Alessandro Manzoni’s great novel, The Bethroted, can also be read as a critical report about Pre-modern law and even about law in general. There is in the novel’s pages a nearly obsessive reference to the corruption, cruelty and injustice of law and lawyers in the Baroque Italy. Manzoni’s criticism of law might be interpreted in two opposed ways, on the one hand in terms of a general suspicion against law, because of the intrinsic moral baseness of the human condition. This would be a reading of the novel as reaffirming the hopelessness of human institutions and a conceptual necessary connection between law and violence. The novel, on the other hand, might be read as a work thought in the wake of Italian liberal Enlightenment. The article inclines for this second reading. There is in Manzoni’s criticism still the echo of Cesare Beccaria’s hope of a possible redemption for law and lawyers.

Alessandro Manzoni, Law, Enlightenment, Liberal Catholicism.

Antonio Rosmini committed himself to Italian unification, working to a realistic agreement that would create a lasting Italian Confederation. From the documents Rosmini kept for publication, we can deduce his favor for a confederal government, with the Pope at the head of the Roman temporal government and, at the same time, at the presidency of a national Diet. In light of the publication of the national and critical edition of the Mission to Rome, this essay intends to focus on some aspects of the Rosminian project proposed in the years 1848-49. In particular, it emphasizes Rosmini’s choice for a Confederation rather than a League and his loss of the Pope’s confidence.

Rosmini, Unification, Diplomatic mission, Confederation, League.

Giuseppe Mazzini believed and maintained that only if the nation guarantees civil and political rights to each citizen, man and woman, and relates to other nations according to «humanitarian law» does it fulfill its «mission». For this to happen, nationality is dissociated from nationalism and becomes the means which must foster cooperation between peoples. Starting from these premises, the essay proposes to place Mazzini’s political thought in the tradition of cosmopolitanism rather than in that of nationalism.

Rights, Idea of Mission, Nationalism, Sovereignty, Humanity.

This paper aims to introduce and illustrate some fundamental points of Vincenzo Gioberti’s thought. Special attention will be paid to the political side of his philosophy, with the purpose of demystifying its simplistic placement within the tradition of Italian Catholic moderatism. Gioberti’s philosophy, despite its inner difficulties and contradictions, which were the result of constant and continuous re-elaboration, represents one of the highest points of the speculation that developed in the period of the Italian Risorgimento. These difficulties determined a reception of Giobertian thought that polarized into two extremes, even within neo-idealist reflection itself: from Giovanni Gentile’s esteem to Benedetto Croce’s rejection. In the middle was the criticism of Bertrando Spaventa, who from the outset grasped the heights and lows of the Piedmontese philosopher’s speculation.

Vincenzo Gioberti, Risorgimento, XIX century Italian politics, Moderatism, Bertrando Spaventa.

The article aims to investigate the complex relationship that Italian anarchism established with the Risorgimento. Moving from the revolutionary events of 1848-49, the formation and spread of libertarian thought began to move within Italian democracy and in particular in the circles of the Federalist school on which Bakunian intent and the establishment of the First International later leveraged. Even later, although amongst continuities and ruptures, anarchism would constantly refer to the more radical political cultures of the Risorgimento era in which it identified not only its genealogy but a possibility for constant practical and doctrinal renovation.

Anarchism, Federalism, Generational Transitions, Democracy, Risorgimento.

The contribution intends to offer a political-intellectual profile of Francesco De Sanctis, highlighting his commitment to Italian Risorgimento and post-unification politics and, at the same time, the development of his critical literary commitment, in particular, in the years following the Unification. In the paper I especially emphasized the ideal-real connection, learned and meditated by the great critic by reflecting on the magisterium of Vico and Hegel, which pervades the two converging commitments of De Sanctis with the same intensity. An ideal-real connection that led him to judge politics and the great protagonists of Italian cultural history by the ability to measure their ideals in the concreteness and within the limits of the true historian.

Politics, Historiography, Ideal, Real, Tradition.

The article shows a parallel reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Bertrando Spaventa’s Principles of Ethics. After highlighting the deep syntony, in particular around the relationship that dialectically binds individuals and their individual interests to the ethical and spiritual dimension of the State considered as an individuality, the author shows how the problem of the national interest as the authentic substance of a people emerges from the pages of Hegel and Spaventa. From this point of view, the state appears as a ‘hieroglyphic of reason’, as a set of interests and feelings, coordinated, however, on a national level in the light of specific interests. This allows us to conceive of the constitution – in the German sense of Verfassung – not as a simple document, written once and for all, nor as a rigid abstract scheme, but as a living form, as the efficient cause of the state organism.

Spaventa, Hegel, Nation, Constitution, Government.

The paper reflects on the revolutionary form of Silvio Spaventa’s liberalism, examining the significance of the process of national unification in his thought and political practice. The revolutionary character of this approach, in which the Hegelian concept of the ethicality of the state is reflected, consists in the critique of the modern form of representation, which reduces conscience to a mere contemplativeconservative view of reality. The abstract form of liberalism is criticised through the introduction of the concept of the state as a directive consciousness aimed at the attainment of civilisation, that is, of that process in which freedom, which finds realisation in the body of the nation and the state, is actually concretised with a view to the common economic welfare.

Silvio Spaventa, Risorgimento, Nation-State, Liberalism, Civilisation.

This article deals with a central theme in young Antonio Labriola’s thought: the tight relationship between politics and pedagogy, which would be deeply redefined, yet remaining crucial, in his radical-democratic period and later in the marxist one. We try to examine this parallelism – which shows an original combination of motifs borrowed from Herbart and Hegel, through Bertrando Spaventa – by mainly taking into account Labriola’s 1870s philosophical essays. Some consequences of that approach on a more directly political level are also addressed, focusing in particular on an unedited manuscript.

Antonio Labriola, Politics, Pedagogy, Theories of the State, Education of the Masses.

Gentile’s answer to the question of what Italy is strictly connected to the concept of becoming and to the doctrine of actualism called to develop it with unprecedented radicality. The essay explores the Gentile’s approach of the 1910s to the concept of nation and to nationality of science, thus bringing out, in contrast with Benedetto Croce, a specificity of Italian philosophy as a radical negation of transcendence, conveyed by a logic that combines faith and certitude.

Giovanni Gentile, Italy, Nation, Italian Philosophy, Becoming.

Apart from his activity as a philosopher and historian, Benedetto Croce has always tried to maintain a strong bound to his cultural tradition, that is with his intellectual ancestors. Among them, a special place is occupied by Francesco De Sanctis, Silvio Spaventa and Antonio Labriola. By publishing their writings between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Croce highlighted this legacy especially in their understanding of public education and university. The idea of «science» developed in this context plays a decisive role in the cultural politics of Croce, in this sense very similar to Gentile’s one, despite the ideological diversities dividing them, after the consolidation of Fascist regime in Italy.

Benedetto Croce, Silvio Spaventa, Italian Idealism, Liberalism, National Tradition.