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Sabetti argues that poor government performance in contemporary Italy has been an unintended consequence of attempts to craft institutions for good - or democratic - government. He shows that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, a chief problem in contemporary Italy is not the absence of the rule of law but, rather, the presence of rule by law or too many laws. A principal conclusion of his study is that postwar Italian politics can best be understood as a laboratory for revealing how and why a search for good government can generate antithetical and counter intentional results. The Italian experience has important implications for all those who aspire to be self-governing - as opposed to state-governed - for it shows what people can do to enhance human cooperation in collective-action dilemmas and suggests the probable results if "democracy" continues to be identified with parliamentary government and representative assemblies rather than with the universality of the village or the local community. The Search for Good Government changes our understanding of postwar Italian politics and provides new ways to evaluate the impact of the political changes that have occurred since 1992, arguing for a perceptual shift in the way we think about politics and the educative role of public institutions.

The paper surveys the rise of political economy in eighteenth-century Naples in a comparative perspective. It presents several arguments: first, that far from being a passive receptor, Naples was a producer of ideas about political economy that complemented other currents of thought in Europe; that the contribution of Antonio Genovesi was at the core of the intellectual development in Naples; that the progress of science and arts in Naples did not constitute a sharp break with the past; and, finally, that thinkers like Genovesi created a credible alternative to both the Hobbesian view of human nature and the Scottish model of political economy associated with Adam Smith. Genovesi's attention to how cooperation can be created to overcome collective-action dilemmas adds to our knowledge of the archeology of modern rational choice theory, while his emphasis on public happiness has been given renewed significance in light of recent recognition that increases in wealth do not necessarily produce individual happiness or life satisfaction.

The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples
1680–1760, John Robertson, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005, pp.xii, 455.In this book, John Robertson, University Lecturer in Modern History
and Fellow at St. Hugh's College, Oxford, does several things all at
once. The result is one of the most profound and illuminating studies in
comparative historical analysis and political thought published in recent
decades.