In 2026, We the Italians celebrates “Two Anniversaries, One Heart” – the 250th anniversary of the United States and the 80th anniversary of the Italian Republic. This article is part of the “Happy Birthday USA: Italy’s Role in America’s Greatness” project, in which we tell the stories of 18 well-known figures of Italian heritage who helped make the United States great.

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Gaetano Filangieri, “public happiness” as the “supreme law” between Naples and Philadelphia

In 1781, the first two volumes of a work destined to leave a profound mark on the history of Western legal thought came into the hands of Benjamin Franklin, then the diplomatic representative of the United States in Paris. It was The Science of Legislation by Gaetano Filangieri, a Neapolitan jurist in his late twenties, convinced that ‘the reform of legislation’ was ‘the only hand that remains to be put forth in order to complete the work of the happiness of humankind’. Franklin, who was then seventy-five years old, let it be known that he had found Filangieri’s ideas set forth with ‘great clarity and precision’, which prompted the young Neapolitan philosopher to write to him, thus beginning a correspondence that would intertwine the fortunes of the Italian Enlightenment with the birth of the American republic.

Filangieri was born on 22 August 1753 in San Sebastiano, near Naples, into one of the most ancient families of the Neapolitan nobility. Destined for a military career, he abandoned it in order to devote himself to legal studies. At only nineteen years of age, he published On the Morality of Legislators (1772), in which he identified as the end of governmental action ‘the preservation’ and ‘the tranquility of the peoples’. Two years later, he published Political Reflections on the Sovereign’s Latest Law Concerning the Reform of the Administration of Justice (1774), in which he praised a law requiring judges to give reasons for and publish their decisions as a safeguard against the arbitrariness of judicial power. In that work, Filangieri made explicit the spirit that would characterize his entire scholarly production: the philosopher’s task is ‘to write a lesson most useful for States, and for all Humanity’.

He subsequently undertook the writing of The Science of Legislation, an ambitious project for the reform of laws in the light of the experience of ‘all countries and all ages’. The work, published in Naples beginning in 1780 and translated into French, German, Spanish, English, Polish, and Russian, earned its author the appellation ‘the Montesquieu of Italy’. Filangieri sent several copies to Franklin, who in exchange sent the Neapolitan philosopher, in 1783, a collection of the constitutions of the United States of America and, in 1787, a copy of the U.S. Federal Constitution, as a token of appreciation for Filangieri’s ‘invaluable work on legislation’. That latter gift, however, reached Filangieri at the Castle of Vico Equense only the following year, when he was gravely ill. He would die a few days later, on 21 July 1788, not yet thirty-five years old.

In The Science of Legislation, the term ‘felicità’ (happiness) appears more than one hundred and sixty times, in its dual public and private connotation. The work opens with a firm condemnation of the ‘military mania’ of the sovereigns of the age, whose calculations were directed towards the resolution of a single problem: ‘to find the means of killing the greatest number of men in the shortest time possible’. Convinced that peace was ‘the first law of nations’, Filangieri urged governments to renounce their spirit of ‘rivalry and jealousy’, to combine their own interests with those of other nations, and to abhor the ‘absurd distinctions of nation against nation, baneful remnants of the ancient prejudices of barbarism, always destructive, but today dishonoring to an age which thinks itself enlightened, and which indeed ought to be so’.

Filangieri’s work proceeds from the natural-law assumption that there exist ‘inviolable rights of humanity and of reason’, which cannot be sacrificed to the contingencies of political power. In order to guarantee them, Filangieri proposed the adoption of a ‘small separate code of the true fundamental laws, which should determine the true nature of the constitution, the rights and the limits of authority’: a rigid constitution, which ordinary legislation ‘must neither destroy nor can destroy’, since no power could assert a right ‘contrary to the liberty of the people, to the security of the citizen, to the interest of the nation, the happiness whereof must always be the supreme law’.

While the U.S. Declaration of Independence had enshrined the “pursuit of Happiness” as an inalienable right of every individual, Filangieri elevated ‘public happiness’ into the guiding principle for the reform of positive law. In order to give concrete form to that vision, Filangieri proposed instruments of striking modernity: a ‘Censor of the laws’, charged with verifying the continuing conformity of legislation with the changing needs of society, and a magistracy inspired by the Spartan Ephors, entrusted with preserving the balance among the powers of the State. These intuitions underlay the Constitution of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799, which introduced the first model of constitutional review of legislation in Europe, although it remained unimplemented due to the downfall of the Republic and the Bourbon restoration.

Moreover, Filangieri laid down a detailed plan for the reform of education, in order to render it public and more attentive to the study of foreign languages; of criminal law and procedure, in order to overcome the inquisitorial model and ensure that punishments were more proportionate to crimes; of taxation, in order to distribute wealth more equitably and achieve ‘the equality of happiness in all classes’; as well as of the laws on the press, in order to make it free and place it at the service of the ‘tribunal of public opinion’.

Filangieri devoted his life to the happiness of humankind, but what would, in turn, have made him happy? To discover that, one must read his second letter to Franklin, dated 2 December 1782: ‘From my infancy Philadelphia has attracted my gaze. I have become so accustomed to regard it as the only country wherein I may be happy, that my imagination can no longer divest itself of this idea […] Might not my work on legislation perhaps induce you to invite me to contribute to the great Code that is being drafted in the United Provinces of America, the laws whereof are to determine not only their fate, but also the fate of all this new hemisphere?’

Franklin’s answer was negative, and Filangieri therefore never set sail for Philadelphia. Yet his ideas nevertheless reached the United States, thanks in part to the many copies of The Science of Legislation that Franklin requested so that he might share them with other American intellectuals. Filangieri himself was aware of the universal scope of the reforming message of the Enlightenment philosopher, whom he described in these terms: ‘Citizen of all places, contemporary of all ages, the universe is his country, the earth his school, his contemporaries and his posterity are his disciples’.