Abstract

The author examines some of the main themes emerging from a reading of Villari’s correspondence with German historians, focusing on his approach to the relationship between Latin and German civilization. Villari’s analysis of the peculiarities of these two different forms of civilization do not emphasize the ethnical and racial characteristics of the nations, focusing on a unifying moral and cultural order which gave a fundamental contribution to the making of Europe. Therefore, Villari interpreted in a wholly original sense the antithesis between Latinity and Germanism, echoed at the level of universal history by the antithesis East/West. Refusing both the metaphysical and naturalistic outcomes of positivistic scientism and the implications of the Idealist culture, Villari approach to this contraposition evokes a dualism which is grounded on Vico’s notion of a common nature of the nations and the more heterodox currents of the Kantian tradition, and should be regarded as an original contribution to the construction of a political and cultural world based on the cooperation between peoples and nations