Reading Il Caffè : Scientific Method and Economic Knowledge in the “School of Milan”

This paper takes into consideration the contents of the main journal produced by the so-called School of Milan, one of the main centers of irradiation of the Italian Enlightenment and among the most important intellectual circles in Eighteenth-century Europe. The essay analyzes, in particular, the reception of new scientific methodologies by the Milanese illuminists (including Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria), as well as their application to the renewal of coeval economic knowledge. The main conclusion is that the School of Milan had a critical and, in a way, disenchanted view of seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries scientific innovation; and precociously learned to grasp the limits of mathematics applied to the social sciences.