Montesquieu.it

About Montesquieu.it

Montesquieu.it — Journal Profile

Montesquieu.it is an Italian open-access scholarly journal devoted to the study of Montesquieu — Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), the author of De l'esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748) — and to the world of political, legal and philosophical thought around him. It is published by the University of Bologna, through the university's department of philosophy and communication (the institution recorded in its Directory of Open Access Journals entry), and it carries the alternative title Biblioteca elettronica su Montesquieu e dintorni — "Electronic library on Montesquieu and his surroundings". Its single ISSN, 2421-4124, is an electronic ISSN: this is a born-digital journal, open access since 2009, in which every article is freely readable and carries a DOI under the prefix 10.6092/issn.2421-4124. The JournalsWorld record for the journal stores that ISSN and Italy as its country, and both are confirmed by the journal's DOAJ record and by its OpenAlex source record, each resolved directly from the ISSN for this profile.

A journal named after one thinker, with a domain-style title ending in ".it", invites two misunderstandings, and this profile clears both away at the start. Montesquieu.it is not a website about Montesquieu in the informal sense: it is a peer-reviewed academic journal — DOAJ records its review model as double anonymous peer review — published by one of Europe's oldest universities, with an editorial team, article DOIs, legal-deposit preservation in Italy's national libraries, and a continuous run of annual volumes since 2009. Nor is it confined, despite its name, to commentary on a single book: its recorded keywords range across philosophy, politics, religion, ethics, ethnology and the philosophy of law, and its pages treat the whole Enlightenment conversation in which Montesquieu is the central, but not the only, voice.

At a Glance

• Full title: Montesquieu.it
• Alternative title: Biblioteca elettronica su Montesquieu e dintorni (Electronic library on Montesquieu and surroundings)
• Electronic ISSN: 2421-4124 (the journal's only ISSN; no print ISSN is recorded)
• DOI prefix: 10.6092/issn.2421-4124
• Publisher: University of Bologna, Italy (institution: Dipartimento di Filosofia e Comunicazione)
• Country: Italy
• Open access from: 2009 (DOAJ)
• Frequency: Annual volumes — volume 1 is dated 2009, volume 5 to 2013 and volume 6 to 2014 in the journal's own article records
• Languages: Italian, French and Spanish (DOAJ)
• Peer review: Double anonymous peer review (DOAJ)
• Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; authors retain copyright (DOAJ)
• Article processing charge: None — DOAJ records no APC and no other charges
• Preservation: Legal deposit with the Italian national central libraries of Rome and Florence (Magazzini Digitali), per DOAJ
• Official site: montesquieu.unibo.it

Origins: an electronic library that became a journal

The journal's alternative title preserves its origin story. A "Biblioteca elettronica su Montesquieu e dintorni" — an electronic library on Montesquieu and his surroundings — is what the Bologna project set out to build: a digital home for Montesquieu studies at the University of Bologna, the university whose scholars have long edited and interpreted Montesquieu's works in Italy. DOAJ dates the journal's open-access life from 2009, and its article records confirm the sequence: the first volume is dated 2009 (a contribution to that volume is cited in the Montesquieu bibliographic record as "Montesquieu.it, 1, 2009, Bologna"), the fourth volume appeared in 2012, the fifth in 2013 and the sixth in 2014, one volume per year. The naming of the journal after its web address — Montesquieu.it — was a deliberate piece of early digital scholarship: the journal announced, in its very title, that it lived on the internet and was free to read there, at a time when most Italian humanities journals were still print objects with a web page attached.

The intellectual setting is Bologna's strength in the history of political thought. The journal's editorial team, as published on its own site, is built around a Scientific Editor and an Editor in Chief at the University of Bologna, with editorial staff at Bologna and at the universities of Seville and Cagliari — a staffing pattern that matches its three working languages and its subject: Montesquieu scholarship is an Italian, French and Spanish conversation as much as an Anglophone one, and the journal is staffed accordingly. (The fetched text of the editorial page gave the roles and institutions but not the members' names, so no names are reproduced in this profile.) What the early volumes established — and the article record shows — is a journal that publishes full scholarly articles with DOIs, abstracts and keywords, in the standard form of an Italian university e-journal: the 2013 volume, for example, carries a long study of civil and political laws in the juridical evolution of the French monarchy according to Montesquieu, following the feudal origins of the Capetian monarchy through the argument of The Spirit of the Laws — archival, textual and doctrinal Montesquieu scholarship of the most traditional kind, delivered in the newest form then available to it.

Scope: one thinker, and everything his thought touches

DOAJ classifies Montesquieu.it under the Library of Congress heading "Political theory" and records its keywords as philosophy, religion, politics, ethics, ethnology and philosophy of law. That keyword list is the journal's scope in miniature, and it mirrors the architecture of Montesquieu's own masterwork, which moves from the nature of laws in general to government, climate, commerce, money, population, religion and the history of Roman and French law. A journal faithful to that author must be prepared to publish a Roman-history argument on one page — the journal carries, for instance, a study of the mutiny of the Roman legions in Pannonia and Germania read through guilt and forgiveness, and an essay on Montesquieu and decadence in the Considérations sur les Romains — and a piece of contemporary political theory on the next, such as its study of the law-relation and relativism in Montesquieu, which follows his concept of law across the legal-political and moral fields. The "dintorni", the surroundings, of the alternative title do real work: the journal's contents extend to the figures and problems of Montesquieu's century and its reception — Voltaire as the witty, colloquial thinker in a review essay the journal published; Émilie du Châtelet and her ambition of intellectual autonomy; Maupertuis and the logic of life between Newtonian attraction and psychobiological determinism; politeness, humanitas and imperialism read through Montesquieu and Tacitus.

For an author, the practical reading of the scope is this. The centre of gravity is Montesquieu: his texts, his sources, his concepts — law, liberty, despotism, moderation, the separation of powers, climate, commerce, manners — his manuscripts and editions, and his readers from the eighteenth century to the present. Around that centre, work on the Enlightenment and on early modern political and legal thought is in scope when it speaks to the journal's conversation, as the examples above show. Work with no thread to that conversation — general political science, contemporary policy studies, philosophy without a historical anchor in the period — is not what this journal is for, and no amount of quality will make it fit. Within its territory, the journal's range across philosophy, law, history and literature is a strength: Montesquieu himself refused those boundaries, and his journal follows him.

Editorial process and peer review

DOAJ records the journal's review process as double anonymous peer review, with the journal's own editorial-policies page as the reference, and an editorial board page published on its site. DOAJ also records a publication time of 20 weeks — the directory's figure for the journal's typical period from submission to publication at the time its record was compiled, and a brisk figure by humanities standards, consistent with a small annual journal that works to a volume deadline. The journal's site provides the standard apparatus of an Italian university e-journal: information for readers (the journal is freely readable without registration, and readers may register for table-of-contents notification by email), author guidelines and a copyright notice on its submissions pages, and article pages that give each contribution its DOI, keywords, abstract and full citation in the form "Montesquieu.it, volume (year)". DOAJ records that articles carry DOIs as their persistent identifiers, that authors retain copyright, and that the journal's deposit policy is registered with the Open Policy Finder service. What could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile is any further procedural detail — reviewer numbers, acceptance rates or revision practice — and none is claimed.

Metrics: a small journal in a small field, measured honestly

The JournalsWorld record gives Montesquieu.it an h-index of 1. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint at the time of checking (source S2736707003), counted 13 works and 1 citation, with an h-index of 1 — figures that describe OpenAlex's partial harvest of this journal rather than the journal's full contents, since the journal's own site and aggregators list several dozen articles (one aggregator counted 42 papers at its last crawl), many published in years OpenAlex's record for the source does not cover. OpenAlex's topic analysis of the works it did hold is nonetheless telling about the journal's centre: Rousseau and Enlightenment thought, seventeenth-century political and philosophical thought, classical antiquity studies, Renaissance and early modern studies, and French literature and criticism — exactly the intellectual neighbourhood the scope section above describes. The lesson, which this profile states rather than hides, is that no citation database currently measures this journal well, and its h-index of 1 should be read as "small, Italian-language, single-subject humanities journal with thin database coverage", not as a quality verdict. Montesquieu studies is a field of perhaps a few hundred active scholars worldwide; its journal's influence runs through editions, conferences and citations in books, which the article databases capture worst of all. Authors choosing the journal do so for its audience — the people who actually work on Montesquieu will read it there — and that audience fit, not any metric, is the journal's offer.

Indexing and preservation

The verified listings are these. The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, whose full record — searched by its ISSN for this profile — supplied much of the publication-practice data in this article, including its review model, licence, charges and languages; DOAJ's listing is the standard public verification that an open-access journal meets the transparency criteria the directory applies. The journal is a resolved source in OpenAlex under its ISSN, as described above. Its articles carry DOIs under the University of Bologna's journal prefix (10.6092/issn.2421-4124), which places them in the Crossref-registered scholarly record and makes each article citable in stable form. And its preservation is a point of genuine distinction: DOAJ records that the journal is preserved through legal deposit with the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Rome and of Florence, in Italy's Magazzini Digitali — the national digital legal-deposit system — which means the journal's contents are held by Italy's national libraries independently of the publisher's platform, a stronger long-term guarantee than most small e-journals can show. No Scopus or Web of Science coverage is claimed in this profile, because none could be verified from a fetched source at the time of writing.

Fees, licensing and author rights

The position recorded in DOAJ is complete and favourable to authors. The journal has no article processing charge and no other charges. Articles are published under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence — free to read and share with attribution, for non-commercial purposes, without derivative versions — and, unlike many journals on that licence, authors retain copyright in their work, as DOAJ's copyright field expressly records. The journal is free to read without registration. In combination, that makes Montesquieu.it a genuinely cost-free venue on both sides: the University of Bologna carries the cost of publication as part of its scholarly mission, readers pay nothing, authors pay nothing and keep their copyright, and the national library system keeps the result. The one limitation authors should notice is the ND element of the licence: translations and adapted versions of a published article require permission, which matters in a field where a good article may later be wanted in another of the journal's three languages.

How to submit

Submissions are made through the journal's site at the University of Bologna (montesquieu.unibo.it), where its author guidelines and copyright notice are published on the submissions pages that DOAJ links. Before submitting, an author should read a recent volume — it is open access, so the journal's current centre of gravity can be seen directly — and should write to the journal's conversation: a Montesquieu argument, or an Enlightenment argument that Montesquieu scholars will recognise as theirs. Choose the language deliberately: the journal publishes in Italian, French and Spanish, and an article's language decides which third of its readership meets it first. Prepare the text to the journal's guidelines, expect double anonymous review, and plan around an annual volume rhythm — DOAJ's 20-week publication-time figure suggests a well-run cycle, but an annual journal's deadline missed is a year waited. Readers who simply want to follow the journal can register on its site to receive each new volume's table of contents by email.

Similar journals

Montesquieu.it belongs to the small family of journals dedicated to a single canonical thinker or to the Enlightenment world around him. Readers of this profile may compare the French Montesquieu scholarship carried by the Revue Montesquieu tradition and by the Société Montesquieu's publications; the broader eighteenth-century field served by journals such as Dix-huitième siècle and Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century's successor series; and Italian history-of-political-thought journals such as Il Pensiero Politico and Storia del pensiero politico, where Montesquieu articles also regularly appear. Within the University of Bologna's own open-access journal family, Montesquieu.it sits among a stable of department-published titles run on the same model — double anonymous review, no charges, author copyright — that Italian universities have built over the past two decades. Its distinction within that company is its focus: a whole journal, annual since 2009, for one author's thought and its surroundings, edited from the city whose university has made Montesquieu a specialism.

Frequently asked questions

Is Montesquieu.it a real peer-reviewed journal? Yes. It is published by the University of Bologna, its DOAJ record states double anonymous peer review, and its articles carry DOIs and are preserved by legal deposit in Italy's national libraries.

What is its ISSN? Electronic ISSN 2421-4124. It has no print ISSN; it is a born-digital journal.

Is it open access? Yes, since 2009. Articles are free to read without registration, under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.

Does it charge authors? No. DOAJ records no article processing charge and no other charges, and authors retain copyright.

Who publishes it? The University of Bologna, through its Department of Philosophy and Communication (the institution in its DOAJ record).

In which languages does it publish? Italian, French and Spanish, per DOAJ.

What does it publish? Studies of Montesquieu and of the political, legal and philosophical thought around him — philosophy, politics, religion, ethics, ethnology and philosophy of law, in DOAJ's keyword list.

What are its citation metrics? The site's record and OpenAlex both give an h-index of 1 at checking; database coverage of the journal is partial, as the metrics section explains, and the figures should be read in that light.

How often does it appear? In annual volumes: volume 1 is 2009, volume 5 is 2013 and volume 6 is 2014 in its own article records.

Sources and verification note

This profile was prepared from the journal's record in the Directory of Open Access Journals (searched by ISSN 2421-4124), which supplied the publisher and institution, alternative title, review model, languages, licence, copyright position, charges, publication-time figure, open-access start year and preservation details; from the journal's own site at the University of Bologna, which supplied its article records (volumes, dates, DOIs and subjects), its information-for-readers page and its editorial-team structure; from a Montesquieu bibliographic record confirming the 2009 first volume; and from the journal's OpenAlex source record (resolved through the ISSN endpoint, source S2736707003), which supplied the open-data work and citation counts and topic analysis quoted above. The names of individual editorial team members could not be verified from the fetched text of the journal's board page and are therefore not reproduced; nothing in this profile has been supplied by analogy or reconstruction.