History of Political Theories

The modern State was born between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. With Niccolò Machiavelli the study of the State and politics takes on a "scientific" character; and with Thomas More the utopian trend originates. The figure of Jean Bodin from Angevin and the theoretical development of the idea of sovereignty, before the political thought of the seventeenth century English, between Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, will then be explored in depth. Particular attention will be paid to the doctrines of natural rights and then to the eighteenth century (Charles Louis de Montesquieu, the Encyclopédie and Jean-Jacques Rousseau), before the turning point of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Nationalism, liberalism and socialism: these are the three great doctrinal strands of the nineteenth century, which will be explored in depth through the figures of the main political writers, from Johann Gottlieb Fichte to Benjamin Constant, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Karl Marx. A look will be taken at the process of the Italian unification (Carlo Cattaneo and Giuseppe Mazzini), up to the debate on the crisis of parliamentarism, which will lead us to address the theories of the Italian school of elites (Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels), those of scholars such as Max Weber and Carl Schmitt and the doctrines of totalitarianism in the twentieth century.