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This essay concerns the Declaration of Rights by Rigas Velestinlís, one of the most important personalities of Greek Enlightenment. First of all, the article tries to explain some important aspects of his biography. He was born in 1757 in Velestino, a little village in Thessaly; he then lived in Istambul, Bucarest and Vienna, and he died prisoner in Belgrade in 1798, after he was given in charge by Austrian police to Turkish authorities for his revolutionary plan. The Declaration of Rights is an important part of his revolutionary vision for the Balkans, and the central subject of this essay, so, is an analysis of this text in a comparative perspective with the French Montagnard Constitution of 1793, that was its main source. Two issues are especially developed in this paper. First, the Declaration by Rigas Velestinlìs tries to explain and exemplify the content of the French Constitution in a more concrete way; the goal of Rigas is to educate Greek people to the grammar of freedom, translating main concepts of the Enlightenment and revolutionary culture in the Balkan context. For achieving this goal, so, the meaning of articles of the French Declaration somewhat change in his translation: for instance, the Greek text asserts that men and women have the same right to enjoy a public system of education. Second, Rigas tries to adapt the national French example to a multinational and multireligious empire like the Ottoman state. Finally, the Declaration by Rigas Velestinlìs is an interesting case of translation of cultural ideas and paradigms in different contexts of late XVIIIth century Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I deal with Bernard Mandeville's views on political economy, in order to reconstruct his overall perspectives on individual moral psychology and on the topic of luxury. First, I discuss Mandeville's views on labour, wages, political management and the balance of trade against the background of contemporary paradigms of 'mercantilism' and 'free trade'. I argue that he freely moved between these categories, and I also contend that they can not be taken as a rigid orthodoxy, which would prevent a real historical recovery of their meaning. Then I turn to his discussion of luxury. I maintain that this aspect of Mandeville's thought can not be reduced to a paradoxical provocation (however brilliant), but must be reconstructed along a three-dimensional framework, because Mandeville elaborated the relative difference between needs and desires in three contexts. This framework was not explicitly stated by Mandeville, but can be recosntructed through a close reading of his writings: first, an international context, in which certain countries specialised in exporting, whereas others in consuming, luxury goods; secondly, a social context, in which the differentiation between luxuries and wants mirrors a social hierarchy; and finally an evolutionary dimension, in which the consumption of luxury goods helps spread benefits to all social ranks in the next generations. In a final section I reconsider the classic question of Mandeville's role in the growth of political economy and his alledged theory of 'possessive individualism' coupled with classical liberalism. I disagree with those reconstructions that take for granted the attendant rise of free trade, individualism and liberalism. Mandeville is a crucial case in point for showing how economic arguments were still strictly interwoven with insights in moral psychology, party politics and social criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article presents a representation of the city in late eighteenth-century French culture. Through the analysis of the thought of two end-of-century architects, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée, the author proposes two particular urban views, both inspired by the concrete desire for radical transformation and empirical aesthetically and conceptually post-materialist philosophy. Criticism of the city, utopian literature, artistic and architectural debates, shape a framework within which Ledoux and Boullée fit, offering the possibility of rethinking urban space, its meaning and its profoundly innovative civic responsibility.