GIACINTO DRAGONETTI: LA CENTRALITÀ DELLE VIRTÙ CIVILI E DEI PREMI NELL’ILLUMINISMO NAPOLETANO ED EUROPEO

Giacinto Dragonetti: the central role of civil virtues and rewards in the Neapolitan and European enlightenments. Giacinto Dragonetti, a contemporary of Cesare Beccaria, published in 1766 an anonymous pamphlet on virtues and prizes. He moved from the observation that human beings made countless laws to punish villainies and vices, but not a single one to reward virtues. His proposal was to have, alongside the criminal code, a kind of code for rewards. The pamphlet was a tremendous success, but, differently from Beccaria’s work on crimes and punishments, it ended up being completely forgotten. Attempts by later scholars to revive its fame (such as the one by Melchiorre Gioja in the early nineteenth century) were not successful. Dragonetti is being rediscovered nowadays in the context of the drive towards a new understanding of the relationship between law and economics, a field to which he rightly belongs alongside Beccaria.