The ‘Economic’ Thought of the Renaissance

This chapter describes aspects of the Italian Platonic revival. It emphasizes the importance of the Platonic heritage through the analysis of conceptual repertoires deployed by humanists and philosophers to express their theories of economic life that would later develop into classical and post-classical theories of political economy. The relationship between Renaissance economic knowledge and the political-economic science which took shape between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries may best be defined, in Michel Foucault's terms, as 'archaeological'. Renaissance scholars enthusiastically supported the notion that the whole world can be modelled through numbers, and that mathematical structures were part of the divine figuration. The cognitive status assigned by the high culture of the Renaissance to economics was thus that of a branch of 'real practical philosophy', as explained by the Florentine humanist Benedetto Varchi. Another paradigm for the use during the Renaissance of the term 'economia' and its variants emerges from theological discourse.