Foreword

Summary

When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited Naples on his Grand Tour of Italy in 1786–1788, he was above all struck by his meetings with the ‘remarkable’ Gaetano Filangieri, heir of the Princes of Arianello, ‘one of those noble-hearted young men to whom the happiness and freedom of mankind is a goal they never lose sight of.’ Baffled, he could only admit that he had ‘never heard Filangieri say anything commonplace.’ From Goethe, this was quite a compliment. At the time, the young Neapolitan he frequented was principally lionized for his massive Science of Legislation, one of the most influential works of eighteenth century legal, political, and economic thought, translated into every major language in the European world and published in at least seventy different editions. Luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, who upheld a lengthy epistolary with Filangieri, found the Science of Legislation an ‘invaluable work,’ wishing for more volumes of it in the wake of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, but it also had popular appeal enough to be included in circulating libraries. In 1806, the Edinburgh Review called Filangieri's magnum opus ‘a work of philosophical excellence, which bears the traces of much learned research, and breathes, in every page, sentiments of the purest virtue, mingled with an undaunted spirit of liberty, and zeal for the improvement of mankind.’ Indeed, Filangieri was a man it was ‘impossible to venerate too much.’