More from the Author

• Article | Harvard Business School Working Knowledge | December 11, 2018

  Free Trade Needs Nurturing—and Other Lessons from History

  Sophus A. Reinert and Dante Roscini

  Citation:

  Reinert, Sophus A., and Dante Roscini. "Free Trade Needs Nurturing—and Other Lessons from History." Harvard Business School Working Knowledge (December 11, 2018).  View Details

  CiteView Details Read Now

  Related

• Book | 2018

  The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy

  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 18th century had its “socialists,” but unlike those of the 19th, 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. I turn 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. I argue 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, I address motivations and contingencies at the very foundations of modernity.

  Keywords: enlightenment; political economy; Italy; commercial society; Economic Systems; Trade; History; Markets; Society; Italy;

  Citation:

  Reinert, Sophus A. The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.  View Details

  CiteView DetailsFind at HarvardPurchase

  Related

• Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018

  Nauru: Paradise Lost

  Sophus A. Reinert, Dawn H. Lau, Courtney Basanovic and Julie Kheyfets

  Keywords: Nauru; Marcus Stephen; Nauru;

  Citation:

  Reinert, Sophus A., Dawn H. Lau, Courtney Basanovic, and Julie Kheyfets. "Nauru: Paradise Lost." Harvard Business School Case 719-009, October 2018.  View Details

  CiteView DetailsEducators

  Related