries marked in their heart, are not made for humanity, and can only
be established by defiling and inundating the earth with human blood. These
laws, once established have always continued to desolate the earth, with the
oppression of agriculture and by impeding the multiplication of the human race.
Consequently, what is done, is what has always been done echoes from the
mouths of everyone not supported by reason and consequently they are unable to
evaluate themselves... Whereas in some countries... legislators have been seduced
by a spirit, beautiful and brilliant in appearance, of order and symmetry, and had
the pretext of ruling and molding society in a spontaneous fashion, and so arrests
and alters the course of nature itself; who could imagine a thing as pernicious and
contrary to the true happiness of a people. 221

It would be difficult to find anywhere in Italy a clearer statement of the

Physiocratic principle that the laws of nature must be the absolute standard for the proper

organization of society. Paoletti clarifies his image of the well-ordered society by a direct

appeal to the model provided by imperial China. The sole instance of a society that may

Paoletti, Mezzi 360.

220

Paoletti, Mezzi 363.

221
beneficially be emulated is that of China, “that blessed empire that values and nurtures

the greatest number and the happiest population in the universe ... recognized by its

prodigious population and the admirable prosperity of its agriculture, by the simplicity of

its custom, the form of its civil government and from its laws not invented from the pride,

cupidity or from the rapacity of its men, but determined by nature and reason.” 222

Paoletti anticipates the objection that would naturally be raised by some

opponents, that he is calling for the imitation of a nation that "worships a false religion."

He dispenses with this objection with the assertion that wherever "the truth is present, it is

always a part of the Holy Spirit." 223 Paoletti's image of China is no less adulatory than

Cacherano's praise of the Roman Republics and is strikingly similar in its enthusiasm.

Quoting Poivre's Voyage d'un philosophe, Paoletti continues,

The Chinese nation has always been governed, like a family, of which the
emperor is the father. His children are his subjects, without any other divisions of
inequality than those that are established by merit and talent... The Chinese had
conserved in their annals from the most ancient times that they consider
themselves all equally children of the emperor, they have never been able to
imagine inequality of birth among them.
From this principle, that the emperor is the father and the subjects are the
children, arises all the duties of society, all of the morals, all of human virtue, the
convergence of all the wills for the common good of the family, and
consequently the love of labor and above all for agriculture.224

It is clear that the Physiocratic vision of society is not one that can be reduced, as

Schumpeter reduces it, to the simple calculation of economic activity as the essential

motive force of human activity. The complete unity of economic, political, social, moral,

and spiritual is present in the image of the family with a father who wields absolute

222
Paoletti, Mezzi 364.
223
Paoletti, Mezzi 365.
224
Paoletti, Mezzi 367-68.
power over its members, and in doing so guarantees a kind of distributive justice over his

children whom he loves equally. The source of the fathers' power is explicitly its

conformity with the laws of nature. It is an image, not entirely dissimilar to that of

Cacherano, of equality within a fixed hierarchy. It becomes clear how this vision can be

simultaneously evaluated as Rousseau's "legal despotism" or Toquville's "doctrinaire

advocates of absolute equality."

Thus far we have only seen Paoletti's more general vision of society. He has

provided the philosophical basis of a society imagined in very broad strokes, but we have

not yet seen the details of exactly how this vision is translated into the immediate

conditions of Tuscan agriculture. We can do this by returning to his earlier work,

L'Agricoltura, at the points at which he writes about the peasants themselves. There is

no better way to get at the precise meaning of the Physiocratic ideal of equality than by

looking at Paoletti's recommendations on how best to improve the lives of the miserable

peasants and to look at the problem of luxury form the Physiocratic point of view.

Paoletti, like most reformers of his day, had a deep sympathy for the plight of the

peasants and placed a premium on the improvement of their living conditions. Early in

the work cited we find an impassioned plea to alleviate the desperate poverty of the

Tuscan peasant, but before one can do this it is necessary to know the causes of this

misery. Paoletti echoes Genovesi's sentiments about peasant misery, and in places he

uses almost the identical words, but unlike Genovesi, Paoletti does not appeal primarily to

the moral sentiments of the landowners to overcome this travesty. His appeal is largely

economic. "Your peasants are your arms,” he writes,

it is necessary therefore to maintain their robust health, if you want to employ

them in the necessary work to make your lands bare fruit. Your peasants are the
 ones that provide all your necessities and pleasures, and they expand your wealth;
therefore treat them well and with kindness, and procure the good treatment and
respect from all your dependents , so they will oblige and reciprocate to you
greater industry, diligence and trust in the administration of your lands.225

This is Paoletti's appeal to the landowners as to why it is in their direct interests

to alleviate the peasant's misery, but the actual task of improving the lot of the peasants is

far more complicated that just good treatment by the landowners. "It is certainly

impossible, he writes, to apply efficiently the remedy to sickness without first discovering

its source."226 He divides the source of this particular sickness, that is, peasant misery,

into four kinds of impositions (imposizioni).: public impositions, impositions of the

padroni, impositions extorted by beggars, and finally what he calls domestic or voluntary

impositions. Impositions are those payments, duties, demands or extractions of any kind

that in some way impinge on the most efficient employment of peasant labor in

agriculture considered in the broad sense. In the last imposition, domestic or voluntary,

Paoletti includes gambling, libertinage and the peasants' use of luxury. A cultured

nation, he writes, quoting Bertrand's Saggio sulla Legislazione necessaria per

incoraggire l'agricoltura, "needs to maintain with every means possible, the moderation,

frugality, the simplicity of custom, and banish all that can foment luxury. "227 Paoletti's

vision of peasant life is austere and strict. The vices that are present among the peasants

can be massively destructive to a nation. "Above all it can influence the size of the

population of a state. A nation is most populated in proportion to the simplicity and

virtue of its kingdom."228 And how does a nation regulate virtuous customs among its

citizens? Paoletti cites the historical examples of "well regulated governments where

225
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 19-20.
226
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 24.
227
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 43.
228
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 51.
there were certain magistrates appointed to these ends... to punish bad customs and forbid

those that could corrupt.... This was the office of the Censors of Rome, the Efors of

Sparta and the Aeropagits of Athens."229 Paoletti's substitutes for these bodies of judges

of public morality are to be found among both parish priests and local magistrates who

can watch or supervise (invigliare) the customs of the people. These two bodies together

can reprimand libertinage, make note of abuses. The most valuable means of rectifying

libertinage, continues Paoletti, is to reform the use of luxury, which is "without any doubt

diametrically opposed to good custom. It is the imposition above all the others that is the

most damaging to the rustic families."230

Paoletti is explicit about what constitutes luxury for the peasants, making a list of

the various abuses which includes primarily ornamental clothing and jewelry

inappropriate to the station in life. "I want,” he writes,

to return the peasants to their ancient simplicity. Ordinary wool and linen must
be the material of their clothing, and only coral their jewelry. There is nothing
new about this proposition. Here is a law of 1637 that regulates almost equally."
To the peasants that inhabit the countryside of Florence and work the land of
their own or of the possession of others, in any manner whatever it is prohibited
to wear pearls or other jewelry real or fake, to be draped in silk except for an
apron, or a band surrounding the hair. And for the neck they are permitted a
necklace of silver buttons, of coral or other material not to surpass a value of four
scudi, and two rings both of which do not surpass a value of three scudi....231

Paoletti's appeal to simple clothing and his strict prohibitions against luxury are,

of course, part of a much larger debate on the significance of luxury, a debate that was

present throughout the eighteenth century.232 Paoletti's discourse on peasant luxury

229
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 49.
230
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 51.
231
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 53.
232
The debate on luxury and its effect on the morality of society and on the economy was a
fundemental debate involving many of the most important minds of the Enlightenment. Issac de
demonstrates how the Physiocrats construct a moralistic argument based on an economic

premise; luxury is damaging to the rustic family economy. Another aspect of his political

imagination that demonstrates a similar construct is the problem of free trade, so central

to the Physiocratic program. Free trade for Paoletti should not be extended to the

peasantry. It is not the appeal of egalitarian austerity that could be found in the Sparta of

Licurgus and so venerated by Mably, but rather an austerity that is demonstrative of a

rigid image of the social order defined by ones relationship to production. Paoletti is not

against luxurious clothing as such, but rather luxury inappropriate to ones station or as he

defined it as a "mode of living superior to that proper to ones rank."233

A view of Paoletti's and the Physiocrats attitude towards the peasantry is found in

the final chapter of his L’Agricoltura, which focuses on the necessity, and means of

maintaining the duties of the peasants. There is probably no animal on the earth that is

more "dissolute" than man when he is not "ruled and guided by reason," Paoletti writes.

He is often very licentious when he is dominated by ignorance and lacks education;

reason is his only caprice. The peasants, he writes,

all want to work in their own way. They work, if and how and when they please.
they do not want to exert themselves for the growth of industry or to acquire
new knowledge, ill-treating the cattle and not caring for them, robbing the seeds
from the earth, hiding and stealing with a thousands tricks the goods of the
padrone, and so many other evils that it would take too long to enumerate. Great
patience and prudence are needed to contain and rule them; in a manner both
generous and ferocious with which one dominates a horse, in the first place it is
expedient to use allurement and sweetness, and at times they need to hear a voice
crude and menacing, and sometimes it is necessary to brandish the whip and use

Pinto in his Essai sur le luxe of 1762 wrote, “Among all the researches made by the spirits of this
enlightened century, perhaps nothing is so important, for the public good and of interest of
humanity, than that concerning luxury.” See La polemica sul lusso nel settecento francese, cura
Carlo Borghero, (Torino: Einaudi, 1974) IX.
233
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 60.
 the severity of punishment, at times one is compelled not to do otherwise.234

Paoletti's voice demonstrates just how deeply the paternalistic social and political

structure is entwined with Physiocratic economics. The specific purpose of the final

chapter in L'Agricoltura was not to expose the pathetic character of the Tuscan peasantry;

it was motivated rather by a more specific economic need. It was essentially used as a

justification for a reform of the mezzadri contract which typically required the landlord to

give the peasant six months notice before they could be evicted. Paoletti, as the voice of

the landowners, believed this to be too long a time frame placing the landlords at a great

disadvantage. The evicted peasants could and often would, according to Paoletti, do

tremendous damage of the property of the landlords. They can, in his words, "do

tremendous damage to the plants and in a brief time ruin the labors, the sweat, the

investments, and industry of many, many years."235 Paoletti recommends that the

mezzadri be allowed only two months after the termination of the contract. But, Paoletti

assures the reader that imposing harsher conditions of the peasant is for the good of the

common happiness. He writes: "The sole end for which I have taken the time to write

this material has been love and the wish for the public good, and he common happiness.

Truth and justice alone have ruled my thoughts."236

The condescending attitude expressed towards the peasantry was the prevalent

and common view among the elite at the time, including, one might add, some of the

most humanitarian of reformers. It demonstrates not only the character of the social order

of the day, but equally the extent to which the peasantry was merely an object in

theoretical constructs subject to the dictates of the rational order in the minds of the

234
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 96-97.
235
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 99.
236
Paoletti, L'Agricoltura 101-02.
reformers, however that order may be imagined. But in the case of Physiocracy, as

expressed by Paoletti, the peasantry has become little more than a factor of production

nearly incapable of willful and spontaneous moral action. The peasant’s actions, just like

the proper care of cattle, must be regulated by the proper technique. It is the proper use

of reason or the rule of reason that will constrict the peasant to virtuous behavior that

would be hallmarked by productive and diligent work.

Before moving on to the critique of Physiocracy and its legacy, it is worth calling

attention to the very specific way in which Paoletti's concept of landed property differs

from Cacherano's and Genovesi's. Both of these writers approach the problem of landed

property from a deeply entrenched humanist cosmology. Both approach the problem by

placing individual man within his community at the center of their analytical structure.

Man, for Cacherano and Genovesi, has historically demonstrated that his virtue flourishes

spontaneously when the social order itself is subordinated to man’s ethical ends. It is for

this reason and no other that both writers suggest the parcellization of large tracts of land

to be divided among peasants and small farmers. For Paoletti and the Physiocrats,

smallholdings were inefficient and under productive units of property, thus,

smallholdings could not be useful to the spread of virtue. Physiocratic ethics had been

subordinated to productivity, and virtue was then no longer linked to ones immediate

relationship to land, but was rather the explicit result of a systemic order, an order that

may at times require the powerful yet loving hand of authority.

The critique of Physiocracy was aimed at two different points of its theory from

two writers at different ends of Italy. The first, as mentioned, was the Neapolitan,

Ferdinando Galiani, who focused his criticism on the ridged application of natural law

irrespective of historical and cultural specificities. The second criticism emerged form
the pen of the Milanese, Pietro Verri, who, although a great admirer of the economisti,

did not accept that produit net was generated exclusively in the domain of agriculture.

Taken together, Verri and Galiani probably did the greatest damage to the Physiocratic

system than any of the contemporaneous European writers.

Count Pietro Verri (1728-97) was, along with Beccaria, one of the representative

figures of what has come to be known as the Milanese school of Italian economists. He is

perhaps best known, along with his brother, as the motive force behind the short lived

journal Il Caffé, but it is his economic works that interest us here. Schumpeter judges

that Verri "would have to be included in any list of the greatest economists" and marks

his most valuable and original contributions to economic analysis as his formulation of a

constant-outlay demand curve and his conception of economic equilibrium based upon a

calculus of pleasure and pain.237 His two most important economic writings, Elementi del

commercio (1760) and Meditazioni sull'economica politica (1771 , place him above

rather than below A. Smith in analytic power according to Schumpeter.238 Verri's

critique of Physiocracy was aimed at a very specific aspect of their program and its

theoretical foundation. Programmatically, Verri was opposed to the Physiocratic notion of

l'impot unique, or the single land tax. The idea that tax should fall exclusively upon

ground rent was, as mentioned, justified on the grounds that land alone was the source of

produit net. All other economic activity was considered sterile insofar as it created no

new wealth. For Verri, industrial or manufacturing activity was of equal importance to

agricultural activity. Verri's principle consideration was the relationship between annual

reproduction and annual consumption. In his Meditazioni he writes:

237
Schumpeter 178.
238
Schumpeter 178.
 Every state reproduces by means of vegetation and by means of manufacture and
every state consumes. As long as the total value of reproduction is equivalent to
the value of annual consumption, then that state is preserved in the condition in
which it found itself, all things being equal. A nation deteriorates when annual
consumption exceeds annual reproduction. Best are those states in which annual
reproduction overcomes annual consumption.239

In Meditazioni Verri never makes reference to the Physiocrats by name directly

but his antipathy towards some of their ideas is unmistakable as when he writes,

Some well meaning writers grieve the grave disorders suffered by the people due
to the customs duty, they have moved to extremes to consider it unjust and a bad
disposal of income, if it is not divided on the basis of land, and with the creation
of a ascetic language they have erected a sect of Economisti, from which is taken
that every man who does not adopt the plow is sterile, and all the manufacturers
they call a sterile class. I respect very much the true and useful things that they
have written but I will not associate with their opinion... Reproduction is
attributable to manufacturing equally to the work of the fields.240

Verri preserves the same emphasis on production that Marx claimed was the

essential Physiocratic contribution to economic theory, but Verri expands its significance

and locates surplus in a far wider range of economic activities. Verri shared with the

Physiocrats a philosophical point of view derived from natural law theories but gave it a

utilitarian twist. He had written on the importance of pleasure and pain specifically in

reference to public happiness or the greatest good for the greatest number. Verri's

critique of Physiocracy was less aimed at their philosophical foundation than at a very

specific point of their economic analysis.

It was up to the Neapolitan Galiani to attack Physiocracy at its heart. Bernardo

Tanucci who had been appointed foreign minister five years earlier had named the Abbe

Galiani secretary of the Neapolitan embassy to Paris in 1759. Galiani's presence in Paris

239
Piscitelli, "Economisit Italiani" 250.
240
Piscatelli 250.
precisely coincided with the extraordinary rise in Physiocratic popularity. Galiani was

already a well known economist for the publication of Della moneta in 1749, a critically

important book in which he challenged the common assumption that the value of money

was the result of convention allowing it to represent value of other commodities. Galiani

asserted that money itself had intrinsic, thus relative value as a commodity. It was

essentially an attack on the social contract theory of money. But it was in another work

that he confronted Physiocracy. Galiani was in Paris at the time of the Neapolitan famine

of 1764 and was, like all of his contemporaries, deeply affected by the tragedy. He turned

his attention to the problem of the grain trade and naturally to Physiocracy to which he

was initially drawn. In 1769 he published his second critically important economic work,

Dialogues sur le commerce des bléds. In his Dialogues , Galiani uses a similar

theoretical approach that had been so successful in his Della moneta twenty years earlier.

It was essentially an attack on natural law theories, that is, the "tendency of the human

mind to take relative words in an absolute sense" or the tendency to draw practical

conclusions from abstract principles.241 Physiocratic doctrine was a universal doctrine

that was equally applicable in all circumstances, everywhere, and for all time. In

response to the proposed universal application of the Physiocratic doctrine of laissez-faire

Galiani writes in his Dialogues: "I am neither for or against the export of wheat... I am

for nothing... I am for people not to reason falsely... The export of common sense is the

only one which exasperates me."242 Galiani was opposed to all those tendencies of the

philosophes to base reasoning on abstract principles and metaphysical preconception

alone. "Let us establish principles,” he writes,

241
Giorgio Tagliacozzo "Economic Vichianism," in Giambattista Vico an International
Symposium, ed. G. Tagliacozzo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1969) 359.
242
Tagliacozzo 359.
 that are derived from the nature of things themselves. What is man? What is the
relationship between man and his food? Let us apply these principles to time,
place, and circumstances. Which is the kingdom with which we are concerned?
What is the situation? What are the mores, the opinions, the opportunities that are
open, and the risks to be avoided? Knowing all this we may arrive at a
decision.243

It was Galiani's opposition to the general tendencies towards all encompassing

universal principles that generated such lavish praise from Schumpeter who asserted that

Galiani was the one eighteenth-century economist who always insisted on the variability

of man and on the relativity, to time and place, of all policies; the one who was

completely free of the paralyzing belief--that then crept over the intellectual life of

Europe--in practical principles that claim universal validity; who saw that a policy that

was rational in France at a given time might be quite irrational, at the same time, in

Naples.244

Although Schumpeter overstates Galiani's uniqueness in this particular mode of

critique--we have already seen that Genovesi was fully aware of the relativism of

economic policies--Schumpeter does not exaggerate the importance of what appears to be

a counter current to enlightenment thought. Giorgio Tagliacozzo directly attributes

Galiani's method to the influence of Vico, arguing that there is a striking parallel between

Vico's earlier attack on Cartesianism and his criticism of natural law theories and

Galiani's polemic against the Physiocrats and consequently "just as Vico was one of the

first and most authoritative critics of Cartesianism, so Galiani was the first and--until

243
Tagliacozzo 359.
244
Schumpeter 292.
John Maynard Keynes-- the most forceful critic of laissez faire."245 Not only can one find

parallels but also the very structure and organization of Galiani's two most important

works--Moneta and Commerce-- are modeled after Vico's New Science.

The influence of Vico on the Neapolitan economists is important largely because

it acted as a kind of limiting factor to the acceptance of Physiocratic doctrine. Vico's

epistemology was incompatible with natural law theory and those who were influenced

by Vico could not order their observation along the axis of laid down by the natural law

theories of Physiocracy. We have seen how Galiani's hostility to Physiocracy can be

linked to Vico, and in his particular case direct link can be made by pointing out that in

his youth Galiani was a frequent visitor to Vico's home in the company of his uncle

Celestino. While perhaps only Galiani was to make a sophisticated use of Vichian

concepts in the formulation of his own economic doctrine, others were more generally

influenced by Vico's historical relativism and in the belief in the variability of man.

Galiani was to express Vichian concepts against natural law in this way in his Dialogues:

"Do you know what the mistake of your writers [the Physiocrats] consists of --a mistake

of which they have never become aware, but which is the cause of all others? It consists

in the belief that men always consume the same quantity of food."246. In other words, for

Galiani, different groups of men live different lives with different traditions, different

economic needs, and behave differently towards different ends. The Physiocrats assume

the universalization of ends, and needs and thus of means.

Of the most important Neapolitan reformers it was perhaps Gaetano Filangieri

who was most positively influenced by the discourse of Physiocracy. But, for Filangieri,

unlike Paoletti, direct contacts with the French Physiocrats have never been

245
Tagliacozzo 361.
246
Tagliacozzo 360.
reconstructed.247 We can, however, recognize their unmistakable influence in his writings.

Born in 1753 he is considered part of the second-generation philosophe to emerge

in Naples, a generation that was to extend and deepen, often in very radical directions, the

work of their teachers and predecessors. Filangieri is best known for his multi-volume

Science of Legislation , which, though never completed, was an extraordinary attempt to

reconsider the whole of legislation in all of its facets and to ground it within a scientific

order.248 In his own words: "The human mind seems therefore to be incompatible with

arbitrary interpretations of exactness and perfection. All science must have their orderly

rules, and the more these rules are improved the more progress is made by the science. Is

the science of legislation to be the single exception to this universal principle?"249

Filangieri states his purpose clearly as a project that will establish the universal

principles for the progress of this new science of legislation. A glance at his proposed

project shows that he is not concerned with legislation in the narrow sense of the term.

He divides his work into seven books, some of which were multi-volume, with the

following titles: General Rules of the Science of Legislation, Political and Economic

Laws, Criminal Laws, Laws Concerning Education, Morals, and Public Instruction, Laws

Concerning Religion (not written), Laws Concerning Property (not written), and Laws

Concerning Paternal Authority and Family Relations (not written). Filangieri imagines

the whole of social intercourse as subject to the principles of scientific legislation. His

insistence on orderly, rational, non-arbitrary laws is conceived as a frontal attack against

all of the feudal structures that dominated the Kingdom and to which he attributed the

247
Villari, “Note sulla fisiocrazia” 247.
248
Gaetano Filangieri, Science of Legislation in Marcello Maestro, "Gaetano Filangieri and His
Science of Legislation" Transactions of the American Philosophical Scoiety New Series vol. 66
Part 6. (1976): 14.
249
Filangieri 8.
misery of the peasantry and the cause of the backwards state of the realm's political and

economic system.

Filangieri's basic point of view had been firmly established as a young man when

he witnessed a revolt of poor Sicilian workers, attributing the revolt to the miserable

conditions of the poor pushing him in the direction of radical reform. He was deeply

influenced by his teacher, Isodoro Bianchi, who, in the tradition of Genovesi, linked the

economy to the moral climate of the nation. In one of Filangieri's earliest essays, at the

age of eighteen, he wrote, "A wise legislator should aim at improving moral behavior,

which is the only source of a nations greatness."250 The progress of the moral stature of a

nation was to remain the principle aim of his work throughout his life.

In the first book of his Science he makes clear his belief that the present age

suffers from the imposition of an amalgam of ancient laws no longer adequate to the

needs of the contemporary world. "A prize was proposed,” he writes,

for the discovery of more deadly ways of killing. There was no thought of
rewarding the farmer who could plow two furrows in the time it took others to
plow one… The fact that we have become so proficient in this murderous
practice should convince us that there is something definitely wrong in the
system of all our governments. ... Since the time of Montesquieu there has not
been a single writer who has not called men's attention to the necessity of reform
in legislation... We are surrounded by wrongful laws: every writers tries to point
them out; and from one end of Europe to another a unanimous voice tells us that
the laws of ancient Rome are no longer useful to Europe.... There is another way,
independent of force of arms, to arrive at greatness; that good laws are the sole
support of national happiness; that good laws are inseparable from their
uniformity and that this uniformity cannot be made over the space of twenty two
centuries by different legislators for different nations, laws which partake of
Roman greatness as well as Longobardic barbarity.251

250
Filangieri 8.
251
Falangieri 12.
 We can already see the similarities between Filangieri and the Physiocratic belief

in universality derived from a scientific rationality. Indeed, in certain passages Filangieri

seems indistinguishable from the French economisti. Like the Physiocrats, Filangieri

privileges the role of agriculture in the economy, but in a slightly modified version,

leaving perhaps a little room for the possibility that other branches of the economy are not

entirely sterile. He writes:

Agriculture gives us the products of the earth; industry increases their value,
enlarges their use, and augments their consumption; commerce enables us to
exchange and transport the products, further increasing their value. In other
words agriculture gives us the substances, industry gives us the form and
commerce gives us the motion.... Therefore, the only absolute and independent
source of wealth is agriculture.252

But Filangieri's use of natural law theory is more complex or subtler than the

Physiocrats, for whom history and cultural specificities have relevance only insofar as

they conform to the timeless and universal laws of reason. Filangieri also recognizes a

universality in which "each epoch nature imprints the same seal on all men, and the same

concern inspires in them similar ideas." 253 This is not, however, the dogmatic vision of

the Physiocrats, but one that is perhaps more related to the vision of Genovesi who

understood universal principles within historical development. Legislation must

rationally conform to the spirit and character of nations but that spirit itself can change

from one epoch to the next. What was true in ancient times may no longer be applicable

to contemporary realities. He writes:

All historians and political writers of ancient times attributed the decline of
nations to the introduction of wealth, and they considered the laws of Lycurgus
which prevented riches from entering the walls of Sparta as masterpieces of

252
Filangieri 24.
253
Filangieri 12.
 political wisdom and models of a perfect wisdom.... Their grand object [of Greek
and Roman] policy by remaining poor was the preservation of frugality, of
courage, strength, endurance and severity of custom.... Our statesmen do their
utmost to encourage the acquisition of wealth, through progress in agriculture,
industry, and commerce. "Get rich if you want to be happy"....What is the cause
of the difference between the ancient and modern code of politics? Are we to
suppose an error in one of the two schools of thought, or are we not to admire the
skill to which they have both adapted their maxims to the genius and prevailing
spirit of their times? Does not the history of antiquity show us the rich nations
submitting to the law of the poorer ones, and do not the modern annals of Europe
show the opposite?.... The nature of things has changed. It is no longer the strong
who gives laws to the weak, but the rich who rule over the poor.
....Wealth has become, therefore, the first instrument of war, and gold and silver
the deciding factors in conquest. On the basis of these indisputable facts we
should take a fresh look at the world.... In conclusion, if the prevailing spirit and
genius of our century requires the acquisition of wealth; if superiority is not due
today to strength, courage and military virtues, but to wealth; if the richest
nations are the happiest and the most feared and respected; then the first task of a
legislator will not be the framing of intrepid minds, in robust and active bodies,
but the acquisition of wealth through the steady progress in agriculture, industry
and commerce. This is the way in which the genius and spirit of our century
must influence our legislators.254

While Filangieri believes that legislation must be subordinated to a prevailing spirit he

has not subordinated the whole of history to single immutable principles in the manner of

Mengotti or the Physiocrats by simply negating to the historical achievements of the

ancients. Filangieri has identified what he believes is a new spirit and subordinated

modern legislative science to the acquisition of wealth. It is because, in his words, the

nature of things has changed. It is a version of natural law operating within a framework

of historical relativism. His vision differs sharply from the Physiocrats in several

important areas. Like the Physiocrats Filangieri's vision is a total vision of social

organization subordinated to a singular principle. However, Filangieri has not abstracted

man to such a degree that he has become little more than a factor in the production of net

product. Indeed, the production of wealth itself is subordinated to the moral development

254
Filangieri 16. (my emphasis).
of man. And moral development is not measured by the conformity of the system as a

whole to the rational productivity of agriculture but rather emerges from the immediate

activity of the individual working in a just society whose goal is the happiness of man.

Unlike the Physiocrats who divide society according to their relationships to the

production of produit net, Filangieri divides social classes according to the distribution

of wealth. "If we observe,” he writes, “the present state of society in Europe we see that

it is composed to two classes , one of which lacks the bare necessities of life and the

other abounds in superfluities. "255 This division between rich and poor places Filangieri

within the framework of redistributive justice. He shares with most of the non-

Physiocratic reformers the belief that land must be more equally divided. This proposed

division should not be an absolute division of wealth, such an idea is little more than a

"fanciful chimera." But wealth should be more justly divided so as to "create a general

comfort that is necessary for human happiness." It is not the equality of wealth, which

should be the goal of legislative laws, but an "equality of happiness in every family, every

class, and every order of society."256 Very specifically, he writes that “A law could rule

that in land sales preferences should be given, at equal prices, to purchasers without

landed property, and in the case of two purchasers with landed property , the land should

be sold to the one with less property. Such a law would be most useful for the purpose of

facilitating the distribution of wealth and enhancing the prosperity of the state.”257

The Physiocrats introduced two significant elements into the concept of land,

which was to essentially redefine its meaning. The first was the complete identification

of economic law with natural law, which effectively rendered the historical element of

255
Falangieri 24.
256
Falangieri 24.
257
Falagieri 25.
land organization entirely superfluous. In other words, ancient cultures no long presented

themselves as a superior form of rural organization. The Golden Age ceases to exist in

the Physiocratic imagination. The modern organization of rural world can no longer find

itself as a return to the past with all that was entailed in terms of its social, political, and

spiritual implications, but can be found wherever agriculture is rationally ordered for the

maximum production of wealth. The second feature of Physiocratic discourse that was to

have far reaching consequences was the centrality of productivity as the standard mean of

measuring the relative success of social organization. With productivity, that is, the

inexhaustible expansion, not redistribution, of wealth, progress can no more be measured

by the nearness to a particular goal, but can only be measured by an endless process of

self-negation always to higher levels of productivity.

By the time of Filangieri's death in 1790, Physiocracy had more or less run its

course as a system. Doctrinaire Physiocrats who campaigned with religious zeal had all

but disappeared, including Quesnay himself who had lost interest in economics before his

death. But discursive residues of Physiocracy remained usually in heterogeneous form.

Filangieri, for example, accepted the centrality of productivity in economic development

and accepted that the production of wealth was the new epoch of the day. But Filangieri

held on to a modified version of the greatness of the ancients by simply arguing that such

greatness could no longer provide a model for the modern world. Land for Filangieri had

retained the qualities of both redistributitive justice as well as the central source of the

expansion of riches. While the very centrality of productivity displaced the historical

meaning--land as the nations patrimony and the source of it spiritual greatness-- it did not

entirely succeed in displacing the immediate ethical meaning. Filangieri was able to

retain the ethical component by identifying happiness with wealth and comfort in general
rather than mans' intimate metabolism with the land. Land was the primary source of

wealth and comforts derived from the proper distribution of wealth was the essential

condition of happiness.

With productivity as a principle concept in the formulation of the image of a

national greatness or the image of a nation's future, those social, political, and economic

forces that could be shown to boost productivity found a new prominence in social

discourse. Productivity itself was increasingly viewed as a question of technique and the

application of scientific principles. Not only could this be demonstrated in the quantity of

agricultural output but the model of scientific organization in agriculture and industry was

gradually imposed on the social world as well. Land can be defined variously, according

to the principle discourse within which it is placed, as the primary cite of ethical activity,

a commodity in circulation, the source of national wealth, or the object of scientific

manipulation.
 Chapter Five

The Newtonian Landscape

The manufacturing industry of every nation develops itself gradually, almost in

the same way that the human body is made, just as childhood passes naturally
to puberty, and from here to adolescence and to virility, unfolding by itself under
its own force, when an absurd government or a corrupt organization does not
oppose its progressive growth. Here is then the true and natural order with
which the arts grow and establish themselves, and here is the necessary
dependence between [the arts] and agriculture. One precedes and the other
follows. 258

Mengotti's comparison between the growth of the human body and the

developmental growth of the national economy establishes a "natural order" of historical

development that culminates in a "virile" industrial economy. A well-established

productive agricultural economy is the basis of all subsequent economic growth as well as

the infancy of its development. For Mengotti, agriculture is the precondition of the

natural development not the end in itself. As was mentioned, the Physiocrats also used an

organic model-- the tree with its roots, trunk, branches, and leaves-- as the image of the

developed socio-economic system. The differences between the two is not only ends but

means. The Physiocrats saw industry as subordinate to an overwhelmingly agrarian

economy, while Mengotti saw agriculture as a less developed or embryonic stage in

overall development. Mengotti's metaphor suggests a historical development of an

economy "unfolding under its own force," while the Physiocrats imagined more of a static

system of proper equilibrium between the various departments of the economy whose

sole aim was the increase in agricultural wealth. For the Physiocrats, the purpose of

258
Mengotti, Il Colbertismo 350.
political power was to establish a complete correspondence between the social order and

the natural order as rationally conceived. For Mengotti, political power should function

to remove the numerous obstacles that might inhibit the natural growth that is inherent in

a natural economic order.

With Mengotti's metaphor one can begin to recognize the emergence of the

discourse of development and its contrasting complement, under-development. As we

have seen time and again the predominant analytical framework was not development

versus under-development, but rather decadence or the fall from the former greatness or

Golden Age with a populous and productive countryside. One should not be surprised

that this discourse emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century with the dramatic

expansion of international trade and the increasingly important presence of England in a

global economic order. Around the middle of the century, it would have been difficult to

mark sharp distinctions between developed and undeveloped nations on the basis of per

capita productivity. India, China and even Mexico were more or less equal to the levels

of productivity of Italy, Germany, and France. Only England was in marked contrast to

its civilized neighbors, displaying a pattern of economic productivity that would expand

exponentially in the following century. The importance of the English presence as an

economic and political model for the reformers of the settecento cannot be

underestimated. By the end of the century the analytical gaze shifted away from the

historic past of what was imagined as ones own Golden from a has been to a not yet.

The old debates of the Querrel were not to be decided by the display of superior forms

in literature, philosophy, morality, or art, but by the ever expanding mass of commodities

flowing from English industry. With productivity as a new measure of national greatness,

a concept that was, if not Physiocratic in origin, then certainly expanded by the vigorous
propaganda of Physiocracy, the economisti were re-locating their focal-point which

essentially a question of technique.

To give one important example of precisely how the English model impinged

directly upon the development of economic analysis in Italy, we can return to the

experience of Galiani. In 1767, at the height of Physiocratic influence in France, Galiani

made his first trip to England in the company of his friend Domenico Caracciolo, the

Neapolitan ambassador to Great Britain. Until this point, Galiani, was very favorable to

Physiocracy and had taken up with ever greater interest the problem of the grain trade,

especially since the famine of 1764. He was interested in using the occasion of his visit,

in his own words, "to instruct myself principally by seeing and learning from the most

commercial and powerful nation."259 England had been highly praised by the Physiocrats

for their rational grain trade policy. But Galiani was not to find confirmation for the

principles of Physiocracy on his visit to England. On the contrary, his trip was to mark his

shift away from the Physiocratic influences. Upon his return he wrote to Tanucci:

Enormous thanks for giving me permission to see this country: a country

deserving to be seen, I have found it very different from the idea given to me by
the descriptions of others [the Physiocrats]. ... In large part I found it very similar
to Italy and infinitely distant from France.... Their actual power seems to me
similar to that of the Jesuits, They are children of industry, of infinite labors, of
great parsimony, of enthusiastic love of public things, of hallowed institutions...
In no country have I seen customs with greater energy and vigor. Here is also the
proof that the apparatus (macchina) is new. Time slows all the springs and
makes all the nails rattle: but it is not so here.260

Galiani's comments on England illustrate the importance of England both as a

259
Galiani in a letter to Tanucci requesting permission to travel to England cited in Dialogues sur
leCommerce des Bleds, ed. Philip Koch (Frankfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1961) 17.
260
Galiani to Tanucci, December 8, 1767 in Koch 18-19.
potential model for the Italian states as well as a mechanical model with springs and nails.

By the time Galiani wrote his Dialogue his thinking had shifted so far away from

Physiocracy that he was giving industry a privileged role in the economy.

The image of England, for a great many, had replaced all other images that were

derived from an ancient splendor. The question was no longer how a nation can recover

the wisdom of the ancients, but rather how a nation can adapt itself to the same apparatus

that drives England. Nor should we underestimate the importance of the mechanical

metaphor in which England is likened to a new apparatus with springs and nails still full

of vigor. In short, Galiani, like so many of his age, was beginning to envision the

economy as a natural process subject to mechanical forces following the same laws that

universally govern natural phenomena.

The very presence of England probably did more than any other single factor to

undermine the historico-critical method of economic reasoning, a method that had been

the framework guiding the investigations of so many like Genovesi and Cacherano. It

was not simply that history had disappeared but rather that history was coming to be seen

in the light of universal progress passing through stages defined essentially by economic

categories: hunting and gathering, agricultural, commercial, and eventually industrial.

Once this image of the historical stages of development emerged, largely the result of the

Scottish influence-- Smith, Fergeson, Robertson-- writers of the later half of the century

increasingly subordinated history to the technology of controlling productive forces..

Control assumed first of all the understanding of dynamic process which required the

application of the principles that had been so successfully applied to the natural sciences,

the primary tool of which was mathematics.

Even as the latter day reformers remained immersed in the historico-critical

method of analysis of economic systems, the discourse of the new scientific and

mathematically deductive methods pervades their works. One example of this discursive

mixture can be found in the works of Filippo Briganti, the son of Tommaso Briganti of

Gallipoli, who had been an important legal reformer in his own right. Filippo was well

schooled in a humanistic education, which included as a complement, a period of study of

agronomy under Giovani Presta. In general, like most of the Neapolitan reformers of his

generation, the most important influence over the direction of his intellectual

development had been the presence of Genovesi. Being among the second generation

reformers, however, Briganti was also largely influenced by the works of the French and

English philosophes whose ideas were well circulated even in the southern most parts of

the peninsula. In addition to his philosophical interests, Briganti, like so many of his

milieu, served for many years in official capacities, first as the mayor of Gallipoli then as

a local magistrate. He was mayor in 1764 at the time of the great famine; a tragedy that

left an indelible mark on all his work.

The idea of progress was among the dominant ideas that everywhere animated

the thinkers of the eighteenth century, perhaps culminating in the work of Condorcet.

The idea was already present at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the work of

Francis Bacon and later in Pascal and Fontanelle, who had developed the idea that

progress was a unique characteristic of human nature. Voltaire, in his historical, work

suggested that the evolution of the arts and sciences was the key to understanding moral

development. By the end of the century,this general idea of progress had developed into a

philosophy of history under the influence of Turgot and Condorcet and, as mentioned, the

Scottish writers.261 The idea that human society had passed through stages in its own

261
Adam Smith writes in this regard: "There are four distinct states which mankind passes
through. 1st, the age of Hunters; 2nd, the age of Shepherds; 3rd, the age of Agriculture; 4th, the
development towards perfection can be found in Filangieri's work as well as other

Neapolitan thinkers like Vincenzo Cuoco and Mario Pagano, who were still working

under the general influence of Vico. But of all the attempts to conceive of the history of

civil society as a universal history of human perfectibility, perhaps only Briganti’s

completed the task. He published two multi-volume works conceived as an integrated

history of man from ancient times to the present. The first was Esame analitico del

sistema legale, first published in Naples in 1777, and the second part published in 1780

as Esame economico del sistema civile.

Assessments of Briganti's work have varied considerably since its first

appearance but more recent views are expressed well by Franco Venturi who writes that

Briganti's "defense of progress, of civility, lacked energy and ended by falling into a

traditional humanistic vision, framed in a catholic and perhaps scholastic vision."262 But

our interest here is less with how well Briganti's vision stands the test of time than it is to

look at the way in which scientific and mathematical forms of analysis influence even a

deeply humanistic vision of history.

Nowhere in Briganti's writings do we find the explicit use of mathematical

formulas or actual quantitative analysis, but, throughout, his works suggest that the

modern discovery of scientific reasoning is the essential stepping stone toward mans'

perfectibility. The Esame analitico is divided into three parts of which man is first

analyzed as being constituted by the laws of nature which are universal and constant.

Secondly, man is analyzed in isolation and finally man is analyzed in his place in society.

For Briganti, man has within himself an order that can be discovered and can be

age of Commerce. Lectures on Jurisprudence." (1762) in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed.
Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1995) 379.
262
Franco Venturi, “Nota introduttiva a Giuseppe Palmieri” in Illuministi italiani, tomo V,
Riformatori napolitani, (Milano-Napoli: 1962) 1093.
expressed as "the science of numbers and of quantity," 263 Every being is a particular

system dependent on the principles of the system and each system belongs to a more

general system "like the wheels of a great machine when fitted and connected, forms and

insures the plan of a universal system, everything is combined, everything is

symmetrical and all is coherent." 264 "The progressive graduation of the physical order,”

Briganti writes, “manifests itself with equal regularity in the moral order." 265

As a philosopher of history and theoretician of the idea of progress, Briganti was

interested in the historical prosperity of a people. He imagined his task as a historian to

be that of compiling all of the materials that will serve to reconstruct the stages through

which humanity has passed, all governed by the laws of perfectibility. Perfectibility, for

Briganti, progressively manifests itself to the extent that the multiple components of the

machine are combined in a manner that reflects universal symmetry and coherence. His

story of humanity becoming civilized is reconstructed to show that increasing civility

follows those people who combine at the same time an "industrious life,” with a

"subsistence copious and vigorous." His Esame analitico follows the processes of legal

systems from a state of nature to the state of society "in which a new order of things

develop and the legislative authority obliges man to be a citizen and the citizen a subject."
266
In his Esame economico, Briganti follows a similar system of analysis in which

"private industry multiplies public goods and renders prosperous the states and robust the

nations."267 Moral perfectibility was the subject of the first part of his work and

prosperity the theme of the second. In Briganti's vision, each necessarily unfolds in

263
Briganti cited by Oscar Nuccio in appendix to Scrittori classici italiani de economia politica.
parte moderna, tomo XXVIII (Roma: Bizzarri) XII.
264
Briganti in Nuccio XIII.
265
Briganti in Nuccio.
266
Briganti in Nuccio XXIII.
267
Briganti in Nuccio.
tandem with the other.

Briganti's sweeping history of humanity is certainly an organic concept in that it

is a total vision of human self-development in nature, but what is striking about Briganti

is the complete subsumption of human history under the two essential categories of law

and economics. The metaphysical and religious components, while not entirely lacking

in Briganti's work, play a superfluous role insofar as they could be entirely omitted

without fundamentally changing his schema. In a lengthy section of volume one of

Esame economico titled Agricoltura, Briganti links agriculture to moral development,

but in a way that is fundamentally different from the way Genovesi makes the connection.

"Nature abhors the degradation of man,” he writes,

“and man does not like the oppression of his fellow man. Where humanity rules, in that

place agriculture prospers, where agriculture prospers, in that place flourishes social

virtue. China is the great model of this economic perfectibility." 268

This general link between agriculture and virtue is not one that is based on the

belief that agricultural activity itself fosters and develops virtue, as we saw in other

writers who emphasized the fresh air, the simplicity of country life, and the care of one's

patrimony. Briganti's vision is immersed in the larger movement towards human

perfectibility insofar as the symmetry and equilibrium between nature, the individual and

society is found. After a long discussion of the agricultural practices of from ancient

times to modern, Briganti writes: "It seems that some people work the land from instinct

and the Egyptians, Chinese, and English cultivate according to a system."269 The

movement from instinct to system is the movement towards perfectibility, from

individual industry to social industry and prosperity. His focus on system is a focus on

268
Briganti, Esame economico, vol. I, 175.
269
Briganti, Esame economico 212.
the rational organization of agriculture or more specifically the homogenization of

agricultural practices that brings together divergent systems into a harmonious

equilibrium of a vast and rational order.

In his section on commerce, Briganti returns to the theme of Esame analitico

when he discusses the contract. "The contract,” he writes, “has as its basis equilibrium

and proportion; it is by nature incompatible with force."270 For Briganti, the equilibrium

and proportion of the contract is the rational homogenization of property relations that has

its homologous counterpart in agricultural systems. The legislation of stable property

relations and the rational exploitation of productive forces together constitute the most

visible expression of perfectibility in Briganti's schema. That Briganti had subordinated

the teleology of historical progress to economic development becomes even clearer in his

discussions of the problems of population.

Population, as we have already noted, was seen as a persistent problem

throughout the eighteenth century and into the early years of the nineteenth, culminating

in the Malthusian projection of inescapable crisis. Like Genovesi, Briganti viewed the

problems of population as a problem of the correct relationship between economic

activity and number of people in a given territory. Briganti had anticipated the

Malthusian crisis with characteristic optimism. With his theory of progress and

perfectibility as his guide, Briganti believed that man had the capacity to overcome all of

the obstacles that caused the disproportion between the means of subsistence and

population. It was his assertion that man, when guided by reason, could modify nature,

adapting it within certain limits to the needs of human existence. The problem in his

view was not the fixed relationship between the geometric growth of population and the

270
Briganti, Esame economico 275
arithmetic growth of food production, as with Malthus, but rather a disequilibrium in the

per capita levels of production. This disequilibrium could be eliminated by improving the

arts and perfecting the instruments of production.271 Schumpeter considered this idea an

important contribution to post-Malthusian analysis, but interestingly attributed it to A.H.

Everet, an American diplomat and newspaper editor who published New Ideas on

Population in 1823, more than forty years after Briganti first suggested this solution.272

We can begin to see how a developmental discourse, as in Briganti-- mastery

over production, improvement of technique, and the rational conformity of social

organization to the domination of nature-- becomes the measure of perfectibility and

progress. It is then the critical elevation of technique over all other discursive positions.

For example, Briganti asserts that moral progress and technical progress are two sides of

the same coin. The ethical life is conditioned by the degree of technical mastery and vice

versa.

It is a long way from Briganti to what Herbert Marcuse would later call the

technocratic rationality that dominates the twentieth century cosmology, but we can see

the early stages of this mode of reasoning even among writers who could be judged,

traditional humanists, with Catholic and even Scholastic intellectual visions. Before

technocratic rationality begins to assert itself as the dominant cosmology, scientific

reasoning must displace or at least subordinate all other forms of reasoning that attempt to

explain social and economic activity. But scientific reasoning itself must be of a

particular kind.

A digression on the development of scientific theory is necessary here in order to

make clear the way in which Italian economic theory largely developed along the axis

271
Nuccio XXXVI.
272
Schumpeter 580.
laid out by the mode of reasoning and discursive structures that had come to characterize

the development of the natural sciences. We have already seen how economic man has

been conceived within sharply divergent cosmologies ranging from Montesquieu to

Mengotti in which man is first imagined by his heterogeneous qualities conditioned by his

natural and social environment or conversely homogeneous man engaged in identical

activities, motivated by eternal drives that are essentially invariable across time, space,

and culture. In the first category we might place Genovesi, Cacherano, and Briganti and

in the second perhaps Galiani and certainly Mengotti. However, these categorizations are

somewhat general in that the line of demarcation is not always entirely clear. If we make

the analogy with the development of the natural sciences, however, we begin to see

precisely how these conceptions differ and understand the importance of their

development.

In both the ancient and medieval conceptions of science one can find distinctly

different orders of reality that govern what we might call a radical heterogeneity of

matter, all subsumed within a cosmology that Gusdorf refers to as an astrobiological

vision of the universe. In the world of medieval science the cosmos was divided between

the celestial sphere, governed by divine perfection, and the earthly sphere, imperfect and

corruptible. "In the medieval system,” writes Ernst Cassirer, “the wall that divided the

two fields of truth were insurmountable. There was an immanent truth and a

transcendental, a human truth and a divine, a rational truth and a revealed truth."273 The

roots of medieval science are found in both the Platonic and Aristotelian systems of

thought. The Aristotelian system at first glance may appear to possess all of the

characteristics of modern science. The fundamental principle of all physical objects for

273
Ernst Cassirer, Dall umanesimo all' illuminismo, traduzione di Federico Federici (Firenze:
Paperbacks Classici, 1995) 179.
Aristotle is that of motion, just as motion was to constitute the center of the Galilean

system. However, there is a critical difference between the two. For Aristotle the essence

of a thing, its substantial form, is found in the motion that corresponds to its particular

nature, which simultaneously gives the substance its ontological character.274 Fire, water,

air, and earth have a unique motion due to particular internal tendencies: fire tends to

move towards the heavens, earth always towards the center of the universe and so on.

Other than the sphere of these four basic elements, each with a unique motion, there

exists another sphere, a celestial sphere composed of substances entirely different and not

subject to the same laws as the four elements. All of the terrestrial elements move in a

linear motion and are after a time subject to arrest, while the celestial substance is eternal,

moving always in perfect circular forms. The one is mutable and subject to decay, the

other immutable and eternal. In the medieval cosmology the celestial sphere is the

divine realm that is ultimately unknowable to man. God and the divine are only knowable

through revelation.

Plato provides a bridge of sorts between the terrestrial corporal elements and the

divine forms that exist beyond the sublunar substances. For Plato, mathematics and

geometry are expression of pure forms and as such are accessible to man. But unlike

modern science, the mathematical forms are available to man only through intellectual

contemplation, not through an investigation of terrestrial substances themselves. For

Plato, all things participate in the divine forms but are not themselves those forms fully

realized. Man, too, can participate in the divine truths through his contemplation and

mathematical reasoning . In the medieval period, this Platonic conception was present

among many of the religious mystics who believed that it was possible to experience

Cassirer 183.
274
divine truth directly through various forms of meditation. This Platonic notion was

critical for the development of modern science in that it posited an essential truth behind

the appearance of things that expressed itself mathematically.

In both the Platonic and Aristotelian cosmologies, a radical discontinuity and

heterogeneity of substance and different orders of truth are bound within a interlocking

totality of mutually interactive spheres of reality. It is the astrobiological conception of

the cosmos that united these different spheres of reality into a totality. These differing

realms were mutually reactive within a cosmological hierarchy. The persistent belief in

astrology, even among the most advanced scientific thought of the Renaissance, is a

consequence of this concept. In the medieval and Renaissance world view the divine

celestial sphere had a direct influence over the lower order of reality. In fact, the word

influenza ( under the influence of the stars) is the result of this deeply held belief. The

break from this vision was a long and torturous process that is marked by the distinct

contributions of several Renaissance intellects culminating in the work of Galileo.

For the modern view of science to develop three changes had to take place. The

first was the idea of the unification of nature, that is, the unification of divergent spheres

of reality that had hitherto been separated by a vast intellectual abyss. The second was the

identification of geometry and mathematics with nature itself, and the third was the

homogenization of substances that had previously been conceived as heterogeneous.

The early attempts to conceive of nature as a continuum without radical

discontinuity between spheres of reality-- first suggested by Nicholas of Cusa, and

supported by Leonardo da Vinci among others-- ended in the flames of Campo di Fiori

when, in 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned as a heretic. While Cusa, da Vinci, Bruno

and others suggested the existence of universal laws of nature, it was Galileo who first
discovered such laws in the filed of dynamics. For Galileo, as for Aristotle, motion was

the characteristic essence of substance, and as it was for Plato, the universality of the law

could only be expressed mathematically. But Galileo radically transformed the

Aristotelian and Platonic system first by substituting the concept of material

heterogeneity with essential uniformity, and secondly by asserting that mathematical and

geometric forms were not transcendent but immanent in nature itself. By demonstrating

that the laws of gravity and inertia act independently of the quality of the substance,

Galileo, in a single stroke, destroyed the Aristotelian theory of nature and the ontological

character of matter upon which the medieval cosmology was founded. Galileo's

homogenization of substance was simultaneously the uniting of the different spheres of

reality. His successful use of mathematical reasoning was instrumental to this

development. Galileo argued that mathematics itself was indivisible; that there were not

two mathematics, one transcendent and one immanent, one divine and the other human.

Rather, God revealed himself in the book of nature, which was written in mathematical

symbols and geometric forms. This identification of nature with mathematical and

geometric forms had already been successfully employed by Kepler, who calculated the

elliptical motion of the planets. But Kepler's reasoning was essentially a return to the

Pythagorean view that substance was number, harmony, and proportion. For Kepler, the

movement of the planets and the proportions of their distances were necessary qualities of

their harmonious essence. The founder of experimental science jettisoned the teleology

of means and ends that characterized the work of Kepler and took a major step towards

the separation of science from metaphysics. In other words, Galileo demonstrated that

the discovery of a universal law of nature was not dependent upon nature’s place in a vast

metaphysical system; all that was necessary was observation, experimentation, and
mathematical reasoning. But it would be superficial to suggest that in Galileo we have

the fully developed prototype of the modern scientist. Galileo was still very much part of

the Renaissance in that his ideal was that of universal man. It was in the succeeding

generations of philosophers that the modern scientific spirit would triumph.

Galileo's success by no means precluded the image of a metaphysical system into

which such discoveries are arranged. The dominant tendency in modern science--without

the metaphysical appendage-- emerged not with the new use of mathematics and the

reformulation of the cosmos, but rather at that moment when nature itself was seen as

having an absolute autonomy from metaphysical investigations. This tendency was

symbolically marked in the founding charter of the Royal Society in 1666 when the field

of investigation expressly excluded religion, politics, and metaphysics.

In the development of Newtonian mechanics we have the one of the earliest

positivist interpretations of nature. When Newton claimed that he made no hypotheses but

only stated that which could be demonstrated by nature, he made claim to a universal,

objective method of discovering the laws of the universe based on mathematical

principles. This was in essence the identity of mathematical concepts with objective

reality. 275 Indeed, it was this specific claim by Newton against which Leibniz argued in

his famous letters to Newton's friend, Samuel Clarke.

Newton believed that the categories of space and time were not only purely

275
In The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy Newton writes: "A rational mechanics
is the science of the motion, that is caused by any given forces, and the science of the forces,
which are required to reduce any given motion, a science which is precisely developed and
proven... And therefore I present this work of mine as the mathematical principles of natural
philosophy, in which everything seems to depend upon the following, namely to determine the
forces from the motions, and from those forces then to derive all the other phenomena... That
which does not follow from phenomena, should be called hypothesism and hypothses--whether
metaphysical, physical, whether they involve hidden properties or are mechanical-- have not place
in experimental physics, In this physics propositions are derived from the phenomena and
generalized by induction."
objective categories of reality but the very cornerstones of reality itself. This idea was a

radical error, according to Leibniz, who argued that space and time did not have an

autonomous existence or even their own substantial existence at all; they were, on the

contrary, only the forms and the order of things and as such were relative expressions

between things as ordered by the intellect. Criticizing Locke in this same vein, Leibniz

wrote that the "consideration of the nature of things is nothing other than the knowledge

of the nature of our intellect and of those innate ideas that we do not need to search for

externally." 276 For Newton, space and time were absolute entities that were outside the

grasp of immediate sense experience, while for Leibniz they were purely intellectual

forms that presupposed the constructive power of the intellect. Leibniz could not accept

the radical division between the ideal and the real or the subjective and the objective that

was presupposed by Newton. For Newton, mathematical principles were derived from

nature itself "in which everything seems to depend upon the following, namely to

determine the forces from the motions, and from those forces to derive all the other

phenomena."277

For Leibniz, no scientific proposition has an absolute objectivity that is not

simultaneously an epistemological problem involving the human imagination. Man and

nature are linked precisely through the imagination, whereas for Newton and the

Newtonians the mathematical nature of scientific propositions guarantees the absolute

and objective nature of our knowledge. In other words, nature conforms absolutely to

mathematical forms and mathematical forms are entirely accessible to human reason and

observation.

276
Cited in Cassirer 335.
277
See footnote 18.
 The importance of this methodological bifurcation in the natural sciences was not

to reveal itself as a essential problem until the twentieth century, but its influence was felt

immediately in the development of the human sciences. From the theoretical point of

view, the new method so successfully applied by Newton could not find its application to

man until a new set of assumptions were made concerning the nature of man and human

society, assumptions that were homologous to those made in the natural sciences: the

universalization of man, the homogenization of his essential properties, and the

unification of different spheres of reality.

By the middle of the eighteenth century all of these tendencies were well

developed theoretically and were struggling to attain a new synthesis in various areas of

investigation. Already in by 1748 David Hume could write in his Enquiry Concerning

Human Understanding the following:

It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions

of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in
its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same
actions: The same events follow from the same causes. Ambition, avarice, self-
love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit: these passions, mixed in various
degrees, and distributed through society, have been from the beginning of the
world, and still are, the source of all the actions and enterprises, which have ever
been observed among mankind. Would you know the sentiments, inclinations,
and course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions
of the French and English: You cannot be much mistaken in transferring to the
former most of the observations which you have made with regard to the latter.
Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places that history informs of
nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the
constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all
varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from
which we may from our observations and become acquainted with the regular
springs of human actions and behavior. These records or wars, intrigues,
factions, and revolutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the
political or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same
manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the
nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which
 he forms concerning them.278

In this short passage, Hume articulates all of the above mentioned tendencies that

paved the way for the application of the Newtonian method to the human sciences. Like

the assumption made by Galileo--that substance is uniform and homogeneous with

respect to its essential motion-- Hume makes the identical claim for human substance

where there is "great uniformity" and "human nature remains still the same" being such

that "the same motives always produce the same actions: The same events follow from

the same causes."279 By asserting the existence of "constant and universal principles of

human action," Hume constructs space and time as absolute dimensions within which

occur the "regular springs of human action and behavior" in much the same way that

Newton assumed that space and time were absolutes within which forces and motions

interacted in a determined fashion. By assuming space (geographical difference) and

time (divergent histories) to be absolute non-relative factors in "the course of life," Hume

could imagine human activity as a "collection of experiments" with external "objects"

from "which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science."

Another pass at the mechanization of man and human society was made, at the

same time as Hume's essay, by the French physician Julian Offray De La Mettrie in his

essay Man a Machine (1747) which attempts to unite hitherto divergent spheres of reality

in a manner somewhat homologous to Galileo and Newton's uniting of the celestial with

the terrestrial sphere as a single continuum subject to the same physical laws. La Mettrie

278
David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in Kramnick 359-60.
279
Hume's assertion of the fixed, constant and uniform nature of man is meant to include only the
"white races. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, he wrote in
1742, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures
amongst them, no arts, no sciences." in Kramnick 629. Note that Hume's criteria for judgement is
based largely on categories of economic development rather than for example the characteristics of
Roman virtue.
divides all philosophical systems into materialism and spiritualism for which he

obviously opts for a radical materialism in which "Experience and observation should be

our only guide."280 Man, in all his aspects, can only be successfully studied and

understood by a philosopher who is at also a physician. La Mettrie writes:

that only they have illuminated the labyrinth of man; they alone have
exposed for us those vital elements hidden beneath the skin, which hides from us
so many wonderful things, they alone, tranquilly contemplating our soul, have
surprised it, a thousand times, both in its wretchedness and its glory, and have no
more despised it in the first state, than admired it in the second. Once again we
see that only physicians have the right to speak on this subject.281

La Mettrie has little use for the metaphysical speculations of Descartes,

Melebranche, Leibniz, Wolff "and all the rest," arguing that one should pay "no attention

to the history of all idle philosophical theories" and all of the a priori theories lead down

false roads. "It is only a posteriori,” he writes, “or by seeking to discover the soul

through the organs of the body, so to speak, that we can reach the highest probability

concerning man's own nature."282 In a summary that clearly evokes the identical approach

suggested by Newton, La Mettrie writes:

Let us conclude boldly then that man is a machine, and that in the whole universe
there is but a single substance with various modifications. This is no hypothesis
set up by dint of proposals and assumptions. It is not the work of prejudice, not
even of my reason alone; I would have disdained a guide which I believe so
untrustworthy, had not my senses held the torch, so to speak, and induced me to
follow reason by lighting the way. Experience has thus spoken to me in behalf of
reason; and in this way I have combined the two.283

For La Mettrie, neither the soul nor the spirit have a reality independent of

280
La Mettrie in Kramnick 203.
281
La Mettrie.
282
La Mettrie.
283
La Mettrie 204.
corporeal matter, there are no metaphysical teleologies with their independent laws, there

is but one universal substance with "various modifications." This is, like Galileo and

Newton, a uniting of different spheres of reality, or more specifically in the case of La

Mettrie, the abolition of the theological and metaphysical considerations themselves.

And like Newton, he makes a claim to universal and absolute truth in that he makes no

"hypothesis set up by dint and assumption." In La Mettrie's mechanistic cosmology, the

truth is only available to those who fully recognize the complete homogenization of

substance in a universe of absolute time and space where all metaphysical realities are

reduced to quantities of force and motion. He writes:

I recognize only scientists as judges of the conclusions which I draw, and I

hereby challenge every prejudiced man who is not an anatomist, or acquainted
with the only philosophy which is to that purpose, that of the human body.
Against such a strong and solid oak, what could the weak reeds of theology,
metaphysics and scholasticism avail; childish weapons, like our foils, which may
well afford the pleasure of fencing, but can never wound and adversary.284

Hume and La Mettrie are but two examples within a larger tendency in the

eighteenth century to re-imagine the human cosmology in such a manner that the tools

successfully applied in the natural sciences could be transferred to realms that were once

considered the domain of metaphysicians and theologians. The tool that alone could

unlock the secretes of the Newtonian cosmos was of course mathematics. The

application of mathematics to the realm of social phenomena was for many a measure of

the success of the human sciences. Mathematical reasoning in the social sphere was

certainly not something that emerged with the Enlightenment itself. Both Hobbes and

Spinoza organized their ethical and political analyses on the Euclidean model using

La Mettrie 208.
284
axioms, theorems, with postulates within a system of deductive logic. Throughout the

Enlightenment, mathematical references abounded in relationship to social phenomena

even among those whose method was essentially historico-inductive as we saw with

Genovesi's use of the terms political arithmetic and political geometry. But in spite of

all of the tremendous hope or faith that the human sciences would eventually take their

place beside the natural sciences in exactness and mathematical rigor, success remained

doggedly elusive due to a lack of quantitative application. Newton resolved all natural

phenomena into motion and force operating within absolute time and space, and both

motion and force could be measured and represented quantitatively. What phenomena in

human society could be universalized and resolved into simple motions and forces? As

we have already seen, Hume and La Mettrie had gone some distance in universalizing and

simplifying the human landscape. But it was the Italians in the eighteenth century that

made the earliest attempts to apply mathematics to problems of a social nature or more

specifically an economic nature. According to Marco Bianchini, the early process of

applying mathematics to economic theory was exclusively a Latin phenomenon--Italian

and French-- but the Italians were more numerous, of their time and were preeminent in

their influence.285

The first serious attempt to apply to phenomena of a social nature the symbols

and methods of mathematics was made in 1711 by Giovani Ceva, an engineer and

mathematician from Mantova, with the publication of De re numaria quoad fieri potuit

geometrice tractata (On money and the limits to which it can be treated mathematically).

The modest book of only sixty pages was aimed at the problem of the value of money and

had little influence outside of Mantua, but according to Schumpeter, while Ceva's book

285
Marco Bianchini, Alle origini della scienza economica. Felicità pubblica and matematica
sociale negli economisti Italiani del settecento (Parma: Editrice Studium Parmense, 1982) 5.
added little to the understanding of money itself, it is of historical importance because of

Ceva's insight into the nature of economic theory.286 In his seminal work, Ceva argued

that real phenomena were unmanageably complex, thus to understand the principles of

things one must construct rational models by means of assumptions and mathematics was

the ideal way of dealing with rational models. It is certainly not surprising that the

earliest attempts to use mathematical models were applied to the problem of money.

Money perhaps more than any other economic phenomenon lends itself to the application

of geometric reasoning and perhaps more importantly, quantification. The problem of the

value of money had been dealt with by a long line of predecessors like John of Salsbury,

Nicola Oresme, Nicolus Copernicus, and Isaac Newton. What becomes apparent by

simple cross referencing is that the links between science, mathematics and commerce

have always been critical ones, so much so that the boundaries between these fields of

activity were not always so clear. Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa for instance, who

introduced the Indo-Arabic numeral system into Europe, was the son of a customs agent

and was himself a merchant who had traveled on numerous business trips. In other

words, Ceva's early attempt to resolve complex social phenomena mathematically was

not an isolated effort or an anomaly for its time but rather very much part of the

intellectual and social environment in which he worked, an environment under the

influence of Galileo, the Freemasons, and rising commerce.

But before looking further at the Italian contribution to the application of

mathematics and the methods of natural science to social phenomena, it should be clear

what is meant by the application of mathematical reasoning in the first place. Schumpeter

tell us that prior to the first decade of the twentieth century, very few economic

286
Schumpeter 301.
publications required that readers have anything more than a rudimentary knowledge of

algebra and analytic geometry.287 Mathematical theory in economics, he suggests, is not

simply the translation of non-mathematical material into mathematical language and

symbols. Mathematical reasoning does not necessarily show on the surface of an

argument in the form of equations and symbols, but is rather a form of argument based on

the resolution of complex materials into simple variables within which relationships of

causality can be logically established. In other words, the application of mathematics to

social theory and economics in particular did not have to await the development of more

complex and more sophisticated mathematical techniques but rather the reverse. The

complexity of social reality had to be reduced in order that it could make use of algebraic

and geometric forms of reasoning. In other words, that the image of reality in the minds

of the early economists had to begin to conform to the the discursive structures at hand, in

this case a structure and a language borrowed from the natural sciences that largely

ordered the observations of social reality and gave impulse to an imagined future. Hume

and La Mettrie, as we have shown, radically reduced the field of variables with the

elimination of metaphysical teleology, the flattening of historical time, and the complete

homogenization of the subject. Still, it was a long way to the resolution into qualities as

simple as mass and motion as Newton had done.

Money, as we have said, was perhaps the natural point of application for

mathematical reasoning, but the problem of the value of money always had to account

for, to some extent, the subjective factors or variables of human behavior. According to

Schumpeter, the Italians were, from Davanzati on (Lezione delle moneta, 1588) the first

to confront the subjective problem in what is called the Paradox of Value --that many

287
Schumpeter 955.
useful commodities have a very low price (water) and useless commodities have a high

price (diamonds)-- in a satisfactory manner. The eighteenth century high point of value

analysis was made by Ferdinando Galiani in his Della moneta published in 1751. Galiani

defined value as the relation of subjective equivalencies between a quantity of one

commodity and a quantity of another. Without delving into a more detailed exposition of

Galiani's contribution to value theory, we will simply point out that his approach based on

subjective equivalencies anticipated marginal utility theory by more than one hundred

years and was, according to Schumpeter, the best and most complete treatment of the

Paradox until the contributions made by Jevons and Menger.

The subjective or utility theory of value dominated value theory until the

publication of the Wealth of Nations and especially until Ricardo published his

Principles . But, on the Continent, utility theory continued to hold sway. There was an

unbroken thread of development between Galiani and J.B. Say, within which Quesnay,

Beccaria, Turgot, Verri and Condillac made important contributions. 288 All of these

contributions to value theory were based on the calculus of pleasure and pain; they were,

in other words, well-developed utilitarians before Bentham's contribution tied his name to

this philosophical position.

The importance of the emergence of utility theory for an understanding of the

impact that the methods of the natural sciences, especially the Newtonian version, was to

have on the development of the social sciences was made explicitly clear by Galiani

himself in Della moneta when he wrote that "the laws of commerce correspond to the

laws of gravity and fluids with great exactness... The desire for gain in man or to live

happily is what gravity is in physics; and all of the laws of the physics of bodies can be

288
Schumpeter 302.
perfectly verified in our moral life by those who know how to do it."289 And with this

basic principle now discovered for the science of man--the principle of the universal

desire for gain and pleasure-- as the axis upon which an exact science can be founded,

quantitative studies with precise measurements will be possible. Galiani continues:

"Physics aspires to discover the immutable measure and the marvelous union between

time, space, and motion, the three great measures of everything... the price of things, that

is to say their proportion to our needs, does not yet have a fixed measure. Perhaps it will

be discovered; for me I believe that it may be man himself."290

The Newtonian principle of absolute measure within eternally fixed dimensions

is now applied directly to man's moral life as it is expressed in his economic activity. The

principle of utility was an ideal resolution from heterogeneity to homogeneity to the

extent that relationships might be measured and quantified. Indeed Galiani's attempt to

frame an analysis of money in terms of circulation, velocity and quantity was a notable

attempt towards this end. Galiani, like so many in his circles, believed that the laws of

society were equally accessible to the methods of science as were the laws of nature.

Such an identification meant that in the minds of the reformers advancements in the

natural sciences would lead to advancements in the social sciences. "History,” writes

Galiani, “is not the interrupted account of the errors and punishments of the human

race... it is no different than by having the astronomical observation for many centuries

one could formulate the motion of the stellar system, so it is in the science of

governing."291

289
Ferrone 579. We can find the identicle view regarding the value of money in the Tuscan
reformer Pompeo Neri's Osservazioni sopri il prezzo legale delle monete published in 1751, “La
misure valore é regolata dalle istesse leggi naturali che regolano la misure della lunghezza,
dell'estensione cubic, della gravita ecc.” in Ferrone.
290
Ferrone 580.
291
Bianchini 91-92.
 We have already seen how the debates over science raged between the veteres

and the novatores in the early decades of the century in Naples, and how those debates

directly impinged on the development of social theory. The environment that was

animated over the emergence of the Newtonian universe was the environment that laical

social theory was developing. Often, those who were investigating nature were the

authors of various political and social texts. Giovani Ceva, for instance, who had written

on money, had also written on the theory of gravity.292 The emergence of the new natural

science, particularly Newtonian science, was fraught with social and political

implications. The opposition to Galilean science, principally Jesuit opposition, was still

very much alive in Italy in the first half of the eighteenth century. Although his works

circulated clandestinely, the complete works of Galileo were not published legally in Italy

until 1744 in Padua. Science and reform were two sides of the same coin. Opposition to

one was usually accompanied by opposition to the other, but of course not always in the

same mixture. Many reformers were in opposition to a specifically Newtonian science

with its particular social implications but were not in opposition to rational reform; this

was the position of the veteres around Doria, Broggia, and Vico in Naples.

One collection of reformers is of particular interest insofar as they were to

represent an aggressive new spirit that was to link together natural science, political and

economic reform, and important theoretical developments in economic theory. The

group, organized around the publication of Il Caffé in Milan in the middle years of the

1760's, included Pietro and Alessandro Verri who, along with Cesare Beccaria, were the

founders of lI Caffé, Paolo Frisi, Gambattista Vasco, Gianrenaldo Carli, Alfonso Longo

and other stars of the northern enlightenment. But of all of those who were linked to the

292
Ferrone 71.
circle around lI Caffé , perhaps the most cosmopolitan and energetically determined to

promote the new philosophic spirit in Italy was Paolo Frisi (1728-1784). According to

Bianchini, Frisi brought to Milan the fever of the Galilean movement persuading many

and creating wide intellectual network making lI Caffé a true encyclopedia.293

Venturi remarkes that Frisi's originality as a mathematician and physicist was his

ability to link his scientific interests to wider issues of the eighteenth century through

finding a common language that was capable of linking together everything from politics

to economics to literature. He was often referred to by contemporaries as the Italian

d'Alembert. 294 In fact, Venturi goes on to argue that their interest in the exact sciences,

the academic spirit, and philosophy, placed both men on a parallel intellectual course and

each can "be considered representative of a positivist interpretation of the

Enlightenment."295

Our interest in Frisi is less for his specific contributions to science-- which were

in fact considerable in the fields of mathematics and hydraulic engineering-- than it is to

Frisi as the animator of a general spirit of scientific investigation among his colleagues.

His life, if one were to take an imaginary glance at his CV, is that of a near perfect model

of the eighteenth century philosophe. After studying philosophy and theology, he took

religious orders among the Barnebites, developed a passion for mathematics and physics,

taught at the University of Pisa, founded a school of engineering in Milan, traveled

extensively within Europe meeting or corresponding with virtually all of the most

important names among the French and English philosophes, published extensively on

subjects as far ranging as witchcraft, political economy, reform, mathematics,

293
Bianchini 150.
294
Franco Venturi, Riformatori Lombardi del settecento, tomo primo (Torino: Einaudi, 1978) 51.
295
Venturi 51-52.
engineering, and Gothic architecture. His influence was by all accounts considerable.

His first publication for lI Caffé appeared in 1765 with the title "Elogio del

Galileo," which received tremendous praise among his contemporaries for the eloquence

with which he brought to life the cold geometry of science.296 Frisi's purpose for the

"Elogio" was to establish unambiguously the importance of the particular role played by

Galileo in the scientific revolution, a role he felt was not adequately appreciated by his

French and English counterparts, and to draw out the essence of Galileo's method, that, in

Frisi's mind, had universal application.

In the "Elogio" Frisi briefly traces the history of science through successive

stages acknowledging the various contributions of Galileo's predecessors. Before the

time of Copernicus, Kepler, and especially Galileo science was characterized as little

more than "the simple compilation and recounting of facts , believing everything without

examining them or connecting them, without descending from the particular

consequences and re-ascending to general principles."297 There was, as a consequence, a

widespread belief in witchcraft, magic, and sorcery. Physics was, according to Frisi,

"errant and capricious, without the guide of geometry and experience, it was reduced to a

kind of metaphysics." Furthermore, this metaphysics was "joined, with scholastic

subtlety, to the Platonic ideas until it obtained the title of divine."298 But the true

revolution in science began with the contributions of two men: Bacone and Galileo. The

first "demonstrated how long was the path to truth" while the second made "great leaps"

in the field itself. "Experience, observation, and the geometric spirit, that Galileo began

to bring to physics, is that which one can now see spread to all the branches of human

296
Venturi. Riformatori Lombardi 62.
297
Paolo Frisi, “Elogio del Galileo” in Riformatori Lombardi, tomo primo 93.
298
Frisi, “ Galileo” 93.
cognition."299 Towards the end of "Elogio del Galileo" Frisi makes comparisons between

Galileo and the other giant of the scientific revolution Isaac Newton, both of whom used

a similar approach, were animated by a similar spirit and employed their abstract

knowledge to useful truths for the good of society. Galileo made important contributions

to the study of water currents and the problem of longitudes while Newton, as Master of

the Royal Mint, contributed to an understanding to the intrinsic value of money and the

reform of the Mint.300

Three elements of Frisi's article should be emphasized here. The first is that the

scientific revolution emerged specifically when the geometric spirit was combined with

experience and observation that brought order to the chaos of metaphysics. The second

is Frisi's assertion that this method can be applied to all fields of human cognition, and

the third is that such application should be for useful truths and the public good. Frisi had

delineated both the method and confines of modern science and had given it a purpose.

Useful truths, as he called them, were only accessible to those who imagined the world

with the essential aid of geometric spirit. It was then, for those influenced by this

method, essential that reality be organized along the axis of geometric logic. For Frisi,

the revolution in physics could only extended itself to other fields to the degree in which

the same methods were applied. Frisi's enthusiasm for the general application of

mathematics was expressed symbolically when he signed his first article in lI Caffé with

the letter [X] as an allusion to his work as a mathematician.

The application of mathematical reasoning to the field of political economy was

an acknowledged goal among those who were linked to lI Caffé or within the circle of

Frisi's influence. Out of this group came two brilliant economists whose contributions to

299
Frisi, “ Galileo” 95.
300
Frisi, “ Galileo” 101.
economic theory was precisely their efforts to apply mathematical analysis to problems of

an economic nature: Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri. Beccaria's importance as an

economist has been almost entirely overshadowed by the publication of his Dei delitti e

delle pene so much so that most of the literature on Beccaria highlights only this aspect

of his work, usually with only passing references to Beccaria the economist.

Schumpeter's praise for the economic contributions of the Milanese nobleman is so high

that he even refers to Adam Smith as the "Scottish Beccaria."301

Beccaria's first contribution of an economic nature was also the first specifically

economic work to be bublished by the Accademie dei pugni in 1762 entitled Del

disordine e de' rimedj delle monete nello stato di Milano. Beccaria wrote this short work

soon after completing his studies of jurisprudence being especially influenced by Locke

Montesquieu, Forbonnais, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Hume, Melon, Davanzati, and Carli.302

His work was immediately criticized for its acceptes at face value of the equality of the

money of different states. But, what is important about the work is the use of a

mathematically inductive method following a geometric method and constructing his

analysis from a formal point of view subdividing the work in definitions, theorems, and

corollaries. In the first section of Del disordine, Beccaria develops a theory of value and

expresses it in strictly algebraic terms. 303 Summarizing his section on value with words

nearly identical to Galiani and Neri, Beccaria writes: "The value of money depends on the

nature of things just as he phenomena of the skies and earth depend on universal

301
Schumpeter 180.
302
Bianchini 142.
303
Bianchini 145. "Il valore di una merce é in ragione composta dell'inversa della somma delle
merci medesime, del numero de' possessori, della diretta de'concorrenti, del tributo corrispondente,
dalla mano di opera e dell' importanza del trasporto; cosicché adoperando le lettere iniziale di
questi elementi sarà v:V: : mtci/sp: MTCI/ SP."
gravity." 304 Beccaria used geometric analysis both to formulate a theory of value and to

employ it in an ingenious manner to calculate the loss the state incurred by incorrectly

fixing tariffs.

Shortly after its publication, Pietro Verri defended Beccaria's work with his own

publication, Considerazioni sul commercio dello stato di Milano, using a more

traditional historico-inductive method of reasoning rather than Beccaria's mathematically

deductive method. But Verri was moving in the direction initiated by Beccaria when he

followed, in his Meditazioni sulla felicitá, with a clearly deductive method of reasoning

based on a highly developed utilitarian thesis utilizing a calculus of pleasure and pain.305

Beccaria's most famous work, Dei delitti e delle pene (1764), is filled with

allusions to his geometric method. "What will be the penalty suitable for such and such a

crime?” he writes, “Are the same penalties useful in all times?... These problems deserved

to be solved with such geometrical precision as shall suffice to prevail over the clouds of

sophistication, over seductive eloquence, or timid doubt."306 He continued with an

assertion that anticipated the development of the social sciences in the following century:

"In political arithmetic, it is necessary to substitute a calculation of probabilities, to

mathematical exactness. That force, which continually impels us to our own private

interest, like gravity, acts incessantly, unless it meets with an obstacle to oppose it. The

effects of this force are the confused series of human actions."307

But how could one assert even the possibility of applying a calculation of

probabilities to human behavior without locating a fundamental law of behavior to which

304
Biancini.
305
Schumpeter praises above all Verri's publication of 1771 Meditazioni sull' economia politica
where he made original contributions with the development of a constant-outlay demand curve and
a clear, if undeveloped, conception of economic equilibrium. 178.
306
Cesare Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments in Kramnick 526.
307
Beccaria in Kramnick 527.
such calculations could be applied. Beccaria states a clear utilitarian principle to support

his claim: "Pleasure and pain are the only springs of action in beings endowed with

sensibility. Even amongst the motives which incite men to acts of religion, the invisible

legislator has ordained rewards and punishments." 308

It would be difficult to find examples in the eighteenth century where the spirit of

Newtonian science is asserted with such vigor in the field of social behavior. The

attractive and repulsive forces of pleasure and pain are the gravitational laws that underlie

all social motion according to Beccaria. Human behavior follows a pattern that is

unrecognizable to casual observation due to the multiplicity of obstacles that, to the

unscientific investigator unarmed with the power of geometric reasoning, results in what

seems to be nothing more than a "confused series of human actions." But with the use of

the laws of probability, one can approach a solution to all of the problems of a social,

political, and economic nature. In chapter twenty three of Dei deletti e dell pene

Beccaria takes up the problem of contraband and, like his reasoning regarding value,

uses a strictly algebraic argument regarding the proportionality of gain and loss.309

Following the publication of Dei delitti e delle pene, Beccaria further explored

the use of probability with an essay on the game of d'azzardo published in Il Caffé

Being inspired by the mathematical writings of Montmore and Moivre, he was interested

in exploring the practical application of the growing calculus of probability-- a calculus

in which he underlined the logico-deductive aspects of his method. Following this article

308
Beccaria in Kramnick 528.
309
Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene (Roma: Tascabili Economici Newton 1994) 58-59."Questo
delitto nasce dalla legge medesima poichí, crescendo la gabella, cresce sempre il vantaggio, e per˜
la tentazione de fare il contrabbanso e la facilità di commetterlo cresce colla cerconferenza da
custodirsi e colla diminuzione del volume della merce medesima. La pena de perdere e la merce
bandita e la roba che l'accompagna é giustissima, ma sarà tanto piú efficace quanto piú piccola sarà
la gabella, perché gli uomini non rischiano che a proporzione del vantaggio che l'esito felice
dell'impresa produrrebbe."
was another in Il Caffé entitled “Tentativo analitico sú i contrabandi.”310 In his essay on

contraband he attempted to calculate theoretically the value of goods smuggled into the

country as contraband. Confessing that he did not succeed, he asserted that he had

nevertheless identified the necessary elements to the solution of the problem. He

suggested that the smuggler followed a strategy calculated to minimize loss, considering

the strategy of smuggling equal to the strategy in the game of d'azzardo and was

therefore subject to the same laws of probability that one could use to analyze the game.

Using analytic geometry, isolating variables, and graphically representing his results in

the form of a hyperbola, Beccaria developed a language of mathematics that seemed to

give the force of nature to his argument.311

The purpose of this detour on the development of science and its impact on

similar developments in social and especially economic theory in general is to highlight

the implications insofar as these developments alter or determine the meaning of land in

the overall discourse of scientific analysis. The choice of Beccaria as the initial focal

point to this end is threefold. The first is that Beccaria clearly articulated the

philosophical position of those within the orbit of Frisi and the short-lived journal Il

Caffé, privileging the methods of the natural sciences and championing the Newtonian

cause insofar as its technique was valid in all fields of human cognition, The second

reason is the high regard in which both Beccaria's contemporaries and his modern judges

like Schumpeter esteemed him as an economist, and thirdly because in Beccaria's

specifically economic writings we find a rather lengthy treatment of the problem of

agriculture in which the full implication of his method is made clear.

Other than his publication on the problem of smuggling, Beccaria did not publish

Banchini 152.
310
311
Bianchini152-52.
his economic writings during his lifetime. His economic ideas circulated in the form of

discussions and government reports and memos while serving as public administrator in

Milan. These reports dealt with: the metric system, population, grain storage and

monetary policy. But before accepting his post in the administration, Beccaria had been

appointed the chair of economics in Milan in 1768 by Prince Kannitz in which capacity

he served for two years. His outline for a course on economics, developed during this

period, was published posthumously in 1804 with the title Elementi di economia publica.

At the end of the section on population in the Elementi or more specifically on the

problems of depopulation, Beccaria concludes that since population is in proportion to the

means of subsistence, one must have a clear understanding of the problems of agriculture

which is the basis of any economy. In the following section on agriculture subtitled "On

the obstacles that oppose the perfection of agriculture and the means to remove them,"312

Beccaria established the criteria for how the problems of agriculture are to be assessed

and analyzed, formulating clear utilitarian principles from which to elaborate the eight

primary obstacles to the perfection of agriculture. It is worth quoting this opening section

at length in order to gain some insight into the extent to which the calculus of pleasure

and pain can subordinate the concept of land to a strictly scientific discourse. Beccaria

begins:

In all of the complicated things in which we are here interested it is not

necessary to do anything other than to remove the obstacles that oppose
themselves to the development of that primitive force in our spirit.
The common interest is nothing other than the result of particular
interests and do not themselves oppose the common interests at least when there
are not bad laws that create contradictions between them; but in all those things
towards which we are in part pushed by need and in part held back by toil and

312
Cesare Beccaria, Elementi di economia pubblica in Scrittori classici Italiani di Economica
politica part moderna, tomo XVIII (Milano: Destefanis, 1814) 169.
 pain, man is divided, that is to say, that in his tendencies and inclinations, he
endeavors to combine the escape from discomfort with the satisfaction of his
needs. From this phenomenon of the human heart it is easy to see which are the
obstacles that are opposed to the progress of agriculture, the most laborious and
costly of the trades; because they are the obstacles that are all combined to
augment the actual inconvenience and discomforts of the hard struggles; those
that hinder either the fruits or the hope of the fruits of toil itself; they will finally
diminish in the mind of man he fear of which inertia is punished, and the clear
concept of the good with which industry in recompensed.
We can clearly see from this that everything is reduced to a single
principle, that is the debasement of the price of the products, for which, little by
little, land will return to an uncultivated state and from which man will distance
himself scornfully from the humble plow and throw himself into the most
sedentary and lucrative occupations of the city. Consequently the obstacles, that
we will soon enumerate, are almost all the necessary effects and consequences ,
more or less immediate, of the debasement of the only true wealth of the nation.
313

Beccaria has reduced the vast complexity of the problems that confront the

proper exercise of agriculture to the resolution of the "primitive force of our spirit" or

"phenomenon of the human heart" as he refers to the utilitarian principle from which

"man is divided," between the satisfaction of man's needs (pleasures) from the avoidance

of toil (pain). This essential force, which is the gravitational principle in economic theory

for Beccaria, has as its basic unit individual man. "The common interest is none other

than the result of the particular interests" which has its exact corollary in the mechanistic

principle of Newton. The common interests itself can be resolved into a single principle

according to Beccaria, which is price . Price is that resultant force that stimulates man to

act in his own best interests to realize his desire for pleasure. The obstacles that Beccaria

is to detail in the following pages are the various laws and practices that disturb the

natural course of the utilitarian principle that would result in the common good.

At this point, we can recognize what I believe to be a rather astonishing

assumption made in the history of economic analysis. Just as Galileo assumed that

313
Beccaria, Elementi 169-170.
mathematics is immanent in nature itself, Beccaria assumes the same for history of

human society withthe calculus of pleasure and pain which he expresses as market price

. For Beccaria, like Smith and Mengotti after him, immanent in mankind's mutual

intercourse are the mathematical principles of the pure market society. What is

astonishing in this assumption is that some phenomena in the course of human history are

considered expressions of these mathematical or ideal principles and others are

considered outside disturbances. The periodic redistribution of common lands, so reviled

by Gemelli, for example, is seen as a phenomenon that inhibits the pure functioning of the

market economy or as something that distorts the rational expression of the utilitarian

principle; thus it is a practice that must be removed. How does one distinguish between

what is part of the natural development from what is a disturbance? For Beccaria, it is

quite simply that which can be derived from the utilitarian principle or to put it another

way that which conforms to its calculus which is, in the Galilean sense, the underlying

reality of all human behavior. Beccaria clearly uses the discursive framework or

theoretical structure of one discipline and imposes it on another, theoretically forcing the

complex realities of human intercourse to conform to his version of Newtonian principles.

We can see a similarity between Galileo's method and Beccaria's conviction that

the secrets of the social world can be uncovered if one can read the book in which it is

written--in this case the ledger of debit, credit and balance of payments. Those

phenomena of a social nature that cannot be expressed in these terms tend to be dismissed

as something outside of the rational calculus from which reality would express itself if

not disturbed by, in Mengotti's words, an" absurd government or a corrupt organization."

How then could the periodic redistribution of land, which is the result of a specific

ancient tradition within a distinctly ethical order, be incorporated into the new economic
calculus? The traditional ethical order could not be resolved into specifically or uniquely

mathematical relationships, and this resistance runs counter to the claim of universality of

the new science. Thus, either ethics must be radically redefined in such a manner that it

can be entirely subsumed into the phenomenal world, subject to direct observation,

measurement, and quantification, or it must be expelled as something outside of nature,

irrational because not universal. Utilitarian ethics are observable, measurable and

universal and, above all, have as its basic unit of measurement the individual. The

utilitarian principle, that functions most naturally in the free market, exists universally in

the nature of man himself, is not the Lebnizian useful fiction that helps to understand the

relationships between observable phenomena, but rather the absolute space, in the

Newtonian sense, in which all social forces necessarily act.

These reformers, who have either adopted the utilitarian position or who have

identified a particular mode of economic behavior with nature itself--like Mengotti--

seek, through their respective reforms to eliminate that which disturbs the natural order so

that reality can realize itself in social phenomena. Thus, Beccaria can logically argue that

the transformation that he is recommending is really nothing more than removing the

"obstacles that oppose themselves to the development of that primitive force in our

spirit." They are not reforms that are seen as necessary for the creation of a market

society but rather reforms that are necessary so that market society, which has always and

everywhere existed in a form distorted by irrational social structures, can be released.

In Beccaria's eight obstacles to the perfection of agriculture in his Elementi, we

find an approach entirely consistent with the view that land is subject to the identical

calculus that governs all social activity. His approach is scientific and technical. The

sole consideration is that which will stimulate production and price, which, as we have
already seen, is the whole social program reduced to a single principle.

The obstacles are divided into the following categories: the imperfection of rural

tools, the conditions of the peasants (food, housing, clothing and health), the lack of

rudimentary education for those who live in the countryside, the difficulties of

transportation (lack of adequate roads and canals), land divided into too few hands, the

lack of adequate circulation of agricultural products (the absence of a competitive

market), the low regard for agriculture and the depressed state to which it has fallen, high

tariffs, and finally high taxes. Most of these obstacles can be overcome by such technical

adjustments, as reducing taxes and tariffs or improving the tools of the farmer. Even

when the obstacle holds promise that Beccaria's logic may be based on purely ethical

grounds, however, he clearly subordinates his reasoning to a strictly utilitarian calculus.

The fifth obstacle for example, that the land is improperly divided into too few hands, is a

carefully reasoned argument for the exact proportion that excites mans' spirit with the

"necessary stimulus of pain and pleasure that causes him to act."314 But it is not simply

that land should be divided to foster the hope for anticipated pleasures. Beccaria also

argues that land can be divided among too many which necessarily increases the

proportion of capital outlays to the resulting produtto netto. In fact, diminishing the net

product, whether with land holdings that are too large or too small, is counter to the

common good and prosperity of the nation. In none of the obstacles cited by Beccaria do

we find a foundation of abstract justice, but only technical consideration of proportion,

movement, and quantity.

What is striking about Beccaria's logic is the extent to which it conforms to the

Newtonian maxim of reasoning with "sufficient cause." 315 His reasoning is dependent

314
Beccaria, Elementi 174.
315
Newton writes in his Mathematical Principles Natural Philosophy :" Rule I , We are to admit
upon the critical assumption that there is a sphere of human activity that can be identified

with nature in both its law like behavior and its universality, and a sphere of human

activity that is outside of nature because it operates against the known laws, is contingent

and capricious. While such an approach claims to have done away with all metaphysical

teleologies, it has simply replaced the humanistic teleology of moral perfection with the

teleology of the universal market of circulating commodities to which all human activity,

driven by the laws of pleasure and pain, is necessarily tending.

In the same circle around Il Caffé, and a long time friend of both Beccaria and

Frisi, was the Piemontese economist Giambattista Vasco, who, like Beccaria, made

significant contributions to economic theory while utilizing a well developed

mathematical form of reasoning, and who made specific contributions to the problems of

agriculture. Giambattista, along with his brother Dalmazzo, who was to die in prison for

his political activities, represented the more radical end of the Italian Enlightenment

insofar as they seemed to be driven by a more egalitarian spirit than many of their

contemporaries. One reason that may help to explain this radical tendency is that unlike

such Milanese contemporaries as Verri, Beccaria, Frisi, and Longo, who were all actively

engaged in official position of the state, Vasco was continually thwarted in his efforts to

attain a suitable position. While this is certainly not a complete explanation, it is

reasonable to imagine that his mind had fewer restrictions placed upon it than one who is

always immediately concerned about the practical implications of his ideas.

Vasco's life reads like the standard pattern for many of our Italian philosophes.

Born into a family of minor Piemontese nobility, Giambattista showed great intelligence

as a young boy, studied law at the University of Torino, joined the Domenicans, made

not more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to epalin their
appearance."in Kramnick 45.
further theological studies in Bologna until he was sent to the convent of S. Cominico in

Genoa. After a period in Genoa, he was transferred to Sardinia where he remained for

eight years. While in Cagliari Vasco immersed himself in many of the principle works of

the Enlightenment: Locke, Diderot, d'Alembert, Condillac among them. At the same time

that Giambattista was beginning to turn away from the path for which he had been so well

prepared, his two younger brothers, Nicoló and Dalmazzo, had become embroiled in

political adventures in Corsica. One brother was arrested and the other became a fugitive.

This political environment, coupled with his intellectual transformation, had a deep

influence on the course of his life. By the time he left Sardinia, Vasco had chosen a path

that was to establish him as one of the most important contributors to the new philosophic

spirit in Italy.

His first contribution to the vast body of reformist literature that was produced in

those decades was an article written shortly after his arrival in Milan in 1766 regarding

the question of peasant land holdings entitled La Felicitá pubblica considerata nei

coltivatori di terre proprie. The article, first published in Brescia in 1769 by Gianmaria

Rizzardi who had edited the first editions of Il Caffé, was an original response to a

question posed by the Free Economic Society of Saint Petersburg in 1767. The question

posed was: "Is it more advantageous and more useful to the public well being that

peasants posses their own lands or only their mobile goods? and to what extent must

rights be extended to the peasants on this property for the public good?" The question,

once posed by the Free Economic Society, had a considerable echo throughout cultivated

circles in Europe and garnered a response of more than one hundred and fifty essays.316

To the question itself, the majority responded in the negative to peasant holdings which
316
Venturi, Riformatori Piemontesi e Toscani del Settecento, tomo primo (Torino: Einaudi, 1979)
65.
made Vasco's positive response somewhat unique, but also unique and noteworthy was

the eloquence with which he made his relatively egalitarian response. The question was

not only one that was appropriate to the specific conditions in Russia, but was in fact

applicable to most of the countries in Europe regarding rural servitude, large versus small

land holdings, and more generally the prospects of agricultural renovation.

On the surface, Vasco’s lengthy essay ( 120 pages in the Collezione Custodi)

might indicate similarities to the arguments of Genovesi insofar as one senses an author

with a compassionate spirit who seeks to distribute the wealth of a nation in a more just

manner; dividing up large estates to create a class of small landholders whose care of

their patrimony ensures a robust nation. However, the similarities do not run any deeper

than this. Vasco's reasoning is entirely structured around a well-developed utilitarian

argument. In the opening paragraph of his essay he defines his utilitarian principle on the

basis of the greatest happiness for the greatest number: "The happiness of a nation consist

of the happiness of its citizens. So the general measure of happiness of a nation is the

sum of the happiness of its members divided by their number."317 Paraphrasing Pietro

Verri's Meditazioni sulla felicitá, Vasco goes on to explain that the "measure of our

unhappiness is the excess of desire over force"318 and it is the essential principle of

legislation to diminish the bad in a society on the basis of utilitarian ratio of desire and

force. To make his argument for the division of land that emerges from the ratio of

desire and force as well as the average happiness, Vasco makes clear that happiness is not

derived simply from the material wealth, otherwise total social happiness could easily

317
Giambattista Vasco, La felicitá pubblica considerata nei coltivatori di terre proprie in Scrittori
classici Italiani di Economica politica, part moderna, tomo XXXIV (Milano: Destefanis, 1814)
13.
318
Vasco, Felicità 15.
accommodate vast inequality of land holdings. "The happiness of a nation depends on

two things,” he writes, “on the physical goods of a nation and on its mode of thought."319

The relative equality of land divisions is not simply so that the peasant will have enough

to eat but is directly related to the mode of thought that is the second component of

national happiness: fear, hope, tranquillity, loyalty etc. For example, while rejecting "all

of the romantic projects invented to restore society to its natural equality,"320 vastly

unequal division of land does create, according to Vasco, an intolerable gulf between the

weak and the powerful insuring the rule of the strong with all of its accompanying

corruption and abuse that overall subtracts form the sum of total happiness.

Vasco's recommends is the passage of orderly agrarian laws that could create a

large number of small farmers. But left up to its own devices land could become overly

fragmented due to inheritance of large families or conversely could revert to large farms

according to market conditions and fluctuations in harvests. In order to remedy both of

these evils to the civil economic system and the general happiness, casse d'agricolture

could be created to help regulate and facilitate the adequate distribution of agricultural

lands.

What becomes striking in Vasco's reasoning is his willingness to utilize the state

as the prime architect to insure the public good. We do not find the same emphasis as

was found in Beccaria and Mengotti on the natural spontaneous development of the

economic system from which it is only necessary to remove obstacles. Vasco is more of

a social architect than that. He recognizes that social happiness is the result of carefully

coordinated ratios of desires to forces that are capable of meeting those desires which

requires constant manipulation. Such manipulation is and can only be the result of social

319
Vasco, Felicità 14.
320
Vasco, Felicità 61.
knowledge. The kind of knowledge in which Vasco is interested is clearly outlined in

the introduction to his essay where he distinguishes between two kinds of social

knowledge.

The success of the natural sciences, according to Vasco, is clearly indebted to the

guide of observation and is responsible for its advancement. The discovery of useful

political truths is also dependent on observation for its guiding principles but one must

reflect on the kind of observations that have a relationship to politics: "There are those

observations concerning the disposition, the character, the heart , in a word ,the nature of

man; others concerning the history of various times and various countries. The first kind

of observations are indispensable for sound political reasoning." 321 But, he continues,

this preferred reasoning concerning the nature of man can not be made without

a profound investigation into what is the source of all of the human passions,
and by which means they can be directed towards diverse objects. But to make
these kinds of observations, and to know intimately the human heart does not
require the great skill of historical understanding. Since simple ideas are and
have always been the same in all men, so in all times and in all places the human
heart is the same, common to everybody and is the same source for all the
passions, all the virtues and all the vices. 322

Vasco does not entirely dismiss the necessity for historical observations in the

formulation of political arguments; they are very necessary in certain cases as for the

"utility of commerce, the value of money, luxury and other similar arguments that would

be dangerous to make with out the use of history as a guide. But it is very difficult to

establish a political theorem founded on the history of nations."323 Historical knowledge

is fraught with the dangers of uncertainty in that certain effects are frequently attributed

321
Vasco, Felicità 8.
322
Vasco, Felicità 8-9.
323
Vasco, Felicità 9.
to certain causes often on the basis of prejudice rather than "diligent observations or

from a rigorous calculus." 324 In short, Vasco argues that his political arguments can be

made "more securely" with a "reasoning . . . founded only on the history of the human

heart."325

What exactly Vasco means by the history of the human heart becomes clear

when one looks at his subsequent works. What he has attempted to do is to delineate the

science of man as the science of the aggregate individual, one who is composed of

characteristics derived from the statistical accumulation of data, that is an attempt to

formulate the ideal man insofar as his behavior is probable behavior thus statistically

predictable. In his later essay, Della moneta, Vasco lays the groundwork for this

approach and proposes something of a psychological explanation of the value of money:

The value of money, like the value of all things, is none other than the
relationship between money and the things that are exchanged. . . . The greater or
less eagerness of men to have one thing rather than another, the difficulty in
obtaining it, are the causes that determine the value of each thing in common
human commerce. But the particular need or desire, that one man may have for
one thing different from the common desire of other men, requires that he
produce a larger quantity of goods to obtain that which is not commonly
produced. There are therefore two values for everything: one arbitrary and
capricious in the particular circumstances of someone, the other commonly
determined, as I have said, from the greater or lesser research on what the
plurality of men do. 326

The key to the science of the human heart is then "research on what the plurality

of men do." And, as we have already seen with Beccaria, such a science is dependent on

the mathematics of probabilities. Throughout the rest of Vasco life the problem of the

324
Vasco, Felicità 9.
325
Vasco, Felicità 11.
326
Vasco, Della moneta, saggio politico in Scrittori classici Italiani di Economica politica, parte
moderna, tomo XXXIII (Milano: Destefanis, 1814) 7-8.
application of mathematics to political economy was at the center of his work. In a late

article published in the Torinese journal Biblioteca oltremontana 1787, Vasco wrote that

"no one can ignore the utility of the calculations on the probability of human life: it serves

as a guide for many very important businesses."327 It is essential for those interested in

buying and selling annuities, for the purchase of a lottery ticket, for the father who wants

to have his son trained in a certain profession, for calculations concerning military affairs,

for anticipating the nutritional needs of the nation etc. Vasco's considerable work on the

history of usury, long term calculations of interest rates and the implications for long term

pattern of savings and investments, displays an extraordinarily sensibility towards the

development of modern economic theory. Our interest in Vasco's sensibility to social

psychology and the science of probabilities, insofar as land is concerned, is to

demonstrate, as in Beccaria, how the mathematical and scientific formulation of man

places land in a different relationship to the overall cosmology. Land has become part of

the utilitarian calculus, another object to which the passions can be directed.

Vasco, like nearly all of his contemporaries, did not formulate a vision of a

reformed society using as his point of departure the actual life activity of the peasants

themselves, neither in their work, their hopes or the dreams that ordered their lives.

Vasco's image of the countryside and the peasants who worked the land is structured by a

theoretical schema that first delineates the idea of land, of peasants, of work, etc. and

orders them according to the demands of his theory. The aggregate peasant, created by

Vasco's statistical theories, establishes the perameters of normal human behavior within

which the observable peasant should conform. But for Vasco, the very observation of

peasant life is determined by the structure of his theory, that is to say how his

327
Vasco, “Estratti” in Scrittori classici Italiani di Economica politica, part moderna, tomo
XXXV (Milano: Destefanis, 1814) 111-112.
observations differentiate between what is significant or insignificant in the peasant's life

activity or what is part of his essential character or what is only a contingent phenomenon

or disturbance to what is otherwise the knowable quantifiable qualities of his life.

Though the specific recomendations of Vasco's reform program were certainly

never implemented, his significance, like that of Beccaria and Frisi, is the eloquence and

force with which he formulated his scientific discourse in the field of social phenomena,

creating and legitimizing a new theoretical and discursive approach to the problems of

economic development. To structure the world theoretically within a specifically

economic framework no longer meant, as it did with Genovesi, to imagine a system of

applied ethics. For Vasco, the economic world consisted of objects that circulated with

forces and vectors according to natural laws that could be observed, quantified, and

manipulated. These objects not only consisted of the goods produced for consumption or

the lands that produced the raw products, but equally the desires, passions, and dreams of

every individual.

At this point the wedge that separates the old from the new vision of man seems

to be driven deeper. Man has been simplified to conform to the dictates of instrumental

reason. The distance between man, as he was imagined by the eighteenth century

philosophes, and man as he operates in his everyday social interaction, has gradually

moved closer together, until, they appear to have merged. The litmus test of how strong

the bonds of this merger actually are is to be found in the degree to which we believe that

the world that we have inherited it is the only one possible.

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