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Reading Il Caffè: scientific method and economic knowledge in the “School of Milan” 293

that, in the nation where it is most diffuse, every single thing produced must
be perfect of its kind. This enlightening spirit mounts the Chairs of lecturers
and makes them methodic, exact, precise; it spreads throughout the world of
judges and it teaches them to compare facts, to analyze the probabilities and
reach correct judgments; it even reaches down to the craftsmen and suggests
more compact, safe, industrious, procedures to make their work more perfect.
Indeed, each of us can ascertain from experience that all the most efficient
and most precise manufactures come to us from nations where the geometric
spirit reigns and that, to the contrary, where it does not hold sway, everything
is suffused with the coarseness and the inexactitude that characterizes un-
48
cultivated nations .
«That’s enough, friend, I told him, your book doesn’t deserve even a
Zero». So Pietro Verri, in his essay on The Fortune of Books, cut short
«a philosopher’s» reading of a text he meant to show pretentious and
antiquated, and whose opening declared: «The love of feeling well,
stronger than that of existence itself, should have the same function
49
for morality as gravity has for mechanics» . The unwarranted extension
of the physical-mathematical metaphor is deplored and deprecated in
tones echoed in the corrosive title Cesare Beccaria gave to «a work [he
is] contemplating in three folio volumes», Nose-ological Elements
50
Demonstrated by Mathematic Methods ) (‘Elementa naseologiae methodo
matematica demonstrata’). This is a tone we would seek in vain in the
text of the rigorous analysis, written shortly afterwards, by Beccaria
and published in Il Caffè: the famous An Analytic Project Concerning
Contraband 51 (‘Tentativo analitico su i contrabbandi’). The article,
posing the question of what duty ratios would persuade a merchant to
trade legally with foreign countries and not, instead, import goods as
contraband – hypothesizing that any contraband goods, once discovered,
would be confiscated –, took a most cautious position from its very
premises, in which Beccaria declared explicitly his conviction that
algebra could serve economy «up to a point». He further made a clear
distinction between human affairs (the «political sciences») and those
of nature, though both shared an inclination towards formalization:
Since algebra is only a precise and rapid way of reasoning on quantity, it
cannot be applied to simple geometry or the other mathematical sciences, but
everything which may in some sense grow or dwindle, everything which has
relations that can be compared, may be submitted to it. Thus even the

48 Ibid., 314.
49 FR1, 150-2, 151.
50 FR1, 44.
51 FR1, 173-5, 173.

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