Luxury and public happiness

"This work charts the development of political economy in eighteenth-century Italy, and it argues that the focus on economic thought is characteristic of the Italian enlightenment at large. Through an analysis of the debate about luxury, it traces the shaping of a new language of political economy which was inspired by, and contributed to, European debate, but which offered solutions that were as much shaped by local intellectual traditions and socio-economic circumstances as by French or Scottish precedent. Ultimately, those traditions were responsible for the development of very distinct 'cultures of enlightenment' across the peninsula - from the insertion of the economy into the edifice of enlightened Catholicism, to the development of physiocracy in Tuscany, to a new analytical approach to economics in the Milanese enlightenment."--BOOK JACKET