Contemporary of every age: Gaetano Filangieri between "public felicity" and institutional economics

In the decades around the turn of the eighteenth century, Naples was capital of the Kingdom of Naples and Europe's third most populous city. Throughout the eighteenth century, the city spawned a school of enlightened intellectuals that, though predominantly juridical in cast, nevertheless displayed a surprisingly substantial openness to a new approach to the social sciences, which had developed above all in France and Great Britain, heavily influenced by the natural sciences and the experimental method. As a prominent member of the Neapolitan Enlightenment School, Gaetano Filangieri was the main advocate of the principle of indissoluble interaction between institutions - formal and informal - and economic development, between governance and economic achievements, that are pillars of today's school of institutional economics. His writings anticipated, in a number of respects, conceptual approaches adopted by later scholars. The present paper offers an institutional focus on his work, deriving inspiration above all from Douglass North and his treatment of the role of the Glorious Revolution.