Antonio Serra, Early Modern Political Economist: From Good Government as Individual Behavior to Good Government as Practical Policy

The Italian jurist and political economist

The term »political economy« was coined by knight and entrepreneur Antoine de Montchrestien in his »Traicté de l’economie politique« (1615). As mentioned in Joseph A. Schumpeter: History of Economic Analysis, New York 1987 [1954]. Elizabeth Boode Schumpeter (ed.); with new introduction by Mark Perlman, p. 163; see also André Tiran: Antoine de Monchrestien and Antonio Serra. Two founders of political economy, in: History of Economic Thought and Policy, 13/1 (2017), pp. 89–100.

In this article, the focus will be on his thoughts about economic policy and especially on how this is a responsibility of government. He is one among several authors of his time, including Althusius, Bodin, Botero, and Grotius, who wrote and thought about the role and position of government in human society. Serra, however, wrote more specifically about the contribution of government to the economy and, thus, its contribution to building a good society. He is among the very first authors, and possibly the first, to regard the state and government in their abstract manifestation, that is, not as a ruler’s personal property, but as the prime mover of wellbeing broadly defined. In section one, a brief biographical context is presented for Serra, along with some notes on the nature and context of the time in which he lived. In section two, the idealized conception of good government that dominated from antiquity until the late sixteenth century is summarized, followed in section three by the claim that the more modern conception of good government started locally but was still visualized in its ideal. This will be illustrated briefly through Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s famous fresco »The Allegory of Good and Bad Government«. In section four, Serra’s ideas about what it actually takes to realize good government are summarized. It appears that his brief remarks on the matter found a following in the eighteenth century (section five), became practical policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are still relevant today (section six).

According to one source, Serra was born in the later part of the sixteenth century in the town of Cosenza in the province of the same name, a little over 300 kilometers south of Naples.

CTI: Antonio Serra between History and Economy, Commercial Technical Institute »Antonio Serra«, 2002, online: http://utenti.quipo.it/patserr/antonio.htm, (09. 04. 2021).

In order to understand Serra and his ideas about good government, he needs to be positioned in his (geographical) context and in his time. That will provide the contrast or the relief (as the term is used in sculpture to refer to three-dimensional shapes on a flat base or in painting as tromp l’oeil) that will make Serra’s ideas stand out in comparison to past ideas about good government (see also sections three and four below). At this time, Naples was far removed from the thriving city-states of northern Italy and north-central Europe.

Tiran: Monchrestien and Serra, p. 89–100; Cosimo Perrotta: Serra and Underdevelopment, in: Patalino / Reinert (eds.): Antonio Serra and the Economics of Good Government, pp. 214–233; Theodore A. Sumberg: Antonio Serra. A Neglected Herald of the Acquisitive System, in: The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 50/3 (1991), pp. 165–373, at p. 372.

Serra lived during an age that bridged an era in which good government was essentially identified with the individual behavior of the ruler – that is, a period ending in the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries in Europe – and the period from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the current time, during which good government came to be identified with practical policies benefitting the citizens. Koselleck labelled this sort of bridging period as a »Sattelzeit«,

Reinhart Koselleck: Über die Theoriebedürftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft, in Werner Conze (ed.): Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft und der Praxis des Geschichtsunterrichts. Stuttgart 1972, pp. 10–28.

Until the seventeenth century, conventional understanding of what constituted good government focused on the qualities that rulers and supervisors possessed that guided their actions vis-á-vis their subjects, that is, the people who were subordinate to them. This line of thinking had its roots in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in the so-called instruction or wisdom literature.

Some of these instructions have been transcribed, such as those of Ii-em-hotep (27^th century BCE), which advised humility as an important characteristic of officials.

Miriam Lichtheim: Didactic Literature, in: Antonio Loprieno (ed.): Ancient Egyptian Literature: History & Forms, Leiden 1996, pp. 243–262; J.B. Pritchard (ed.): Ancient Near Eastern texts relating to the Old Testament, Princeton, NJ 1969 [1955]; see also the »Instruction of Ka-Gemmi«, vizier of Pharaoh Sneferu (2613-2589 BCE).

Some of these instructions found their way into the earliest legal codes: Ur-Nammu, King of Ur, 2111–2094 BCE and Hammurabi, King of Babylon, 1792–1750 BCE. The instructions were based on personal experience; the only formal teaching at the time was for learning how to write. In ancient China it was Shen Buhai, a high-ranking civil servant, during the Chou period, who emphasized the importance of education for efficient administrative and technical expertise (4^th century BCE). His ideas were adopted by Yu Hyŏngwŏn, a scholar in seventeenth century Korea.

Jos C.N. Raadschelders: Impartial, Skilled, Respect for Law: The Ancient Ideals of Civil Servants at the Root of Eastern and Western Traditions, in: Korean Journal of Policy Studies, 35/1 (2020), pp. 1–27; J.B. Palais: Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions. Yu Hyŏngwŏn and the late Chosŏn Dynasty, Seattle 1996.

For most of history, government was regarded as the property (patrimonium) of the ruler, and this idea persisted well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, James I [King of England and Ireland, 1603–1625 and James VI as king of Scotland, 1567–1603] noted »I am the husband and the whole Isle is my lawful wife; I am the head and it is my body.«

I. B. Cohen: Interactions. Some Contacts between the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA 1994, p. 30.

While there had been cities and city-states in antiquity, those that emerged in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were neither self-contained republics – as in the case of ancient Greece – nor administrative centers of an empire – as in the case of southern Mesopotamia and Rome.

Harold J. Berman: Law and Revolution. The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, Boston 1983, pp. 357–380.

This changed in two phases. First, from the seventh and eighth centuries on, feudal lords granted annual, and sometimes weekly, market rights to towns. Farmers were to take their produce to the local market and sell it there. Both buyer and seller paid a tax, and some of that went to the landlord. Second, from the eleventh century forward, modern cities emerged not only with an agricultural base, but also with a flourishing new class of artisans and craftsmen. Commercial activity intensified. From the second half of the eleventh century, various towns were granted a city charter, and several of these served as a model for similar charters in the same region. The cities in northern Italy were among the first, but these were quickly followed in the first half of the twelfth century by cities in France, England, and the German territories. It spread to the Low Countries in the course of the thirteenth century. This is the age of the guilds in Europe, an age of social mobility.

These city charters provided some degree of autonomy from the feudal lords in exchange for a share of the taxes. Municipal administration consisted of one or more mayors, several councilmen or aldermen, and justices [échevins] who served for fairly short periods of time of six to twelve months. The cities usually had »lower jurisdiction«. Authority over »high jurisdiction«, that is, criminal and capital punishment, rested with the king or lord or their representative, for example, bailiff [baljuw]. While these cities were part of a Europe dominated by one organized religion, the Catholic Church, they were the first secular states of Europe. They did not emerge organically, they were founded intentionally. Perhaps they were also the first capitalist states, a thought that crossed Sumberg’s mind when he wondered whether the rise of capitalism happened because of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, as – in Sumberg’s view – Weber had argued, or because religion was removed from the center of urban life.

Sumberg: Antonio Serra, p. 365.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, municipal government was no longer considered to be someone’s personal property; it had become the property of the commune. Good governance was thus not embodied in an individual, it was invested in the community. The best visualization of an idealized good government is that of Ambrogio Lorenzetti who painted the allegories of good and bad government in the town hall of Siena in 1338–1339, a decade before the Black Death. In Lorenzetti’s good-government fresco, good government is still depicted in the image of a person; but it is an imaginary person, a bearded man, surrounded by the ancient ideals of faith, hope, charity, temperance, prudence, fortitude, magnanimity, and justice.

Gjalt de Graaf / Hanneke van Asperen: The Art of Good Governance. How Images from the Past provide Inspiration for Modern Practice, in: International Review of Administrative Sciences, 84/2 (2018), pp. 405–420.

The emergence of municipal government in Europe can only be understood as a function of the interplay between the creation of institutional arrangements and how people were involved as citizens. That interplay is captured very well in a recent study by Maarten Prak

Maarten Prak: Citizens without Nations. Urban Citizenship in Europe and the World, c. 1000–1789, Cambridge 2018.

While in prison, Serra was pondering the fate of his city by comparing it to the wealth and prosperity of cities such as Venice and Genoa in the north. He refuted his contemporary Marc’Antonio de Santis, who had argued a few years earlier that the poverty of and lack of money in the Kingdom of Naples was a function of the high rate of exchange.

Anna Casella: De Santis, Marc’Antonio. Biographical Dictionary of Italians, vol. 39, 1991, online: https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/marc-antonio-de-santis_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/ (21. 04. 2021).

It is this remark by Schumpeter that prompted this author’s consideration of Antonio Serra as a bridge between what had been bubbling up in thought about and action in municipal, civic communities before his time, and what would follow after him in thinking about the role of government in society and in the economy. That is, in the centuries preceding Serra’s ideas, city-chartered local governments had become the responsibility of the community as represented in the local political and economic elite. This would trickle up to an awareness of the possibility that even a country could be governed on the basis of a represented population. That thought percolated through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, became stronger and stronger, and reached its apotheosis in the Atlantic Revolutions – for more, see section six).

Serra’s book is divided into three parts.

Roncaglia: The Heritage, p. 303.

A diversified economy is important because agricultural production is dependent upon common accidents. A »multiplicity of manufacturing activity«

Serra: A Short Treatise, p. 121.

This is the first time that a law of diminishing returns is identified.

Connectivity and trade are, in Serra’s view, possible through investment in infrastructure that then included physical infrastructure such as roads, canals, harbors, and so forth. The question arises: How can such connectivity be assured and who is the initiating actor? Also, to Serra a country appears rich when its people are »enterprising, hard-working, creative people who trade not only within their own country, but also abroad, and who are constantly looking for ways of applying their skills«.

Serra: A Short Treatise, p. 123.

What Serra hinted at, a government that invests in infrastructure and people, becomes more fully realized over the next two centuries through ideas about a truly activist government. That is to say, it was initially a type of activism fueled by the elites who espoused enlightened absolutism, where citizens were assumed to be the beneficiaries of good government as defined and managed by monarchs, albeit those inspired by Enlightenment principles, rather than participating in good government directly, as in a democracy. This means that only some of Serra’s ideas were touched upon by Cameralist scholars in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and it was not until the twentieth century that Serra’s ideas about the position and role of government in society and economy become reality in the welfare state.

This is not the place to provide details about the emergence of the administrative and welfare state, so only a few authors shall be mentioned. The German administrator Ludvig Veit Von Seckendorff (1626–1692) wrote in his »Teutscher Fürstenstaat« (1656) about a a concept of government that invests in a well-employed population, supports compulsory elementary education, protects internal freedom of industry and trade, and, as a consequence, eliminates the medieval craft guilds. This is what, indeed, happened in the slipstream of the Atlantic Revolutions. Von Seckendorff also believed that tax revenue should be based on the excise, thus leaving those with higher incomes free to reinvest profits in their businesses.

Schumpeter: History, p. 164. This last element of Von Seckendorff’s ideas is reminiscent of the American neoconservative notion of ›trickle-down‹ economics.

Like Von Seckendorf, his contemporary Nicolas Delamare (1639–1723), a career administrator who worked for King Louis XIV, among others, but also wrote about the role of the state for the general welfare of society in his »Traité de la Police«, which was published in four volumes between 1705 and1738.

This sixteenth to eighteenth century notion of polity, polizei, or police, is not to be confused with the more limited meaning of police as law enforcement which emerges in the nineteenth century.

It was in the eighteenth century that the German philosopher and Cameralist Christiaan von Wolff (1679–1754) observed that the state »should bring to its inhabitants well-being, happiness, »Glückseligkeit«, or – using the Aristotelian notion – eudaimonia.

Mark R. Rutgers: The Prince, His Welfare State, and Its Administration. Christiaan Von Wolff’s Administrative Philosophy, in: Public Voices 4/3 (2000), pp. 29–45, at pp. 30–31.

In the works of Von Wolff and De Tocqueville, a careful balancing act is visible between the interests and needs of individuals and their families on the one hand, and that of the social contract between families that is embodied in the state on the other. According to Von Wolff, a state should not enter the private sphere too much, as its authority is limited to developing policies that advance the common good. The same balancing act between individual/family and society/government is visible in Adam Smith’s »The Theory of Moral Sentiments« (1759) and »The Wealth of Nations« (1776). In the first book, he describes human beings as self-interested but also as having a natural sympathy toward others. Society survives when there are rules that prevent people from harming one another.

Jerry Evensky: Adam Smith’s »Theory of Moral Sentiments«: On Morals and Why They Matter to a Liberal Society of Free People and Free Markets, in: The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19/3 (2005), pp. 109–130, at p. 113.

There are other authors, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Nicolas, Marquis de Condorcet, who write about progress in society on the basis of an egalitarian spirit, but the authors cited above specifically consider the relation between people as individuals and people as a community with a government administration. In the contract between community and government, the latter becomes a »container«,

The conception of institutions as both an »instrument« serving those in and with power as well as a »container« that serves the population at large is drawn from the anthropologist Clive Gamble (2007).

Antonio Serra is one among many authors in the past seven to eight centuries who believed that the position and role of government in society should not be determined by being the property of a privileged individual, but should be more like a »container«

Clive Gamble: Origins and Revolution, Cambridge 2005, esp. ch. 4.

In the previous sections, a bird’s-eye view was provided of the development of these ideas, starting at the local level in the high Middle Ages and extending to upper-local levels in the early modern period. As argued elsewhere, the time of the Atlantic Revolutions concludes a period of slow, yet profound change in thought about the position and role of government in society and establishes a very different relation between people and their government. At least in terms of political theory, people are no longer subjects serving government. They become citizens served by government. The American and French Revolutions established a historically unprecedented institutional arrangement for governing with, among other things, the separation of politics and administration – for example, elected versus appointed – the separation of church and state, the separation of public and private sectors, and the introduction of written constitutions.

Raadschelders: The Three Ages, pp. 66–71.

Again, it is local governments that take the lead in mitigating the worst consequences of urbanization and industrialization through regulations for better housing, fewer working hours, limiting child labor, construction of public utilities (gas, water, electricity), construction of sewer systems, creation of sanitation departments, public health initiatives, and so on. In fact, it is at the local level that the modern study of public administration originates. At both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, it is local administrators who call for the need for educating the next generation of local civil servants and develop a curriculum for it.

MN. Curtis Hoffman: Paradigm Lost: Public Administration at Johns Hopkins University, 1884–96. Public Administration Review, 62/1 (2002), pp. 12–23; Jos C.N. Raadschelders: Vijftig Jaar Bestuurswetenschappen, 1947–1996, in: H.M. de Jong (ed.): Bestuurswetenschappen. Een analyse van 50 jaar Bestuurswetneschappen, Den Haag 1998, pp. 4–39.

At the same, however, one cannot assume that the three decades after WWII were glorious in all respects. The universalist welfare state was also one where eugenics had been practiced during the prewar decades,

Véronique Mottier: Eugenics and the State. Policy-Making in Comparative Perspective, in: A. Bashford / P. Levine (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford 2010, pp. 134–153.

Some 50 years later, it appears that the time of decreasing income inequalities have passed, with the increased emphasis since the 1970s and 1980s on neoliberal economics that, especially in Anglo-American countries, emphasize individual liberty, contracting-out, and privatization, deregulation, and free market. This was also a recipe peddled in the 1990s by what is known as the Washington Consensus, where the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the American Treasure Department advised developing countries to open their markets and focus on tax reform, fiscal discipline, trade liberalization, deregulation, and privatization of state enterprises. What thinkers like Serra and Smith warned about actually happened: the capture of the public sector by private interests, and the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk. Have the neoliberal economics served the populations of democratic-developed and of lesser-developed countries, or have they served those with economic and political power? Given that income inequality has increased pretty much everywhere

Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA 2014.

Based on a few hundred years of thriving local government, Antonio Serra pondered what lessons could be learned from the past, contrasted the Neapolitan and Venetian present, and contemplated a future where local experience could be extended to include all those in a sovereign jurisdiction. Some might think that this is reading too much into what Serra actually wrote, but he does hint at elements of public institutional arrangements that are expanded upon in the writing of scholars in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who thought about the position and role of government. These ideas became the lived reality in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the past 40 years, it appears that to varying degrees democratic political systems have retreated somewhat from this benevolent, inclusive welfare state, so the question becomes: is this permanent, or what’s next?

History is never a linear process from a current to an improved situation. Rather it is a waxing and waning of trends influenced by the intricate interplay of individual and institutional agents. The neoliberal economics and neoconservative politics have put a strain on the human nature of sociality, collaboration, sharing, and reciprocity, and this is most clear in the Western democratic political systems that have absorbed political, religious, and economic refugees from other parts of the world. In these countries nativist sentiments have emerged and have been exploited and manipulated for personal gain by right-wing parties. Powerful individuals seek to bend and control institutional arrangements in the hope of serving their own drive for and toward power. At the same time, it is the institutional arrangements that actually may prove to be the guardian of sociality. In his study about the impact of immigration upon the welfare state and social identity, Crepaz notes that especially the social-democratic regimes have proven to be quite resilient to the influence of nativist sentiments; corporatist-conservative regimes less so, and neoliberal regimes least so. At the same time, though, the Nordic social democracies did practice eugenics. Crepaz observes that the universal welfare system found in northwestern European countries builds trust among people of different backgrounds and overrides, but not obliterates, the in-group/out-group thinking emphasized by those espousing nativist sentiments. Social trust is molded by the institutional arrangement of the universal welfare state.

Markus M.L. Crepaz: Trust Beyond Borders. Immigration, the Welfare State, and Identity in Modern Societies, Ann Arbor 2008, p. 149.

Perhaps this author gives Antonio Serra too much credit, but Serra is not thinking only about economic issues. His attention to the position and role of government in society makes him someone who had a vision for a better future based on his own experiences in Southern Italy and comparing that to the economy and society in north-Italian city-states in his past and present. Writing in prison, his personal life may have felt to be at rock-bottom, but he found hope in thinking about a better future. Ending on a personal note, in the past ten years or so, the number of students who are cynical and/or concerned about the future, has increased quite a bit. This is certainly the case in the United States, where I teach, and is possibly less so in European countries. But, in all Western countries, millennials and gen-Xers experience the consequences of income inequality, and it appears that the pendulum of history is slowly but surely swinging back to some version of a less individualistic, less market-driven, less prostituting-principles-for political-power behavior. With Serra, and with so many thinkers before and after him, we can reflect and learn from the past and apply what we have learned as we project into the future.