SALVATORE BONFIGLIO

Il dibattito sulle forme di governo nel periodo statutario

N. 153

Summary — The a. examines the attempts to classify the forms of government carried out by some distinguished scholars of public law between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, with particular reference to the influence which the Italian doctrine of the last century experienced owing to the monarchic representative principle of English origin.

While in the nineteenth century, when Europe sees the parliamentary monarchy flourishing, the doctrine discussed on the representative or non representative character of the various forms of government, in the early twentieth century the conception of the law as a system of abstract norms goes through a crisis. After the first world war, with the crisis of the Liberal state and the birth of other historical forms of State, at the centre of the political and constitutional debate were placed the problems of the legitimacy and of the legitimation. In Germany, in particular, the idea of the political factor as characterizing the form of the State went a long way.