Abstract

This essay discusses the relationship between the literature on the «household management » and that of «government of the city» focusing on Giovanni Botero's Ragion di Stato and Bartolomeo Frigerio's "Economo prudente". Within the context of the changes in the Italian political culture in 16th and 17th century, the two treatises reveal a convergence between political and domestic government based on an original rethinking of the Aristotelian model. The "oeconomic" arts of managing the household that appears in the model of "pater familias" are applied in the different sphere of the Statecraft giving birth to an «economic reason of State».