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Civil economy, born with the scope of contributing to the debate on public happiness, is normally defined as a cultural perspective of interpretation of the economic market theory, based on the principles of reciprocity and fraternity, characterized by the idea of a society able to promote a "good common life", complementary and functional  to the realization of individual happiness. Antonio Genovesi, the maximum exponent of the Neapolitan school of civil economy, claimed that civil life and commercial activity were inextricably linked, and market is therefore a constituent element of socialization and civilization of human beings. He fully sets himself in the stream of the political economy stemmed from Scottish Enlightenment, where "natural sociability", "moral sense", "benevolence" and "sympathy" were fundamental categories in the moral philosophy of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and would become a central concept in the philosophical and economic thought of Smith. The present paper aims at studying the theory of public confidence by Genovesi, and bringing out the importance of “homo reciprocans” in a market economy. The paper is organized as follows: in the second section the thought of Genovesi is presented, focusing on  the link that exists between public confidence, market and happiness. In the third section, we examine the current European growth schemas, according to the logic of political economy and social market economy, and highlight their criticalities. In the fourth section, we discuss in what terms the scheme of Genovesi’s civil economy could be helpful to understand, and even overcome, such criticalities.