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Reading Il Caffè: scientific method and economic knowledge in the “School of Milan” 283

mathematical, though not necessarily numerical» (a characteristic
from which coherently proceeds «the refusal of the phenomenological
data, the need to highlight the functional relations hidden among the
22
various components of reality» ) – then I think we need to examine
more closely the possibility of including Verri’s economic production
(and, more broadly, the ideas regarding scientific method applied to
the social sciences formulated by the participants in the Lombard En-
lightenment), under this heading. Let me then take a few pages to
open up this line of thought.
The bibliography regarding Verri has introduced some important
elements of complexity into the apparently compact methodological
structure within which Verri formulated his economic theory. Already
23
in the Meditazioni, where the basic goal of happiness (felicità pubblica )
is presented as an algebraic formula in the reduction of the relationship
between the terms of desire and possibility, and where, as a staunch
utilitarian, Verri leans towards addition in the form of an enlargement
of the possibilities offered to mankind, the propensity to take advantage
of one of the concepts destined to become essential to his political
economy – that is, the creativity whose existence is the indispensable
condition for the passage from the merely passive possession of things
to the enjoyment of full-bodied happiness – has been remarked. «The
excess of needs beyond […] power [to assuage them] is the measure of
man’s unhappiness, and it is no less the unhappiness of a State», he
would later write in his Economia politica.
So the mere enjoyment of goods is distinguished from their desirable
creative enjoyment, that is, the pleasure of doing and making with all
the elements open to human possibility. From this premise comes, on
the one hand, Verri’s analysis of virtù, defined as every useful act and
thus a term/concept with an active meaning; on the other, an anthropology
which focuses on the possibility of activating, with adequate stimuli, the
personal, human, resources producing creativity. Even in Verri’s most
important economic essay, the Meditazioni, the insistence on the theme
of creativity as the fountainhead and origin of the formation of wealth –
24
and so a proper object of political economy – is evident .
An immediate indication, with strong methodological consequences,
of the role Verri assigns to ideal and practical creativity in the develop-
ment of economic discourse may be seen in the process integrating
the principle of «automatic mechanisms» into the theory and policy of

22 P. Tubaro, Un’esperienza peculiare del Settecento italiano, cit., p. 194.
23 The notion of public happiness best conveys the significance of the contribution of
the Milanese School (see P.L. Porta, Italy, cit.).
24 P. Tubaro, Un’esperienza peculiare del Settecento italiano, cit., pp. 47-8.

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