Dispotismo e libertà nel Settecento

This essay is a reprint of a little volume that Mario Rosa published at Bari in 1964.
The reason for this initiative, besides being homage by the Scuola Normale for the university-teacher who has moved from industrious scientific and didactic activity is to make available a book that today is difficult to find even in libraries.
But above all, having come out at the same time as Felix Raab's classic work on the interpretation of Machiavelli in the Anglo-Saxon world of the Modern Age, it precedes and in some way sets in motion a historiographic period characterised by strong recurring attention to enquiry into the relationship that in the course of the xviiith century linked the developments of republican political thinking to interpretations of the figure of Machiavelli.
Rosa, without aiming at an analysis of the whole subject of xviiith century 'republicanism', finely follows the plots, pressures and interests that in Italian culture and politics of that century led to a 'republican' re-reading of the character, arriving at a reconstruction which, besides offering a permanent lesson in method, has even today full historiographic validity.