CARLI, GIAN RINALDO. — Born in Capodistria on 11 April 1720, died in Milan on 22 February 1795, he was one of the most prominent figures in the Milanese cultural milieu that flourished around the Verri brothers, Beccaria, and Parini. At the age of twenty-four he became professor of astronomy and navigation at the University of Padua (1744–49), and demonstrated the fruits of his scientific studies in the work Sulla declinazione dell'ago magnetico (1747). After an unsuccessful attempt to establish an industry, he went to Milan (1764), where he became part of the learned society that gathered around the Caffè.
In 1765 he published the Discorso della Patria agli italiani; and he demonstrated his competence in economic science with the work Delle monete e dell'istituzione delle zece in Italia, still appreciated by economists today.
He devoted particular attention to educational problems, as issues that could contribute to improving society both with regard to conduct and to intellectual knowledge. To this end he wrote the Nuovo metodo per le scuole pubbliche d'Italia (Opere, XVIII, Milan 1787).
C., observing the deficiencies of the schools of his time, in which pedantic teachers exercised the memory rather than forming the mind, outlined a plan of educational reform, asserting first of all that education belongs to the State, which must provide schools of common education for children from four to nine or ten years of age, where they would learn to read, write, and calculate. These schools were followed by what he called elementary schools, but which in reality corresponded to the present-day gymnasium and lyceum: their purpose was to provide an intellectual education, first activating the memory (through the study of languages, moral maxims, geography, which must begin with the topography of one’s own country, and history), then reflection (geometry, logic); finally, the young people would study Italian and Latin poetry and eloquence. Returning to certain principles of the humanist school, C. wished glory and honor to be placed in the education of the young as the incentives best suited to enable them to acquire « vigore ed energia per le grandi cose e per le utili azioni e imprese ». To complete their studies, there followed, on the one hand, the Academy of Sciences and Arts, with purely scientific aims, and, on the other, the university, with an entirely professional purpose.
Although not free from the influence of Rousseau, C., in his work L'uomo libero, refuted the Contratto sociale of the Genevan, while in the Ragionamento sulla ineguaglianza fisica, morale e civile tra gli uomini (1792), he criticized Rousseau’s Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes. In the first essay he aimed to arouse « subordinazione e rispetto verso le leggi ».
In the other essay he asserted, against Rousseau, the spiritual and ethical inequality of Christianity, according to whose conception physical, moral, and civil inequalities constitute a law of harmony necessary for the preservation and progress of society, which is « un monte composto di strati di natura diversa, uno sovrapposto all'altro, in modo che reciprocamente si sostengono », « al contrario un monte tutto composto di uniforme arena, a nessuna vicenda della pioggia, del vento, dell'aria può egli resistere ».