OTIUM Travel
TURIN:
POWER, MYTH, AND THE CREATION OF THE MODERN STATE
This seminar is dedicated to a question that remains central for both the 19th and 21st centuries: how is a modern regular state created?
Dates — September 11–13, 2026
Location — Turin
Lecturer — Mikhail Minakov
Number of participants — 25 people
Turin is one of Europe's premier cities for the philosophical reflection of the modern state. It serves as a crossroads for the political history of the Risorgimento, the sacred symbolism of monarchical power, and the intellectual energy of Italy's first capital. This ancient city was not only the seat of the Savoy dynasty but also the site of Friedrich Nietzsche’s loss of self, the birth of Cesare Lombroso’s scientific totalitarianism, and the development of Gianni Vattimo’s postmodern "weak thought".
This seminar is dedicated to a question that remains central for both the 19th and 21st centuries: how is a modern regular state created? Does it emerge from institutions and laws? From war and diplomacy? From myth, sacredness, and symbolic order? From the political will of elites? Or from a cultural imagination capable of envisioning a people as a historical unity for the first time?
Turin allows us to examine this question in several registers at once. On one hand, it is the city of the Savoy dynasty, Cavour, monarchical liberalism, and the Museum of the Risorgimento—meaning it is one of the main laboratories of Italy's political unification. On the other hand, it is a city where the dark and extreme sides of modernity are particularly visible: the sacralization of power, mystical imagination, scientific claims to reading human nature, genius, madness, and the crisis of identity.
During the seminar, we will discuss how states are created, why political power always needs a myth, how modernity turns a human into an object of knowledge and management, why Nietzsche experienced his internal collapse in Turin, and how the late philosophy of Gianni Vattimo helps to rethink the state, truth, and power after the end of great metaphysical foundations
The seminar combines lectures by Mikhail Minakov, discussions, walks through Turin, visits to key museums and urban spaces, as well as joint evening dinner conversations. Its task is not only to tell the history and philosophy of Italy but also to show Turin as a living laboratory of political philosophy.
Lecturer — Mikhail Minakov
Mikhail Minakov is one of the leading political philosophers in the post-Soviet space. Professor of Political Theory at the European University Viadrina (Germany, 2017–2019, since 2025), Senior Advisor at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center (USA, 2017–2025), and Professor of Philosophy at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine, 2008–2018).
Mikhail Anatolievich Minakov has worked with the Soros Foundation, the United Nations Development Programme, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Aspen Institute, and the governments of European countries and the USA.
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