ABSTRACT
A mania for economic books. This hallmark clearly characterised the eighteenth century, an age that preceded any other in the profuse number of printed books. Contradictorily, there was no other epoch in which public opinion was so misguided about economic matters. This is how Goudar introduced his book on the means to re-establish the Neapolitan economy. Only in the last decade, he stressed, many more books have been published on population, agriculture, commerce, and the arts than all those published in Europe since the breakdown of the Roman Empire.
