Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
Publications
Publications
  • 2018
  • Book

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

By: Sophus A. Reinert
  • Format:Print
ShareBar

Abstract

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.
  • Find it at Harvard
  • Purchase

About The Author

Sophus A. Reinert

Business, Government and the International Economy
→More Publications

More from the Author

    • May 2025
    • Faculty Research

    The Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve

    By: Sophus A. Reinert, Mattias Fibiger and Sue Jia
    • March 2025 (Revised March 2025)
    • Faculty Research

    Peru: 'A Beggar Perched on a Throne of Gold'

    By: Sophus A. Reinert and Jonathan Schlefer
    • February 2025
    • Faculty Research

    Lebanon: Splintering Cedar

    By: Mattias Fibiger, Jaya Y. Wen, Sophus A. Reinert and Gerard Zouein
More from the Author
  • The Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve By: Sophus A. Reinert, Mattias Fibiger and Sue Jia
  • Peru: 'A Beggar Perched on a Throne of Gold' By: Sophus A. Reinert and Jonathan Schlefer
  • Lebanon: Splintering Cedar By: Mattias Fibiger, Jaya Y. Wen, Sophus A. Reinert and Gerard Zouein
ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Accessibility
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College.