Abstract

Starting from Koen Stapelbroek’s recent book, Commercio, passioni e mercato. Napoli nell’Europa del Settecento, the article aims to analyse some studies about the relationship between economy and morality, a topic that has already attracted the interest of scholars of politics and of economic thought. Primarily, it will analyse the main arguments of these works, and then the different approaches they used. It appears that most of these studies consider the State as a main subject; therefore, the article proposes to integrate this perspective with the New Institutional Economics theory, which could raise interesting possibilities for broadening current knowledge on the topic.