Solone e gli altri. Sulla figura del legislatore in Vico

The essay intends to highlight the importance of the figure of the "legislator" in the Universal Law and its radical transformation in the different versions of the Scienza Nuova, in consonance with the change of the philosophical-political approach that Vico progressively realised. If in the Universal Law the legislator (Theseus like Solon, Romulus like Lycurgus) is the real incarnation of that wisdom that is always presented as the rounded foundation of politics, in the Scienza Nuova this figure appears instead substantially emptied to be transformed into a "poetic character", ideographic representation of the "age of heroes" and of the powerful social conflicts that characterise it, decreeing its inexorable destiny. A perspective within a new statute of "knowledge" and its relations with "power", which in the long run ends up involving also the nature and the very scope of Vico’s Scienza Nuova.