After the Leviathan

Abstract

The Author sketches an assessment of the last two decades of constitutional history of the early modern period, checking the current sustainability of the approach on which was based the innovative historiography of the '70s, which stood for the plurality and composite nature of the "corporative" polities. Reacting to a recent book of the Brazilian historian Laura de Mello e Souza (USP), he argues that such a pluralistic and decentralized political model shall also be applied to the colonial societies; the resulting being the emphasizing of local political agency and the multi-leveled and entangled pattern of governance of the so-called "colonial Empires", a topic on which the most recent colonial historiography is conveying.