Roberto Tufano, La teologia civile e il singolare cattolicesimo di Carlo Antonio Broggia (1698-1767). Il Dio impotente e la ricerca della ‘politica felicità’.

Carlo Antonio Broggia was a Neapolitan economist and reformist active in the first half of the 18th century. He was studied in the last century by two eminent historians of the Enlightenment, Franco Venturi and Raffaele Ajello. This article, based on unpublished manuscripts by Broggia, explores some little-known and not yet explored aspects of the Neapolitan reformer, such as the osmotic relationship between religious thought, economic and political reformism, cosmopolitanism and the enhancement of the African-Mediterranean model of the ancient Egyptian civilization. In the thought of this reformist the “science of economics” is interchangeable with the “science of order” and his ideas about the “government of men” and “economics” described in his unpublished pages reveal a clear theological – political order and theological-moral, which enters the dialectical game with the political thought of mercantilism. Broggia shows us his belief in an unusual God, similar to that of Spinoza, and his adherence to not at all orthodox Catholicism