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300 Germano Maifreda

some of the material published in Il Caffè – which should be
accompanied by the analysis of the major works and the correspondence
of Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, Paolo Frisi and
various other participants in the great season of general renewal of
political and economic culture which was the latter half of the 18th
century in Lombardy – would make it possible to perceive with
immediacy the admiration for the mathematical, physical, astronomic
and, more broadly, philosophic-scientific tradition that had grown up
in the West thanks to Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Harvey, Petty and the
other protagonists of the development of the research method we
consider ‘scientific’ today.
However, the admiration of the leading exponents of the Lombard
Enlightenment for the methodological/scientific innovations of the
preceding decades never becomes the sterile acceptation of pre-
existing quantitative schematization, nor the banal imposition of
mechanistic readings and interpretations of economic and social
systems. Instead, it is precisely in the natural sciences, on the one
hand, and in the social sciences (and therefore economics), on the
other, that we find one of the original elements of the Lombard En-
lightenment: at once a marker of its cultural status as a phenomenon
of European significance and of its precocious emancipation from the
uncritically ‘scientific’ patterns evolving in other European areas
during the same decades.
So it seems we ought to proceed very carefully indeed in hypothesizing
that the members of the enlightened Lombard circle most engaged in
the construction of a project of political reform and, thus, in the elab-
oration of a new economic culture, gave their full and authentic
support to the geometric/mechanistic conception of social – and
economic – life; or even to Political Economy as a discipline replicating
the model of the exact sciences, since that might schematize functional
relations to the detriment of the phenomenological and empiric
dimension of social and cultural reality.
The richness and the up to date information of the methodological
debate appearing in the pages of Il Caffè allows far more articulate
concepts to come into view – and with implications not of secondary
importance for the reformatory political project, both as regards the
epistemological aspects that most directly invest the formation of eco-
nomic culture and as regards the relations between this and the other
sciences concerning society.

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