Reform and Utopia in Early Modern Italian Political Economy

This chapter studies the tension between reform and utopia in early modern Italian historiography, and suggests that the Neapolitan discussion of happiness as a pathway to improvement forms a promising way forward. While the tension between reform and utopia has become established as a commonplace, especially but not only in the works of Franco Venturi and his monumental Settecento Riformatori (1969) and Rivista Storica Italiana, the tension led to utopia being treated as the counterconcept to reform: although reform is understood as a form of improvement from a given situation, utopia becomes an abstract and an unattainable improvement goal that loses contact with reality. In this manner Italian historiography continues to treat reforms in terms of success or failure. This chapter thus tackles the centrality that Franco Venturi attributed to change as “reform” in the Italian Enlightenment, opening out Venturi’s intellectual development from the 1930s onwards and thereby explaining why it was that he came to attach such great importance to the work of Antonio Genovesi and his chair of political economy created in Naples in 1754.