La repubblica come categoria storica

The republic as historical category
This essay analyzes the formation of the «republic» as double-sided object, a political concept and a histori- cal paradigm, on the ground of the very influential models proposed by John Pocock and Quentin Skinner at the end of the of the 20th century. In the work of the two historians the «republic» has been represented as a political form provided with strong temporal continuity. The languages of the civic virtue and the political liberty, elaborated in ancient times (Greek or Roman), are revived in the Italian communes of the later Middle Ages (in Skinner’s vision) or during the Florentine Renaissance (according to Pocock). Though their views about the characters of these languages diverge markedly, Pocock and Skinner share the same intellectual project: the rediscovery of a specifically republican tradition who runs through the whole modern age, to the American and French Revolutions, and returns as an answer to the crisis of western political systems in the second half of the 20th century (also thanks to its deep historical roots). The essay looks into the relationship between these languages and the institutional set up of the political systems in which they are practiced. On the ground of northern Italian examples, it has emerged that this relationship is very problematic and that the perspective of the «republic» as coherent an durable notion, outside the field of the more traditional history of ideas, is untenable.