Note 91 — Chapter XIX · FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES

Of the aforesaid eight-and-twenty writers on economics, probably the majority were freethinkers. Among them, at all events, were Count Algarotti (1712–1764), the distinguished æsthetician, one of the group round Frederick at Berlin and author of Il Newtonianismo per le dame (1737); Filangieri, whose work on legislation (put on the Index by the papacy) won the high praise of Franklin; the Neapolitan abbate Ferdinando Galiani, one of the brightest and soundest wits in the circle of the French philosophes; the other Neapolitan abbate Antonio Genovesi (1712–1769), the “redeemer of the Italian mind,”91 and the chief establisher of economic science for modern Italy.92 To these names may be added those of Alfieri, one of the strongest anti-clericalists of his age; Bettinelli, the correspondent of Voltaire and author of The Resurrection of Italy (1775); Count Dandolo, author of a French work on The New Men (1799); and the learned Giannone, author of the great anti-papal History of the Kingdom of Naples (1723), who, after more than one narrow escape, was thrown in prison by the king of Sardinia, and died there (1748) after twelve years’ confinement.