A beginning: Gaetano Mosca

In 1896 – a crucial year in Italian history, with the failed attempt at colonialisation in Africa and the beginning of the long crisis of the end of the century – Gaetano Mosca published his masterpiece, Elementi di scienza politica (‘Aspects of Political Science’), gaining a chair at the University of Turin in the same year. Mosca was to teach constitutional law, but it was a teaching focused on historical and political rather than juridical studies. Mosca's attention to ideas and political institutions was, however, focused on legislation with an eye to empirical and historical matters. Along with constitutional law, philosophy of law was the other subject that, more than any, formed the basis for the discipline of political studies, shortly to be introduced in Italian universities. Numerous legal philosophers contributed to the history of political ideas in the twentieth century, from Gioele Solari to Giorgio Del Vecchio, and from Adolfo Ravà to Alessandro Levi.

The philosophy of law is a typical borderline subject, concerned as it is with both positive law and abstract speculation. It was the historical approach to the latter that provided an important starting point for the history of political doctrines. The neo-idealists, starting with Croce and Gentile, developed a complex philosophical historiography. Gentile's school practised a history of thought centred on ‘precursors’, using a unidirectional temporal axis leading from the present to the past. Philology, chronology, and biographical and background reconstruction were given little attention, while the focus was solely on the construction of ‘chains of concepts’: an ‘arrangement of connections of a super-temporal kind between the various links of these chains, for the exclusive clarification of logical connections’.