Special section of the journal “Storia e Futuro”. Introduction

The twelve texts that make up this special section of “Storia e Futuro” were presented as papers in the 54th International Congress of Americanists, held in Vienna in July 2012, in a symposium entitled The circulation of political ideas in the Atlantic area. Comparative dimension in the study of taxation, natural resource management, social integration and foreign policy (1770-1880). Our symposium brought together historians and social scientists from the Americas and Europe, with the goal of analyzing comparatively the evolution of political thought defined as Atlantic, in a secular chronology beginning in the 1770s – when the liberal political model of the modern state is born--, and ending in the 1880s – with the transformation of that model by incorporating new ideas of economic progress and social justice. The Atlantic-Western world made significant progress in the early nineteenth century, when liberal political theory (proclaiming equality of all citizens before the law) and economic liberalism (promoting the interplay of supply and demand in the context of clear and equal rules for all agents) helped overcome the stratification logics of absolutist societies of the ancient regime based on social inequalities and discretionary politics. At that time, the nationalist discourses of the new nation-states were built on the basis of a narrative that confronted the own (internal) with the foreign (external). In the early twenty-first century there is a need to rethink the nation-state and its explanatory statements in the context of an expanded and inclusive, rather than exclusive, Atlantic area.