Carlo Cipolla is an Italian writer, well known to specialists for his studies in medieval and early modern Italy and to a wider audience for his contributions to economic and social history. He is also famous for his essayistic and humoristic book The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, a national bestseller in Italy, produced as a play in France and familiar to Romanians since 2018, the year that it was published by Humanitas Publishing House.
“He was a humanist as well as an historian and an extremely good researcher,” said Charles Muscatine, a professor emeritus in UC Berkeley’s English department and one of Cipolla’s longtime friends. “He was an absolutely charming, generous, humorous, interesting person and Cipolla was a member of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain, the British Academy, the Accademia dei Lincei, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia. He was awarded the Premio della Presidente della Republica in Italy, and the Premio Balzan, as well as honorary degrees in Italy and Zurich, Switzerland.

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity asserts 5 basic laws that can sound trivial, mean or even cruel, but at a more attentive look will reveal their bitter truth.
The idea that despite your ` talent` at discovering the signs of stupidity everywhere, you can be amazed to see people whom you had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be lacked of self-awareness,stupid, harassing your activities when you least expect.
The book reinvites us to reflect more on the democratic egalitarian approach to life, contradicting the formula according to all men and women are naturally equal, whereas cultural and intellectual distinction are due to education and not to nature.” Always and inevitably, each of us underestimates the number of stupid individuals in the world” the first law undoubtedly asserts.
Enjoy the booktrailer!
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity