SAPERE ECONOMICO E METODO SCIENTIFICO NELL’ILLUMINISMO LOMBARDO: NOTE DA “IL CAFFÈ”

Abstract

Economic knowledge and scientific method in the lombard enlightenment. Notes from «Il caffè». The connections, emerging between the 16th and the 18th century, between the evolution of economic knowledge and the rise of the scientific method, are important research topics for historians of economic ideas. However, further research on the application of the scientific method is still needed, especially when we come to the analysis of how economic principles took shape in Lombardy during the Enlightenment. The same need for further research concerns the debates on economic policy during the Age of Reforms in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This is even more necessary for Milanese Enlightenment scholars, who have been relatively neglected in comparison to the contemporary Neapolitan writers. A first aspect, enphasized in this paper, is the admiration expressed by the Lombard authors toward achievements coming from elsewhere, and particularly from outside Italy. Reading “Il Caffè”, together with the works and correspondence of Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, Paolo Frisi and many other scholars, gives immediate and clear evidence of the Lombard attraction for the scientific tradition in mathematics, physics, astronomy, and, more generally, for the western tradition of epistemology and philosophy of science rooted in the works of Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Petty, Harvey and others. However, admiration and attraction never boil down to a passive acceptance of ready-made recipes, nor do they lead to mechanistic interpretations of the working of social and economic systems. It must be said that one of the original traits of the Lombard contribution during the enlightenment is the inclination to draw the appropriate epistemic distinction between the natural sciences on one side and the social and political sciences on the other side. The Lombard writers were precocious in keeping aloof from any acritical scientistic drift.