This work offers an examination of how Newtonian science affected the early 18th-century Enlightenment in Italy in terms of religion and politics.

For centuriesthe society and politics of Old Regime Europe relied on the strong connectionbetween past, present, and future and on a belief in the unstoppable continuityof time. What happened during the eighteenth century when the Age of Revolutionsclaimed to cancel the previous social order and announced the dawn of a newera? This book explores how antiquarianism provided new political bodies withallegedly time-hallowed traditions and so served as a source of legitimacy forreshaping European politics. The love for antiquities forged a common languageof political communication within a burgeoning public sphere. To understandwhy this happened, Marco Cavarzere focuses on the cultural debates taking placein the Italian states from 1748 until 1796. During this period, governmentstried to establish regional "national cultures" through erudite scholarship,with the intent of creating new administrative and political centralizationwithin individual Italian states. Meanwhile, other sectors of local societiesused the tools of antiquarianism in order to offer a counter-narrative on thesepolitical reforms. Ultimately, thisbook proposes a localized way of reading antiquarian texts. Far from presentingtimeless knowledge, erudition in fact gave voice to specific tensions whichwere linked to restricted political arenas and regional public opinion.

Written by one of Italy's leading historians, this book analyses the Neapolitan nobleman Gaetano Filangieri and his seven-volume 'Science of Legislation' in their historical context, expounding on his legacy for the histories of constitutional republicanism, liberalism, and political economy.

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.