A work about power

Freemasons is a work based on the consultation of unpublished archives, rich in historical and socio-anthropological citations that help contextualize the research. We feel compelled to emphasize that our intention was, among many other objectives, to reconstruct the ideological and material genesis, in the medieval and Renaissance centuries, of a revolutionary society such as Freemasonry, while nevertheless dedicating the majority of the narrative to the modern and contemporary era. Indeed, we have received a number of complaints—from many potential readers with diverse interests—precisely regarding the fact that, to this day, the publishing market has offered research on Freemasonry that fails to connect the question of its pre-modern origins with its role as a highly modern builder of contemporary society.

The lamentations also refer to the realization that the aforementioned publishing market, on the subject of Freemasonry, has been limited either to sleepy, scholarly monographs, more or less solid but entirely self-sufficient, which can only be appreciated by a small group of specialists, and which are rather unexplanatory in relation to the fundamental links between Masonic power and profane society; or to the typical careless and fanciful books that exploit the conspiracy-theory and anti-Masonic vein a priori; or perhaps to some meritorious but insufficient batch of inadequately prepared essayists and/or journalists; or even to small, reassuring, and dreamy works—perhaps signed by some retired Grand Master, ma non troppo—with blatantly apologetic, hagiographic, and/or misleading and deceptive intentions, and with narrative resources that yield very modest results.