This chapter argues that Vico’s philosophy, Kant’s transcendentalism, and Victor Cousin’s eclecticism, were merged together by legal thinkers in Naples in 1830s and 1840s to forge a philosophical foundation for law based on universal principles and derived from the study of society. The adoption of Hegel in Naples transformed Vico’s philosophy of history into the dialectical unfolding of an absolute rationality identified with the idea of freedom. According to Neapolitan thinkers, Hegel’s philosophy of history became the realization of a universal reason that was acknowledged as the idea of freedom. Building on Vico, Hegel’s philosophy of history disclosed to Neapolitan legal thinkers the universal law that guided the progress of all nations. By drawing on Hegel and Vico the Neapolitan Hegelians were endeavouring to establish the principle of nationality as the expression of both inner liberty and the political liberty that unfolds within historical institutions.

This chapter focuses on Italian Hegelians’ interpretations of Machiavelli’s political thought and argues that during the nineteenth-century Italian political language underwent a radical transformation: while the term Risorgimento had generally indicated a specific period of modern history (approximately from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries), by the end of the century that term began to be identified with the Italian struggles for national emancipation. At the same time the word Renaissance began to be used to indicate the period of early modern history between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, also identified with the birth of ‘Modernity’. The transformation of the language represents a change of ideas, of the way the intellectual and political leaders of the Risorgimento interpreted the failed religious and moral reformation in early modern Italy and how Machiavelli represents the ‘Italian Luther’.