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Author Reinert, Sophus A., author.

Title The Academy of Fisticuffs : political economy and commercial society in Enlightenment Italy / Sophus A. Reinert.

Publication Info. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018.
©2018

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xii, 668 pages) : illustrations, maps
Physical Medium polychrome
Description text file
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents Introduction: Lupi sacri -- Hard knocks cafe -- Capital (and) punishment -- Cycloid pudding -- Achtung! Banditi! -- Enlightenment socialisms -- The threshold of Utopia -- Arches and stones.
Summary 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.-- Provided by publisher
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Accademia dei Pugni.
Verri, Pietro, 1728-1797.
Verri, Pietro, 1728-1797.
Beccaria, Cesare, marchese di, 1738-1794.
Beccaria, Cesare, marchese di, 1738-1794.
Enlightenment -- Italy -- Lombardy.
Enlightenment.
Italy -- Lombardy.
Socialism -- Italy -- Lombardy -- History -- 18th century.
Socialism.
History.
Chronological Term 18th century
Subject Lombardy (Italy) -- Economic conditions -- 18th century.
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Economic Conditions.
HISTORY -- Europe -- Italy.
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Economic History.
Economic history.
Chronological Term 1700-1799
Genre/Form History.
Other Form: Print version: Reinert, Sophus A. Academy of Fisticuffs. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018 9780674976641 (DLC) 2018006858 (OCoLC)1023105443
ISBN 9780674916180 (PDF)
0674916182 (PDF)
0674976649
9780674976641
9780674976641 (hardcover)