Duties of a person

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) was the main ideologist of the Risorgimento, the movement for the reunification of Italy in the 19th century. A fervent patriot and revolutionary, literary critic, and journalist, he had a significant influence on European thought of his time. He was friends with Thomas Carlyle and George Sand, and debated with Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen. His vast creative legacy comprises a hundred volumes, but his main work, in which Mazzini summarized his political and moral-ethical views, is a small yet very substantial composition "The Duties of Man" (1860). Written in the form of an appeal to Italian workers, it asserts that the rights of a citizen can only be the result of fulfilled duty, and the pursuit of merely material interests leads man and society to catastrophic consequences. In Russia, a complete translation of this most important work for political philosophy was published only once, in 1917. This edition has long become a bibliographic rarity and is known only to specialists. More than a hundred years later, we publish the text in a new edition, supplementing it with modern analytical materials.