Antonio Genovesi taught Political Economy in Naples, the first chair of this discipline in the world. His text Lezioni di commercio o sia di economia civile is one of the first to discipline economics as an autonomous science.
1713
1769
Economista, filosofo
Antonio Genovesi (1713-1769) was a great innovator of culture and science, a perfect exponent of that generation of scholars who paved the paths of modernity with moderation and decisiveness. A moderate enlightenmentist, we might call him, the first in the world to hold a chair in economics, the first to teach in Italian rather than Latin, he lived between Salerno and Naples and helped to found precisely a discipline that, according to the dictates of Adam Smith, was to bring wealth and prosperity to the Kingdoms.
Born in Castiglione in the province of Salerno, he devoted himself to his studies at a very young age; after a private apprenticeship in the province, he arrived at the seminary in Salerno, where he graduated and took his priestly vows.
Moving to Naples, he came into contact with the innovative ferments particularly related to Gian Battista Vico, from whom he inherited the chair of Ethics at the University’University. But he soon tired of metaphysical and philosophical problems and moved on to teach in that chair of Political Economy, which, as mentioned, was the first in Europe.
His writings, collected under the title “Lectures on Commerce or both on Civil Economy,” was published in 1765, one of the first texts discussing the wealth of nations through investment in education, in the reform of agrarian property and on protectionism in trade and industry.
