This paper goes back to David Hume’s  pronouncements on the limited, and not absolute,  significance of empirical laws in general and to  Hume’s suggestion that the value of  ‘scientific’ laws concerns the realm of expectations and, more generally, the functioning of the mind.

The early developments of cognitivism in the realm of  the study of the polity is analyzed in the works of the Italian Enlightenment and their connections with the Scottish Enlightenment.