Il volume "Languages of Political Economy. Cross-Disciplinary Studies on Economic Translations", edito dalla Pisa University Press. e curato da Elena Carpi e Marco Guidi dell'Ateneo pisano, raccoglie una serie di studi condotti da storici della economia, linguisti e storici della letteratura che hanno partecipato al programma LLP/Erasmus Progetto Multilaterale "EE-T. Economia e-Traduzioni in e da lingue europee, una piattaforma online" coordinato dall'Università di Pisa.
Al fine di comprendere appieno i testi economici del passato è molto importante sottolineare gli aspetti linguistici. Ogni testo infatti è stato tradotto dalla lingua originale in altre lingue europee, usando termini specifici che riflettono il contesto storico e politico del periodo. È quindi necessario un'analisi linguistica delle diverse traduzioni per comprendere la storia del pensiero economico così come è altrettanto importante ricostruire il contesto sociale, istituzionale e intellettuale delle traduzioni, al fine di capire le ragioni che hanno ispirato tali imprese e il pubblico a cui erano rivolte.
Il libro contiene saggi di Giulia Bianchi, Fabrizio Bientinesi, Elena Carpi, Marco Cini, Carolina Flinz, Alessandra Ghezzani, Cristina Guccione, Marco Guidi, Matteo Lefèvre e Monica Lupetti.
Pubblichiamo qui di seguito un estratto dell'introduzione a firma di Elena Carpi e Marco Guidi.
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[...] The content of the message conveyed by political economy was variable along time. In the 18th century the main focus was on the ability of the sovereign and its ministers to promote welfare through emulation, protection of national industry, jealousy of trade, colonial expansion, and war. At the beginning of the 19th century this attitude progressively faded away, replaced by the new gospel of laissez-faire, a vision that it would be limited to confine to the argument that markets are efficient in coordinating individual decisions and generating the "unintended result" of social welfare. What is reversed in this new consensus is the conception of government as the result of the visible hand of a paternal sovereign.
There is a "governmentality" in the natural laws of commerce and population that imposes itself as an impersonal and unalterable necessity, obliging individuals and governments to follow the virtuous path marked by them (Foucault 2004a, 2004b). This vision was in turn partially reversed by the critical attitudes that, both on the left and on the right wing of the political spectrum, arose in the last decades of the 19th century as a response to the so-called "social question", the dark side of the expansion generated by the industrial revolution and the development of world trade. And further evolutions occurred in the early 20th century as a response to the dramatic consequences of wars, revolutions and totalitarianisms.
The communication of these messages was the product of individuals and networks who actively promoted not only the spread of economic ideas, but also the creation of institutions that, both in civil society and in government, translated these ideas into new programmes and actions, with a view to generating welfare, justice, and progress. And the point is that an important part of this process of social construction was represented not only by successful ideas and ideologies, but also by consistent languages and tropes shared by entire communities, through which social mechanisms and the behaviour of individuals and groups were represented. There is no social organisation without a coherent representation of it in the mind of participants, and there is no representation without a coherent language. It is in this way that historians of economics meet experts in linguistics and literature, and feel an increasing necessity to cooperate with them.
A second, specific reason for this cooperation is determined by the typical transnational dimension of the spread of economic ideas and economic institutions. The maps traced by historical demographers for the expansion of the great viral diseases of the past across national borders are a model that could be applied to the circulation of economic notions and languages, and to the transmigration and adaptation of successful economic institutions to new contexts. Translations of treatises, textbooks, pamphlets and journal articles are essential elements of this virality (Guidi 2013). Historians of economics have started to pay attention to translations as vehicles for the circulation of economic ideas and tools for the promotion of ideologies, political programmes, and class or group interests (see Reinert 2011).
The cooperation with experts of languages and literature dramatically improves the understanding of these phenomena, by encouraging a more in-depth contrastive analysis of the source and target texts, of their internal structures and paratextual apparatuses, and of terminology, syntax and rhetoric. If language is the backbone of the social construction of reality, the migration of terms, tropes and slang is the fuel of institutional imitation and adaptation. It is a fact that neologisms are often the product of translations, or of those individuals and circles that produced translations. But neologisms and new languages are successful and survive (at least for a certain time) only provided that they are actively spoken in relevant contexts. This is an additional reason for promoting and constantly feeding a common area of research between experts of economics and experts of languages [...].
Elena Carpi, Marco E.L. Guidi