She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Echoes of a Distant Republic: Italian Perspectives on the American and French Revolutions, with the following results:
The Page 99 Test works great for this book! Page 99 happens to center on one of the book’s central ideas: that of “constitutional pluralism.” By this I mean the idea that no particular form of government is, in itself, necessarily good or best. In the classical formulation, government by one, by the few, or by the many could all serve the common good—or, on the contrary, could become tyrannical and serve exclusively the interests of the faction in power, whether that faction was one, few, or many. Page 99 focuses on a Neapolitan Enlightenment thinker, Gaetano Filangieri, author of the then-famous The Science of Legislation. I argue that Filangieri, like many thinkers before him—from Aristotle through medieval Scholastic and Renaissance authors to William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, whom Filangieri greatly admired—was a “constitutional pluralist,” rather than an advocate of democratic republicanism, as historians have often interpreted him.Learn more about Echoes of a Distant Republic at the University of Virginia Press.
This is an important part of the book’s broader argument. Echoes of a Distant Republic explores how people in the Italian states interpreted the American Revolution, and how those interpretations changed in response to the French Revolution. It focuses on Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples between 1765 and 1799. The book argues that the American Revolution was initially not understood as a “revolution” in the modern sense of the term. Rather, it was generally seen as part of an Age of Reform: an attempt to correct abuses, rather than a radical break with the Old Regime. Nor was it generally understood in Italy—or, arguably, in Europe—as a call for antimonarchical revolution. The French Revolution changed this. As the French Revolution unfolded, earlier interpretations of the American Revolution were transformed as well. The American events came to be understood as the “mother” of the French Revolution and, increasingly, as the beginning of a global movement against the injustices and hierarchies of monarchical regimes. Page 99 captures one small but important piece of that larger transformation.
--Marshal Zeringue