AMARI, EMERICO. - Politician and thinker, born in Palermo in 1810, died there in 1870. A complex personality: scholar, patriot, and believer. Imprisoned (1848) and exiled, he returned to Palermo in 1860; after participating in parliamentary life, seeing his synthesis of national unity and regional autonomy, liberalism and Catholicism, unrealized, he formed a party of his own. From juridical, statistical, economic, and other studies, he rose to Vichian perspectives, critically renewed, in the philosophy of history, and was appointed to that chair in Florence in December 1859.
He outlined a Teoria del Progresso (1843) as a “continuous reform indicated by science and accomplished by liberty through tradition.” His Critica di una Scienza delle Legislazioni comparate (1857), which defines the concept, discusses the methods, sketches the system, and indicates the auxiliary sciences of this “new science,” achieved renown and would deserve extensive re-examination. Also noteworthy is his Florentine inaugural lecture Del concetto generale e dei sommi principi della filosofia della storia (taking a position with regard to s. Agostino, Dante, Machiavelli, Bossuet, Vico, Lessing, Hegel, Romagnosi, Guizot, etc.).