Abstract

With the subjectivist turn, which took place with the advent of modern rationalist philosophy, each individual acquires its own full epistemological and ethical autonomy. As a emancipated rationally capable citizen he shall holds fundamental personal rights and freedoms and this destroys the principle of authority typical of the classic philosophical and ethical objectivism. Thus was born also the ideal of a secular state, according to which there must be a public normative space not metaphysical and not religious. The advent of the secular state was preceded by the spread of secularism in the sociological field and of religious tolerance medieval which, for reasons of mere opportunity, recognized limited concessions to subjects, as shown by the analysis of the main policy documents and legal premodern.