The New World isn't new: elements of a Campanellian geopolitics

The "New World" is a constant presence in the political thought of Campanella for all that it never received a specific treatment in a single work of the author. The presence of the "New World" leads in this article to an original reading of the utopian leanings and the universalism to which Campanella's reflections on history and politics are most often connected. In this way, an attempt is made in particular to demonstrate how considerations about the New World, as an historic problem, caused Campanella to evolve in his theoretical conception of the empire, and to assign to Spain of the imperial mission to unify the world (from a strictly historical point of view). The issue at hand is to demonstrate how the application of an old concept (the empire) to a new spatial and temporal reality (the New World of the Spanish conquest) can endow it with new heuristic force and conduce to a reading of history not without interest for our current reflections on the various forms of World History.