'Economy' in European History

Words, Contexts and Change over Time

Luigi Alonzi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350273351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Prompted by the 'linguistic turn' of the late 20th century, intellectual and conceptual historians continue to devote a great deal of attention to the study of concepts in history. This innovative and interdisciplinary volume builds on such scholarship by providing a new history of the term 'economy'. Starting from the Greek idea of the law of the household, Luigi Alonzi traces the different meanings assumed by the word 'economy' during the middle ages and early modern era, highlighting the semantic richness of the word and its uses in various political and cultural contexts. Notably, there is a particular focus on the so-called Oeconomica literature, tracking the reception of works by Plato, Aristotle, the 'pseudo' Aristotle and Xenophon in the Italian and France Renaissance. This tradition was incredibly influential in civic humanism and in texts devoted to power and command and thus affected later debates on Natural Law and the development of new scientific disciplines in the 17th and 18th centuries. In exploring this, the analysis of the function of translations in the transmission and transformation of meanings becomes central. 'Economy' in European History shines much-needed light on an important challenge that many historians repeatedly face: the fact that words can, and do, change over time. It will thus be a vital resource for all scholars of early modern and European economic history.

Part I Oeconomica: From ancient times to the Middle Ages and Renaissance

1 The classical discourse of the Oeconomica

The Italian for ‘noun’ is sostantivo, the idea of lending substance to an object by defining it, rather than qualifying it in one way or another. Through a noun things come to life in the world of meanings that men and women confer on reality. An adjective has a different function; it refers not to the essence of things but to the ways in which they assume different forms. The adjective co-exists with the noun, qualifies it and helps to define it; indeed, nouns and adjectives are not two entirely different worlds, completely independent of one another, so much so that nouns sometimes can be transformed into adjectives or, conversely, adjectives into nouns. Nouns and adjectives play a kaleidoscopic game in the changing flow of time. There are many examples of names derived from adjectives, also called objective names. They generally occur when a single quality identified by an adjective is picked to define a noun, and as a consequence of this choice, this quality comes to be considered the principal characteristic of the noun. Conversely, a noun may generate an adjective by transferring to it one of its characteristics, whether real or thought to be real. Lexical structures are not sacred signs dropped from the sky and invariable since the dawn of time; they have their origins in complex processes performed by human communities, processes that change from time to time and impose themselves upon every single person in the hic et nunc of their existence.

Meanings are conveyed through nouns or adjectives in different forms, through the semantic context in which they are expressed. Interesting lexical elements called substantivized adjectives are created from the varied relationships between nouns and adjectives. In this chapter particular attention will be paid to a substantivized adjective derived from the transformation of the Greek word οἰkονομία (Oikonomia), a noun extraordinarily rich in semantic implications, used at least since the fourth century bce and made up of a double etymological root: οίkοϛ (Oikos), or house, and υεμ (nem), a term referring to a conceptual range that includes the verbs ‘to manage, to direct, to supervise, to take care, to arrange, to order’. If we want to be exact about it, it might be added that this supervision and this management was rational and regular. Oikonomia can be rightly considered to be the ‘art’ or ‘science’ teaching the right management of a house: the rational supervision of household management.

The image of the Oikonomos, the master of the house or, as he was later called, especially in Christian cultural environments, the Paterfamilias, emerges from some fundamental texts of fourth-century Greek culture, particularly in the works of Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon. Here the relationships between the father of the family and his wife, children and servants are thoroughly defined, at the same time establishing rules on how to govern urban and rural assets with frugality, without any waste, aiming at growth and betterment.

The notion of Oikonomia was for a long time opposed to that of Chrematistics: the former indicating the virtuous management of goods, the latter being linked to the idea of enrichment, avarice, profits, often involving trade and business. These notions must of course be separated from any anachronistic reference to an autonomous economic framework as conceived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they cannot therefore be read as anticipations of subsequent economic analysis. As early as the fifth century, Boethius placed the Oeconomica (the science of household and family) between ethics and politics: care for the family between care for oneself and care for the res publica.

In the opening of his Politics, Plato (428/7–347/6 bce) tried to rigorously define the goal of his inquiry, warning readers not to be confused by the use of the words; at the same time, his methodological introduction was founded epistemologically, since it was aimed to delineate exactly the field of political science, its specificity and therefore the place it occupied among different scientific disciplines. As in his previous work The Sophist, the protagonist of the dialogue was the Stranger from Elea (in the role of the teacher), while this time his interlocutor was Socrates the Younger. Using the words of the Stranger from Elea, Plato clearly argued that political science was integral to theoretical disciplines, the sciences devoted to the teaching of knowledge. He pointed out that, from this standpoint, the science of a man who presided over a small city and that of a man managing a large house were not to be considered so different from one another. In this literary and semantic context, the notion of ‘oeconomic science’ η οἰκονομικη επιστήμη (Pol. 259 c 3) was introduced.

Stranger But, certainly, the science of a true king is kingly science?

Younger Socrates Yes.

Stranger And will not he who possess this science, whether he happen to be a ruler or a private citizen, rightly be called ‘kingly’, when considered purely with reference to this art?

Younger Socrates At least he has a right to be.

Stranger And surely the householder and the master of a family are the same.

Younger Socrates Yes, of course.

Stranger Well, so far as government is concerned, is there any difference between the grandeur of a large house and the majesty of a small state?

Younger Socrates No.

Stranger Then as for the point we were just discussing, it is clear that all these are objects of one science, and whether a man calls this art of kingship or statesmanship or householding, let us not quarrel with him.¹

Thus, according to Plato there were no great differences between the different forms of government, whether it was the government of a kingdom, the government of a city or the government of a house. It was not worthwhile to waste time debating the use of these words. However, not only did the Athenian philosopher greatly underestimate the weight of these words, one could say semasiologically; he also underestimated the possibility of clearly defining the science of familial government onomasiologically. As we shall see, the definition and lexical expressions, that he used to refer to household management, initiated an unending series of discussions in the following centuries, exacerbated by different literal and conceptual translations.

A fundamental problem regarding the conceptual and linguistic translation of the term ‘oeconomic science’ lies at the core of historical interpretations elaborated during the last two centuries. There are significant differences between translations of the quotation above into English, Italian and French, which variously condition the interpretation of the subject examined; analysis of these translations will provide an important key for the solution of the problem we are dealing with. Having read the English translation above, we might note that translation into Italian and into French alters meaning and sense:

Straniero Ma l’arte dell’autentico re non è l’arte regia?

Socrate il giovane Sì.

Straniero Ma chi la possiede, sia che governi, sia che si trovi ad essere un privato, non sarà correttamente chiamato, in base proprio a quest’arte, uomo regio?

Socrate il giovane Giusto, certo.

Straniero E l’amministratore ed il signore allo stesso modo?

Socrate il giovane Certo.

Straniero E allora? La figura di una grande casa, o, d’altro canto, il volume di un piccolo Stato saranno forse molto differenti dal punto di vista del loro governo?

Socrate il giovane Per niente. [C]

Straniero Dunque – il nostro esame ce lo ha appena rivelato – è evidente che esiste una scienza unica per tutte queste situazioni. Che la si chiami scienza regia, o politica, o amministrativa, non ci sarà, per noi, alcuna differenza in proposito.²

L’étranger Mais la science d’un véritable roi, c’est la science royale?

Socrate le jeune Oui.

L’étranger Et celui qui la possède, qu’il soit chef ou simple particulier, n’aura-t-il pas, quel que soit son cas, droit au titre royal du fait même de son art?

Socrate le jeune Il aura droit certainement.

L’étranger Et il en sera de même de l’adminstrateur et du maître de maison?

Socrate le jeune Sans contredit.

L’étranger Mais dis-moi: entre l’état d’une grande maison et le volume d’une petite cité, y a-t-il quelque différence au regard du gouvernment?

Socrate le jeune Aucune.

L’étranger Par conséquent, pour en revenir à la question que nous nous posions tout à l’heure, il est clair qu’il n’y a pour tout cela qu’une seule science; maintenant, qu’on l’appelle royale, politique, économique, nous ne disputerons pas sur les mots.³

The Italian translator Claudio Mazzarelli uses the term ‘scienza amministrativa’ to render the Greek expression η οίκονομικη επιστήμη, while the French translator Émile Chambry, conforming more strictly to the Greek, prefers the term ‘Science économique’. It could be argued that the French translation offers a better understanding of some crucial lexical aspects that allow the conceptual form of the Greek expression to be understood in the following centuries; in particular, the term ‘maître de maison’ seems more appropriate than the generic terms ‘signore’ and ‘amministratore’ of the Italian translation. Yet, as we shall see in the following chapters, Claudio Mazzarelli’s reading provides a conceptual translation that we must always keep in mind in order to understand the meaning of the term oeconomy, so as to avoid being misled by the bare lexical figure (material signifier) into projecting onto it a meaning that emerged only during the nineteenth century, a meaning which was not part of the culture of the previous centuries.

Among others, Arthur Schopenauer examined these issues in his essay Über Sprache und Worte, suggesting that scholars be extremely cautious in translating the words and concepts of the classical age into a modern language. Referring in particular to Latin, he argued that in order to correctly translate a concept of the past it was very often necessary to use completely different words from those used by the ancients, and that to learn another present or past language meant primarily enriching one’s own cultural endowment. As a consequence, the rendering of classical texts requires not so much a translation word by word but rather a total immersion in past concepts. When translating contemporary sentences from different languages it is sometimes enough to decompose and recompose them on the basis of different syntaxes; but to give a complete idea of sentences from a distant past there is often a need to split the sentence and rephrase it, lending it a completely different structure. Schopenauer added that a noun might need to be translated into a verb, and that the final result of this confrontation between past and present could lead to the invention of a new language.⁴

As regards the literature of Oeconomica, one of the most important works at the origin of discourse on the science of household and family comes from the pen of the Athenian historian and...