In 1985, Daniele Archibugi, at the time a young activist in the European peace movement, wrote a letter to Norberto Bobbio, the undisputed personality of the Italian political and intellectual landscape, who had recently been appointed as a Senator for life by President Sandro Pertini. Inspired by Bobbio’s insights on war and peace, Archibugi sought feedback. As his habit, Bobbio replied, offering guidance and support. This initial interaction marked the beginning of a correspondence that spanned fifteen years, focusing on various themes that Bobbio had addressed and continued to explore, despite the passage of time. This exchange is particularly significant as it underscores Bobbio’s generosity in serving as an intellectual guide and mentor, making it a valuable piece of public record.

This volume presents the unpublished full translation of Bell in Campo (1662), a play by Margaret Cavendish. In her introduction, Maria Giulia Sestito reconstructs the historical context and political significance of the play. By staging a war between the Kingdom of Faction and the Kingdom of Reformation, Cavendish publicly intervenes to legitimise the restoration of the monarchy by undermining its gendered foundations. In literary fiction, women escape the patriarchal dictum that war is men's business. On the contrary, their discipline and determination are crucial to the victory of the monarchy and the reform of their own subordination to their husbands. In a hall of mirrors, Cavendish's writing becomes an analysis of the historical condition of women, a challenge to the male authority, and at the same time a possibility for liberation.

The Festschrift for Pierangelo Schiera intends to be above all a discussion of some of the subjects that he continues to face. The contributions collected here by friends and students retrace some of those subjects from different and original perspectives: the link between legitimation and representation of the order (Vincenzo Calì, Giuseppe Olmi); melancholia and the forms of the discipline (Luigi Lombardi, Gianfranco Borrelli, Angela De Benedictis, Luca Cobbe, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Paola Rudan); the modernist link between social sciences and the constitution of society (Matteo Battistini, Niccolò Cuppini, Roberta Ferrari, Maurizio Ricciardi); liberalism, administration and the “degeneration” of the modern state (Carla De Pascale, Giuseppe Duso); autonomy and the discipline of constitutions (Luigi Blanco, Anna Gianna Manca, Renato Mazzolini); constitutional history and political doctrines (Isabella Consolati, Gustavo Gozzi).

This volume in memory of Alessandro Pandolfi contains the papers given in Urbino in 2018 in the conference dedicated to him, as well as contributions from friends and colleagues, dealing with the main aspects of his research: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mercantilism, Foucault's work (especially the genealogy of Liberalism and the investigation on the “care of the self”), the debate on human nature, the relationship between Colonialism and modernity. The first part of the volume is composed by 5 essays which reconstruct Alessandro's commitment to both university and society (the authors are: Matteo Cottignoli, Anna Tonelli, Stefano Visentin, Toni Negri and Pietro Massarotto), while in the second part essays are collected that address themes and problems present in his research. The authors of this second part are: Luigi Alfieri, Luca Basso, Luca Cobbe, Simona Forti, Nicola Giannelli, Augusto Illuminati, Fabio Raimondi, Maurizio Ricciardi, Domenico Scalzo, Luca Scuccimarra, Alessandro Simoncini, Adelino Zanini.

Logistics has been recently considered a privileged perspective from which to understand contemporary world, with a specific focus on the interactions among multiple mobilities – of people, commodities, capitals, information. However, the inherent risk of this perspective is that of reducing to the present a set of dynamics which recurred throughout history in various not linear and reversible ways. The essays in this volume seek to highlight the historical and geographical specificities of the logistic processes. They contribute to define the “logistics of migrations” through the analysis on specific case studies, and offer useful elements to address historical continuities and ruptures, within an interdisciplinary debate between historical and social and political sciences.

This supplement collects the materials elaborated after two conferences dedicated to Merio Scattola’s research themes, held at the University of Padua with the support of the Department of Historical, Geographic and Antiquity Sciences, the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies and the patronage of the Galileian School of Advanced Studies. It contains contributions by José Luis Villacañas, Giuseppe Duso, Michele Basso, Adone Brandalise, Angela De Benedictis, Maurizio Merlo, Luise Schorn-Schütte, Paolo Slongo, Alfredo Viggiano. The supplement ends with a brief but significant memorial of Merio by Michael Stolleis. The aim is to continue the dialogue with Merio on some interdisciplinary issues that have long been the subject of common research. The introductory note by Michele Basso and Mario Piccinini explains the choice of themes and the approach chosen. We would like to thank Marco Geuna, Claudia Passarella, Paolo Scotton and Antonio Staude for their collaboration.

In this collection of articles different disciplines – anthropology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, law, history of political thought, oral history and historiography – reflect upon epistemic questions – in terms of content, methodology and horizon of sense – emerging from the use of the concept of recognition. The aim of the volume is to highlight the way in which alterity cannot be reduced to a mere object of recognition but compels disciplines to continuously reposition themselves in relation to their own theoretical foundations.

The volume is the outcome of an extensive investigation of the concept of order in modern era. It reconstructs specific moments and expressions of the inexhaustible research of a principle of order, which characterizes the classic age of triumphant liberalism as well as today’s neoliberal program. A thinking about order emerges in different and contradictory ways in philosophers like Hume and Hegel, while it is contested by the feminist critique of patriarchy and reformulated by Gramsci. However, this thinking reveals all its material force in the organization of industrial production, in the planning of the city and of society, in the construction of political and social order in Italy and the United States and, not least, re-emerges powerfully in the analysis of post-industrial society with its logistic and cybernetic organization.

By attacking the project of consolidation of the union in multiple ways, the antifederalists left a lasting mark in the «constitution» of the United States in a double meaning: as the fundamental law and as the formation of specific political and institutional dynamics. By advancing the notion of the «antifederalist question» the book addresses the birth of the United States, analysing the different voices of the opponents to the adoption of the federal Constitution, the transmission of popular constitutionalism and the persistence of a critical tradition and appeal to the people in the history of the United States. The book argues that the «antifederalist question» shows a set of issues in the attempt to constitutionalize the outcomes of the revolution and that these where expressed in a variegated combination of ideas and values, and a plurality of behaviors, rather than a comprehensive political thought. Through a plurality of sources and historiographical approaches, the author shows how the «antifederalist question» is a privileged entry point for an analysis of the tensions of the period of formation of the United States and of the historiographical interpretation, as well as for a re-reading, through the critic to the federal Constitution, the conflictual origins of the American State.

These unpublished writings of Beatrice Potter on the history of English economy and on Karl Marx’s economic theory represent the first phase of her elaboration of a new science of society, in the face of the crisis of individualism and laissez faire. They are the first steps of an intellectual and political path that at the end of the Victorian age will lead her to become the patroness of British sociology and a leader of Fabian socialism. Her peculiar critique of political economy is also an essential contribution to the history of English and European political thought. Potter casts here the foundations of a different socialist doctrine that, starting from Fabian Society’s reformism, will produce a conception of State and civilization that re-elaborates Marxian thought on the ethical and social level.

The hypothesis of the book is based on the observation that science and art are, along with labour, the main tools with which the Duce has joined the Zeitgeist of modernism. By integrating the study of physics International Congress held in Como in 1927 with other cultural events of the fascist brand – the Italian participation in “Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes” of 1925 and the International Mathematics Congress held in Bologna in 1928 – it emerges in the project as in the practice of Benito Mussolini a common thread that relies on art and science. Two fields considered with great attention by the new regime in order to win first of all credibility and reputation in the international arena, but also two fields on which to operate for domestic political goals, starting with the attempt to tie fascism with differentiated layers of intellectuals operators, who were to help forming the new ruling class the regime needed.

This third collection of the works of Pierangelo Schiera brings together the essays published between 1976 and 2013. The volume incorporates some of the main paths of research that have so far characterized his work. The first one is the long process of constitution of the modern State: it is investigated by studying the reason of the State and constitutionalism. In this third volume, however, the focus on the formation of modern society prevails. Within this age-old process, melancholy emerges as a symbol of the human condition, or of an individuality that must constantly invent and discipline itself. The laborious discipline of these individuals aims at achieving a lifestyle able to express an ethical choice. The historical survey of the classics of political thought, such as Christian Thomasius, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Max Weber, joins the analysis of some authors that are otherwise considered minor, like Adolf Knigge and Madame de Stael, Sismonde de Sismondi or Arthur de Gobineau, but it also conveys the art of politics by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Johann Sebastian Bach. In all these cases the focus of Schiera is on the doctrinal character of the intellectual products of these writers, i.e. the way in which all their different projects contribute to the self-awareness of society. In this age-old lab, which blends institutions, sociality and individual, the bourgeois identity takes shape slowly but unmistakably.

This volume is an homage to Luigi del Grosso Destreri. It contains an unpublished essay written by him on the epistemology of the social sciences that goes from the “modern scientific knowledge” to systemic sociology and its critic. The general idea – which links this essay to the following – is that scientific knowledge does not necessarily derive from the always more exact measurement of political and social phenomena, but can also derive «from casual observations that move the research towards new directions». This tension towards an open epistemology is recalled by Alberto Brodesco who retraces the popular fate of Heisenberg’s theory of scientific uncertainty, while Massimiano Bucchi reconstructs the introduction of the category of serendipity by Robert K. Merton. Pierangelo Schiera, ultimately, introduces the historiographic approach of random history, which takes the not necessarily ordered character of historic experience into account.

Combining political philosophy, political history, cultural history, gender history, social history, historical demography and sociology, this two-volumes work first focuses on the ways in which the master-servant relationship has been understood in the long term, from Aristotle onwards and with a particular attention to the early modern period, trying to test how the different ways of understanding it have influenced the construction of the category of citizenship.

The focus then shifts onto two crucial moments for the elaboration of the modern categories of citizenship, i.e. the first English Revolution and the French Revolution, reconstructing the tortuous path that led servants to gain citizenship and franchise (Vol. 1, Chapter 2). It was a path with a development never completely accomplished, as shown focusing on long trails of the asymmetries built within the domes-tic sphere. Gender is here brought to the fore. Race and ethnicity, as well as the condition of migrant, are also shown to be extremely important in creating relationships of dependence (Vol. 1, Chapter 3).

The first volume analyses the master-servant relationship focusing on the enduring ways in which dependence is conceived within the domestic sphere in a long-term perspective, though also documenting, at the same time, the profound changes in the subjects involved in that relationship. But this is only part of the story: to be con-tent with this perspective would imply a partial and misleading interpretation (vol. 1, Conclusion).

The second volume will present the categories of servant and master as the battle-field of a microphysics of power relationship made of endless negotiations and daily struggles, both individual and collective, in which even the theoretical elaborations of philosophical texts, laws and legislation are weapons used in the fight. What is in dispute is (trivially?) power.

This work is the result of an investigation conducted in different phases. It poses some preliminary issues that Schiera has encountered during his research on the AFTERMATH of the modern State or, in other words, on the future.

Legality and legitimacy have historically been the main materials for State-building, funded on a variable composition essentially based on the principle of authority which demands discipline, that is to say the obedience of the many to the command of the few. The law has been the rational instrument – and therefore a shared one - of the organization of this difficult relation.

Political obligation derives from a rational awareness which precedes it: that of the insatiable melancholy of a human being genetically made for sociability, but naturally incapable of living it in a passive way. From here derives the constitutional communitarian factiousness, which goes beyond the differences of conditions (status) deviating on new aims (Border).

Man and territory: both growing bigger and uncontrollable. There are new spaces and new needs, to which the law’s chant arrives with a more and more feeble sound, because it has dispersed itself in time, becoming unintelligible.

There is a necessity to find a measure. Let the law return to measure in order to be rule. And this same measure should be, for what is possible, the one of man and woman. They must participate in the concert, if they want to; but they must want to,if they can; but they can, because, as usual, technique allows them to. And finally comes the great role of administration, that we must render a silk cage and not an iron one, in order to tie men and women in-to participation and solidarity, which, in the global world, could become the new form of obligation to cohabitation.