Chapter Two - The Critique of the British Constitutional Model and the Political Laboratory of the American Revolution

Summary

After centuries of general oppression, may the revolution which just took place across the oceans, offering all the inhabitants of Europe an asylum against fanaticism and tyranny, instruct those who govern men in the legitimate use of their authority.

D. Diderot, Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (1782), II, § 74

The Scienza della legislazione would have been something entirely different without the American Revolution. Less passionate and prophetic, perhaps more traditional and predictable, it would certainly lack those original traits which make it a milestone of Western constitutionalism.

That epochal event gained a ‘strong character of exemplarity’ for Filangieri that in fact marked his most inspired and durable pages, gave vigour and courage to his most radical political positions, and constituted both a subterranean current in, and the tenacious red thread of, his enormous oeuvre. It is well known that the clamorous events across the Atlantic hit the spirit of the young jurist hard also on the human level, seriously influencing the tormented civil and political experience of late eighteenth-century Naples. They were really sincere, in this sense, the words that the young cadet of the ancient house of the Princes of Arianello addressed to Benjamin Franklin on the second of December 1782, asking him to favour his transfer to America:

Philadelphia has attracted my gaze ever since I was a child. I have so gotten used to consider it the only country in which I can be happy that my imagination cannot rid itself of this idea… But how can one leave the service of one's own prince without a cause to justify the decision? […]