Birth of a Metropolis: The Open City and the Social Sciences in Naples, 1650–1800

The paper examines the process of urbanization that invested the capital city of Naples in the early modern period and the new knowledges, or social sciences, of the polity necessitated by that same process. This paper shows that the hypertrophic growth of early modern capitals numbered among the preconditions for the development and application of the social sciences in Europe. It illustrates how hypertrophic growth undercut both the extant structures and self-understanding of the early modern capital, by obviating the police organs and political categories of the municipality. The paper makes plain why and how the social sciences were first deployed to regulate the alien members of the civic polity from above and to empower them from below. If the city long had been understood as the source of political civilization in Europe, then the advent of the metropolis as both a reality and a concept posed hard questions about the nature and governance of the capital city and its constituency in the age of Enlightenment. Consequently, the aims of this paper are threefold. In the first place, it documents the birth of the concept of the “metropolis” and shows how it challenged traditional assumptions about the civilization of the city, both political and cultural, and the behavior of its constituency. Secondly, it contextualizes the new language of the “metropolis,” by documenting the demographic expansion of the city and showing how that expansion posed a new sort of political problem that was beyond the remedy of the traditional organs of municipality. Finally, it will give an example of the social sciences that described the “metropolis” around 1750 and make plain that they were not only the instruments of a centralizing administration but also the tools of the common people, who with them too claimed to promote their rights to “civilization.”