Benvenuti and the Europe

The article deals with Feliciano Benvenuti’s visionary contribution to the interpretation of European integration. The paper traces Benvenuti’s intellectual journey to overcome the traditional mindset relating, on one hand, to the conception of the State and, on the other, to the emergence of a supranational form of administration. The enquiry leads to two separate conclusions. Generally, in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a non-unidirectional development of the science of administrative law, in which several different evolutionary paths cohabited. At a more specific level, European legal integration was based both on the development of a Community law having its own peculiar characteristics, on the one hand, and the identification of a common substrate to the Member States’ legal systems on the other.