EARLY UTTERANCE OF 'SOCIALIST' AND 'INVISIBLE HAND' – IN THE SAME BREATH
[FACCHINEI, Ferdinando.]
Note ed osservazioni sul libro intitolato Dei delitti e delle pene.
[Venice, Zatta,] 1765.
[Bound with:]
[VERRI, Pietro; Ferdinando FACCHINEI, commentator.] Meditazioni sulla felicità … Con un avviso e con note critiche.
Two works in one vol., 8vo, Facchinei: pp. 191, [1 (errata)]; woodcut ornament to title, woodcut head- and tailpieces; occasional very light foxing, one or two minor stains; Verri: pp. 61, [1], [2 (blank)]; woodcut vignette to title; very light foxing; very good copies, uncut in contemporary carta rustica, spine lettered in ink; spine very lightly rubbed; contemporary ink attributions to Facchinei (front free endpaper verso) and to Verri (title-page), contemporary ink shelfmark to front free endpaper verso.
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Note ed osservazioni sul libro intitolato Dei delitti e delle pene.
First edition of this influential Enlightenment work with profound philosophical, political, and economic implications, containing in a single page both one of the earliest instances of the term ‘socialist’ in print and an early reference to the concept of the ‘invisible hand’, pitched one against the other.
A polemic against Beccaria’s momentous, anonymously published On Crimes and Punishments but in fact much wider in scope, Facchinei’s (1725–c. 1814) Notes provide ‘a desperate and extreme defence of the traditional world’ (Venturi). Although Facchinei presents what is certainly the most radical rejection of Beccaria’s ideas (including those relating to capital punishment and torture), his views are complex: he does not wholly disagree with Beccaria, Verri, and their enlightened circle, notably on the subject of luxury as a potential factor in the increase of welfare in society.
Facchinei does, however, take issue with what he describes as ‘socialist’ views, which call for a secular, democratic revolution with the aim of creating a perfect society based upon the consent of truly free men (p. 9). Citing Rousseau’s Social Contract as the germ of such ‘socialism’, Facchinei argues that the view is both wholly unfounded and disproved by factual historical records. What history teaches us, according to Facchinei, is that the rise and fall of empires and republics is determined by the ‘law of the strongest … by such circumstances and combinations that one can discern in this process (judging justly) the work and contribution of an invisible, yet very powerful hand’ (ibid., trans.).
The Note ed osservazioni are here bound with the second edition of Pietro Verri’s Meditations on Happiness, a slim, powerful pamphlet first published in 1763, here republished for the first time with Facchinei’s notes, which increase the work by a quarter and take issue with fifty-five assertions in Verri’s pamphlet. That the two works, printed in the same year, were bound together soon after publication, suggests that the earliest owner was keenly interested in, or perhaps directly involved with, the dialectical forging of the new social and philosophical order taking shape in Lombardy in the 1760s.
No copies of either work recorded on Library Hub. OCLC finds six copies in the US of the Facchinei and only a single copy of the Verri (Kansas).
Facchinei: Melzi II, p. 239; not in Einaudi. Verri: see DBI 44, p. 30, and Melzi II, p. 175. See Venturi, Settecento Riformatore I, pp. 707 ff.; Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: political economy and commercial society in Enlightenment Italy (2018), passim.
