Economia, politica e governamentalità. Un’indagine sui trattati sull’economica nel tardo Rinascimento italiano

This article aims to investigate some of the most relevant Italian early modern treatises on economica in an attempt to highlight, with a genealogical approach, the birth of a new art of government, which takes the name of political economy. By comparing the treatises of Giovanni Battista Assandri (Della economica overo disciplina domestica, 1616) and Bartolomeo Frigerio (L'economo prudente, 1629) with the tradition of Aristotelian oikonomia, and highlighting their originality in the context of the late Italian Renaissance reflection on the arts of government, the aim is to describe the historical moment from which an unprecedented convergence between economics and politics takes place. In the light of this research, the convergence between “economy”and the “political”, which occurs in the wake of Giovanni Botero's discourse on the ragion di Stato, seems to be a new one of state government that will have a decisive importance in the formation of political rationality and modern "governmentality"