Sometime around 1750 a Neapolitan abbé opened a new French book and read it in its own language. The book was Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, and the reader was Antonio Genovesi. He called its author Granduomo and wrote that it had left every earlier political system far behind. When an Italian translation appeared in Naples in 1777, eight years after his death, his notes ran along the foot of its pages. One of the last sits beneath the second chapter of Book 20, a chapter titled “On the Spirit of Commerce.” Montesquieu opens it with a sentence that would travel far: “The natural effect of trade is to lead to peace.” The note answers without ceremony. “Commerce is the great source of war. It is jealous, and jealousy arms men.”
What lies between the admiration and the rebuttal? Luigino Bruni and Paolo Santori take that footnote as their whole object. They read it as a philosophy in compressed form, and as the record of a mind that had once believed what Montesquieu believed.
The Matter of a Footnote
The sentence Genovesi contested belongs to the doux commerce thesis, the idea that trade gentles manners. In Albert Hirschman’s account, the new commercial societies of Europe were imagined as resting on interests rather than passions. Pride and revenge were violent and unpredictable. Interest was steady and calculable.
Genovesi does not deny that trade can serve peace. He moves the cause elsewhere. “If two nations trade together for reciprocal needs,” the note continues, “these needs are in opposition to war, not the spirit of commerce.”
Much of the scholarship follows István Hont’s Jealousy of Trade and places this quarrel among the rivalries of eighteenth-century states. Bruni and Santori pursue a philosophical hypothesis about the texts instead. Genovesi, they propose, read Montesquieu as a thinker of mechanism, for whom human conduct could be explained by physical causes such as climate, soil, and the form of government. The complaint resembles Rousseau’s charge that Montesquieu merely described governments as they exist, and it anticipates Louis Althusser’s later phrase, “mechanistic materialism.” The inquiry concerns Genovesi’s reading and what it made possible for him, not its fidelity to Montesquieu.
The word both men were arguing over has a long memory. Spirit descends from the Greek pneuma, breath or air, which the Stoics took for the finest matter in the cosmos and the reason governing all things. In the Latin spiritus the meaning divided. Physicians from Galen to Descartes spoke of animal spirits moving a body conceived as a machine, while theologians spoke of a Holy Spirit, eternal and indivisible. Over the next two centuries the French esprit drifted from the divine toward the faculties of mind. The Italian Vocabolario della Crusca gave spirito a sense nearer the ground: a soul, or a nature, inclined toward some particular thing.
By Montesquieu’s day another sense had settled over these. The spirit of a thing was its underlying meaning, spirit as against letter, in a contrast that echoes the apostle Paul. Montesquieu wrote that he treated not of laws but of their spirit. Genovesi inherited this sense intact. To ask after the spirit of commerce was, for both, to ask what commerce is at bottom.
Fear, and What Is Held in Common
The disagreement appears in Genovesi’s very first note. Montesquieu had defined laws as the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things. Genovesi objected that this treats laws only as real relations. A science of human affairs must also weigh possible relations, what could or should obtain between one person and another. These belong to what he called the right of the moral laws.
Genovesi was no stranger to physics, and he held observation to be the starting point of every inquiry. Yet description is a first moment, not a last one. Formed in the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, he placed nerves and sensations in the mechanical order and virtue in the moral. Reason is the faculty by which a human being passes from one to the other. It lets us compare, judge, and choose.
The difference grows vivid where both men imagine human beings before society. Neither accepts Hobbes’s war of all against all. For Montesquieu, natural man feels first his own weakness, and his timidity is extreme. Mutual fear, joined to sexual attraction and the pleasure of knowing, draws people together.
Genovesi reads the scene otherwise. When two strangers meet, he writes, the first movement of the mind is reciprocal observation. The second is recognition with mutual pleasure, unless appearances excite suspicion. It is not mutual fear that unites men, he concludes, but the common consciousness.
The authors dwell on that adjective. Mutual fear is the fear each has of the other, fixed on the possible blow and blind to the other’s fear. Common names something shared and known to be shared. The Italian comune descends from the Latin cum-munus, a gift given in return. To see another as bearing the same vulnerability is already to have crossed from the physical into the moral. That crossing is a choice, guided by reason and formed by education.
Two Spirits in a Single Exchange
Montesquieu’s chapter makes three claims that matter here. Commerce brings peace because its spirit unites nations. That union holds between nations, not persons. Between persons, the spirit of commerce runs against the moral virtues, as Holland showed. Yet in Book 5 he had written that a commercial democracy could keep its mores intact, since commerce brings frugality, moderation, and order. The authors resolve the tension through his method. Commerce sustains virtue in small, equal republics and erodes it where great inequalities of wealth arise. Material conditions decide its moral effects.
Genovesi declines that last step. Trade for reciprocal needs, in his note, is not something the spirit of commerce produces of its own accord. It arises when persons and nations consciously choose to understand their exchange as mutual benefit. The refinement is the work of education. Rational education teaches the interdependence of nations. Moral education forms justice, benevolence, and a love of country that opens onto the community of humankind.
This is the civil economy, economia civile, and its vocabulary carries its difference. Genovesi speaks of mutua assistenza, mutual assistance, where political economy would say mutual advantage, and the change of word returns intention to the market. Man is called a sociable animal, he observes, but he is hardly the only one. What sets human sociability apart is a reciprocal right to be assisted and a reciprocal obligation to help.
Hence the title of his treatise, Lezioni di commercio o sia di economia civile. Commerce does not civilize of itself. It becomes civilizing when citizens learn to read their exchanges as mutual service, and what they learn between persons they can carry into the relations between nations. Without that formation the spirit of commerce degenerates and stirs the conflicts it might have calmed.
Where Commerce Is Loved
The note to Book 20 is late, and it records a change. In the Elementi di commercio of 1757, Genovesi named peace as the third fruit of commerce, since one nation has an interest in buying and the other in selling. The Lezioni repeat the passage, now crediting the author of The Spirit of the Laws. Then comes a qualifying sentence. Jealousy of gain and the power of the sea not infrequently arm nations, though the interest of trade soon disarms them.
By the opening of the seventeenth chapter the qualification has become a thesis. “The spirit of commerce is that of conquest,” Genovesi writes. Barbarians conquer peoples and lands; trading peoples conquer riches. In the second edition of 1769, the year of his death, he added a footnote for readers who found the phrase odd. They should ask, he wrote, why we trade if not to conquer.
Here he takes up a distinction from Jean-François Melon. The aims of commerce are to sustain a population and furnish it with the comforts of life. Its spirit is conquest. The spoils have changed from land to riches. The jealous temper of war remains.
The distinction holds Genovesi’s thought together. Commerce carries both possibilities, the drive to dominate and the promise of mutual assistance. Its telos, the end that discloses what it truly is, appears only among people educated toward virtue. Mutual assistance comes more easily between individuals than between nations, and between nations it requires that education be widespread. Where that education is absent, the spirit of commerce narrows to the spirit of conquest, and conquest ends in war.
Bruni and Santori read in the fading of doux commerce one of the failures of Western humanism, in a century where governments still go to war with commercial interests at their side. Genovesi had already named the condition in a single clause. Where commerce is loved, he wrote, war cannot go on. The love was never in the goods. It belonged to those who traded, and it had to be taught.
Bruni, Luigino, and Paolo Santori. “Peace, War, and the Spirit of Commerce: Genovesi as a Reader of Montesquieu.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, advance online publication, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837226101412.
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