From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution PDF
Preview From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution
From OikOnOmia to Political Economy translation by loretta Valtz mannucci. This translation is financed by the chancellor of the Università degli Studi di milano and by the Dipartimento di Scienze della Storia e della Documentazione Storica of the same university. From Oikonomia to Political Economy constructing Economic Knowledge from the renaissance to the Scientific revolution GErmano maiFrEDa Università degli Studi di milano, italy © Germano maifreda 2012 all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Germano maifreda has asserted his right under the copyright, Designs and Patents act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by ashgate Publishing limited ashgate Publishing company Wey court East Suite 420 Union road 101 cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7Pt Vt 05401-4405 England USa www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data maifreda, Germano. From Oikonomia to political economy : constructing economic knowledge from the renaissance to the Scientific revolution. 1. Economics – Europe, Western – History – to 1800. 2. Discoveries in science – Europe, Western – History – 16th century. 3. Discoveries in science – Europe, Western – History – 17th century. 4. Europe, Western – intellectual life – 16th century. 5. Europe, Western – intellectual life – 17th century. i. title 330’.094’0903–dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data maifreda, Germano. From Oikonomia to political economy : constructing economic knowledge from the renaissance to the scientific revolution / by Germano maifreda. p. cm. includes index. iSBn 978-1-4094-3301-9 (hardcover)—iSBn 978-1-4094-3302-6 (ebook) 1. Economics—Europe—History—15th century. 2. Economics—Europe—History—16th century. 3. Science—Europe—History—15th century. 4. Science—Europe—History—16th century. i. title. HB81.m36 2012 330.94’02—dc23 2012027001 iSBn 9781409433019 (hbk) iSBn 9781409433026 (ebk – PDF) iSBn 9781409471240 (ebk – ePUB) V Printed and bound in Great Britain by the mPG Books Group, UK Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Exchange of Value; Value of Exchange 15 2 Genealogies of Value 43 3 Talking, Looking, Portraying the Marketplace 73 4 Demanding and Offering 107 5 Work: The Yardstick of Value 143 6 The Economic System 183 7 A Systemic View of Nature 213 Epilogue 249 Bibliography 257 Index 291 This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgements This is the updated, expanded and revised edition of my 2010 book L’economia e la scienza: Il rinnovamento della cultura economica tra Cinque e Seicento (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura). My research has in large part been conducted as part of the ‘Cultural Diversity’ programme, generously supported by the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, under the direction of Professor Giulio Sapelli who has, as always, been generous with his time and stimulating with his comments. I have profitably discussed the basic assumptions with other scholars working on the programme: Daniele Atzori, Nicoletta Ferro, Sara Roncaglia, Veronica Ronchi and Filippo Tessari. I have also, benefited from the observations of participants in the Red Columnaria international seminar on ‘Economic Growth Genealogies in the Shadow of the Spanish Empire: Comparing Countries, Regions, Domains, and Boundaries: 16th–20th Centuries’, held at the University of Milan, 13–14 April 2007, as well as the conference on ‘The Economy as Culture, Politics as the Practice in Modern Europe: Dynamics and Contaminations’, University of Milan, 23–24 September 2010; my thanks go to their organizers, Giuseppe De Luca and Gaetano Sabatini. Guido Alfani, Michela Barbot, Giorgio Bigatti, Giorgio Borelli, Marina Benedetti, Elena Brambilla, Maria Canella, Francesco Dandolo, Antonio Di Vittorio, Tommaso Fanfani, Roberta Garruccio, Tamar Herzog, Grado Giovanni Merlo, Luca Mocarelli, Pietro Redondi, Vito Rescina, Enrico Stumpo, Giovanna Tonelli and the anonymous Ashgate reviewers have contributed in a number of ways to the development of this study and to its publication, discussing its premises or commenting the various rough drafts. Gaetano Sabatini has been a fundamental factor in this project’s success and has opened up new possibilities for future development of its themes. The Chancellor of the University of Milan, Professor Enrico Decleva, and Professor Grado Giovanni Merlo, Chair of the Dipartimento di Scienze della Storia e della Documentazione Storica of the same university, have found financing for an English translation. Professor Loretta Valtz Mannucci, herself an historian, has been more than a fine translator, contributing to the final version of the text with advice and critical comments. Tom Norton has undertaken the index. To all of these people – who, of course, have no responsibility for the final results – go my thanks. This book is dedicated to Loris De Lion. This page has been left blank intentionally Introduction Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalents, exchanging – these preoccupied the earliest thinking of men to so great an extent that in a certain sense they constitute thinking as such. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887.1 How did Western economic learning come to claim status as a separate discipline? When – and how – did it begin to define and organize its own field of specialization, vocabulary, areas of interest and methods of study? What kind of methodological problems were raised by the attempt to make economic knowledge a real science? What ties were there between the study of production, exchange and consumption of goods and services and other forms of knowledge in a cultural context as hostile to specialization as the centuries from the waning of the Middle Ages to the mid-1700s? These are some of the questions that led me to write this book. We can define the ‘economic knowledge’ I have in mind as the body of attempts – at various levels of the social hierarchy and in widely different intellectual and professional contexts – to furnish a fairly general view of the functioning of economic life in society. Joseph A. Schumpeter defined ‘history of economic analysis’ as ‘the history of the intellectual efforts that men have made in order to understand economic phenomena or which comes to the same thing, the history of the analytic or scientific aspects of economic thought’.2 This interpretative ambition also distinguishes economic knowledge from the mindsets brought into play by the separate groups – merchants, farmers, labourers and consumers – historically engaged in acts of production, exchange and consumption, for these figures did not intend to interpret economic life as a whole; they meant simply to act in ways which may be judged economically important according to specific theories or points of view. Inevitably, any attempt to study the forms economic knowledge took in Western culture between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern era is conditioned by the forms and methods the field assumed in the mid-eighteenth century, when it became a distinct discipline among other human and social sciences. The intellectual operation fixing the premises that led to the affirmation 1 Ed. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 70. 2 J.A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (1954) (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 2, italics in original.
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