Chapter One - The Enlightenment and the Political Critique of the Scientia Juris

Summary

A law student at the outset of his studies ought first to know the derivation of the word jus. Its derivation is from justitia. For, in terms of Celsus’ elegant definition, the law is the art of goodness and fairness. 1. Of that art we [jurists] are deservedly called priests.

Digest, I, 1, I

Why did discussions concerning the right to punish, rather than reflections on different forms of government, imbue and mark large parts of the political debate of the Italian Enlightenment, characterizing it so profoundly in relation to other European milieus? For what reason, for example, did the most original aspects of eighteenth-century discourse on political philosophy – first of all with regards to meditations upon justice and the formulation of a new science of legislation rather than the detailed analysis of governmental institutions or the nature of power – emerge in a historical context like that of the Kingdom of Naples? What lay behind the sudden attention paid by Neapolitan thinkers to the ancient theme of the Diceosina and the concept of a just and fair society? We know that the myth of the noble savage, the primitivist utopias of hypothetical states of nature, and of perfect republics never enjoyed great success in Italy. The homeland of Dante and of Machiavelli, of the most refined humanism and of the most ruthless political realism, did not entertain itself with daydreaming when it came to making headway in the art of government.