Vitam instituere. Genealogia dell’istituzione

After a long period in which it was believed that radical thinking must necessarily follow a path of destruction, this book aims to rethink the relationship between life and institutions. By overturning this thesis, Roberto Esposito not only reconstructs the twentieth-century debate on the innovative role of institutions, but also recognises its deep roots in three classical authors: Machiavelli, Spinoza and Hegel. Starting from the enigmatic Latin phrase of uncertain origin, vitam instituere, the author traces its first elaboration in modern philosophy, along a path that only today seems to be experimenting with a possible outcome in a new interpretation of the relationship between politics and life. While the theme of institutio vitae finds its initial expression in Roman law, Machiavelli was the first to conceive of politics as an instituting energy. After Spinoza conferred on the social imagination the capacity to institute relational life, Hegel saw for the first time in the “objective spirit” the space in which society and the state articulate themselves in the dynamics of institutions. But in the Hegelian system, it is dialectic itself that expresses the instituting power as an infinite process in which ideas are embodied in reality. It is only from these modern roots that contemporary thought finds in the movement of institutions the strategic place where the languages of philosophy, anthropology and politics intersect in a new horizon of meaning.