FILANGIERI, GAETANO. — Jurist, born in Naples on 22 August 1753, died at Vico Equense on 21 July 1788.
He owes his fame, immense in his own time but now almost faded, to the work Scienza della legislazione (Naples 1780 ff.). A believer in the Enlightenment raison, he sees in the wisdom of rational legislation the surest ethical-political method, though not without the occasional danger of falling into juridical abstractionism and mechanism (a danger common, however, to all theorists of enlightened despotism), which is moreover often avoided through the conscious utilitarian and individualistic solutions he advances in dealing with problems of the State.
Favorable to a tempered monarchy, he extols the balancing function—between it and the people—of an “intermediate stratum”: the nobility and the magistracy; a solution rooted in the thought of Montesquieu. F. is not entirely bound to the esprit géométrique: in outlining, for example, the concept of the nation, he already perceives that it is founded upon consciousness and will. Naturally, however, the central core of his theories is genuinely Enlightenment-oriented: for F., every state solution is above all an eudaimonistic solution; his pacifism and his humanitarianism likewise aim at the realization of happiness on earth.
In the social sphere he favors the abolition of feudalism, and in the economic sphere the primacy of agriculture and a single tax. In the field of criminal law he is a strenuous defender of the individual against the scant guarantees afforded by trials based on the inquisitorial method. In the educational sphere he advocates state education, which can generally form the “citizen”: F.’s educational method is linked to the naturalistic abstractionism of the century; it is nature, “this one teacher,” that regulates the progressive order of pedagogy. Naturally, his keen insight resolves the initial harshness in the concrete techniques of education when he recognizes the demands of the spirit, which is free. Scienza della legislazione was placed on the Index on 6 December 1784, evidently because of its rationalistic and jurisdictionalist postulates.