Public law between nineteenth and twentieh centuries: the epicentre of a cultural earthquake. The european phenomenon and the italian case study.

The essay investigates the transition between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries as a cultural encounter between two different constitutional cultures. Beginning from the crisis of the late Liberal age, interpreted as a European phenomenon, the essay shows the progressive birth of a constitutional doctrine of the new ‘mass society’, which grew to maturity during the Twentieth Century, but which didn’t delete the previous one. As the Italian case study demonstrates, the differences between the two juridical cultures did not weaken over the course of time, but survived alive and relevant late into the Fifties of the Twentieth Century.