Chapter Ten - The Liberal Constant against the Enlightened Filangieri: Two interpretations of Modernity

Summary

Closing the Commentaire [sur l'ouvrage de Filangier], at a distance, by then, of a hundred and forty years, we can no longer accept, as Constant's generation did, the validity of his verdicts and his critiques. How poorly Constant knew the world of eighteenth-century Naples! He did not understand that many of the contradictions he noted were nothing but attempts to understand the reality which surrounded Filangieri… And how can one not see that Constant did not fully understand that desire for justice and equality which so deeply underlies the eighteenth century, and which the nascent liberalism of the new century would evade in a thousand ways and perhaps hide with a thousand sophisms? Why not feel Filangieri's fear of war, rather than be overcome by Constant's optimism, which saw war excluded and impossible in modern economies and societies?

Franco Venturi, ‘Gaetano Filangieri,’ in Illuministi italiani (1962)

Between 1822 and 1824, a strong, unexpected attack on Filangieri appeared in Paris. It was a veritable public trial, masterfully studied and successfully concluded through the publication of two dense, caustic volumes, which culminated with the bitter banishment to oblivion of the entire Enlightenment school of natural law that had emerged in Naples in the second half of the eighteenth century.

In over four hundred printed pages entitled Commentaire sur l'ouvrage de Filangieri, Benjamin Constant, the spiritual father of European liberalism and author of this implacable condemnation, denounced the dangers, the anachronisms, and the possible misunderstandings hidden in the work of the Italian jurist and philosopher.