History of Economics

In this book, sociologists, philosophers, and economists investigate the conceptual issues around the performativity of economics over a variety of disciplinary contexts and provide new case studies illuminating this phenomenon. In featuring the latest contributions to the performativity debate the book revives discussion of the fundamental questions: What precise meaning can we attribute to the notion of performativity? What empirical evidence can help us recognize economics as performative? And what consequences does performativity have for contemporary societies? The contributions demonstrate how performativity can serve as a powerful conceptual resource in dealing with economic knowledge, as an inspiring framework for investigating performative practices, and as an engine of discovery for thinking of the economic proper.

Pubblicate all’insaputa dell’autore nel 1699, Les Aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse di Fénelon divennero immediatamente un best seller europeo, anzi, di gran lunga il maggiore best seller europeo per quasi due secoli. Erano state scritte per insegnare al Delfino di Francia come doveva governare un re saggio e virtuoso, ma vennero lette, a seconda dei gusti e delle sensibilità delle epoche, come un trattato di politica e di economia in veste letteraria, un romanzo pedagogico avvincente, un’appassionata introduzione all’epica classica, un capolavoro di lingua e di stile, e molto altro ancora.
Frutto di un progetto di ricerca interdisciplinare realizzato dall’Università di Pisa, il presente volume offre per la prima volta una catalogazione bibliografica rigorosa e uno studio approfondito delle traduzioni del Télémaque nelle principali lingue europee, ricostruendo nei dettagli le dimensioni e le vicissitudini di un viaggio straordinario, grazie al quale, tra il XVIII e il XIX secolo, lettori di ogni età formarono le loro idee sulle virtù e sui doveri del Principe e dei cittadini, si avvicinarono ai principi dell’economia politica, modellarono i loro canoni estetici e appresero tanto la lingua francese quanto, grazie alle numerose edizioni plurilingui, le altre lingue europee: un’impresa che ha consentito di portare alla luce e di schedare più di quattrocento diverse edizioni, in inglese, tedesco, olandese, italiano, latino, spagnolo e portoghese, restituendo le esatte dimensioni di un successo senza frontiere.
Questa opera costituisce, dunque, uno strumento di consultazione indispensabile per le biblioteche umanistiche e per gli storici delle idee politiche, economiche, linguistiche e pedagogiche, nonché per gli studiosi delle letterature europee.


Con contributi di: Giulia Bianchi, Fabrizio Bientinesi, Alexandre Calvanese, Federica Cappelli, Elena Carpi, Marco Cini, Carolina Flinz, Marina Foschi Albert, Daniela Giaconi, Laura Giovannelli, Marco E. L. Guidi, Marianne Hepp, Monica Lupetti, Luca Mi-chelini, Letizia Pagliai, Alessandro Russo, Gertjan Schutte, Barbara Sommovigo.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content of the Forum:
Dante and Economics
COORDINATED BY ANTONIO MONTEFUSCO AND FILIPPO PETRICCA; CONTRIBUTIONS BY Kristina M. Olson, William Caferro, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Giacomo Todeschini, Enrico Fenzi, Juan Varela-Portas De Orduña, Ronald L. Martinez

In 1927, the philosopher Benedetto Croce argued that socialism revitalized the political landscape and affected every aspect of intellectual life in Italy. Yet there was a space which socialism could not penetrate: literature. Croce was responding explicitly to Frederick Engels's preface to the Italian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1893). Engels claimed that, just as medieval Italy was the cradle [End Page 176] of capitalism and Dante its poet, at the end of the nineteenth century Italy was awaiting the Dante of socialism (Engels 1893). For Croce, conversely, poetry was irreducible to economics, and Dante's gaze at the past was precisely what made him a poet: "Dante era uno spirito doloroso, in contrasto coi suoi tempi, e rivolto romanticamente al passato, e perciò fu poeta" (Croce 1991 [1927]: 207–8).
Croce and Engels exemplify the two main approaches that twentiethcentury scholars have taken to Dante and economics. On the one hand, Dante is presented as resistant to the rising monetary economy, rescuing the Empire and the Church in an anachronistic attempt to reform the system and preserve a declining medieval world. On the other, Dante emerges as a champion of progress: capitalist, modern, socialist or democratic, sometimes aligned with the poor and sometimes with the wealthy class. The contradictions apparent across these conclusions raise the question: what exactly does it mean to investigate Dante and economics? As we know, economics was not a separate discipline in the Middle Ages. What we understand today as "economics" was then a set of rules and aspects intertwined with theology, philosophy, and broader moral concerns (Lambertini 2019), encompassing questions of the circulation and distribution of resources, the determination of value, the nature and fairness of exchange, monetary policies, and legislation. Dante certainly engages with these themes in his works: he stages and envisions systems of distribution; he presents sins such as avarice, simony, usury, and greed; he uses language and metaphors involving trade, usury, and debt; he represents money, and takes sides in the theorization of excess and moderation, trade and gift. These matters were particularly important in the context of late medieval Florence, a city under transformation, with an increasing population, a growing economy, and an expanding trade network (Faini 2010, Day Jr. 2015; Goldthwaite 2009; Caferro 2020). So where was Dante standing in relationship to this world in flux? Was he aware of the significant financial shifts and techniques that Florence was witnessing and developing at this time? Did he reject or embrace the economic changes that made the Florentine economy so influential?