This essay focuses on the successful reception of David Hume’s political thought by the most influential Enlightenment authors of southern Italy, such as Genovesi, Galiani, Filangieri, and Grimaldi. The attention to Hume as a political thinker and economist reached an incomparable level in the eighteenth-century Neapolitan culture and society, though it has not been adequately considered by Italian historiography. Hume’s vision of government, commerce, luxury, and development of nations stimulated in the Parthenopean cultural environment a very participated and variegated debate. Political economy, in particular, was the breeding ground for the connections between Hume’s intellectual interest and that of the Neapolitan Enlightenment movement because of the similar social situation of their respective contexts, Scotland and Kingdom of Naples. The eighteenth-century Neapolitans entirely understood the sense of civilization proposed by Hume: not as an instrument of the utopic perfectibility of human nature, but as the gradual development of a given civil society under a free government.
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Titolo: | Hume politico a Napoli. Per una rilettura della fortuna del «celebre scozzese» negli scritti degli illuministi meridionali |
Autori: | |
Data di pubblicazione: | 2020 |
Rivista: | |
Abstract: | This essay focuses on the successful reception of David Hume’s political thought by the most influential Enlightenment authors of southern Italy, such as Genovesi, Galiani, Filangieri, and Grimaldi. The attention to Hume as a political thinker and economist reached an incomparable level in the eighteenth-century Neapolitan culture and society, though it has not been adequately considered by Italian historiography. Hume’s vision of government, commerce, luxury, and development of nations stimulated in the Parthenopean cultural environment a very participated and variegated debate. Political economy, in particular, was the breeding ground for the connections between Hume’s intellectual interest and that of the Neapolitan Enlightenment movement because of the similar social situation of their respective contexts, Scotland and Kingdom of Naples. The eighteenth-century Neapolitans entirely understood the sense of civilization proposed by Hume: not as an instrument of the utopic perfectibility of human nature, but as the gradual development of a given civil society under a free government. |
Handle: | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11770/307484 |
Appare nelle tipologie: | 1.1 Articolo in rivista |