What did politics mean to the men of the late Enlightenment? Was theirs a singular and independent conception? Did it differ in practices, discourses, representations, and language from what would be developed in the revolutionary period to come? What forms of struggle, what tasks and, above all, what limitations in their way of conceiving politics confronted them in those last, tormented years of the Old Regime? What shape did the newfangled republican and constitutional patriotism take between the American and French Revolutions, between 1776 and 1789, in those enlightened circles which presciently warned of the threat of that despotism which, as the freedoms of antiquity were reasserted for modern times by Rousseau and his many followers, was seen lurking in the eighteenth-century revival of so-called classical republicanism? Through which paths and what struggles were the language of the rights of man, a form of republicanism apt for the modern world, and Enlightenment constitutionalism created, and developed, in Italy? Is there a relationship between the political culture of the late Enlightenment and the genesis of the Italian democratic and republican tradition? This book endeavours to answer these and other questions by formulating some working hypotheses based on the achievements of the new cultural history of the Enlightenment and by developing themes and issues that I have tackled in the past. The entire work, however, centres first and foremost on the analysis and study of a personal history and an important publishing event (together providing the unifying thread guiding this investigation through the labyrinthine politics of the late Enlightenment) which caused a sensation in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century: Gaetano Filangieri's publication of the Scienza della legislazione (The Science of Legislation) in Naples, in the spring of 1780.