People the world over aspire to self-rule, especially when living under domination, conquest, and empire. Inspired by the work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, Filippo Sabetti explores how people attempt, over time, to make the longing for self-government a reality.Struggles for Self-Rule explores key moments in Italian history through a comparative perspective – from the city republics to the challenge of self-rule in France, Spain, and Catalonia – to study the circumstan...

The work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom represents a distinctive contribution to the study of political economy, public policy and administration, collective action, and governance theory. Efforts to present a comprehensive overview of the Bloomington School that grew around the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis (now renamed the Ostrom Workshop), which they founded more than 40 years ago, received new impetus with the award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science to El...

This edited collection further expands our knowledge about what comprises a successful constitution in both theory and application. Building on the research and analysis of Vincent Ostrom, who as one of America's leading scholars on constitutions has spent a lifetime writing about constitutions in America and overseas.Each essay shows how particular countries, governments, and organizations devise constitutions to reflect their visions of governance and sets of rules for their lead...

At a time when social scientists are increasingly focusing on the reasons why nations fail and democracies die, Filippo Sabetti turns to the opposite issue, asking instead why institutions endure. To do so, he presents Gasparo Contarini’s sixteenth-century description of the Republic of Venice to help modern readers understand what made Venice the longest-lived self-constituted republic.In its long history, Venice was the only city that succeeded in constructing a durable republica...

Nineteenth-century Italy is a vast, unexplored territory in the history of modern political thought and liberal democratic theory. Apart from Mazzini, Pareto, and Mosca, the authors of this period are little read, even though their central concerns – the riddle of human liberation, progress, and liberty – are as important today as ever. This volume presents a selection of the writings of Carlo Cattaneo (1801-1869), one of the period's most important thinkers, as selected by an equally impo...

Deeply influenced by Enlightenment writers from Naples and France, Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823) was forced into exile for his involvement in the failed Neapolitan revolution of 1799. Living in Milan, he wrote what became one of the nineteenth century’s most important treatises on political revolution.In his Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, Cuoco synthesized the work of Machiavelli, Vico, and Enlightenment philosophers to offer an explanation for why and...