Abstract

The main task of a constitutional history aiming at finding out the reasons for the assemblages and assets of modern politics should be the research of the basic ingredients of the latter, while also trying to reduce them to only a few common denominators. Science, administration and discipline could help to explain, through their complex interconnections, the principal contents of a trend to modernity, which on the one hand, can not be reduced to the often mistifying event of enlightment, but on the other, have to be separated from a theological vision of the world which sometimes reappears as a life raft in desperate times. The author discusses in these pages the actual crisis of the state's soveregnity, trying to put forward answers which look at the same time at the growing globalization of life and at the need of new responsibilities for individual and collective persons: in both cases the need of new senses of measure is emerging.