Naples, Lord Acton and the European Catholic-liberal moment

Matteo Liberatore, the Jesuit who prepared Rerum novarum, and Lord Acton, the great British liberal historian, were both born in Naples: a coincidence that invites us to restore a forgotten tradition.

From Vico, Genovesi and Filangieri in the 18th century to Taparelli and Liberatore in the 19th, Naples was one of the great homes of a liberalism at once Catholic and critical of the centralised state.

This genealogy, extended by Acton, Döllinger, Newman and Sturzo, reminds us that liberalism is not an exclusively Anglo-Saxon affair — and that its French and Catholic traditions are more complicit than is said.

When one discovers Matteo Liberatore and learns that he was born in Salerno in 1810, that he made his career in Naples at the Collegio Massimo, that he founded La Civiltà Cattolica with Taparelli — another Neapolitan Jesuit by adoption — the question naturally comes to mind: why Naples? Why did this city, capital of a Bourbon kingdom long held to be backward by progressive historiography, produce one of the great moments of nineteenth-century Catholic liberalism?

The question is not anecdotal. Lord Acton, the most famous of the British liberal historians of his century, was also born in Naples, on 10 January 1834, into an Anglo-German family in the service of the Bourbon court. His most quoted formula did not fall from the sky:

« Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. »

This sentence, drawn from a letter to Mandell Creighton (1887), comes from the close observation of a power he had seen from the inside, within his own father’s family. And behind Acton and Liberatore there emerges a Neapolitan tradition that deserves to be restored, because it changes the usual geography of liberalism.

From Vico to Filangieri: three centuries of Neapolitan intelligence

The Neapolitan genealogy begins very high. Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), with his Scienza nuova (1725), founds a philosophy of history that already resists the abstract rationalism of the French Enlightenment and that would be rediscovered by the German Romantics. Antonio Genovesi (1713-1769) occupied in 1754 the first chair of political economy in all of Europe at the University of Naples — that is, twenty-two years before the Wealth of Nations of the Scotsman Adam Smith. Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1787), a pupil of Genovesi, wrote Della Moneta at the age of twenty-three: it is one of the great treatises of monetary economics of the century, praised by Hume and read by Smith. Gaetano Filangieri (1752-1788), with La Scienza della legislazione, became for Franklin and Jefferson one of the inspirers of American constitutional thought; the correspondence between Filangieri and Franklin is documented. Vincenzo Cuoco, finally, analysed the Neapolitan revolution of 1799 (Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana, 1801) with a lucidity about the gap between the enlightened elites and the people that French historiography would take a hundred and fifty years to reach.

This tradition is not a chance alignment. It stems from several converging factors: the strong ecclesiastical autonomy of the Kingdom of Naples, which protected university teaching from direct political intervention; the presence of a large merchant and legal bourgeoisie in the Mediterranean capital; constant intellectual contact with France, Spain, England and the Empire; the centrality of an erudite clergy, Jesuit or Benedictine, which made the Neapolitan colleges direct competitors of the Sorbonne or Oxford. Naples, in the eighteenth century, is not the province one has sometimes imagined: it is the largest city in Italy, and one of the five largest in Europe by population and intellectual production.

The Liberatore-Taparelli moment

It is on this soil that there grew, in the nineteenth century, what one might call the Neapolitan Jesuit-liberal school. Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, trained in Rome, came to head the Collegio Massimo of Naples in 1833; there he undertook the neo-Thomist restoration that would culminate in the Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale (1840-1843), translated into French in 1855. Matteo Liberatore, his junior by seventeen years, joined him and collaborated on La Civiltà Cattolica, founded in Naples in 1850. The Principes d’économie politique of 1889 are the crowning of sixty years of Neapolitan reflection on the relations between economic freedom, natural law and Catholic doctrine. They prepare Rerum novarum, which Leo XIII would sign two years later.

Lord Acton: Naples seen from inside power

The Acton case deserves to be specified, because it complicates the genealogy in a fruitful way. Sir John Acton, his grandfather, was prime minister of the Kingdom of Naples under Ferdinand IV and then I, between 1779 and 1804 — that is, at the apogee of Bourbon power. His father, Richard, continued to serve the court. Lord Acton thus grew up at the junction of three worlds: the English Catholic aristocracy through his father, the German house of Dalberg-Acton through his mother, and the Neapolitan court through his birthplace.

His family is not a family « reactive » to Bourbon power: it is Bourbon power.

The remarkable fact is that Acton emerged from it not absolutist but profoundly liberal. His education in Munich, under the direction of Ignaz von Döllinger — another major figure of the European Catholic-liberal moment — brought him closer to a severe critique of Roman absolutism that he would carry as far as the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), where he publicly opposed the definition of papal infallibility. His formula on absolute power comes precisely from the close observation of a power he had seen operate within his own family. Naples gave him not liberalism by opposition to the regime, but liberalism by maturation within the regime, which is perhaps more profound.

The rupture of 1860 and the « questione meridionale »

On the frequent thesis of a Neapolitan liberalism that would have formed in reaction to centralism, a chronological distinction must be made. Before 1860, Bourbon centralism is real but uneven; the Neapolitan intellectual tradition lives despite political power, never really against it — except in the revolutionary sequence of 1799 and the republican martyrology of Pagano, Cirillo and Eleonora Pimentel Fonseca. After 1860, on the other hand, the Piedmontese conquest of the South, directed from Turin by the House of Savoy, imposed an administrative centralisation far harsher than the Bourbon regime had been: brutal suppression of the religious orders (which directly affected Liberatore’s Jesuits), confiscation of ecclesiastical property, dissolution of the southern economic structures for the benefit of the North’s industrialisation, mass conscription, brigandage repressed by arms. This is what Italian historians call the questione meridionale, and which indeed creates, by way of reaction, a new generation of southern intellectuals hostile to the unitary state.

Liberatore published his Principes in 1889, in an Italy where Piedmontese centralisation was already twenty-nine years old. His insistence on the plurality of natural societies, on the subsidiarity of the state, on the autonomy of intermediate bodies, on the illegitimacy of the state that absorbs society, targets very precisely what the House of Savoy had done to the Mezzogiorno.

This is not merely doctrine; it is also intellectual resistance.

The European Catholic-liberal moment

Let us broaden the view. What Naples, Acton and Liberatore reveal is in fact a vaster European moment: that of nineteenth-century Catholic liberalism. In England: John Henry Newman, Lord Acton, Nicholas Wiseman. In Germany: Ignaz von Döllinger (Acton’s master in Munich), Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (bishop of Mainz, pioneer of social Catholicism). In France: Lamennais before his rupture, Charles de Montalembert, Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, Albert de Falloux, Frédéric Ozanam. In Italy: Antonio Rosmini with Delle cinque piaghe della Santa Chiesa (1832, placed on the Index in 1849), Vincenzo Gioberti — with important ambiguities — then Liberatore, Taparelli and, later, Don Luigi Sturzo.

All these figures have in common a thesis: Catholicism is not the natural ally of absolutism, it is the natural ally of political liberty. A thesis that Tocqueville defended in his Democracy in America. All these thinkers see in the modern centralised state — whether Jacobin, Bourbon, Savoyard, Prussian or Victorian — the structural threat to the dignity of the person and to the legitimate plurality of societies. This is what Acton sums up in another formula, less known but just as essential:

« Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. »

This movement did not remain without posterity. Leo XIII, in 1891, would be its magisterial culmination: Rerum novarum is the work of a pope who had read Bastiat during his pastorate in Perugia, who had Liberatore work on the drafting, and who consciously situates himself within the European tradition of Catholic liberalism. In the twentieth century, Don Luigi Sturzo — born in Sicily, territory of the Kingdom of Naples, trained in the same Italian school — would found in 1919 the Partito Popolare Italiano on the same basis, and would prepare, through De Gasperi, Schuman and Adenauer, what would become post-war European Christian democracy.

Why reopen this file today

Knowing this intellectual and political genealogy has two merits. It first avoids reducing liberalism to an exclusively Anglo-Saxon and Protestant affair. French liberalism, from Montesquieu to Bastiat, and European Catholic liberalism, from Vico to Sturzo, are two tributaries of the same river, which have sometimes diverged but which have coexisted and dialogued for three centuries. Liberatore reads and criticises Bastiat; Acton admires Tocqueville and Burke; Newman and Montalembert write to each other; Döllinger and Acton instruct a whole generation on the history of liberty.

It then recalls that the critique of the centralised state is not the monopoly of one school or one era. Vico, Filangieri, Acton, Liberatore and Sturzo posed it each in his own way, in different contexts, but converging on the essential: a free society is a plural society, made of natural communities that the state must respect, protect, and only supplement where they fail. What Pius XI would name, in 1931, subsidiarity is, in reality, a European tradition whose roots plunge into eighteenth-century Naples, and higher still.

To read Acton, to read Liberatore, is to enter an uninterrupted intellectual conversation on the nature of political liberty, and to rediscover that the two great traditions of European liberalism — the French and the Catholic — are, in many respects, more complicit than is said. At a time when liberalism is questioning its own foundations, this detour through Naples is well worth the journey.

Jean-Baptiste Noé holds a doctorate in economic history (Sorbonne University) and is a professor of geopolitics and political economy at the Ircom. He is editor-in-chief of Conflits.