La Naissance du langage politique moderne: l'héritage des Lumières de Filangieri à Constant by Antonio Trampus (review)

Antonio Trampus takes as his cue Napoleon's perhaps apocryphal comment of 1799 that the Neapolitan thinker Gaëtano Filangieri (1752–1788) was 'notre maître à tous'. Trampus begins by exploring the semantic shifts that provided Filangieri with a refreshed political vocabulary. The meanings of happiness, morality, rights, law, constitution, freedom, and equality evolved in Italy in the diplomatic services of the trading city-states and in Masonic Lodges, with input from former Jesuits seeking intellectual sociability after the suppression of the Society in 1773. The debate following the Corsican Constitution of 1755 is of particular significance because it engaged not only lawyers but, increasingly, politicized intellectuals, including Rousseau. This constitutional and linguistic laboratory gave Filangieri an example to follow and a new language to work with. The often transnational nature of the institutions Trampus considers serves well the double movement of the study, showing how they provided a set of problems, forums for exploring them, and the means to disseminate the new ideas and the evolving language in which they were given expression. Filangieri's work emerges from this discussion as a synthesis of Italian Enlightenment thought on legal and constitutional issues, expressed in direct, innovative, yet clear and readily translatable language. Moving from context to translation and reception, Trampus focuses on perceptions of Filangieri's political language as novel and the ways in which it in turn transformed the political language of the target cultures, notably in Germany and in France, where a certain myth of Filangieri as a precursor of the 1789 Revolution emerged. Finally, Trampus considers Benjamin Constant's Commentaire sur l'ouvrage de Filangieri (1822), published to accompany a new edition of a French translation of Filangieri. Constant's sceptical but serious attention to the work reinforced Filangieri's place in the European intellectual canon. A more explicit methodology might have helped to substantiate some of the claims made in the second half of the book, such as that Filangieri's Scienza della legislazione was a bestseller in Enlightenment Europe, and to draw out additional implications of the reception process. For example, Trampus takes us in productive directions by looking in detail at the evolution and translations of a key concept, 'constitution', initially a simple description of how government works, but later a prescription, a formal legal framework for how government should work. It is used in both senses in Filangieri, and Trampus shows how German translators chose translations — 'Regierungsverfassung', 'Verfassung', 'Grundgesetz', and the relatively new 'Konstitution' — to draw out the particular usage. If German translators used such a range of nuanced terminology, though, what is the nature and extent of Filangieri's contribution to the birth of a new political language? Did the very process of translating Filangieri transform German meanings? Or did German translators impose existing German meanings on Neapolitan ones? Further work is therefore needed to ascertain whether Trampus's title oversells Filangieri's impact on political language, but he nevertheless contributes significantly to our knowledge of an important thinker whose ideas were taken seriously well beyond their immediate Neapolitan context.