Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Part One The New Politics ‘Ex Parte Civium’
- Part Two A Difficult Legacy
- Chapter Eight The Original Character of Enlightenment Constitutionalism: From the Scienza della legislazione to the 1799 Progetto di costituzione napoletana
- Chapter Nine Vincenzo Cuoco: The National Critique of Cosmopolitan Enlightenment Constitutionalism
- Chapter Ten The Liberal Constant against the Enlightened Filangieri: Two interpretations of Modernity
- Chapter Eleven Filangierian Heresies in the European Democratic Tradition: The Principle of Justice and the Right to Happiness
- Notes
- Index
Chapter Eight - The Original Character of Enlightenment Constitutionalism: From the Scienza della legislazione to the 1799 Progetto di costituzione napoletana
from Part Two - A Difficult Legacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Part One The New Politics ‘Ex Parte Civium’
- Part Two A Difficult Legacy
- Chapter Eight The Original Character of Enlightenment Constitutionalism: From the Scienza della legislazione to the 1799 Progetto di costituzione napoletana
- Chapter Nine Vincenzo Cuoco: The National Critique of Cosmopolitan Enlightenment Constitutionalism
- Chapter Ten The Liberal Constant against the Enlightened Filangieri: Two interpretations of Modernity
- Chapter Eleven Filangierian Heresies in the European Democratic Tradition: The Principle of Justice and the Right to Happiness
- Notes
- Index
Summary
There is a general constitution for all societies, which consists of the union of all their wills… [it] consists of two fundamental principles. First, the union of their wills aiming at the conservation of the natural rights of each; secondly, the way of reuniting those wills and strengths and of exercising them.
F. M. Pagano, Saggi politici, II ed. (1792–93)It is well known that the expression and concept of ‘Enlightenment constitutionalism’ does not exist in current historiography. Given that the language of historiography until recently also lacked the concept of Old Regime constitutionalism, this should not be particularly surprising. Still, it seems very difficult not to employ it, or some similar term, if one really wishes to understand the deeper structures, nature, and true message of the Scienza della legislazione. The concept of Enlightenment constitutionalism of course has to be explained and its meaning specified beginning from its historical context, that is the crucial period between the two great revolutions, the American and the French, as well as the novel elements which characterized the most important parts of that grandiose project. This is what the previous chapters tried to do, examining decisive questions like the umpteenth metamorphosis of natural law brought about by Enlightenment thinkers who put the question of human rights at the core of the political debate of the late eighteenth century, and by exploring the unexpected consequences of that increasingly tangled nexus between rights to liberty and the principle of equality for ways of thinking about politics, morality, and religion.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Politics of EnlightenmentConstitutionalism, Republicanism, and the Rights of Man in Gaetano Filangieri, pp. 140 - 152Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2012