FILANGIERI, GAETANO. Jurist, born in Naples on 22 Aug. 1753, died at Vico Equense on 21 July 1788.
His fame, which was very great in his own time but has now largely faded, rests on his work *Scienza della legislazione* (Naples 1758 ff.). Believing in the *raison* of the Enlightenment, he saw in the wisdom of a rational legislation the surest ethical-political method, though not without sometimes falling into the danger of juridical abstraction and mechanism (a common failing, however, among all theorists of enlightened despotism), a danger which he often avoided through his conscious advocacy of utilitarian and individualistic solutions to problems of the State.
Favourable to a tempered monarchy, he exalted the balancing function (between it and the people) of an “intermediate class”: nobility and magistracy; a solution rooted in the thought of Montesquieu. Filangieri was not entirely bound to juridical experience: in delineating, for example, the concept of nation, he already perceived how it is founded upon consciousness and will. Naturally, however, the central core of his theories is distinctly Enlightenment in character: every solution to a problem of the State is, for Filangieri, above all an eudaimonistic solution; his pacifism and humanitarianism likewise aim at the realization of happiness on earth.
In the social sphere he favoured the abolition of feudalism, and in the economic sphere the primacy of agriculture and a single tax. In the field of criminal law he was a staunch defender of the individual against the scant guarantees offered by procedures based on the inquisitorial method. In education he advocated State instruction, which could generally form the “citizen.” His educational method is linked to the naturalistic abstraction of the century: it is Nature—“this ancient teacher”—who regulates the progressive order of pedagogy; naturally, his keen insight dissolves the initial harshness in educational competition when he recognizes the demands of the free spirit.
The *Scienza della legislazione* was placed on the Index on 6 Dec. 1784, evidently because of its rationalistic and jurisdictional postulates.