“Una rete immensa lega tutte le verità”: Cesare Beccaria’s Lectures on Public Economy and Sylvester Douglas’s Translation "A Discourse on Public Oeconomy and Commerce"

Beccaria’s fame as a writer on public economy has been somewhat obscured by the extraordinary renown he acquired as the celebrated author of On Crimes and Punishments (1764), and by the fact that his lectures were not published during his lifetime. A corrupt version of his work at the Scuole Palatine as Professor of Public Economy, along with other shorter economics writings which had instead been published, was edited and issued posthumously by Pietro Custodi, in 1804, and has since attracted the attention of later economists and of contemporary scholars on the Enlightenment (e.g. Venturi, Schumpeter, Francioni, Capra, Porta, Audegean, and many others). In November 2014, to mark the 250th anniversary of On Crimes and Punishments, the third volume of the National Edition of Cesare Beccaria’s Collected Works (directed by Luigi Firpo and Gianni Francioni), devoted to the philosopher’s economic thought and works and edited by Gianmarco Gaspari, came out, to round off the sixteen-volumes outstanding collection, which has greatly contributed to shed light on the intense statecraft and reformist activity undertaken by the Milanese governing bodies and cultural elites in the late eighteenth century. The first part of my essay aims to provide a brief survey of the main findings and analyses provided by Gaspari, whose meticulously researched critical edition offers a far-reaching scholarly commentary on the relationship between Beccaria’s philosophical tenets and economic thought, including in-depth insight onto the influences of, and elaborations on, English and Scottish sources. The second part will focus on the Discourse on Public Oeconomy and Commerce, the English translation of Beccaria’s inaugural address at the Scuole Palatine (Prolusione nell’apertura della nuova cattedra di Scienze camerali), made in 1769 by the young gentleman Sylvester Douglas (later Baron Glenbervie, Lord of the Treasury from 1797 to 1800, and Pay-master General and Vice-president del Board of Trade), who had been personally acquainted with Beccaria and the Milanese scholarly milieu during his Italian Grand Tour. Taken up with a view to spreading Beccaria’s example among the English youth, the translation provides, as a whole, a truthful – both source- and target-aware version, producing a text that must have been widely circulated among the English and Scottish intellectuals, opening up new, rewarding paths for intellectual cross-fertilization and cultural encounters.