Organization, cooperation, and progress in Padua's political economy

This chapter examines the interplay of plants and politics in Padua from the vantage point of the socio-economic theories that circulated in Padua during the first half of the nineteenth century and that were reflected in Andrea Meneghini’s social vision. In particular, this chapter focuses on the philosophies of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and Domenico Romagnosi (1761–1853) and on the diffusion of historicism, organicism, mutualism, transformism, and progressivism and on the use of vegetal imagery in these contexts. During the period under consideration, economics and political economy were emerging as autonomous disciplines and their discourses often were still part of general reflections about natural processes. Many scholars of the political and economic sciences of this period reacted to the apparently perfectly organized and functioning living nature, adopting—or rejecting—this as a model of harmonious interaction in the hoped-for administrative and societal order. In contrast to other recent scholars, who maintain that enlightened and mechanist-physicist thought remained influential in Northern Italy, I argue that an ‘organicist switch’ took place during the 1820s and 1830s that was also a ‘botanical switch’, as shown by the adoption of several vegetal and organic metaphors.