The territories of politics are often dark and mysterious, tested by ambivalent drives: fear, ambition, violence, but also the desire for freedom, mutual help, the search for a common good. Gianluca Briguglia, Professor of History of Political Doctrines at the Ca 'Foscari University of Venice, starts from the biblical origin of human beings, Adam and Eve, and through the centuries he comes to talk about the plague, a perfect catastrophe but also a new beginning, as in the Manzoni Promessi sposi. Alternating the history of the ideas of real characters, who with their thought and their action have changed the way of seeing politics, with the ones of of imaginary figures, born to represent uncertainties but also solutions, Briguglia traces the origins of modern political thought and he reconstructs the meaning of what Aristotle called "political animal": the human being.
Briguglia studies the words of Niccolò Machiavelli and puts them in relation with recent politics, he takes us to the land of monstrous cynocephali to explain the perception of "difference" he tells us about the giants, symbol of power from the Bible to Thomas Hobbes, and talks about the wonderful figure of Christine de Pizan, an extraordinary medieval woman. The ideas and the "monsters" of this “political bestiary" belong perhaps to a distant world, but they are still able to raise doubts and anxieties, unexpected openings and brilliant insights, offering the reader a fundamental reading key to understand the world in which we live today.

GIANLUCA BRIGUGLIA (Milan 1970) works as a researcher in European universities, such as the LMU in Munich, the EHESS in Paris, the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Strasbourg, where he was also director of the Department of Philosophy. He is currently professor of History of Political Doctrines at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of the Ca 'Foscari University of Venice. He is the authors of many books on medieval political philosophy, including Medieval Political Thought, Einaudi 2018.