Antonio Genovesi’s economic-political treatise on civil economy was a major contribution to debates in the mid- and late eighteenth century on the nature of political economy. At that time, Genovesi’s book was extensively translated and discussed across continental Europe and Latin America, where it was read as a foundational text of political economy like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the analysis of the mutual implication between the economic and the political order of society by revisiting Genovesi’s theory of civil economy defined by him as ‘the political science of the economy and commerce’. First, the paper retraces Genovesi’s conception of civil economy as a branch of political science and the role of virtue in ordering the polity according to ‘the nature of the world’. Second, it explores Genovesi’s theory of production as an inquiry into the complementarity conditions productive activities should meet for a well-functioning polity to persist over time. Third, our argument emphasises the importance of Genovesi’s analysis of production structures for his theory of internal and foreign trade. In this connection, the paper investigates Genovesi’s idea that the maintenance of a country’s ‘trading fund’ should be the fundamental objective for its internal and external trade policies. These policies, according to Genovesi, should be consistent with the context of the body politic under consideration and the economy’s proportionality requirements for any specific stage of development.

中文翻译：

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美德、生产和商业政治

安东尼奥·吉诺维斯 (Antonio Genovesi) 关于公民经济的经济-政治论文对 18 世纪中后期关于政治经济学性质的辩论做出了重大贡献。当时，Genovesi 的书在欧洲大陆和拉丁美洲被广泛翻译和讨论，在那里它被视为政治经济学的基础文本，如亚当·斯密的《国富论》。本文的目的是通过重新审视 Genovesi 将其定义为“经济和商业的政治科学”的市民经济学理论，为分析社会的经济秩序和政治秩序之间的相互影响做出贡献。首先，本文回顾了 Genovesi 将公民经济作为政治科学的一个分支以及美德在根据“世界的本质”对政体进行排序中的作用的概念。第二，它探索了 Genovesi 的生产理论，作为对生产活动应该满足的互补条件的调查，以便一个运作良好的政体长期持续存在。第三，我们的论点强调了 Genovesi 对生产结构的分析对他的内外贸易理论的重要性。在这方面，本文调查了 Genovesi 的观点，即维持一个国家的“贸易基金”应该是其内部和外部贸易政策的基本目标。根据 Genovesi 的说法，这些政策应该与所考虑的政治体的背景以及经济对任何特定发展阶段的相称性要求相一致。