The Scienza della legislazione would have been something entirely different without the American Revolution. Less passionate and prophetic, perhaps more traditional and predictable, it would certainly lack those original traits which make it a milestone of Western constitutionalism.

That epochal event gained a ‘strong character of exemplarity’ for Filangieri that in fact marked his most inspired and durable pages, gave vigour and courage to his most radical political positions, and constituted both a subterranean current in, and the tenacious red thread of, his enormous oeuvre. It is well known that the clamorous events across the Atlantic hit the spirit of the young jurist hard also on the human level, seriously influencing the tormented civil and political experience of late eighteenth-century Naples. They were really sincere, in this sense, the words that the young cadet of the ancient house of the Princes of Arianello addressed to Benjamin Franklin on the second of December 1782, asking him to favour his transfer to America: