Editing Alessandro Manzoni (section)

==Politics and economics==
Manzoni favored the Italian unification and was even a member of the [[Senate of the Kingdom of Italy|Italian Senate]].<ref>{{Cite web|title=Alessandro Manzoni|url=http://notes9.senato.it/Web/senregno.NSF/4bee8c11a5b4a95ec1256ffc00512823/f2f7825ad61d102dc1257069003186f0|url-status=live|website=Senato della Repubblica|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180410145037/http://notes9.senato.it:80/web/senregno.NSF/4bee8c11a5b4a95ec1256ffc00512823/f2f7825ad61d102dc1257069003186f0? |archive-date=10 April 2018 }}</ref> Before and after his embracing an austere Catholicism upon marrying Henriett Blondel, Manzoni's politics can be broadly described as liberal. Since his French trip, Manzoni's liberalism included a profound understanding of economics. He was well acquainted with authors such as [[Jean-Baptiste Say]] and [[Adam Smith]] and left numerous notes on the economic treatises and essays he was reading.

His understanding of economics came to surface in his grand historical novel ''[[The Betrothed (Manzoni novel)|The Betrothed]]'', particularly in Chapter 12, where he deals with the famine in [[Lombardy]]. Economist and [[President of Italy|President of the Italian Republic]] [[Luigi Einaudi]] praised the chapter and the whole of ''The Betrothed'' as "one of the best treatises on political economy ever written".<ref name="auto"/> Economic historian [[Deirdre McCloskey|Deirdre N. McCloskey]] likewise described it as "a lecture in Economics 101".<ref>{{Cite book|last=McCloskey|first=Deirdre N.|url=https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo22655327.html|title=Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World|publisher=University of Chicago Press|year=2016|isbn=9780226527932|location=Chicago}}</ref>{{clearleft}}