Sismondi e il dispotismo come problema storico

The philosophical and political category of ‘despotism’, after its heyday in the second half of the Eighteenth century, was profoundly transformed in the decades following the French Revolution. Members of the Coppet Circle had an important role; they also considered the concept of despotism – in its archetypal features and in its modern variants – to try to understand the historical process that led from the Revolution to the Restoration. The present paper first states the circumstances of Sismondi’s participation in this specific intellectual context. From his early writings to the Études sur les constitutions des peuples libres, ‘despotism’ appears to be the object of a theoretical approach; the originality of this attempt is to dealing with despotism as a ‘historical problem’.