This article discusses recent Francophone and Anglophone research on physiocracy. In particular, it focuses on how the new intellectual history and the consequent emergence of a "histoire historique de la pensee" found original expression in the methodological evolution of this field of study. Indeed, scholars are no longer interested only in physiocratic "ideas", but also, if not above all, in the concrete historical reality in which they took shape and sought to gain ground. Historiography has paid attention to the biographical and social trajectories of its exponents, their political action, as well as the scientific practices, literary strategies and pedagogical approaches aimed at promoting, disseminating and publicising the physiocratic project. This confirmed that, far from being ethereal, knowledge processes interact with the "context" in which they are situated. Significantly, this circumstance is further confirmed by studies on the international circulation of physiocracy, which highlight that the reception of this theory had a creative and pragmatic character inspired by hermeneutic freedom: as a true "matiere vivante", it was adapted to the specific economic, social and political problems of the countries where it was imported.
Between 1915 and 1945, the desire for European unification, as an antidote to the two world wars that had devastated the continent, was a particularly pressing issue, involving intellectuals from a wide variety of backgrounds: within this diverse front, the Jewish component played a significant role. This essay analyses the motivations that led some Italian Jewish intellectuals (Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani, Claudio Treves, Nello and Carlo Rosselli, Carlo Ginzburg, Eugenio Colorni) to embrace the European solution. All positioned on the composite socialist front, each arrived at the idea of creating a United States of Europe by drawing on their own cultural background, but in all of them, albeit in different ways, a Jewish legacy is recognisable, thus providing an original response to the "crisis of civilisation" that had called into question their own emancipation.
The essay analyzes the contribution of Late Enlightenment thought to the development of a new universalism and humanism of the moderns, as a response to global war and colonialism in the second half of the 18th century. While the philosophical reflection of the early 18th century focused on religious critique and tolerance, in the second half of the century, new economic, political, and social issues emerged, interpreted in light of the epistemological revolution of the Encyclopedic and the new human sciences. In particular, this essay focuses on the philosophical contribution and universalism of Diderot, Herder, and Filangieri.
After the civil war against the Marians, Lucius Cornelius Sulla distributed to his veterans a large amount of land in Italy and presumably combined this reform with a reduction of grain distributions in Rome; nevertheless, Cornelian agrarian laws had weak effects on the economic system of the first century BCE: literary sources (in particular the oratio Lepidi and the Ciceronian speeches de lege agraria) show that Sulla did not reinforce durably the class of smallholders and that his efforts to forbid the concentration of land property were superficial and ambiguous.
Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europe witnessed a profound transformation in military culture, which increasingly involved governments and public opinion in crucial issues concerning the economic, civil, and political life of the continent. The aim of this essay is to reflect on the central role that the Enlightenment played in redefining these issues, promoting the ideal of perpetual peace as a humanistic response to the horrors of modern warfare particularly the Seven Years' War, which paved the way for the final crisis of the Ancien Regime and the Western imperial and colonial system, ushering in the era of the Atlantic revolutions.
