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Reading Il Caffè: scientific method and economic knowledge in the “School of Milan” 281

general cultural climate within enlightened debate, and not only in
Lombardy. It testifies the presence of a significant skepticism as to the
heuristic reach of geometrization of the social sciences. In 1772, when
the so-called ‘sixth edition’ was published, Ignazio Radicati di Cocconato
already advanced a number of basic criticisms, writing to Frisi in
March of that year to express his disappointment and fears for the
future: «they will make of political economy what the Scholastics
made of philosophy». The important reservations of the Tuscan math-
ematician, Pietro Ferroni, followed in 1796.
A particularly outraged analysis was contained in an anonymous
pamphlet entitled Meditazioni sull’economia stercoraria, which Franco
Venturi has shown to be the work of Carli, probably offended by
Verri’s failure to mention his earlier criticism in the new edition of his
work. The Meditazioni parodied the «excremental economy», following
a pattern of argumentation already visible elsewhere – for example in
the letters exchanged by the Genoese Pietro Paolo Celesia and
17
Ferdinando Galiani in December, 1772 .
The uneven response accorded to the mathematization of economic
knowledge proposed by the Milanese Barnabite, Frisi, is worth a brief
widening of our perspective and a few further elements to fill out the
picture may be useful premises for some more specific considerations I
shall develop in the second part of this paper concerning ways in which
the figures of the Lombard Enlightenment dealt with the theme of
scientific method in relation to economics and the other social sciences.
As Pier Luigi Porta has observed, one of the distinctive traits of the
Lombard Enlightenment project for the elaboration of a new economic
science is its reforming intent and the will it embodies to break open
the tradition of the public administrator with a wholly legal formation
in favor of a broadly economic figure with special, scientific, charac-
teristics. This was especially the case after the creation on November
20, 1765, of the Supreme Royal Council on Public Economy (Supremo
Reale Consiglio di Pubblica Economia), presided by Gian Rinaldo
Calvi, Verri’s antagonist as well as one of the most important economists
18
in the Milan of the time . Verri’s own economic thought – which con-
stituted the prime expression of that great political and cultural
moment – went from Elementi di commercio (whose first version dates
from 1760), to the last of the Discorsi entitled Sull’indole del piacere e
del dolore [‘On the Disposition of Pleasure and of Pain’] (1773): a work
in which he once again took on themes of major scientific import, ar-

17 P. Tubaro, Un’esperienza peculiare del Settecento italiano, cit., p. 203.
18 Bognetti, Moioli, Porta, Tonelli 2006, 1-91.

n.43 Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XV - Agosto 2018
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)