Sophus A. Reinert

The terms “capitalism” and “socialism” continue to haunt our political and economic imaginations, but we rarely consider their interconnected early history. Even the eighteenth century had its “socialists,” but unlike those of the nineteenth, they paradoxically sought to make the world safe for “capitalists.” The word “socialists” was first used in Northern Italy as a term of contempt for the political economists and legal reformers Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria, author of the epochal On Crimes and Punishments. Yet the views and concerns of these first socialists, developed inside a pugnacious intellectual coterie dubbed the Academy of Fisticuffs, differ dramatically from those of the socialists that followed.

Sophus Reinert turns to Milan in the late 1700s to recover the Academy’s ideas and the policies they informed. At the core of their preoccupations lay the often lethal tension among states, markets, and human welfare in an era when the three were becoming increasingly intertwined. What distinguished these thinkers was their articulation of a secular basis for social organization, rooted in commerce, and their insistence that political economy trumped theology as the underpinning for peace and prosperity within and among nations.

Reinert argues that the Italian Enlightenment, no less than the Scottish, was central to the emergence of political economy and the project of creating market societies. By reconstructing ideas in their historical contexts, he addresses motivations and contingencies at the very foundations of modernity.

Winner of the 2012 Spengler Prize
Winner of the 2012 EAEPE-Myrdal Prize
Winner of the 2012 George L. Mosse Prize

The mid-eighteenth century witnessed what might be dubbed an 'economic turn' that resolutely changed the trajectory of world history. From the birth of new agricultural practices and the foundation of private societies to the sustained and popular theorization of social and material phenomena, the period experienced an unprecedented interest in 'economic' concerns across a wide spectrum of human activities and social strata alike.

The discipline of economics itself emerged amidst this turn, and it is frequently traced back to the work of François Quesnay and his school of Physiocracy (literally the 'Rule of Nature'). The school or, as it was called at the time, sect of économistes spearheaded a theoretically sophisticated form of economic analysis that postulated the virtues of laissez-faire and the unique ability of agriculture to generate wealth. Though lionized by the subsequent historiography of economics, the theoretical postulates and policy consequences of Physiocracy were disastrous at the time, resulting in veritable subsistence trauma in France. This galvanized relentless and diverse critiques of the doctrine not only in France but also throughout the European world that have, hitherto, been largely neglected by scholars.

Though Physiocracy was an integral part of the economic turn, it was rapidly overcome both theoretically and practically, with durable and important consequences for the history of political economy. 'The Economic Turn' brings together some of the leading historians of that moment to fundamentally recast our understanding of the origins and diverse natures of political economy in the Enlightenment.