Beyond Genovesi

Civil Philosophy from Political Program to Positive Science

Abstract

The essay focuses on some central aspects of Antonio Genovesi’s civil thought and endeavours to trace the development of his philosophical heritage in the writings of Giandomenico Romagnosi. In the nineteenth-century climate that frames the intellectual experience of Romagnosi, eighteenth-century civil philosophy is elaborated according to perspectives that show how an entire tradition, linked to Genovesi and the reading of Vico’s Scienza Nuova, nourishes the Italian culture on the threshold of the Risorgimento. The very idea of civil philosophy is transformed: from a political proposal, framed in the reformist perspective of enlightened despotism, it becomes a search for principles and tools capable of placing under scientific control the process of ‘civilization’.