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.
Il saggio è dedicato alla "fortuna" dei saggi economico-politici di David Hume nell'illuminismo napoletano grazie alle estese citazioni e i commenti rinvenibili nelle opere dei più influenti intellettuali, come Antonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri, Ferdinando Galiani e Francesco Antonio Grimaldi. L'autore dimostra che l’originale visione humeana della libertà, dell’origine del potere politico, del commercio, del lusso, della moneta, dell’interesse, delle tasse, del debito pubblico, della "popolosità" e dello sviluppo delle nazioni contribuirono sensibilmente, con un impatto senz'altro maggiore rispetto ad altre posizioni politico-culturali, allo sviluppo di un partecipato dibattito pubblico sulla civilizzazione e il "governo libero" del meridione italiano, benché sia stato abbastanza trascurato nella storiografia politica contemporanea.
Hume politico a Napoli. Per una rilettura della fortuna del «celebre scozzese» negli scritti degli illuministi meridionali
Spartaco Pupo
2020-01-01
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.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
