Abstract

Between history and historiography, this essay aims to re-considering the history of "modern State" in the Western historical experience. In the middle of a long historiographical controversy, during which it was even affirmed the impossibility to reading the European history throw the filter of this concept, this history is here analysed through the use of two categories: "absolutism" and "constitutionalism". The unstable balance, often resulted in a conflict tearing, between these two poles of modern Western State experience, that monocratic-centralizing on the one hand and that pluralistic- participatory on the other, has marked the European political history so constitutively and so deep to may be considered the main stream of the whole European history. It represents indeed an essential reference point for any reconsidering of the present and the future of all the political organized communities, which are deeply marked by a progressive reduction of intervention capacity of the nation States.