Genovesi's appointment in 1754 to the specially created chair di commercio e di meccanica at Naples university marked, as Franco Venturi has noted, the full flowering of the complex of political and cultural developments which made up the Neapolitan enlightenment. Yet this event is perhaps too easily seized upon as representing the birth of a secular science of politics, a transition, as Genovesi jokingly said of his new position, from metafisico to mercatante. In this essay I wish to show how these two elements were fused as Genovesi sought to give them coherent expression in a new language of politics adapted to the needs of modern commercial society.

Born in 1713 at Castiglione near Salerno, Genovesi was the first son of a family of small landowners fallen on hard times. He was educated for the priesthood, being ordained in 1737, when the death of his uncle gave him enough money to continue his studies in Naples. Neapolitan intellectual life was at this time undergoing a profound change. The Cartesian and Platonist philosophies which had dominated the last fifty years still prevailed, but their three main representatives, Pietro Giannone, Giambattista Vico and Paolo Mattia Doria, were all to die in the 1740s and an important new current of thought, fervently anti-metaphysical in character and stressing the experimental method of Newton, was growing up in opposition to them.