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Antonio Genovesi's students of political economy at the University of Naples in 1755, thus, must have been pleasantly surprised when the professor delivered his lectures in Italian. He was "the first," according to a number of sources, though it is not clear exactly what that means—the first in Naples, the first on the Italian peninsula, the first in Europe. It is not even clear if he lectured in the northern language of Dante or the home-grown Neapolitan variety of Italian, a vibrant and living language at the time with an impressive literary history of its own. Whatever the case, it still made old (he was 43!) professor Genovesi a pretty good guy, I'm sure. Genovesi was one of the prominent members of the
Neapolitan Enlightenment of the mid-1700s, a school
that includes Gaetano
Filangieri, Vincenzo Cuoco
and Vincenzo Russo . As a
young man he was educated for the church but gave that
up. He then studied law but eventually devoted himself
to philosophy. That is not as abstract as it sounds.
Genovesi wrote the first systematic and complete work
in Italian on economics, his Delle lezioni di
commercio (1767) and was, in fact, the first
professor of the newly founded Chair of Political
Economy in Naples in 1754, the first such chair at a
European university. He stressed that human wants were
the foundation of economic theory and that labor was
the source of wealth. He preached the education of the
masses (no doubt the reason behind his lectures in
Italian) and the abolition of feudalism. He wrote his
early works in Latin: Disciplinarum metaphysicarum
elementa (1743) and Elementa artis
logico-criticae (1745). His major work, the Lezioni
di commercio, was in Italian, as was his Philosophical
Meditations (1758). He was born in 1712 and died
in 1769. |
