Docenti proponenti
His research interests have developed along two thematic axes since his doctoral years: the modern republican tradition, with particular attention to the theoretical elaborations of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers; and the medieval and modern ‘just war’ tradition and its contemporary reformulations. In the 1990s his research focused in particular on debates about the modern and contemporary republican tradition, between historiography and political theory. He has edited the Italian editions of important Anglo-Saxon contributions, including Quentin Skinner’s Freedom before Liberalism and Il repubblicanesimo. A Theory of Liberty and Government by Philip Pettit. Between 1995 and 1998 he participated in the European research group, coordinated by Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen, on ‘Republicanism. A Shared European Heritage’, making contributions on the legacy of republican themes in Scottish thinkers. Motivated by these interests, he participated in the national PRIN research groups, coordinated first by Antonio Santucci and then by Emanuele Ronchetti and Luigi Turco, on English and Scottish philosophy between the 17th and 18th centuries and its links with continental philosophies.
He contributed to the Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, edited by Carlo Galli and Roberto Esposito, published by Laterza, with the drafting of various entries, mostly dedicated to authors linked to the modern republican tradition. More recently, he also contributed to the Encyclopaedia Machiavelliana, coordinated by Gennaro Sasso, for the Treccani Institute.
In the last fifteen years, he has not limited himself to broadening the study of modern theories of war, moving between the theorists of the School of Salamanca and Kant, but has tried to delve into the new forms of legitimisation of armed conflicts, elaborated by both political philosophers and contemporary jurists: those theoretical elaborations that have provided justifications for the practice of so-called ‘humanitarian wars’. Dissatisfied with some one-sided presentations of Machiavelli’s thought, even by learned historians who refer to the Cambridge school, he has tried in recent years to account for the complexity of the Florentine secretary’s thought, addressing conceptual nodes such as those of conspiracies, of the “remedies” needed in extraordinary times, and of the use of religion, and then to show the specific selections that modern republican thinkers have made of the “corpus” of Machiavellian reflection. The results of this research are now being printed in a volume entitled Machiavelli and the Modern Republican Tradition, to be published by Il Mulino in the series “Studi e ricerche”; a partial translation of the volume, limited to the chapters on Machiavelli, is planned by Oxford University Press, in the series “Oxford Constitutional Theory”.