social body. In this he anticipated, without doubt, Jeremy Bentham, and completely demolished the individualism of religious morality.
Concerning Giordano Bruno much has been said in Italy in one way and another during the last few years. Authors who have given a moderate judgment of him are truly rare. Apotheosis has been pushed so far as the erection of a monument to his memory in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, in the same square and in the same Rome which, formerly papal—and even today the seat of the pope—had seen him burned.
However this may be, Giordano Bruno cannot be denied a magnificent breadth of view, and therefore we cannot refuse to put him among the more direct precursors of modern sociology.
Campanella (1568–1639) is an idealistic philosopher well-known by his Utopian work, "The City of the Sun," but he is lacking in historical knowledge, and hence the merits of his works are literary rather than social.[1] It is not so, however, with Filippo Briganti, who in 1777 published anonymously an "Analytical Examination of the Legal System." In this work so much light is shed upon the organism of society, and human nature, and it is so full of civic wisdom, and the whole is expressed in language so brilliant, and at the same time so scientific, that one does not know whether to admire more the philosopher or the jurist, the biologist or the sociologist, the moralist or the litterateur. Certainly Filippo Briganti must also be mentioned as one of the forerunners of sociology.
The authors just mentioned are not well known for their sociological publications. This is not true, however, of G. B. Vico. La Scienza Nuova of Vico is above all an eminently modern work, as is shown by the critical works concerning it which are constantly increasing. An illustrious Austrian sociologist, my friend Ludwig Gumplowicz, has written: "The first inkling of a science of the nature of nations may be accredited to Giambattesta Vico."[2] Pietro Siciliani points out how a first
