![]() | The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy Subjects: Accademia dei Pugni; Verri Pietro 1728–1797; Beccaria Cesare marchese di 1738–1794; Enlightenment -- Italy -- Lombardy; Socialism -- Italy -- Lombardy -- History -- 18th century; Lombardy (Italy) -- Economic conditions -- 18th century; The terms "capitalism" and "socialism" continue to haunt our political and economic imaginations, but we rarely consider their interconnected early history. Even the eighteenth century had its "socialists," but unlike those of the nineteenth, they paradoxically sought to make the world safe for "capitalists." The word "socialists" was first used in Northern Italy as a term of contempt for the political economists and legal reformers Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria, author of the epochal On Crimes and Punishments . Yet the views and concerns of these first socialists, developed inside a pugnacious intellectual coterie dubbed the Academy of Fisticuffs, differ dramatically from those of the socialists that followed. |
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