"Cuoco's classic account of the 1799 revolution and counter-revolution remains one of the most important historical texts written in Napoleonic Italy. With this translation, Haddock, Sabetti, and Gibbons have done a service to European intellectual history, political science, and the comparative analysis of revolutions." -- Sean Cocco, Department of History, Trinity College, Hartford "Vincenzo Cuoco deserves to be ranked among the leading political theorists of the late Enlightenment, revolutionary, and Napoleonic periods. Haddock and Sabetti's introduction is now the best, most authoritative essay on Cuoco's treatise in any language." -- John A. Davis, Institute for Advanced Study, Paris, and Department of History, University of Connecticut

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 how revolutions succeed or fail. A major influence on political thought during the unification of Italy, the Historical Essay was also an inspiration to twentieth-century thinkers such as Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci.

This critical edition, featuring an authoritative translation, introduction, and annotations, finally makes Cuoco’s work fully accessible to an English-speaking audience.

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‘Thanks to this edition of the Historical Essay on the Neopolitan Revolution of 1799… English-speaking readers finally have access to a lynchpin of the great history of Italian political thought.’