Considered as a fundamental element in the construction of identity and individuality, the body is also revealed as an object that can be redefined by collectivity and politics. This paper deals with the frames and borders of performativity and especially biopolitics, whose axis articulates theories about the political uses of the body and their variability in terms of meanings and consequences.

The French translation of the Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution by Vincenzo Cuoco in 2004 offered the opportunity to outline some features of the Parthenopean Republic of 1799 from the point of view of an observer, who proved himself profoundly influencing. The idea of a passive revolution, compared to the Hegelian attitude toward the 1789’s events in France, was called to re-emerge even in Gramsci’s Prison’s Notebooks, related to the project of an intellectual and moral reform in Italy.

In the Antiquissima (1710) Metaphysics isn’t a speculation on the first being, but a philosophy which pursued the double aim of humiliating and exalting human thought, imitating divine science with that poetical freedom of ingenious doing. But Vico’s facere is a construction of fictiones which was full of truth but empty of moral “certainties”. Than in the De Uno (1720) the metaphysical interest was related to the reality of law and auctoritas as the world of action and certainty, as a part of truth. Scire-conscire was the nexus that joined together (in De constantia, 1722) the «verum conformatio» with the modern ethics.

The following article by Otto Pöggeler appears for the first time in its translation to Italian. Here, Pöggeler further enquires some of the topics already developed in his previous essay Philosophie und Revolution beim jungen Hegel. After briefly reviewing the history of the reception of Machiavelli’s work in German thought, the author focuses on the main theme of Hegel’s interpretation of The Prince, framing it in the wider context of the debate on the concept of raison d’état. The question about the relation occuring between power and ethicity is key to clarify Hegel’s Auseinandersetzung with Machiavelli, and moreover to encourage a comparison between contemporary thinking and the models of classical German philosophy.

In the third issue of the Milanese Journal “Costume”, published in 1946 as the last issue of the bimonthly cultural journal edited by Edgardo Sogno and Angelo Magliano, Enzo Paci wrote a long review of Luigi Scaravelli’s Critica del Capire, which appeared in November 1941. If this review was well-known among the critical reception of Paci’s works, it remained completely unknown among Scaravelli’s scholars, since it is not even quoted in any of the bibliographies of the Florentine philosopher.

The following paper reproduces the unpublished text of a conference likely held by Scaravelli at the Deutsch-Italienisches Kulturinstitut zu Köln (Petrarca-Haus) in 1939. The author’s will was to introduce the German public to Gentile’s thought, presented as a newer and more appropriate version of a philosophy of spirit – a philosophy that was born with Kant’s Copernican revolution, which had first taken place in aesthetics and only subsequently in gnoseology, and that had been the starting point for Romantic culture. Setting aside Scaravelli’s critique of actualism, as expressed in Critica del capire, the Italian thinker identifies sentiment as the “condition of transcendental thought itself”, which had given a firmer cohesion to Gentile’s system.